AI 010 - Immemorial

You could almost argue that it's archtrees all the way down, branches becoming roots becoming beds becoming canopies.

You travel down through all these caves and caverns, lava pits and lost cities, and realize all of it is cradled in the branches of two understory layers of like five archtrees, three of them broken or severely damaged, in a forest of archtrees.

So you gotta think: if we dug down beneath Ash Lake would we find another Journey to the Center of the Earth?

And then in DS2 all of the archtree branches have been replaced with roots. Places like Amana and FoFG are rampant with giant tree roots, many of them new. One of them holding a big weird metal spike thing I've gone on for ages about in Scholar.

We know that the Age of Ancients, from the perspective of a human or even a god, was static and unchanging. This is despite the fact that the presence of dragons, animals, trees, societies, and the other stuff clearly indicates that some kind of living and evolving ecosystem was undeniably present, but, because Socrates is mortal, the life cycle was occurring on a much slower timeline than for those creatures touched by Fire.

There are many obvious analogies you can draw: man harnessing fire, alien invasions, the nature of plagues, the Internet. The dodo are meeting White People for the first time, is what I'm saying, with the birth of the First Flame.

This post is dealing with stuff leading up to that. Probably not everything, because there's quite a lot, but the primary focus is going to obviously be archtrees.

So what is an archtree and how does it work?

Tah-dah!

Dual Phase Evolution

This is me basically paraphrasing the WP of the subtitle, only adapted for Souls physics, inasmuch as we understand them. The general idea is that, in relative terms, ecosystems tend to remain in a kind of stasis, called a 'global' phase, until some big upheaval happens, at which point everyone is scrambling to adapt -- the 'local' phase -- which eventually leads to a slightly-different global phase.

The global phase -- presented as timeless and unchanging -- was the Age of Ancients: where everything was more-or-less balanced, and any kind of evolutionary excitement was occurring in terms of very slow specializations within an established environmental niche. In fantasy terms: the elves from Lord of the Rings are presented as being creatures much more at-home in a global phase, as are dragons and hollows in Dark Souls.

And Then There Was Fire

An archtree explodes, or something. The Dawn of the Age of Fire.  

At this point the Souls-verse enters a local phase, marked by jockeying for position amid the new resources in the new normal, and the new normal seems to really, really, favor seeds. 

Four of these seeds (not really, but, but they're presented as such,) grow into four little bushes by virtue of being closest to the mortally wounded tree. They, mostly, decided how to divvy up all that pine tar and warmth and light.

Now, for what follows we need to understand that the Age of Fire, even though it's in a local phase from the perspective of archtrees and dragons, it is also in a global phase from the perspective of anything that doesn't have access to the four Flame-derived humours, and vice versa. Jesus that sentence made my eyes cross I hope it came out right. The Age of Ancients is still occurring, with Lordran's Age of Fire being a temporary aberration from 'normal,' but also the Age of Fire, by the time Gwyn took over, was the new normal as well. 

The 'cycle of Flame' seems to be

1. Birth/Fire
2. Growth/Light 
3. Decline/Dark 
4. Death/the Dead.

This means that the new local phase, referred to as the 'dawn of the age of fire,' and similar, was the period of Izalith's rule.  kingdom seems like it was the most culturally advanced at the time of the First Flame, so it would follow that she would have been the First Lord. 

I mean, when we first meet Gwyn he's in a fucking cave what's a sun god doing in a cave like a fucking frankenstein huh? He took over after the Chaos Flame, which was Iz's attempt to resolve the fade.

But the archtrees are still there, underneath it all, and because archtrees are still there everything else that was of the Ancient world is still, hypothetically, there. Or could be again. 

Except from the perspective of these new rosin-and-turpentine powered upstart bushes, none of this stuff is even alive because it can't even really die. Plus, when cellulose and petrified wood was all there was, the little bushes near the Great Sap Pine had fuck all chance of ever becoming big trees themselves, right, so fuck the big trees.

Plus who wants to be a tree? It's boring and everyone wants your sap.

A dragon is immortal. A hollow is immortal. Ground into dust, diffused as moonlight, carved up into armaments: a dragon is immortal. Maybe not sapient or sentient or aware, but alive in a 'Lord Cthulhu Lied Dead But Dreaming' sense. Because dragons, like archtrees and hollows, are Ancient. Things that are ancient behave, if anything, like a kind of cellulose-based amoeba that, over a long-enough timeline, can turn into a tree the width of, like, a planet I suppose.

Or a very exclusive nightclub.

An Archtree, in a sense, is its bark, same a real tree. You can cut a strip of bark off from around a tree, couple inches wide, and the tree will die. On the other hand, you can saw half the limbs off and, so long as it still have enough leaves and no parasites get in, the tree will probably be fine. But, like, the local/global phase thing again.

Trees are a circle and bark is a ring. That doesn't directly relate to anything, it's just important thematically.

So this amoebic, prokaryotic, mineral-based cellulose (soululose?) stuff that makes up archtrees behaves, in a lot of ways, like wood. In other ways it behaves like rock. it can take the form of tree trunks, branches, roots, and stalagmites & stalagtites.

