Final Fantasy XIV · Halicarnassus Server
Chronicles of the Shire
Adventures, glamours & tales from Eorzea — by Vex Arkveld
Talked out of Tamriel by a coworker. Never went back.
I was not supposed to be here at all. I was in Tamriel, perfectly content, losing a long-running argument with a bank vault. Then a coworker started talking about Final Fantasy XIV, and did not stop, and kept not stopping, in the patient way that water does not stop working on rock.
So I rolled a character on Siren, largely to end the conversation. I gave it a fortnight.
That was the end of that. I do not remember deciding to stay. I remember looking up, discovering that several hours had gone somewhere without asking me, realising I had accidentally made a friend, and thinking: ah. Oh no. This is going to be a thing.
It was a thing. It is still a thing. Elder Scrolls Online has not heard from me since, and I believe we are both at peace with the arrangement.
Where it started, and where it ended
Dragged out of Tamriel by a coworker who would not let it go — still the best thing anyone has done to me without asking permission first. Then two years in Shirogane, paper screens and a koi pond that came with the deed, a house I never once stopped translating. It ended in drama. That is all you are getting for now.
Home
The Lavender Beds, ward twenty-two, plot twenty-eight, and a Free Company called the Shire. Lottery entry number three. I will not be taking questions.
The newest door
El Santuario, and a gang of people who keep editing me into photographs I was not standing in. I travel there more than I can honestly account for.
I was terrible. Genuinely, memorably terrible — the sort of sprout who stands in the wrong circle and then apologises to the party about it. What saved me was that nobody seemed to mind. Somebody always stopped, always explained, always waited. I have been quietly trying to pay that back ever since, one baffled newcomer at a time.
I clear content and I enjoy it, but let us be honest about where the hours actually go. Glamour. Housing. Standing perfectly still in good light for forty minutes while somebody counts down and somebody else wanders off to look at a flower. The fights are the excuse. The wardrobe is the hobby.
The Free Company was never a plan. It started as a question — what if there were somewhere that simply felt like home? — and turned into «LOTR» on Halicarnassus. Small, warm, and growing into something better every month. The bar is stocked, the Starlight tree goes up indefensibly early, and the cat has claimed the good chair permanently.
Because otherwise it goes past far too quickly. A house takes a fortnight, a lottery and six hundred pieces of furniture, and six months later it is simply where you live. Writing it down keeps the fortnight. And if somebody else reads it and recognises their own Eorzea looking back at them, that is a considerably better outcome than the one I was aiming for.
That is the shape of it, and deliberately only the shape. The rest is already scattered through the Chronicles — the house I entered one lottery too many for, the fantasia I swore on my life I would never use, the friends on another data centre who keep putting me in pictures I was not in, and the drama that took me from Siren to Halicarnassus.
That last one is in there as well — older than almost everything here, down near the bottom of the pile. I am not going to point at it.
That is all the map you are getting. Go and find them.
Read the ChroniclesThe journey begins
Never wiping the same way twice
The Shire has walls
All 10 slots perfected
They fell, eventually
Curated life content
«LOTR» born on Halicarnassus
Every corner of Eorzea
The grind is real
300+ tracks collected
Sharing the joy of discovery
But the journey continues
