KRLM · 20.04 · The Realms · essay · October 4, 2026

Everyone I Was

I went looking for one character on an old hard drive and found a dozen. Three realms, one laptop, and the Minstrel in the last frame.

8 min Jeff's voice, cloned

Siger stands in front of a castle gate at dusk, staff angled across his body, giant knight statues and banners behind him. — Siger, the Friar, at the gate. Dark Age of Camelot, 2003.

I went looking for my Minstrel and found three hundred and seventy-two photographs of people I used to be.

It started with the essay about the Minstrel, the class I played in Dark Age of Camelot twenty-odd years ago. Writing it, I wanted a picture of him, and I had a feeling there were folders somewhere. There were. Two of them were labeled with the game's name and one with the name of its first expansion, Shrouded Isles, and they'd been sitting in my Documents folder since 2003, sorted under the year I copied them off the PC. Guides I'd downloaded. Maps of Midgard I'd saved as web pages. Two videos. And the screenshots.

I didn't remember most of what was in them. That's the part I want to tell you about.

The Friar

The first picture is Siger, face down in the grass by a river, dead.

Siger was a Friar, and I loved the idea of him: a man in a brown habit with a quarterstaff, devout and dangerous. In the picture his whole party is down around him. There's a gravestone beside him that says Hadric's Grave, and in the chat somebody is asking, "should we not take solo reds and purps?" It's a photograph of a mistake, taken by the person who made it, and I'm so glad I took it.

Siger lies dead on a grassy riverbank beside a gravestone, with party members scattered nearby and the chat window open. — The first photograph. Siger, dead by the river, and the chat window working out whose fault it was.

Siger was featured in many more. Siger at the castle gate at sunset. Siger looking up at a chalk horse cut into a green hillside, which the game borrowed from Oxfordshire. Siger walking toward a lamp-lit cottage at dusk, which could be the last frame of a film. And Siger standing in water over a thing called a Fusnup he's just killed with his staff, while a goblin fisherman shouts "No! My fishes!" and then, to nobody in particular, his chant: "Worms eats the dirt. Fishes eats the worms. Goblins eats the fishes!"

The healer

I remembered Siger. I had forgotten about Vendadoc, and he turns out to be the character I photographed most.

Vendadoc was a Cleric, which is Albion's healer. I must have thought I was being clever with the name, a doc tucked in there for anyone who looked twice, and the pictures agree, though they tell it their own way. Vendadoc is dead in more of them than anyone. Dead on the stairs of a dungeon while the group jokes about the kiss of life coming. Dead by a willow tree at night beside a gravestone with his own name on it, while a mercenary named Lambchops lies next to him in the grass and types "this grass is soft and taste great." Dead head-first in a river, boots sticking up out of the shallows, his shield still dry.

Vendadoc's body is plunged head-first into the shallows of a river, boots and cloak above the water, a gravestone on the bank. — Vendadoc, the healer, in the shallows. The gravestone on the bank is also his.

My favorite is the quiet one. The game made you wait when you quit. A countdown ran in the chat, and for those seconds you couldn't do anything but stand there while it let you go. Vendadoc spent his sitting on a moonlit hillside. Just above the numbers is the last thing he said to anyone that night: sorry, he couldn't bring the dead back yet. Hamlin could, and did. I'd forgotten him completely, and here he is, sitting it out under the moon.

Vendadoc sits on a moonlit hillside among tall plants as the quit countdown runs in the chat window. — Logging off under the moon, with an apology.

Hibernia

Then the pictures leave Albion, and I started meeting strangers.

There's Dingh, in Hibernia, a fighter with a short blade and a round shield. The pictures find him in a meadow by a lake, fighting a wolf while the sun goes down, frame after frame, blade up, shield up, the light getting lower behind him. Then the wolf is gone, and he's sitting on the mud shore in front of a wide orange lake. I don't remember how Dingh got his name, but he fought until the light was right and then sat down to watch it.

A small hooded figure sits alone on a muddy lakeshore, looking out at an enormous orange sunset. — Dingh, alone with the sunset.

Then there's Sevaled, who has bark for skin and a crest of green leaves for hair, one of the tree people the expansion added, and a striking thing to look at even now, the grain of his face catching the light. In his best picture he stands face-on beside a mantis the size of a horse, like a man posing with his dog, and I think it was his: a charmed pet, the biggest thing in the meadow. Behind them, a smaller mantid rebel cons purple, which is the game's way of saying don't. With a pet like that at his side, I suspect he was about to anyway.

A bark-skinned figure with leafy hair stands beside a giant mantis in a night meadow. — Sevaled and his mantis.

The other side

Then Midgard, which is the realm you fight against when you're from Albion, and I was there too.

Pix is tiny, blue-faced, dressed in yellow, and has a spirit for a pet so large that in one picture Pix sits in the rain entirely inside it, like a child in a tent. Pix waves at the camera in front of the glowing portal stones. Pix stands on a pebble beach with their back to me, watching a pink sun go down over a flat sea. Whoever Pix was, they had the same habit as the rest of us.

A small yellow-clad figure raises a hand and waves in front of glowing purple portal stones. — Pix, waving.

There's Lavaseva with two blades, arriving in a town with a Norse name. There's Grildin, in a guild called Midgards Uprising, who swims a lake in five overhead frames, a small blue cloak crossing water that has taken in the whole sky. And there's Gentian, back in Hibernia, a robed caster with a little companion at his heel, standing in a green clearing ringed by a dozen lumpy moss creatures while I ask a guildmate in chat whether she's still coming to the farm.

A tall robed elf with a staff and a small robed companion stand in a sunlit green clearing, surrounded by hunched moss creatures, with a guild greeting in the chat window. — Gentian, surrounded, making plans.

The sky

Somewhere past the two-hundredth picture there's a run of fifty where nothing happens. The camera points straight up. Clouds. A sun flare. A single giant insect crossing the frame, then the same sky without it. Eight frames of blue. I went through them twice, waiting for the picture to arrive, and then I understood that the sky was the picture. I'd lain down somewhere in Midgard and photographed the weather.

A bright starburst sun in the upper left corner of a deep blue sky with soft white clouds. — One of about fifty.

The man who runs to a water tower every morning and writes about attention was already in there, in 2003, lying on his back in a game, looking up.

The last frame

I never found the Minstrel, is what I was going to write. I'd been through all three hundred and seventy-two, and he wasn't there. Friars, clerics, a swordsman watching a sunset, a tree man, a spirit-keeper, a swimmer on a lake full of sky, fifty skies. No Minstrel.

Then I opened the last one.

sshot330. A character in a red cape on a misty hill in Albion, a timber house behind him, a lute on his quickbar. His name is Galyvon, and he's new. He tried to charm the wrong type of creature, three times, and then decided to play a song. He's the last photograph I took before I copied the folder off the PC, and he's the one I was looking for, standing at the very end of the line where I'd have found him first if I'd read the pictures backward.

A red-caped figure stands on a misty wooded hill in Albion, a timber house behind him, with a lute on the quickbar and a giant spider in the pet window. — The last frame. Galyvon, the Minstrel, three charms on the wrong creature and one song.

I went wide in that game instead of deep. A dozen characters across three realms, many of them a few evenings old. Looking at them now, I don't mind. Each one was a way of standing in that world for a while and seeing what it looked like from there, and I took pictures.

I'm back in Albion this week, as it happens. New account, new character, a Sorcerer, because what I missed most was charming things. The Minstrel can wait. He's good at that. He's been standing on that hill since 2003 with a spider, playing his anthem.