When left undisturbed in an 'unformed' (free of Flame or direct sunlight) location, a tree will just grow straight up, as with the Great Hollow, until it is either injured or finds (plain ole regular) sunlight, at which point it attempts to take branch. Probably water or soil, as well, at which point it attempts to take root. In the presence of sunlight branches will appear as they do on real world trees, but when underground it doesn't exert the effort, and, yknow, the inverse for being above ground and finding water.

The Tree Is Dead Hail New Tree

Archtrees die. This is, like, the equivalent of a dragon becoming inert. What seems to happen is that either the bark will become too thick, old, or damaged and will petrify, or the core becomes hollowed out, I suspect due to infection or its sub-systems turning parasitic.

When the bark dies or is severely injured the exposed core will begin to behave like bark and attempt to take both branch and root through the old bark, using it as both nutrients and an anchor to grow the new canopy/understory.

When the core dies/is injured it begins to hollow. This is experienced as a gradual, or possibly very sudden, drop in elevation for the 'top' of the archtree. This is probably also fatal for the exposed bark as well, unless there are sufficient nutrients around, but that generally requires the presence of other archtrees.

The Great Public Health Hazard Tree Fort of Anor Londo.

The Great Hollow is actually really really healthy for an archtree and because of its environment.

So archtrees, even leaving out the 'potentially infinitely respawnable given enough time' are pretty sturdy, but not indestructible. We see fields of them being burned down by Izalith, we find their smoking remains at the end of the Dragon War, craggy fingers fused into stone, we find an endless plain of lava in Drangleic where some mad, prehistoric engineer found a miraculous way to make titanite by rendering an entire forest down to charcoal and smog.

Archtrees can also be unmade, corroded out of existence, by the abyss of Manus. This mechanic is referred to in the sequel as Dark Fog, and seems to be the result of humanity existing in a vapor, rather than a liquid, flame, or distinct motes. In other words, a dense fog of disembodied willpower desperately seeking purpose that, like a drowning person, drags anything it can into its clutches.

I don't know what causes it to unwrite geography, but the 'lost' sections seem to be gone forever, although if the tree is healthy enough the wounds will at least be able to seal themselves. The closest equivalent I can come up with for what might be happening is what Nito does to that root in the intro cinematic.

Within and Upon

Trees need ecosystems. Bugs to carry pollen, animals to carry seeds, the right balance of microbes and decaying plant matter and sun and air and water and so on.

So who served the Ancients?

I've mentioned, many times, that I think hollows and giants come from seeds. The seed/larva, if unable to take root/branch, will instead develop limbs and sensory organs, 'hatch,' and begin looking for a way to either take root or perform some suitable service to the parent tree/ecosystem.

Fallen Giant birthing a tree.

Hollows live both above and below 'ground,' but in their natural state seem to prefer subterranean environments. It's possible that the division between the gods and men originally came down to this kind of dwarf/elf dynamic.

The presence and implied presence of an entire world's worth of mammals and birds would seem to indicate that at least some of these creatures predated Fire. It's possible that they're different breeds of evolved sub-tree, or the result of seeds grown under certain conditions. Includes things like rats, dogs, wolves, birds, horses, steer, goats, sheep and so on. Many of them may have been bred by colonies of seedlings in societies ranging from nomadic hunter-gatherers to early agricultural communities.

I mean, you don't see many wooden castles anymore, but they used to be everywhere.

Seeding Giant Tree

Another hypothesis is that any big, healthy branch or root of a large enough tree could itself take root/branch/leg, and thereby become a 'descendant' of an archtree. Given the nature of the hollow log in Ash Lake, we could be looking at something like the birth of a giant.

Mushrooms, of course, probably predate the First Flame. They seem to occur naturally and flourish under the right conditions, such as in the Great Hollow, beneath Huntsman's Copse, and probably in the caves around Darkroot/Farron. This might be because of the relationship between blood and lightning, as mushrooms are the source of Gold Pine Resin.

Elizabeth, famous racist and liar, is generally credited, in Drangleic, as being the godmother of alchemy, and in the Lothric period they were widely known as scholars (although this might be them stealing credit from the 'elves' of Oolacile).

YOU KNOW I'M A NECROMANCER RIGHT? NO, WAIT, NOT NECK ROMANCE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU

It's a contentious point, but I think I know what happened to the mushroom people outside of Darkroot.

There is a particularly opaque class of enemy in the second and third game. They appear in groups in seemingly random locations. They're weak, but have a lot of health. Their melee attacks involve kind of ineffectually leaping at their much taller foe and trying to headbutt them with their lure.

More often, they'll rely on their 'ranged' attack, a short-range AoE 'breath' class pyromancy that can inflict poison or, sometimes, corrosion. They are insects, which also predated the First Flame, and they are parasitic, although often symbiotic and even familial towards their host.

In profile they look like mushrooms.

There Jugo.

Which transitions use nicely to Izalith, who had a royal family before the Age of Fire, and were the kind of society that could create the Gold Hemmed Black Robes that, if they really are the same as the Prayer Set, were really incredibly well made.

Plus they demonstrate that the bugs that live in and on archtrees took hollows for hosts/partners before disparity. It's possible that, yknow, the bug was Master and the hollow was Blaster, but in a much more, yknow, Ferngully-esque environment.

