Told by Percy Spamchop · 12th October 2026
A dead man has been giving me orders, and I have never heard him speak.
Apothecary Berard was Forsaken, as I am, of the Royal Apothecary Society, until Arugal‘s magic closed over him in Pyrewood Village and left him a worgen for good. I killed him there to take his journal, and I did not read it. I do not read the notes of men I have killed. It is the one courtesy I am in a position to afford them.
Master Apothecary Faranell read it for me. He read it standing, in the Undercity, and it has been coming out of him ever since as errands. First came a plague of his, meant for the Scourge and the living alike, and then, since a plague must be made of something, moss: six of one kind from the Lake Creepers, six of another from the Skulkers, and a single Hardened Tumor, which Berard found on a murloc once and never a second time. Faranell reads these out to me from the page like a list. I have spent an afternoon in Lordamere Lake, being killed, on the instruction of a page I have not seen.
I took the moss and the tumor down to the Apothecarium by the sewers. Faranell received them as one receives coal, and turned the journal’s pages with them at his elbow, and I looked, because I was standing nearest, at the hand it was written in. It was a good hand, steady and practised, the kind that keeps columns. It was a hand like mine. A man like me had written that, and had ended where he ended. I stopped looking, and Faranell did not offer to show me more.
Player’s caption: new offhand
The other errand that evening was easier. Shadow Priest Allister wanted wizards removed from the roads, and a good many of them were gnomes. A gnome can be argued with, and I argued with each one in the usual way. I typed dead gnome good gnome into the stone beside one in the grass, and it was the most satisfied I was all day. A dead man’s orders cannot be answered at all.
Player’s caption: dead gnome good gnome
In Pyrewood I told myself that not reading the journal was a matter of principle. I would still like to know whether the principle protects Berard, or me.
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Last updated 12th October 2026, 23:51