5th August 2026

Part 5 of the Veilstrike series

It was Unclegrumble‘s letter that changed the shape of the whole problem. Golden portals, the gnome wrote, appearing across Azeroth — fighters from realities that weren’t quite this one, banners nobody recognized, histories that had run somewhere this world’s own hadn’t. Veilstrike read it three times before he let himself connect it to anything. The gold in his own memories had always felt like madness dressed up as memory. Reading Unclegrumble’s account, for the first time, it felt like corroboration instead.

Unclegrumble, he wrote back, your letter has disturbed me more than I care to admit. I have memories — fragments, always edged in gold — of the Scourge victorious, of armies I never marched with. You mention Morgrave. Tell me plainly whether there is anything real behind the rumours: a weapon, a tabard, a scrap of armour, anything that could not possibly belong to our own Azeroth. I need to know whether what I remember is mine.

Unclegrumble’s answer came back in his usual cramped, cheerful hand, offering less certainty than Veilstrike had hoped for and more than he’d expected. There was talk, he wrote, of a tabard torn from someone who’d stepped through one of the portals — Scourge markings, but wrong ones, symbols belonging to a Scourge that had actually won. There was talk, separately, of a sword nobody could account for, its blade carrying marks that didn’t match any history their own Azeroth had ever recorded. He couldn’t vouch for either object. He wouldn’t dismiss them either.

Not long after, in the common room at Brill, Veilstrike overheard a mage further down the bar say a name that stopped him mid-step: Morgrave. The mage, pressed, offered little beyond secondhand rumour — that the necromancer had come through one of the golden tears himself, out of a world where the dead had already won everything worth winning. It wasn’t new information, not really. But hearing the name said aloud by a stranger, unprompted, made the whole business feel less like something Veilstrike had assembled out of guesswork and more like something that had simply been true all along, waiting for him to catch up to it.

He built three theories out of what little he had, turning them over the way he used to turn over a lock before deciding how to open it. The first, and the one that felt truest the longer he sat with it: he had always belonged to this Azeroth, had been Edric exactly as he remembered being Edric, had died fighting Morgrave the way Unclegrumble remembered him dying — and Morgrave’s working, dragging a piece of that other Azeroth through with him, had simply left some of that world’s residue tangled in the raising, the way smoke clings to a coat long after the fire’s out. The second theory ran darker: that Edric himself had originated somewhere else, died there, crossed through whatever these tears actually were, and woken in Deathknell already carrying someone else’s ending. The third he liked least of all and trusted least besides — that he’d been human in an Azeroth already lost, and Morgrave had brought him here deliberately, already halfway turned, before finishing the job properly.

He kept coming back to the first theory, mostly because of Unclegrumble. It was the only version of events that made sense of why a proud, thoroughly Alliance gnome would keep corresponding, faithfully, with a Forsaken rogue increasingly obsessed with the side that was supposed to be the enemy. They had been friends before any of this. Unclegrumble had watched him fall. Whatever guilt or loyalty kept the letters coming, it was rooted in a friendship that existed before Veilstrike did, which meant that friendship, at least, wasn’t something Morgrave could have brought through a tear in reality. It was the one thing in the whole business Veilstrike was fairly confident belonged entirely to him.

I believe I understand part of it now, he wrote, in what became his second letter. I think I was always Edric. I think I died here, beside you, exactly the way you remember it. And I think when Morgrave raised me, something of his own world came through with him and settled in whatever was left of me to settle in. That would explain the gold. It would explain the certainty, which I still haven’t shaken, that the dead were somehow supposed to win. But tell me honestly — have you seen either object yourself, the tabard or the sword, or only heard the same rumours I have? And tell me the harder thing too, if you know it. Do you remember what actually happened to me. I would rather have the truth than the comfort.

No answer to that question ever fully satisfied him, then or since. Unclegrumble wrote what he knew, which was less than either of them wanted, and Veilstrike went back to the life he’d built in the meantime — quests by day, the coffin under the Brill inn by night, gold and blades and Forsaken errands accumulating the way they do for anyone who stays in one trade long enough. Whenever the Scourge came up in conversation, he listened harder than he let on. The name Morgrave stopped being a mystery to chase and became something closer to a splinter he’d stopped trying to dig out, mostly because digging never seemed to get any closer to the surface.

He still doesn’t know, with any certainty, whether the golden memories are his own or something Morgrave left behind out of carelessness rather than cruelty. He is Forsaken. He is not Scourge. He has never stopped, in some small and carefully unexamined corner of himself, wanting to be. He was Edric once, definitely, and he is Veilstrike now, definitely, and most days that’s as much certainty as he lets himself ask for.

Somewhere, presumably, Morgrave still exists — in this Azeroth, in the one he came from, or in whatever sits between the two. Veilstrike has never gone looking for him directly. He tells himself that’s patience rather than fear, and most days he’s reasonably convincing about it. Until the truth surfaces on its own, he keeps heading north when the opportunity presents itself, not because he particularly wants the Lich King dead, but because he has come to suspect that whatever answer exists for what he is, it’s more likely to be found somewhere under the ice than anywhere else he’s thought to look.

Somewhere along the way, without either of them marking exactly when, the letters stopped being about proving anything and started being simply what they were: two old friends writing to each other because they always had. Unclegrumble had a tower by then, and an undead housemate of his own who’d shown up one evening to collect a debt and never left, and it struck him, more than once, how little explaining that arrangement would need if he ever tried describing it to Veilstrike. He wrote as much, eventually — an invitation, half-serious the way most of his invitations were, to come see the place for himself. There’s no shortage of spare coffins, he added, which was, if anything, an undersell.

Veilstrike has not yet taken him up on it. He tells himself Tirisfal keeps him busy, which is true, and that the north still wants finishing, which is also true, and neither of those is the actual reason. He is not sure he wants Unclegrumble to see, up close, how much of the old friend is still in there and how much has been rearranged. Some visits are easier to keep postponing than to actually have.

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More in the Veilstrike series

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