The people of Izalith seem to have been, like, spiders, ants, maybe even weevils and scorpions, but there were probably other invertebrates present in the unformed world, crabs and oysters and so on. Other vertabrate species, of course, were things like serpents, lizards, and dragons, and possibly amphibians as well.

AI 009 - Profane Use

Alright I'm going to try to update this one. I'm terrified of this because it always effs the formatting all to hell and I like to cut paragraphs I think I don't need and then not notice all the references to the cut material until later. If this all looks like one of those newspaper scrap ransom notes I promise you it may have looked better before.

Cuz storytelling hard. 

2019 to 2023 here go.

I'm miserable. Lonely. Hair under my skin. I hurt and I want to fight and I want to drink and I want to throw a dart at a map and just walk away. From everything. Again.

Except I been where all the darts go and it ain't better and drinking would be a death sentence for me at this point anyway. Fix here. Try. There's no soil I would ever take root in anyway.

My partner really needed comforting and reassurance. I didn't have any to give. I feel so fucking rotten I'm gonna work on this stupid random off the cuff update until they wake up for work and try to have breakfast ready and be passable simulacrum of the person I should've been 3 hours ago.

Everythings good though. or as good as it's ever been for me, hard to imagine better. I don't know where I'm going with this update wish me luck.

Back to the show.

Look at this. It's the Old Dragonslayer. The Old Dragonslayer is Ornstein's hollow. He is hollow because he relinquished his lords soul when he left Anor Londo. He left some time after Gwynevere and seems to be waiting for word from her. Don't worry about that, that's not what's important right now. Look at this:

That's a Dark Lightning attack, right? Those aren't common. 

Now, look at this, same boss, same attack:

What looks to me like's happening is the Dark Lightning is being converted into some kind of blood/stagnation field attack. The visual effect/spell is called something like 'poison swamp.' Whatever it is, I've convinced myself that it is very important.

Right, one of the lead theories about this has it that Gwyndolin or somebody used O's soul to create the puppet Ornstein we find protecting Gwynevere with Smough. This would meant that the 'real' Ornstein - the hollow that had acted as host for the Lords Soul, could have begun a new 'life' as a starting character, only with the fading memories and muscles of a dragonslaying god. This is an echo of the journey that King Nameless took, because they're born from the same Lords Soul, which will always be a variation of the Heroes Journey. I don't think all of the Light characters are based on the Heroe's Journey, only the Lightning Spear/Sacred Oath characters. 

It led Nameless to Forossa, then to Archdragon Peak. It led Patches on a merry old journey that I promise i'll try to outline at some point. 

Ivory, Patches? Really?

It led Ornstein to Olaphis, where we find him serving a foreign religion and not even bothering to hunt a nearby dragon. because he isn't a dragonslayer anymore, he's a Princess Guard. THE Princess Guard, maybe.

Except he's using Smough's buttslam attack. The 'real' Ornstein lands superhero pose.

So...

Maybe we fought the real O in DS1, and that he THEN renounced his post after his defeat to Solaire (canonically for the purposes of this series,) and took up residence in Heide somewhat recently. Hell, given the timeline, it's possible the Old Dragonslayer may have passed Vendrick the Bastard (the canonical Dark Lord from DS1, again for the purpose of this series), on Vendrick's way to Lordran to fight a golem created from Ornstein's Lord's Soul. We'll call that the latest point in time he would have left Lordran.

In the last post I mentioned Gael, and how he's spent so much time playing around with his soapstone that he knows how to exploit a bunch of weird glitches only he knows about, like arriving after a delay when being summoned or summoning himself via soulsign to teleport. 

As an example, he really wants you to to kill Friede and Ariandel, but because of his slavely vows he's unable to raise arms against members of the White. On the other hand, if members of the White are found to be engaging in things like necromancy or igniting a forbiddened fire (both of which appear to happen) he would probably be free to act in his capacity as executioner and do what's best for the larger institution. 

Why bring that up? Because if you're broken the way I am you think EVERYTHING has a lore explanation, and when you believe that you start noticing things like that, which also includes things like ODS's overly-elaborate jump attack.

Fallen Ornstein, who may or may not have absorbed part of Smough the Cannibal, charges up a dark lightning attack, but rather than coming down on the spear, he flops on his ass and blasts out what looks like a kind of Wrath of God dark/blood magic attack. Which is still fucking impressive, just not very majestic looking and over in like 2 frames.

ODS, maybe, hasn't mastered his own Dark Soul yet. If he wasn't human when he started his journey, he is when we find him. It could be as simple as he doesn't have the stats to pull the attack off anymore. 

If it's even blood magic, but if not for insane theories we'd still be hearing the same boring af Vaati explanations.

I mean I love Vaati, but he's certainly not gospel and I personally would be horrified to think someone like him still agrees with parts of his early work at this point.

Lost Legends

So if the red/black thing indicates blood magic are red phantoms related to blood?

Unless I missed something, the first and most noticeable time we find allusions to blood magic in the first game is with all the Jeremiah the Impaler/notched whip stuff in the Ariamis Painting. Since the Ariandel Painting is an attempt to restore Ariamis, you could almost assume that the themse of blood and ice must involve a similarly forbidden fire being intentionally drowned in the first painting. At least until rot sets in, which it kind of looks like it is already, and they I guess all set up a ballot box and voted to burn their world down.

