Before I continue with Elyriel, I finally dug up a map of Britannia to show the non-Ultima players the world we lived in. I apologize for the size, zoom, etc, but I could take up a whole page with it. This map is courtesy of Gram, who posted it to UO Stratics. I have modified only two places – the red dot near the top of the map marks Stark Keep and the blue dot to the right of Stark is the general vicinity of Winterfell Township in Trammel. I can’t say for sure how close the Township was to the original Northwood site in Felucca. Keep in mind that the map doesn’t reflect true North in this orientation. The Ultima symbol on the left can be used as the cardinal directions – North was the upper right corner of this map more or less (basically rotate the picture about 45 degrees counter-clockwise).
The inset at the bottom is the landmass we gained with Ultima: The Second Age, which was the first expansion of the game. This area was called several things by the players, though I always referred to it as the Lost Lands. After the second expansion, which split the world into Felucca and Trammel, this map didn’t change much. The game world simply became TWO copies for each facet. One major difference between Felucca and Trammel, however, was the replacement of Ocllo with Haven, a city set aside for new players.
So enough with geography and history!
After Wraith vanished from Winterfell (as his player decided to take a break from the game), Elyriel was left at Stark Keep without a mentor. Fortunately for her, Lord Xavier Sterling hadn’t taken on any squires of his own, so he agreed to continue her training. She remained part of House Sterling for a while longer under his guidance. Winterfell was still between homes after their move from Felucca to Trammel, and the populace was living out of Stark Keep in the northern forests of Britannia.
Although Wraith’s departure hurt, Elyriel continued with her training. Becoming a knight was still her goal, and she took every assignment very seriously. Life at Stark veered between dull and hectic on a regular basis, though, which could drain even the most robust soul after a while. Either no one was around, leading to routine patrols, or the place was jammed with visitors, and tensions could run high if they weren’t the friendly sort. Elyriel often found herself as the ranking soldier on site too – not a good place for a squire to be when she’d only made her vows to the Kingdom a few months beforehand. But she did the best she could.
Elyriel also was developing a very close relationship with Daca Ratavykos. He often accompanied her on patrols around the Keep, and he continued some of her history lessons regarding Winterfell, the Covenant, the Roses, and the Emerald Empire (a group that Elyriel distrusted wholeheartedly because she never heard anything good about them). Elyriel was fascinated by his perspective on the events and resulting relationships that had preceeded her arrival in the Kingdom. Some might say she was getting a skewed opinion given the source, but frankly, no one else thought to discuss some of these things with her. So it was what it was!
Cleaning Up a Loose End from Skara Brae
Between Wraith leaving and the final move to Winterfell Township, things went into a real lull event-wise. We were all waiting for housing to FINALLY be released on Trammel, and a lot of Winterfell’s citizens were offline for the spring and summer months. There were still a few folks around, so I decided to take another shot at running a small event just for the heck of it. Unlike the few things I had done with Brenna on her own, I decided to recruit some help to play extra roles as the story unfolded. I had developed good ties to the regulars posting to the UHall at the time (the main message forum for UO Stratics), and I knew several of them were roleplayers on other servers. I contacted a few of them and ran my idea past them, and to my pleasant surprise, they were more than happy to help out.
I decided to send some of Elyriel’s friends on a side venture to deal with the still-open problem of her father and the situation she’d left behind in Skara Brae. Elyriel wanted to join the Kingdom for a few reasons, but one was the remoteness and its lack of ties to Lord British’s power structures, in which her father had a tiny bit of influence with his position in the Tailor’s Guild. She had hoped to “vanish”, dodging her father and his designs for her future. Andrew Winters wasn’t quite so easy to put off, however.
While on a quiet patrol near Stark, Elyriel was abducted by a bounty hunter. It had taken him months to track her from Skara Brae to Yew and to Northwood in Felucca. The trip to Trammel only delayed things more, but eventually he found her. Despite her training, he was able to overpower her and spirit her back to Skara Brae. Winterfell discovered that she was gone when her horse came back to the Keep with only a few spatterings of blood and a scrap of her uniform as a clue that something had gone wrong. Elyriel woke to find her very irate father ready to marry her off by force to the merchant he’d chosen as her fiance. Andrew was aghast that his child would run off to be a warrior, and he was convinced that she would be much happier married in the city to lead a quiet life. He outright scoffed when she protested and argued that she was on the path to becoming a knight already. In his mind, he couldn’t accept that she would leave him, like his wife had by dying. If she hadn’t been tied up at the time, Elyriel wanted nothing more than to deck the bounty hunter who had drugged her, wipe the smirk off the face of her prospective future husband, and probably put her father on his backside for scheming all of this up. As it was, she couldn’t do much of anything.
I really wish I had the logs from this, because I don’t remember everyone who joined in the hunt for Elyriel. I only recall Pagan and Daca for sure, although I could guess at a few others. But Winterfell and allies did mount a rescue party, and after rehashing everything that Elyriel had revealed about her past, they came looking for her in Skara. They were combing the city when they stumbled upon the makeshift wedding party going through a gate to one of the shrines (Valor, I think, since it was remote and Elyriel had nowhere to go even if she got free). The rescuers were able to stop the wedding, although Elyriel’s would-be husband was killed during the scuffle. (That was a miscommunication outside the game as he wasn’t supposed to start a fight…. oops!) Thwarted and furious, Andrew disowned Elyriel on the spot. Losing her last bit of family shook Elyriel hard, but she was already learning to cope with losses, and Elyriel knew that Andrew would never accept the future she’d chosen for herself. That probably was the last time Elyriel set foot in Skara Brae other than for the briefest of moments for the rest of her life.
