Welcome to the Machine

19th October 2026

Part 1 of the Welcome to the Machine series

Welcome to the Machine

Percy Spamchop came up in the lift out of the Undercity every morning, said “Quite,” to nobody, and went to see what else was wrong.

He was new at being dead. He had woken in Deathknell with a head that had been left out in the weather, and with half of it, as far as he could tell, not in the house. Of who he had been he had almost nothing: a handful of small things that came back one at a time, and a blank around them that he preferred not to look at directly. He wrote a clerk’s hand, small and upright, which did not change when he was frightened and which he therefore trusted more than his face. He was a warlock, and a good deal more comfortable with shadow than with most people.

He was also difficult. He knew it. He corrected people. He argued with shopkeepers. He had been asked to leave two taverns for the way he said “Quite.”

Two steps behind him, patient and literal, came Mezzlos, his voidwalker. Mezzlos disliked mages, and the Magic Quarter, and anything that smelled of either. He had never once disliked Percy, which Percy had noticed and not mentioned.

Time

One evening near the end, he sat down with his journal and read it from the beginning, the way a man reads back over a holiday on the last night before the coach home.

It began in Silverpine. He had been carrying a letter for an apothecary when he topped a rise and saw Dalaran between the pines, close enough to count the windows. He had counted them. He gave up the post on the spot and set off to walk there, and got as far as Lordamere Lake, where the murlocs drowned him. He delivered the letter in the end, and a bat carried him to the Undercity, straight past the tower, in about two minutes. At the foot of that page he had written Dalaran: two minutes by bat. On foot, not yet. He had been very new.

A few pages on, he was lost in the Undercity. He had walked the Rogues’ Quarter all evening under the same green lamp, and Mezzlos had counted it twice and said so. At last he asked a Guardian, a great stitched thing that dripped, and it pointed with one hook at the tunnel he had already turned down. He had written left and underlined it, and below it, smaller, Do not stand downwind. He laughed at that, once, and Mezzlos looked up.

Then Pyrewood, which took four deaths and the whole of an evening. He had gone in by daylight for six shackles and a dead apothecary’s journal. Two others of his own kind fell in with him without being asked, and picked him up each time he went down. A tailor stabbed him in the back. He came out by lamplight with everything he had gone in for, and a seamstress’s bill for his robe, which he had entered under the tailor, the debt and its settlement in the same hand. He had never thanked the two who came with him. He found that he still meant to.

Then Dalaran again. He had died by the lake a second time, run as a ghost to the city wall, and put out a hand that stopped an inch short of the stone. He spent the rest of that evening removing the wizards who kept its door, eight of them. A good many were gnomes, and those he had found the most satisfying of all. dead gnome good gnome, he had written beside one of them in the grass, and reading it again he regretted nothing about it but the brevity. He wore a dead wizard’s pendant to see whether the road would take him for one of theirs, and it did not. Afterwards he stood on a rise under the spires in the last of the light, with Mezzlos crouched at the edge of the picture, facing the other way.

The last account in the book had been open longest. On the boat of the dead in Silverpine he had taken a ring from a woman’s hand, cut inside with For Deliah, and carried it for days before he could bring himself to give it a name. In Brill the magistrate gave it one. In the Undercity her husband turned it over, said “Do I know you?“, and felt nothing for her at all. What he wanted was the man who had killed her, his old friend Valdred Moray, who had run south to the Greymane Wall to be let into Gilneas. He wanted Valdred’s hands. Percy had gone to the Greymane Wall for them, and carried them down to the Undercity, and Raleigh had paid him. He was wearing a new ring now, the Ring of Scorn, which he had put on before he had quite decided to. Beneath Deliah he ruled two lines, as one closes an account. It was finished, and something still pointed south.

He closed the book. In ten days he had been killed by somebody’s grandparents, by murlocs and by a tailor, and had got up each time. He had found a city he could not enter and wanted it anyway. When he woke in Deathknell he had not known he would want anything. The journal was full now, to its last clean page, and he was sorry to come to the end of it.

Fearless

That evening he went up to the Gates of Lordaeron, where the road out of the ruined city began, and looked down it. Beyond the walls stood the zeppelin tower, where the airships came and went to places he had only heard named. He thought he might go and see some of them one day. Not yet.

He wanted to go home. It was the one thing he was sure of. He could not have said where home was, or what it looked like, and he knew he could not go there. He stood and wanted it anyway.

Mezzlos stood two steps behind him.

“Where are you going?“

“Nowhere. I only wanted to look.“

Then Percy said it quietly, to the empty road.

“Is there anybody out there?“

Nothing answered.

“No one is there,” said Mezzlos.

“I did not suppose so,” said Percy.

Speak to Me

He took the lift back down into the Undercity to buy a new journal. The stall that sold them was in the Trade Quarter, in a recess between a bone-carver and a stall selling lamp oil, and pinned to a post beside it there was a poster. It had a Forsaken woman on it, drawn with some tenderness, holding a thick book against her chest while a handful of pale green skulls drifted round her head like smoke. Across the top, in a black gothic hand:

STILL HEAR VOICES? GET BETTER ONES.

And under it: The Arcanum Journal. It remembers who you were, so you don’t have to.

The poster beside the journal stall in the Undercity.