But do they burn it down with the fire in the painting? Because I really am starting to thing that the fire in the second painting is the first first flame.

Because the first flame went out. Extinguished. Doused. Faded, past tense. Not. Lit. There Is No Fire In Lordran At The Time Of This Writing Please Advise, Love Gundyr.

We find someone wearing Jeremiah's set in the Dark Chasm in the second game, but it's pretty clearly not the original King in Yellow. I mean they're called Pretenders aren't they? I don't know if that's the wiki name or in-game name. The thing is is the Dark Chasms are heavily implied, if not outright stated, to be the remains of the Chasm beneath Oolacile. The implication may be that Jeremiah left the Painting and gained some admirers, but Heysel and the Xanthous Scholars seem to be the product of a blending of the histories/sorcery of Jeremiah (and possibly this implied cult of Xanthous Prince Pretenders in the Abyss,) and Princess Dusk (and whatever story Elizabeth told everyone after we came through in the first game). Except the X Scholars aren't light sorcerers or dark/chaos pyromancers. 

No no non o NO IT"S TURNING INTO A JEREMIAH POST YOU HAVE ONE OF THOSE ABORT

-

We find the Bloodshield in Ariamis, which mentions the fact that blood is enchanted, and boosts resistances in the Painting.

Blood. Blood in the game Dark Souls. All of it's enchanted. Not important I guess.

I goeth whence I want, lady

Skeletons and katana users use bleed.

It makes sense for the Dead to rely on Bleeding, since not only are they immune to it, but blood loss seems to be required if an undead/undying is to achieve true death. At least until some kind of saturation point is reached, as we find in the third game around the Cathedral of the Deep where literally the ground is enchanted because of all the blood and the rockworms, remember them, they fucking love the stuff.

Like I said not important or somebody important would've noticed.

Katana users are a bit more perplexing, as they're almost all pyromancers, but there are enough non-pyromancers for me to not think of them as explicitly a weapon from Izalith and the Eastern Land/Jugo.

The Eastern Land is Jugo. Jeremiah's from there. Look, this all checks out you can roll your eyes and say I'm just making random connections and I totally don't blame you for not reading, like, the entire this because holy shit I can't even remember if I've explained the connections at this point in the series.

Katanas, as well as the Claw weapon, with the maybe exception of the Chaos Blade, come from the Eastern Land. It's not at all clear (No, it is clear there are lots of connections there is more proof that Jugo is the Eastern Land than there is proof that Big Hat Logan is called Big Hat Logan because he wears a Big Hat - Updater9000), but it could be that this Eastern land is actually Jugo, as the two ronin-archetype characters we meet in-universe, Alonne and Shiva, both have unusual relationships with pyromancy, look like Samurai, and have an animal charge on their pauldron: a lion for Shiva, an ant for Alonne.

Ants are really important to the story too. But not this story.

My personal best explanation is that Jugo probably borders the Great Swamp, and that a princess of Izalith (or possibly a prince or even a group of refugees,) fled Lordran shortly after the advent of Chaos, passed through the Swamp, and settled in Jugo. The Swamp pass-through planted the, ahem, seeds that would eventually give rise to Salaman and Quelana's school, while Jugo would eventually align with Mytha and Agdayne's neo-Alken/Carthus following the collapse of Drangleic. Jesus this must sound crazy if you haven't read the rest of this but people click on this post for some fucking reason go read from the beginning weirdo.

The problem, of course, is that Jugo is described as being east of Drangleic, and the Eastern Land is described as such from Lordran's perspective and, like, is the place literally called "Eastern Land" in Lordran even though?

Look, Jugo must also be south of Mirrah, which would put it southeast of the Dragon Shrine, on the other side of the southern mountains. If Mirrah is Balder, which I'm only slightly less certain of than EL being Jugo, then there's probably more we could work out.

Blood magic I'm supposed to be talking about blood magic.

Another, much more iffy example of blood magic in the first game is the Gravelord Sword Dance. If you watch close you can see your PC's hands light up red and blue as you go into the cast animation and you know how I feel about blues and reds. The spell literally has you pull the taijitu of a soul apart and use the energy to cause a Firestorm but Swords.

It says "Many eyes were offered" in order to create the miracle, which makes it seem like you gotta go full Event Horizon to even gain access to this technique, at least normally.

The Bleeding

 I don't have anything new to say about the Brotherhood, but I did notice - and think it's weird - that they don't seem to have access to blood magic. In fact, I don't think there are any characters from Alken, save for arguably Vendrick (he was half Anor-olaph-venn descended, which may be the X factor,) with access to blood magic (Vendrick has a blood magic attack). 

I mean, that doesn't mean Alken didn't have access to blood magic, it's pretty rare stuff, but it's also pretty common. Well, not in DS3. 

Elana, on the other side, seemingly does have access to blood magic, and can use it (and other stuff) to do things like create 'living ghost' soldiers.

They emit a 'bloodstain' style Soul effect when you break them. I bet it smells like 7-Up.

Alonne's sword's 'spirit' functions off of blood magic, but is associated with the pink aura of flame sorcery (Rapport, Demon Firesage's spells,) rather than the black and red (non-fire) effect we see with blood magic. 

