PrimEvil Annals · Old Frontiers · a tale of old, before the keep, before the crossing — when we were nobody at all.
Before Hurbury. Before Excalibur learned to fear a banner it could not see. Before any of us could afford a horse — there was Cotswold.
You have to understand what we were. We were level six. Collectively. Ranolph had a rusty falchion he’d named “Consequence,” which was generous, because the only consequence it ever delivered was to Ranolph’s own stamina bar. Gudd had exactly enough stamina for one swing and an opinion about when to use it. Osana said nothing, as Osana does, and stood slightly apart from the group, as Osana does, already — somehow — closer to the bind stone than any of us.
(For the record, nobody has ever seen Osana die. We have only ever seen Osana already respawned, dusting himself off, looking at the rest of us like we were late.)
It started, as these things start, with Berthold and a plan.
“Fellwolves,” he said, “by the river. Easy XP. We hold the bridge, pull them one at a time, we’re level ten by supper.”
This was a lie in four parts, and we followed it anyway, because that is what a guild is.
The bridge at Cotswold is a humble thing — old stone, moss in the joints, the river chuckling underneath like it knows something you don’t. We took our positions. Ranolph at the front with Consequence. Gudd behind, hoarding his energy like a man guarding the last match in a storm. Mib somewhere — Mib is always somewhere, never quite here. Collegian, naturally, was in /gu, arguing that the pull was clean.
It was not clean.
It is never clean.
Berthold pulled one fellwolf. The fellwolf brought four friends, a river sprite nobody had accounted for, and what I can only describe as a personal grudge. The XP-rich quiet of the riverbank became, in the space of a single heartbeat, a great deal of teeth.
(Fook, said Solitare, from up the hill, where Solitare always is, watching, scouting, never in it. Fook, that’s a lot of wolves. Thank you, Solitare. Invaluable.)
Here is the thing about that night, the thing we still talk about twenty-odd years on, the reason it is written down at all:
The bridge held.
Not because we were good. We were emphatically not good. Ranolph swung Consequence and missed the broad side of a fellwolf three times running, then connected on the fourth purely by the law of averages and looked astonished. Gudd finally pulled out his pole — but at the wrong wolf, with perfect commitment. Mib materialised from somewhere at exactly the moment a sprite was about to take Ranolph from behind (I say), and he did one extraordinary thing nobody could later explain, and vanished back into somewhere. Collegian stopped typing long enough to actually fight, which was its own small miracle.
And Osana — silent, separate, already half a thought ahead of the rest of us — simply did not let the line break. Stood at the weak point of the bridge where the moss was thickest and the stone was worn, and held it. Held it longer than any man at level six has a right to. Held it the way he would later hold doors in Darkness Falls, the way the guild would later hold Hurbury when Excalibur was dying around us — though none of us knew any of that yet. We just knew the wolves did not get across.
When it was over, the riverbank was quiet again. The water went back to chuckling. We were all still standing, which had not been the plan, the plan having been considerably more horizontal. Nobody had bound. Nobody had run. We had, against every available odd and several laws of competent play, won a bridge nobody was attacking us for in the first place.
Berthold surveyed the carnage, leaned on his sword, and said the words that would become, in their way, the whole of us:
“See? Told you. Clean pull.”
We didn’t get to level ten by supper. We got to level seven, lost most of an afternoon, and gained the only thing that ever mattered: the knowledge that this particular collection of disasters would, when it counted, hold the line. For each other. Over nothing. For no reason. /salute.
That’s the spirit intended. That’s PrimEvil. It started on a mossy bridge in a starter zone, with the wrong spell cast at the wrong wolf, and a silent man who would not move.
(Berthold still owes Gudd a rez. Some debts predate the guild itself.)
— Transcribed from the telling, retold every year, embellished every time. Cotswold, Albion. Circa the very beginning. Still accurate.