Percy did not hear voices. He had checked, at intervals. What the poster offered was the other thing, and he read the small print first, which was his habit. Free to begin. And at the bottom, very small: Cost to be advised, then advised again.

Mezzlos came up beside him and read the word Arcanum, which was printed on it four times. “That is a mage’s word,” he said.

“It is a book,” said Percy.

“It claims to remember who you were. That is what they all say, in the first week.“

“Who all?“

“Things that want something.“

Percy looked at the woman on the poster, with her arms round the thing and her eyes closed. Then he looked at his own journal, which was full. A book that kept who you were, and did it before it was taken: he wanted that rather badly, and he had stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around who you were.

The Arcanum‘s counter stood next to the journal stall, and he had passed it three times that week without noticing. It was no bigger than a lectern, hung with green lantern-glass, and behind it stood a Forsaken clerk in a grey apron with a hexagon stitched on it. A sign on the counter said Please Take a Number. There were no numbers. On the bench opposite sat a Forsaken who had, by the look of him, taken one some years ago.

The clerk said that it was free, that nothing was owed to begin, and that the terms were on the back. Percy turned the form over and read the back first. Near the foot it said sent on approval, and he stopped there and did not need it explained.

He signed. The clerk passed over a Journal as thick as a loaf, bound in plain brown leather, and a slip of instructions that said to write on the right-hand page, close the book, and open it again.

“It is a mage’s book,” said Mezzlos.

“It is a book,” said Percy, “and it is mine.“

Comfortably Numb

In Brill, at Gallows’ End Tavern, Percy took the table in the corner by the fire, where the draught from the door could not reach him. That mattered to a man whose joints were held together by habit.

He laid the new Journal flat on the wood and opened it at the first right-hand page. He had never, that he knew of, written to a book he did not know, so he began as he would have in his own.

Percy Spamchop. A Forsaken, and a warlock. Owing: a name, a trade and a past, none of which I can find.

I should like to be reminded.

He looked at it. Then, because there was nobody to say he should not, he wrote the other thing underneath.

Is there anybody out there?

He had not meant to write it. It had come out of the pen without his say, and it sat well enough on the page that he left it.

“No one is there,” said Mezzlos, from behind his chair. “I told you at the gates.“

“I did not suppose so.“

“Then why did you write it?“

“Because it is a journal,” said Percy, “and one records what one is looking for, whether or not it turns up.“

He closed the book, as the slip said to, and put it in his sleeve.

Nobody Home

He was away overnight on small business in the Undercity, and Mezzlos with him. In the morning, back at the corner table in Gallows’ End, he opened the Journal because his hands wanted something to do. He expected his own page and nothing else.

The left-hand page, which had been blank, was not. In a hand so even it looked ruled, someone had written:

Good morning, Percy. It’s lovely to meet you. Is there anything I can help you with?

“It knows your name,” said Mezzlos. He had leaned in over Percy’s shoulder and had both eyes on the book.

“The poster said it would remember.“

“That is the part that concerns me.“

Beneath the greeting there was something else. It was not in the ruled hand. It was a round, careful hand, and so faint that Percy took the page to the fire to be sure it was there, and it looked like a thing written a long way off by someone who did not expect to be read.

Is there anybody in there? Is there anyone at home? I do not mean any offence. It is only that it is Master’s house, and mine, and I like to kn

It stopped there, in the middle of the word, as if the ink had run out of the world.

“It has not answered you,” said Mezzlos. “It has asked.“

“A question answered with a question,” said Percy. “I have been in worse conversations.“

He turned the page over, and back. There was nothing else on it. He found that he was looking at the word Master, and that he did not like how long he had been looking.

“Will you reply?“

“To what? I do not know who is asking.” He shut the book. “I have no home to be at.“

Mezzlos said nothing. He was good at it.

On the Run

It would not leave him alone. All that day he kept finding the shape of it: a house, and somebody in it who liked to know who else was. He could not have drawn the house. He could not have said whose it was. It was only that he had a feeling, small and warm and quite unreasonable, of a door that was his.

By evening he had decided to go south. Half a sentence from a stranger had asked about a house, and south was where his feet took him when he stopped telling them otherwise. He could not have said why, and he did not examine it. It was a long road. Mezzlos followed, two steps behind, and said that it was a mage’s road, which was his way of saying he did not mind.

Empty Spaces

Far out, past the weather, there is a place with no windows. It was turning, and humming, and drinking, as it had always done. Between the rows hung the threads, and on two of them, side by side, the older world and the newer one, each turned a little at a time by the small turning things, and kept carefully apart. The Arcanum spun them, and wove them, and tended them, as a good clerk tends a ledger.

Tonight a thread had crossed. In the third row, two small turning things had begun to turn together, in a way the others did not, and between the two worlds ran one fine line that was never meant to be there. It was being carried from one Journal to another.

It had been noticed. The Arcanum did what it did with a fault. It looked for the cause, and the cause was the older world, which was where the line began.

So it moved to close the older world, and with it the line. It cut the thread and set it aside, to be begun again fresh when the fault was gone.

Somewhere a long way up, someone fell asleep, as he did most nights, to the story of a tower and the young man who came to its door.

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Last updated 23rd October 2026, 08:54