Alsanna has access to the same flame-to-frost magic as Priscilla, which I'm gonna go ahead and classify as 'lifehunt' until I decide otherwise. I mention it because ice, blood, and Chaos seem to show up together a lot, and Alsanna is linked to a Champion of Chaos devoted to dampening a flame, just like Priscilla and Jeremiah, and El/Friede and Ariandel.

Because it's the same stories over and over.

Since Ivory was likely of Anor stock, if not a Heavenly Child of Gwynevere, it makes sense that we wouldn't find, like, obvious blood worship all over the place the way we do in the Paintings. The reason for this may be because a Chaos Flame has a different relationship with blood than the Flame of the bonfire, which doesn't seem to interact with blood at all, unless it's applied directly, in which case the blood will squelch the fire, while Chaos would render the blood to ash.

[HEY FUTURE FUTURE ME, PUT A PIN IN THAT RE GUNDYR'S MISSION - JUST FUTURE ME; will did, old future me, you're welcome and you've been so unhappy lately because you don't have a real creative outlet, old future me and also me from last night - Updater 9000]

Vendrick has an in extremis plasma orb attack he'll chuck at you once about every three thousand years. I think it might technically be a pyromancy, as it's palm cast, but that doesn't necessarily mean much, as it seems like the majority of caster bosses in DS2 are implied pyromancers/palm casters.

In case 'palm caster' maybe isn't self-explanatory: a lot of bosses (and other characters,) in the second game shoot spells directly out of their hands, particularly Soul Stream-style spells, rather than with a catalyst. I think the reason people use catalysts might be something like 'casting a soul arrow feels like having a soul arrow rip through your palm' or something. Second game palm casters include the Iron King, Nashandra, the Giant Pyromancers in the Giants' Memories, and Navlaan. [and Aava Lud & Zallen, poser - FM]

Can't forget about these guys and their blood obsession, either

Plasma Orb and Dark Lightning

So I'm calling the blood orb attacks, like what Vendrick or the Pilgrim Butterfly shoot at you, plasma orbs, and there's a reason for this despite blood plasma being, literally, xanthous in color. This could be misleading because plasma, apart from referring to refined blood, can also relate to matter in an ionized, superconductive state. Plasma is, well, fascinating and complicated, but involved with a lot of electricity-related stuff, like lightning, which is the end result of a channel of plasma being created from a storm cloud to the ground.

Also, I'm explicitly not talking about blue lightning or Deep/Maggot-based blood magic.

Plasma orbs fall into a couple of broad categories, and I am absolutely not certain what technically does and does not belong on this list. I try to be liberal w/r/t inclusion but supply explainers for why some things might not qualify. Plus I'm probably forgetting stuff. The two categories are body-based and earth-based.

Body-Based

• Vendrick's Spell
• Dragonslayer Armor's Keepers (includes a kind of blood-based Soul Stream attack)
• Ariandel, at least to some degree
• Ghru Leapers
• Gael (the skull orbs seem to erupt from inside him and then get absorbed by the earth. Or you)
• DS1 Catacomb exploding heads (these create a pink WoG style explosion I associate with the Flame Sorcery of Izalith. The non-respawning Mass of Dead enemies in lower New Londo also spit them out. I include them because they're clearly the inspiration for the Elder Ghru and Gael's blood attack).

Earth-Based

• Elder Ghru
• Gravelord Sword Dance (This may be one of those things where the color scheme was changed slightly between games, or it may be completely unrelated)
• Fallen Ornstein (inverting the plasma attracts lightning mechanic)
• Gael (demonstrating the plasma attracts lightning mechanic)

So, what about Black Lightning?

Apart from Ornstein and Agdayne (if I'm remembering correctly,) it mostly shows up in the Lost Crowns areas. Specifically the Fume Sorcerers and the Imperfect [I had a thing about the EL reindeer thing here, but I can't tell if they're shooting dark lightning or not HAIL SNOWFIELD]. 

I doubt that the Fume Sorcerers have much in the way of personal identities left, having been subjugated by Nadalia, and we know nothing about them except that they arrived after Nadalia [I think they may be related to the missing Eleum Loyce Priestesses]. Their use of the lightning, prayer circle, and Emitted Force schools miracles would tie them to...well, this is interesting, isn't?

df

Emit Force is described as a foreign derivative of the Wrath of the Gods tale in the first game. The foreign country being Catarina (from Catherine, one of Miyazaki's Favorite Names). 

In Drangleic Emit Force is told by Targray, as are Wrath and Force. This would seem to imply that, from the Way of Blue's perspective, Emit Force is gospel, so to speak.

Anyway, this kind of reunification of the High Anor diaspora is only ever seen in glimpses and mostly only in the second game, where the White are outlawed. And maybe most notably with the Fume Sorcerers.

And they're loyal to Nadalia, inasmuch as there's a they there.

On the other hand, they cast their miracles as a sorcery, and without a real catalyst apart from their daggers which, like all post-McDuff Olaph/Venn arms, are garbage at being actual weapons.

The Imperfect spit black lightning orbs as a kind of breath attack. Given their location and that they look like dragon/serpent/pus of man hybrids it might be an early example of some kind of Deep magic. It might just be the area they're in, but their orbs seem 'wetter' than the others, somehow.