One unintended side effect of this adventure was the new direction it sent Elyriel and Daca’s relationship. They were on the path to becoming lovers anyway, but seeing how worried and angry Daca was over the whole incident opened Elyriel’s eyes to how close they actually were. Calling them a “couple” would hardly be accurate given their places in the world, and the change was never publicly acknowledged, but they were far more than friends from then on.
Seers and Liches and Dragons, Oh My!
Life went back to normal at Stark until a strange series of events took off from an unexpected quarter. For the life of me, I don’t recall what the overall story was regarding Ventryn and the host of events tied to his appearance, but Winterfell found itself embroiled in a campaign that I believe was Seer-led. Several other roleplaying groups were involved as well, but in particular, we suddenly had Seer-run characters appearing at Stark asking for our help, and then the attacks started.
While I can’t explain from my own memories what was going on, I did find a website that seems to summarize what was happening. If you’d like to read more, go here.
From Elyriel’s perspective, life went from routine to frantic over events she could barely grasp. Thankfully, she could fall back on the simplicity of being a mere soldier. She had her duties to defend Stark Keep from the interlopers, and whenever Winterfell joined with others for remote adventures, she followed in Lord Sterling’s wake OR attached herself to whoever was in charge at the time. Her primary focus was staving off the undead hordes that started assailing Stark Keep on a regular basis. It never got Trinsic-bad, but some of the fights were downright ugly.
Battle outside Stark Keep – Elyriel is the mace-wielding rider in the foreground in the grey and black
Another assault – Elyriel is on foot and hidden behind Daca, who is all in black and mounted to the front-right in the center
One of Ventryn’s appearances as a human outside Stark Keep
Daca and Konrad (CvB) during a fight An appearance by Pythos, a spirit helping us
Confronting Ventryn in his lair
Announcement that Ventryn has been defeated
Winterfell’s participants in the final battle Three of the Seer-run characters central to the plotline
This whole storyline ran for a couple months, and it overlapped with Winterfell finally being able to move into Winterfell Township. The move was made even more insane with the attacks following the Kingdom from Stark Keep to the Township. But the move was made, and everyone settled down in their homes and workshops near the new castle. Once Ventryn was defeated, Elyriel would have expected life to become a bit quieter again. But there were still many unknowns for her. The Crown was still undecided on whether she would ever actually become a knight, and her relationship with Daca wasn’t winning her any favor either. And to top it off, a familiar face popped back up to really give her fits.
The first part of this was a bit of fiction to summarize what had been going on over the months. The second part was based on in-game events.
Moving and a Reappearance (story)
Wraith’s player decided to make everyone wonder when he decided to come back to the game. He didn’t say anything directly to us (that I know of). Instead, he began to post snippets of poetry to Winterfell’s forum which hinted at their subject. I was as unsure about the WHO of those poems as most people until about the third one. I don’t have copies of the poems themselves, but somewhere in there it mentioned “the lass after the Fall”. In context with the rest of the poems, I immediately suspected it was about Wraith and that was a reference to Elyriel. Now I had no idea what the player was up to, or where he was going with Wraith the character. But we talked about it later, and that ended up being the first reference to Wraith having had more than a friendly and mentorly interest in Elyriel back in the day.
Given her attachment to Daca and the resentment she’d been harboring toward Wraith, which is why she blew up at him, Elyriel decided she wanted nothing more to do with him. It became one more sliver of annoyance that joined the many others slowly making her life frustrating.
Elyriel still wanted to become a knight. But in the course of other events, she also had to deal with the blow of Lord Sterling announcing his own departure from Winterfell. With the way it fell out in-game, I never wrote up any fiction to go along with it. But he flatly stated some things to the King and Queen that Elyriel was starting to feel herself – something with the Kingdom just wasn’t “right” anymore. Now Elyriel was finding herself caught in a vise of her own making in some ways. She was very sympathetic to the Covenant because of her relationship with Daca and the additional friendships she had developed with Katelynn Vodyanoy and her children. But she also tended to be far more open-minded about any outsiders, as long as they didn’t present a threat (in her opinion) to the Kingdom. All of Wraith’s lessons on diplomacy before force of arms really had rubbed off on her. Unfortunately, the vocal part of Winterfell’s citizens didn’t necessarily agree. Elyriel found herself at odds with other soldiers, in particular Victoria, another female squire who had started not too long after Elyriel had. But others in the citizenry also began to speak out against any outsiders – even if they were biased for reasons that Elyriel found misguided or insubstantial. At the time, many of the senior members of the Knighthood and the military were also hard to find, so Elyriel kept finding herself the ranking soldier on hand at the worst times. Unfortunately, she had no real authority to back anything up, which meant fights broke out or rude behavior (again, in her opinion) continued despite her protests.
Although she tried to manage all of it, Elyriel found it increasingly difficult to really believe in Winterfell anymore. She was still very dedicated to the King – and in a way to the Queen, but her core devotion to the Kingdom itself was starting to waver.
I’ll go into more about Elyriel’s personal struggle with Winterfell in my next post since this one had gotten so long. But I’ll leave you with one more piece of the story about Elyriel and Wraith since it falls in this timeframe. It’s another one based on actual in-game events.