2nd November 2026

Part 4 of the Welcome to the Machine series

Hey You

He went to the tower first, because a master’s house is entered by its front door, and he went as he was, a ghost.

The road up from the ruins was steep and paved, and a horse came down it with nobody on its back, white and thin as smoke, its hooves making no sound on the stones. Behind it walked a man with a lantern. He was talking to himself in the manner of a night watchman who has walked the same round for a long time: who goes there, and all quiet, and a word about a horse called Midnight that nobody was to touch. That was Calliard. He walked straight past Percy, close enough to brush his sleeve, and did not turn his head.

He says nothing. He does not even see me. Am I a ghost to him, as he is to me?

Further up, something in a servant’s coat came round a corner and looked straight at him, which nothing had done since Durnholde. Behind it, where it had come from, was a door in the hill that led down. He let it be for now. He went back down to the angel by the ruined houses and took what it offered, the sickness with it, and climbed the road a second time with a body under his robe. It seemed the better way to call on a house.

From the last turn of the road the tower filled the sky, and he stood there longer than he meant to. It put him in mind of his room at Brill, the one with the coffin and the narrow window, which he had not thought of as home until that moment.

It reminds me of my new home in Brill. I am at peace.

A small light went past his face, a blue wisp the size of a moth, and then another. He wrote other spirits trapped here? and put a mark against it to come back to.

At the great door stood a man in a long coat, quite dead and very correct. This was Hastings, the caretaker. He looked at Percy the way a butler looks at the tradesmen’s entrance, and informed him that the Master did not at present abide uninvited guests. He was waiting for a courier, he said. Percy had carried a good many letters in his time, to apothecaries and executors and once, by bat, past Dalaran, and he said so. None of them was for this house, and Hastings said that too.

Hastings the caretaker does not care for me. Shall I haunt this place forever?

Then the household came out to see him off. They were dead, as he was, and there were more of them than he could deal with, and they barred the way with the weary courtesy of staff who have been told that nobody is to come in. He died on the step.

The dead bar my way. This is a strange place, where the threads seem thin.

He walked back down the hill without a body, past the angel this time, to the stair under the broken house and the words cut over its door.

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The Cellar

The Master’s Cellar was two cellars. The first was a wine cellar as long as a street, and the household was at work in it. They were the servants of the tower, or what the tower had kept of them: footmen, maids, a cook, carrying empty bottles from rack to rack and laying a long table that nobody came to sit at. Nobody asked Percy what he was. He found he had been very tired of being asked.

There was a desk at the end of the long room, and on it a cellar book. He could no more leave a ledger unread than leave a door unlocked, and he looked. It was kept in a good, plain hand for “the Master, Medivh“, which was a name that meant nothing to him, and every entry was signed with a single letter, M. The last entry ordered wine for a banquet and stopped in the middle of a line. On a nail above the desk hung a pair of horse’s blinkers, the kind a carter puts on a horse to keep it from seeing what might frighten it. He could not account for them. He entered them anyway.

The second cellar was older, and its floor had given way. Through the hole a stair of broken stone went down into caves, and at the bottom there was water: a wide, pale, still pool with a shelf of dark rock in the middle of it, and on the far bank, going to and fro, the wailing spectres.

As a spirit I am safe. With my body I am doomed.

He tested this, being a careful man. He went back to his body and got into it, and the spectres came across the water to him at once, and he died. He did it again, and died again. He did it four times in five minutes, and on the third occasion he stood over himself for a while before getting back in.

I look so peaceful in death.

The fourth time he stayed out. His body lay on the rock shelf with its hands at its sides, and beside it, a little further along the stone, lay an older one: bones, quite clean, with a scrap of the same red cloth under them. He looked at that one only briefly.

Trapped here. My bones lie next to me. The wailing spectres go round and round. This is not a cellar I should choose to haunt.

Somebody else came through once, a traveller from another plane, as he thought of them, in a hurry and armed. They went on through. When they had gone the place was quieter than before.

There was running water all round the shelf. He sat by it for a long time, and found some comfort in it, as there is in any sound that goes on without needing an answer. Then he wrote the longest entry he had written in some days.

I do not know whether anyone will ever hear me. I am at peace. It is damp, but spirits do not mind the damp, and it is nice to have company. Karazhan seems to be a place where reality thins.

Later, when the spectres had forgotten him, he went back into his body once more and kept to the middle of the shelf, where they did not come. The day went over the pass above him, unseen. Once he lay down on the shelf beside his bones and folded his hands. He did not sleep; since Deathknell he never has. He stopped, as he always did, and the cold came and lay down with him, and it was easier to bear on the stone in company than it had been alone.

When he got up again the light in the cave had changed, and the lamps were going out on the stair, one at a time, from the top down.

The world is ending. Thirteen minutes to go.

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The Last Page

He opened the Journal on his knee and wrote the last page. He kept it plain, as one keeps a closing account.

The Master’s Cellar. That is what the lintel says, cut by someone who expected it to be read.

It lies under the servants’ houses, below the tower in the pass south of the dark wood, where nothing grows and the wind comes from every side. I came down the pass dead, and the tower drew me as Pyrewood did. Its doors are closed to me. The cellar is not.

The household is still here. They are dead, as I am, and busy, as I am not. They carry empty bottles and lay a table nobody sits at. Nobody has asked me what I am.

There is a desk, and on it a cellar book kept for “the Master, Medivh”, signed by someone with a single letter, M. The last entry stops in the middle of a line. On a nail above the desk hang a horse’s blinkers, which I cannot account for, and which I have entered.

Mezzlos fell with me at Durnholde and has not come back. Since then the world has been coming apart at its seams. A door under a mountain raised me when it should not have, and a city I once meant to live in killed me in under a minute. I have it all written down.

The lamps are going out from the stairs down. Up in the wine cellar the servants are not hurrying. When I came down, one of them was laying a last place at the table, very precisely.

The wall of the cave across the water has gone thin. On the other side is another cellar, with a green lantern, and a small person at a desk with a book like mine open in front of him. I think he is the one who asked if anybody was at home. I think this is his Master’s cellar too, or the same one seen from the other side.

I have never written to him. I do not know what one says first. I shall say what everybody says.

Hello?

He looked at it, and let it stand, and then he stood up on the shelf and said it aloud to the cave, in case the cave was the better way to send it.

“Hellooooo?“

The spectres went round. The water ran. The page lay open on the stone and nothing came back.

So he did what he could. He said, to nobody in particular, “Goodbye, cruel world,” because somebody ought to, and then, because nobody was watching and he had never in his life, so far as he knew, done it before, he danced. It was not good dancing. It was a Forsaken in a red robe on a wet rock at the end of everything, and it went on for longer than was dignified.

“Is that all you’ve got?” he asked the dark, when he had finished.

The dark came down the stair. He yelled it this time, as loudly as a man can who has no breath to spend, so that it went all round the cave and came back to him off the water.

“GOODBYE, CRUEL WORLD!“

When he looked down, there was writing on the left-hand page of the Journal that he had not put there.

It was in a round, careful hand, the hand of someone who forms each letter on purpose and has been told to mind his spelling. It came up out of the paper slowly, a letter at a time, as if it were being written that moment on the far side of the wall.

Hello. Stay where you are. I’ll find you.

Percy read it. Then he put the book down on the stone, straightened his back as far as it would go, and raised one hand above his head, as one does across a crowded station, and shouted back as hard as he could.

“HELLO!“

Then all the lamps went out at once.

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More in the Welcome to the Machine series

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Last updated 2nd November 2026, 19:04