Prologue

the prologue of Trixie Doomsprocket, told by herself

The Boomsprockets of Gnomeregan

I was born under Dun Morogh, in Gnomeregan, the finest city ever built. It was finer than Ironforge, finer than Stormwind and finer than anything the tall folk will ever manage, because gnomes built it, and gnomes measure twice.

We are Boomsprockets. My grandfather made sprockets, my mother made better ones, and when I was born a clerk at the Hall of Records wrote a D where the B should go. Nobody had the paperwork to fix it, so I have been a Doomsprocket ever since. Looking back, the clerk saw me, still in my mother’s arms, more clearly than anyone else ever has. Every Boomsprocket has been an engineer, back as far as the family ledgers go. They are very thick ledgers, written very small, which is where my trouble began.

I couldn’t read them. I have never seen well, not even as a child, and the spectacles only ever helped a little. I could feel a gear train turning. I could hear when a cog was wrong, the way you hear a lie. But a screw the size of a sesame seed, a schematic drawn in ink finer than a whisker? To me they were a grey fog with opinions.

So I was an apprentice the way an imp is an apprentice to a doomguard: present, keen, and setting fire to everything that mattered.

The Night the City Fell

The troggs came up from beneath in the year twenty, as the count from the Dark Portal has it. The dwarves had been digging at Uldaman and woke them, and they tunnelled into our lowest levels in numbers nobody had counted. The High Tinker didn’t ask the Alliance for help. The Alliance had the Scourge to fight, and we were gnomes: we would think of something.

We spent five years thinking of something. Every corridor we sealed, the troggs dug round, which no plan had allowed for, because nobody sensible digs through rock when there is a perfectly good door. We lost the city a level at a time. I was an apprentice for all of it, in a workshop that kept being moved upstairs.

Then, in the year twenty-five, High Tinker Mekkatorque flooded the lower city with radiation to stop them, on the advice of his trusted Sicco Thermaplugg, who turned out not to be trustworthy. It stopped a great many troggs. It stopped a great many more gnomes.

I was in the workshop on the third level when the alarms went. I remember the green, a light so bright it went straight through my spectacles and into the back of my skull. It’s the brightest thing I have ever seen, and very nearly the last. When it faded, my eyes had gone from poor to tragic. Everything since has been shapes, colours, and the odd wall I discover by walking into it.

We fled to Ironforge, those of us who could. The dwarves gave us a corner of their city and called it Tinker Town, which was kind of them. It was also small, which they thought suited us.

Proving I Could Be an Engineer

In Tinker Town I tried, honestly, to be a Boomsprocket. I tried from the spring thaw to the first snow of autumn. That isn’t long, and it was long enough.

• The automatic boot polisher: it polished two boots, then the dwarf wearing them.
• The self-stirring stewpot: it achieved escape velocity.
• A mechanical squirrel: I am told it is still loose somewhere in the Commons.

The master tinker, a kind gnome with a very long sigh, finally sat me down. “Trixie,” he said, “engineering is the art of seeing small things clearly.” I said I could do that if the small things would hold still and stand closer. He took my wrench away, very gently, and that was the end of it.

I am no engineer. I am only a gnome. It took me a long time to learn those aren’t the same thing.

Anvilmar

With no wrench and no trade, I did what the city’s leftover gnomes were doing: I went up to Coldridge Valley, to Anvilmar. That’s where the dwarves train anyone willing to fight the troggs, the same troggs that took our city. I meant to be useful. I didn’t much mind how.

Anvilmar is a great stone hall full of tall folk shouting at one another about axes. I went looking for someone who might teach a small gnome something, and climbed the first stairs I found. I can’t see stairs well. I can’t see where they lead at all. These led to the mezzanine.

It was quieter up there. It smelled of brimstone and candle smoke, and there were chalk marks on the floor I could feel through my boots before I could see them. A figure stood among them. His name was Alamar Grimm. He looked at my spectacles, and then at the fog behind them, and he said the most important thing anyone has ever said to me:

“You don’t need to see it, little one. You only need to understand it.”

What He Showed Me

Fel magic, it turns out, is an equation. A summoning circle is a schematic you can feel with your fingertips. The Twisting Nether is a power grid nobody has bothered to wire properly, and a soul shard is a battery. Best of all, a demon is a multi-tool that does the fiddly parts itself.

Every engineer in my family spent their life building machines to do their work. I would simply summon one.

I’ll admit to other reasons. I wanted Gnomeregan back, and I wanted the troggs to have a very bad day. I wanted the master tinker to hear one day that the girl who couldn’t hold a screwdriver now commanded entities from beyond the stars. Most of all I wanted to prove that a small gnome who can’t see can still do everything, and do it better, and do it on fire.

Alamar Grimm listened to all of it without a word, which I took as approval. Then he put a stick of chalk in my hand, closed my fingers around it, and pointed at a clear patch of floor.

I knelt, pushed my spectacles up my nose, and began to draw my first circle. It was a Wednesday evening, the fourth of November, and I was level one.