10th August 2026

Part 3 of the The Wrong Stormwind series

Blondage came along, which turned what could have been a grim errand into something closer to a proper few days away. She’d never seen this Stormwind before, obviously, and treated the whole business with the enthusiasm of someone who’d been handed an unplanned holiday rather than dragged into someone else’s mystery.

This Stormwind, it turned out, was not quite the one either of them already knew. Tucked between the ordinary shopfronts were others that didn’t announce themselves — narrow doorways, unmarked signs, a sense that whoever moved through them belonged to some other current running underneath the city’s ordinary business. UG spotted at least one shop selling wands to customers who clearly weren’t warlocks or mages by any classification he recognised, and gave it a wide berth once he worked out, from a poster in the window, exactly whose world it belonged to and what she thought of people like Lichmyface’s own kind, if they’d been born the wrong shape for her liking. Some things weren’t worth the coin regardless of the timeline. Elsewhere there were rumours of a flat world balanced on the back of something enormous, and shops selling luggage that was rumoured to walk on its own if you looked away too long. UG didn’t go looking for those either, mostly because Blondage wanted dinner.

At night the city told stories, in vaulted pubs down crooked stairwells and in old churches turned over to something other than worship. They spent one evening in a labyrinth of a place cut straight into the rock under the bridges — cold stone, low ceilings, a banshee’s name over the door and, allegedly, a ghost or two still wandering the back rooms — listening to travellers from every direction take turns at a small stage, each with a story no one could verify and no one much wanted to. Another night was spent in a repurposed church, watching a performer built out of contradictions — equal parts world-weary and delighted about it, dressed for a very different kind of ceremony than the one the building was built for — hold a room that clearly adored her. UG didn’t catch the performer’s name. He caught enough of the show to recognise the title, printed on a board outside, as one Blondage already knew rather well.

The investigating happened in the gaps between all of that, right up until the gaps turned into the whole point of the trip. The shop UG eventually found didn’t deal in ordinary secondhand weapons — it dealt, as far as UG could tell, in things that had wandered in from somewhere they didn’t belong, priced according to how unlikely their story sounded. Given everything else this city apparently let through its doors, UG stopped being surprised that a sword like the one he was after had found its way onto a shelf here too. The owner had a tabard behind the counter matching the description in Veilstrike’s letters almost exactly, and a sword to go with it, its blade carrying markings that didn’t match anything from this Stormwind’s own history any more than they matched UG’s own. He bought both without much negotiating.

It was while paying that he mentioned the other rumour, half out of curiosity, half just making conversation — a sword, supposedly, with symbols like nothing he’d ever seen. The owner knew exactly which one he meant.

“Big thing. Wings either side of the crossguard, runes down the flat. Had it in for months. Nobody wanted to touch it — looked cursed, and priced like it too.”

UG went still. He’d never seen Frostmourne with his own eyes, only heard it described often enough, in enough different accounts, that the shape of it had settled into something he could picture without trying. Wings on the crossguard. Runes on the flat. Whatever this Stormwind’s history held, that sword had no business existing whole in it — not here, not anywhere UG knew of, not unless the Lich King this shop’s world remembered had simply never lost.

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More in the The Wrong Stormwind series

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