Ward 22, Plot 28: A Lavender Beds House That Was Already the Shire

For two years I decorated around a contradiction. The Shirogane house was genuinely lovely — paper screens, a koi pond that came with the deed, a wisteria month no expansion has ever topped — and every evening I spent in it I was quietly translating. Far Eastern bones, hobbit heart. It worked. It never once stopped being work.

Then I moved worlds, put my name into one more lottery, and on the seventeenth of August the message scrolled past in chat:

›You have won the right to purchase a plot.

Halicarnassus. The Lavender Beds. Ward twenty-two, plot twenty-eight, and a large one at that. My lottery entry was number three, which I have decided to read as an omen, because three is a very hobbit number and I will not be taking questions on it.

─── ✦ ───Nine Days

For anyone who hasn't done it: Eorzean housing is a nine-day patience trial decorated with maps. You scout the wards, you watch for vacant signs, you drop a frankly unserious amount of gil into the entry pot, and then you try very hard not to picture the rooms before the result lands. Most cycles I managed that. This one I did not. I had already decided where the bar was going.

Reader, the bar went exactly there.

❝Shirogane I had to translate. The Lavender Beds only needed unpacking.

─── ✦ ───No Translation Required

Here is the thing I wasn't ready for. I walked up the path on the first evening, stood at the gate with my decorating list open, and realised I could throw most of it away. The Lavender Beds is the Shire. It has been the whole time. Wooded glade, crooked lanes, water somewhere behind the trees, everything green and low and a little overgrown. Someone at Square Enix built the Shire in 2013 and simply declined to mention it.

I had spent two years teaching a house a second language. This one already spoke mine. There was nothing to argue with — no tiled roof to work around, no reflecting pool to talk out of being a reflecting pool. I just had to move in and stop fighting.

─── ✦ ───A Small Confession

I didn't do the inside alone. I know exactly what I want a room to feel like, and I have almost no patience for the part where you nudge a shelf into a wall forty times until it stops looking like a shelf in a wall. So, for the first time ever, I hired a designer.

A proper one, the kind with opinions about sightlines and lamp heights. My brief was more feeling than furniture, mostly hobbit pub, but make it glow, and they understood it straight away. Didn't laugh, either. Or at least not where I could hear. A few days later they came back with the whole house already imagined, room by room, and a list.

The list was everything. Every single piece, all six hundred of them, because six hundred is the new item limit and neither of us was willing to leave a slot on the table. I spent the next fortnight crafting, buying and pestering FC mates for dyes, and every piece went exactly where they said it would. Six hundred out of six hundred. Every room still sounds like me. It just stands up a little straighter.

─── ✦ ───The Tap Room

The first room we finished was the one I'd been dreaming up for the whole nine days. Long wooden bar, bottles lit from behind so the whole shelf glows like a stained-glass window (their idea, and the best one in the house). Stools that are objectively too tall for a Lalafell (my idea, and I refuse to replace them). String lights along the ceiling. Two lamps that throw exactly the right amount of orange.

It is, obviously, the Green Dragon. I didn't ask for a pub. I asked for somewhere the Free Company could stand around talking rubbish for three hours after a raid night, and it turns out that's a pub. The cat wandered in on the second day and has not acknowledged my ownership of the building since.

─── ✦ ───Starlight Came Early

And then I did the thing I do every single year, just a little earlier than is strictly reasonable. I love Christmas. Properly, embarrassingly, the-playlist-comes-out-in-September love it. So Starlight has come early to the Shire. The tree is up in the corner by the fire, the mantel is full of candles, and nobody is allowed to say the word September indoors.

People came anyway. More than came — they stayed, sat by the fire, and argued about whether a pub needs a tree. (It does.) That's the whole test of a house, really: not whether the furniture matches, but whether anyone turns up to sit in it.

─── ✦ ───Still To Do

The list is shorter than the Shirogane one ever got, which tells you something:

• ✦A proper round green door at the front. The current one is a placeholder and it is bothering me daily.
• ✦Herb beds along the side path — and a small patch of Thavnairian onion, the Shire's unofficial crop.
• ✦A reading nook upstairs. Bay window, blanket pile, three teas on the shelf, nothing else allowed in the room. This one I'm doing myself, which first means deciding which of the six hundred gets evicted to make room.
• ✦Somewhere permanent for the bell an FC mate gave me on my first nameday. It has moved house twice now and deserves better.
• ✦A bench by the water, facing away from the house, for the evenings when you want the glade and not the company.

─── ✦ ───An Open Door

The house isn't finished. I'm not sure I want it to be — the Shirogane place was only ever really mine in the weeks I was still changing things. But the fire is lit, the bar is stocked, the cat has claimed the good chair, my designer has been paid and thanked twice (I meant it more the second time), and the address is up on the FC notice board.

If you're on Dynamis and fancy a look — Halicarnassus, the Lavender Beds, Ward 22, Plot 28 — send me a tell. The door's the wrong colour for now, but it opens. And yes, the tree stays up until January. Possibly February.