I think Agdayne uses a dark lightning attack during the bossfight with Velstadt, but I don't know if Agdayne's ever actually finished casting it, for anyone, ever, before V clobbers him. Remind me to go back and try to see it, because it's probably important. I'm pretty sure he has a casting speed of 1 or something though. I should just have him beat up some hollows or something duh IM BRILLIANT.

So, from all of this we can then start making even shakier conjectures and say that blood magic and 'non-standard' lightning (blue and black variants) seem to have some kind of implied magnetic relation, possibly similar to that of plasma and lightning irl; a kind of inversion of the usual 'Dark pursues Light' truism caused by manipulating Dark in a liquid state.

So I'm sure there's more to this story, but I'm going to move on to the third game, as briefly as possible, before doubling back.

Luckily I'm limiting myself to Dark Lightning, so I ain't gotta explain this.

March of Droplets

The third game is loaded with blood magic. It's first on clear display in lower Farron. The Ghru Elders - the giant dog-faced guys using tree stumps as club/catalysts - can cause clusters of homing plasma skulls to spawn from the ground and pursue the player. These are probably related to the spirits of the fallen that the Watchdogs are charged with, uh, watching.

The Leaper Ghru also use blood magic. If they successfully grab the player they can be seen tearing at the Ashen One's face and throat with their beak, and when the player is released the Ghru gains an apparently blood-based Power Within style buff, minus the HP drain effect caused by overheating your actual blood.

The Ghru are a species reminiscent of donkeys and/or mules, in that they're both hybrids and have a hard time reproducing. It seems like Ghru with forehooves, rather than forearms, are crucified, while hand-having Ghru are allowed to live in some kind of Dr. Moreau of the Flies society. I say that because the 'acceptable' Ghru run a fairly wide gamut of 'civilized' behavior, with some behaving like hounds and others casting a combination of pyromancies and miracles.

The Leapers, if I had to describe them in a word, are rigid. They stand Straight Up. They Are Upright, Buddy. If you've seen the first season of Daredevil, and minor spoilers if you haven't, they remind of the dichotomy between the raging, violent, narcissist fail son Inner Child behind Wilson Fisk's facade of meticulousness, faux austerity, and seemingly bottomless calm.

The Elder Ghru and the Common Ghru look like different species. The commoners seem like a mix of Capra and Crow heritage, while the Elders look like a mixture of giants and wolves. The nearest connection I can make, and it's pretty iffy, is between them and the Millwood Knights, who are not only abnormally large but are associated with wolves and use earth-based magic attacks. Alternately, they may be descended from the Stone Knights of Darkroot, as they drop those guys's gear.

I think blood is probably one of the main components in the soil around both lower Farron and the Cathedral of the Deep. And probably the Painting as well.

In fact, we find the legendary Notched Whip as soon as we enter the area, in the gatehouse chapel as soon as we arrive. We also find Gael, who, at least in the distant future and in desperation and during an apocalypse, has access to a sort of reverse and Full Badass version of Fallen Ornstein's goofy clutch attack.

The third game WoW, at least around the Cathedral of the Deep, are obsessed with blood. I'm pretty sure this is what has led to the maggot infestation. Honestly, this part of the game is why I abandoned Prisoner of Ash.

Low blood pressure

Then we come to Carthus.

Carthus, near as I recall, doesn't have any blood sorcerers, but does have an obsession with blood. We learn in the Cathedral that dying from blood loss slows reanimation, likely due to the nature of reincarnation. since the blood would be in a different area than your body it might take longer to return to 'home' than if you died from something like internal bleeding. Probably that's what causes long loading screens amirite.

Hypothetically, if all your blood dried up and couldn't return with your body you wouldn't be able to return home upon death, which may be the common characteristic common to all third game forlorn: when killed they eventually just respawn where they were killed.

When you consider how Elfriede and the Painting Girl talk about the bonfire it's almost like bonfires are invisible to them. This could have some kind of relationship with the process of becoming forlorn. If you don't know what I'm talking about exactly, look up the descriptions of Homeward, both the miracle and the bone. I'm saying if a corvian or Farron Follower tried to use a homeward bone they'd probably just rematerialize right where they were standing, which may explain how Gael's self-summoning 'glitch' works.

Now, if you read the other series you know I think that, following the events in DS2, the Age of Dark ushered in by the True King of Drangleic eventually evolved into the empire that preceded Lothric. The empire was composed of elements of Volgen-Lindelt, Way of/Blue Sentinel, Shulva, Carim, Foross, Olaph, and maybe even Mirran descent. This empire can be thought of as Neo-Olaphis, in that it was broadly a blue, Anor loyalist faction, although Elana was probably viewed as something like the first queen or founding deity.

Much like how Olaphis was originally founded, a large group of colonists, in response to a mounting threat, set off for Lordran and the legendary First First Flame.

The nature of this threat can be thought of as Neo-Alken: the large, red, Drang loyalist faction. This kingdom would become known as Carthus as it went on to become the new empire when it conquered Neo-Olaphis. Neo-Alken was composed of factions loyal to Alken (Unclear if this includes Nadalia,) Jugo, The Undead Crypt,

And, like the legendary Drang hero Sir Yorgh, they literally and figuratively drowned the old empire in blood.

