Last Night in Aldermere

They announced the shutdown in June. A little post on the forums, three paragraphs, the kind of thing you read twice because the first time you're sure you've misunderstood. Thank you for twelve wonderful years. Servers will go offline permanently on the 30th of September at 00:00 server time. We hope you'll join us for one last adventure. Twelve years. I'd been there for eleven of them. My character was a healer called Wrenna, a tall woman with a green cloak I'd earned in 2016 by doing something eighty times in a row, and a house in the hills above the starting town with a garden I'd planted myself. The last night I got on at nine. The starting town was rammed. I'd never seen it like that, not even at launch. Thousands of people, all in one place, the server groaning under it. Characters were standing on the walls and the roofs and the fountain. Someone had brought every mount they owned and was cycling through them, a horse then a wolf then a dragon then a giant chicken, over and over. Someone else was playing the game's one and only in-game instrument, a lute, and the tune was slightly off because the lute was always slightly off. The chat was going too fast to read. I picked out bits. Remember when. Does anyone know if. I met my wife here. I met my husband here. Ten years. Twelve years. Thank you thank you thank you. At ten our old guild started turning up. Not all of them, some had left years ago, but Hallam came, who'd been our tank when I first joined and who'd not logged on since 2020, and Jessamy who'd run the raids for four years and then had twins, and Piotr, who'd been eighteen when I met him and was now, I knew from the group chat, thirty and a dentist in Krakow. We stood in a circle outside the guild hall, which was where we'd always stood, and typed at each other. "Old lady's still got the cloak," Hallam said. "Old lady never takes off the cloak."

"Right. What are we doing. We've got two hours." We did the first dungeon. The very first one, the one you do at level six, the one with the rats. Twelve of us, all max level, all in our best gear, and we walked through it and killed the rats and nobody used any abilities at all, we just hit them with our weapons the way we'd done at level six when we didn't know what we were doing. It took twenty minutes. We stood at the end by the treasure chest that had a bronze sword in it and let Piotr open it, because he was the youngest and he always had been. Then we went up to my house. I'd never had them all there. They stood in the garden. Jessamy said it was nice and I said thanks, and neither of us said anything about how it was all about to stop existing. At half eleven there was a thing. The developers did something, a message across the whole sky in gold letters, the way they used to do for events. It said the same thing as the forum post, more or less, thank you, twelve years, but seeing it written on the sky over my garden was different. Then the fireworks. They'd put fireworks in. Over every town, the whole map, all at once. We went back down to the fountain for the end. It was somehow even fuller than before. The chat had slowed down, actually, people had stopped typing and were just standing there. At 23:58 Hallam said: "Well." At 23:59 Jessamy said: "Love you lot." I typed something. I don't remember what. My screen was blurry. At 00:00 the world didn't fade or crumble or do anything cinematic. It just stopped. One moment there were thousands of people by a fountain and the next there was a small grey box that said connection lost, and behind it, my desktop, and the wallpaper of my actual garden that I'd set that afternoon so there'd be something to look at when it went. I sat there a while. Then the group chat on my phone lit up, and it was Piotr, and he'd typed: "same time next week?" and then "joking" and then "not joking". Wrenna's still there somewhere, on a hard drive in a building I'll never see. Green cloak. Garden in the hills. Rats.