Unlike Farron, who follows a path toward blood magic, Carthus followed a path towards pyromancy based on the Black Flame of Humanity. I don't even know what that means, really, still.

We find blood magic again in Upper Lothric. During the Dragonslayer Armor fight, the Pilgrim Butterfly unleash probably the most impressive display of the stuff in the entire series, including Plasma Orb barrages and something like a giant blood-based Soulstream laser.

In the Painting DLC we find, of course, Ariandel using a mixture of Dark Blood and bonfire fire to resurrect Friede - an act of necromancy that I suspect allows Gael to exploit a workaround in his enslavement and attack members of the church.

I ain't even gonna with the Ringed City right now.

Conclusions

It seems like there's something like an evolution of blood across the games. In the first we have Priscilla and Jeremiah, possibly guarding an unlinked Flame and keeping it dormant with the blood of humans and chaos pyromancers.

Later we find a split between magical and mechanical factions. On the one hand we have Shulvan priestesses - descended from Olaphis in their methodology, if not intent - using blood magic to create phantoms and, I suspect, Imperfects, living ghosts, Elana's 'mire,' and they may even be using it to sort of reverse engineer things like Chaos Pyromancy (Thomas, Elana,) and Black Lightning (Imperfects, Fallen Ornstein).

Bear in mind: they also have quite a lot of (septic) dragon blood to play around with, as did Mytha.

Mytha is not only more red/aggressive than Elana in her tactics, she's also incredibly blue in the sense that she's smart enough to be incredibly utilitarian, subversive, and cunning. She may have gained access to black lightning from Agdayne, who would probably be a dope paladin if he wasn't so terrible. Although she doesn't seem to have access to plasma based magic, she does have access to an apparently pure line of Izalith pyromancy, possibly in the form of a lost Chaos Sister in Jugo.

This diverging path of pyromancy would eventually lead Wolnir and his pyromancers down a path towards the Abyss, at which point Wolnir, and by extension Carthus, surrendered and the war that Lordran-Lothric-Farron were losing badly abruptly came to an end, with Farron and the Way of White victorious and they all lived happily ever after hooray.

The Way of White, under Carim, would inherit the mantle of the 'blue' Notched Whip/Shulva school of blood magic, but rather than using Bleed for-or-directly-against Flame, they used it to turn the stagnant mire of Elana into Aldrich's vision of Deep Waters. Ariandel the Totally Not a Big Crow is involved in this, I suspect.

The Watchdogs, then, become heir to the plasma orb/Sword Dance 'red' school of blood magic, save for the Pilgrim Butterfly's relationship, which I don't understand yet, but suspect involves Elana managing to stay just ahead of Mytha from the time of in-game DS2 through to the Fall of Carthus/Thorolund-Carim Merger.

I think I'm gonna cut it here, because I honestly can't go any further without talking about Blue Lightning and a bunch of other sort of unrelated stuff. The next post will probably be about Archtrees and the Age of Ancients, which I've been bumping that post for a while now because stuff keeps overtaking it.

AI 008 - To Wander Eternally

There is a legend.

They say that,

If you are very good,

Or very lucky,
That when you die,

You become an angel.

As always, I try to stay away from certain parts of DS3 in these posts, particularly Londor and the primordial serpents, so there's stuff that's not talked about here that should and will be talked about. Just not here. 

[YOELS ENTHUSIASTICALLY]

I've mentioned it before, but this post will be discussing what I've been calling 'bunshin no justu,' or clone/doppleganger art/magic. It comes up a lot. I stole the term from Naruto. Well, the Naruto wiki, I've seen like two and a half episodes of Naruto, but it complements the Japanese-text framing of the various magic schools in Souls, with majutsu being sorcery, anjustu being hexes or dark arts, and jujutsu being pyromancy.

Plain ole 'jutsu' can refer to prehistoric or unexplained arts, as well as pyromancy, since all of it seems to have originated in Izalith, a lot of it probably even before the First Flame.

Also, 'jikukan jutsu,' or space-time art/magic would be another school. This is related to teleportation, summoning, and time-manipulation as a school of magic. The line between bunshin and jikukan can get a little blurry when you really try to hammer out the differences between, say, a Pinwheel clone and the illusory Gwynevere. I suspect that that's as it should be, as all of the arts we see in-game are probably descended from and interbred with the same 1-4 pre-Fire/Ancient schools.

Right, so, angels.

Moonlight

The Moonlight Butterfly is the first 'angel' we meet in Dark Souls. Haunting, alien, serene, and prone to nailgunning the curious into oblivion with soul spear barrages, it can be hard to notice the strange, mechanical implements grafted onto their bodies.

There is a ringed contraption that connects to their backside via a spoke. The outer surface of the ring, connected to the spoke via a hub, is covered in punk spikes. There is a 'double helix' contraption running the length of their spine and emerging as a 'horn.'

MB's share the same theme song and the same general spell set as Gwyndolin: a type of soul spear barrage and a magic-based Pursuer/Emit Force variant. The butterflies' 'home' seems to be inside the primordial crystal, and the ones we find there are neutral towards the player unless attacked. I'm guessing this means they're not naturally hostile. This could have a few different implications, which I'm gonna outline and then explore.

• The Butterfly is sentient, and has complex reasons for attacking us as we approach
• The Butterfly is not sentient, and reacts instinctively as we approach
• The Butterfly may or may not be sentient, but is being directly controlled by Seath, or possibly even Gwyndolin

With humanoid characters there's basically a 1:1 relationship between spell-casting proficiency and intelligence. Rosabeth had to switch schools at the academy because she couldn't learn sorcery, but she's implied to be a genius pyromancer, which doesn't require intelligence in the 'book-learnin' sense, but does require a lot of intelligence in the 'if they found themselves stuck in an abandoned cabin for a year they wouldn't starve to death due to not understanding how shovels or food or knots or water work' sense. We don't know if this is true with non-humans, and we also don't know what the game considers 'intelligence.' For example: Alvina is a lot more talkative than Sif and seems fluent in jikukan, but Sif remembers us 1,000 years later (or at least indicates this to the player). 

Dusk describes herself as having been snatched from Oolacile and 'banished to a plane of distortion' while inside the Crystal Golem. She was there for a long time. Long enough to completely lose hope, sure, but that can take like a week. From what I can tell she was in the golem for maybe 1000 years. Then escaped from the golem thanks to us. She wasn't free for long. Probably her release from the golem caused her to re-appear on some kind of magical radar jutsu accessible by both Manus and Carim, but by the time Chester arrived via the other half of the old pendant she had already been taken, probably snatched the way we were only right in front of Elizabeth the Racist Old White Lady Mushroom.

We can think of the crystal golems as two separate entities, the golem itself and the person trapped in the 'pauldron' crystal. The golem may be acting as a cocoon, in some way holding the person inside in stasis long enough for some kind of metamorphosis to occur. I hope you see where I'm going with this.

The moonlight butterfly looks like it's still a cocoon, is what I'm saying. That doesn't make more sense does it? 

ta tessera zoa

See what happened with Kaathe was...

Further into Ruin

Not yet. Not yet. 

I want to point out some changes between the Ruin/Primordial Crystal in the first and second games. 

In the Duke's Archives we find that the Ruin is converting the landscape into crystal and what seems like might be a mix of Blue and Twinkling Titanite, which both the golems and butterflies have blue titanite as part of their make-up. 

In Tseldora we find the Ruin slowly converting everything into sand, brightstone, and spiders.

Basilisks. In the first game they cursed us - caused one of our humors to crystallize - killing us instantly. Imagine your blood being flash frozen, then that times like ten. In the second game they petrify us, which you can't even reincarnate if you're a statue unless acted on by an outside force (gameplay contradicts lore here, obviously). Gin You Wine Petrified Wood. There's even a unique, 'eyeless' basilisk outside of Ornifex's house. I was hoping a point would present itself here, but damned if I know what they mean. Probably there's a system to their drops.

Finally, we find non-hostile butterflies all over the Crystal Caves, which obviously both those and Seath have kind of 'angelic' aspects to them. In Tseldora we find the spider people, which I attribute to Aldia's obsession with Izalith/pyromancy. They look quite similar in profile to an angel. I think they might technically be pyromancers, even if they obviously can't cast.

Historically, however, witches have been quite opposed to the appearance of angels.

HELLO I AM AN ANGEL WELCOME TO TSELDORA HAHAHA WHAT SPIDERS?

Latent Dark and a descent into madness

I've talked about the Darklurker a lot on here. The Lurker uses both jikukan (the teleporting Resonance hex,) and bunshin techniques ('mitosis,' the wiki calls it,) as well as mixtures of the two (teleporting itself while cloned, jikukan spells in its bunshin form). I'll discuss both, since it's not immediately apparent, but these are actually two different high-end secret magics this character is proficient at.

The first art is a bunshin technique that creates an exact copy of itself with a shared healthpool. This may not, in fact, be literally be a bunshin technique. The Darklurker's Mitosis functions more like a plant figuring out how to split itself into two plants which is, like, way different from what Pinwheel  and Shanalotte do.

The jikukan technique involves opening a portal, like a Portal-the-game portal, firing a spell into it, and having the spell exit the other sides tracking the player. There's not much to say about it beyond how unique it is. 

The Darklurker is implied to be the original Manus, which I've discussed elsewhere. The Dragon Chime reinforces this, as it is a similarly 'pure' artifact that remained uncorrupted despite being steeped in the Abyss for centuries. Lurker has 8 limbs. As with bunshin and jikukan, creatures with 6, 7, or 8 limbs could fill an entire post. As far as the Lurker goes, I think it might be related to the shrine at the Rise of the Dead, which shows two burning figures either merging or splitting. This may be related to Londor and the fire of Ariandel, but that's way far ahead of where we are now.

So, if the Darklurker is an angel, and before that he was Manus of the Abyss, and before that he was the corpse of a pygmy lord, and before that he was a pygmy lord sorcerer brought back by the Ool missionaries to the Ringed City, at what point does one become the other, and should we consider the 4 Queens of Drangleic Lurker's siblings or descendants, and should we consider Lurker, Manus, and the Pygmy Lord to be separate characters?

I don't know.

I do know that we have to perform a pretty elaborate ritual of pilgrimage to even gain access to Darklurker, involving 'linking' three sword-less bonfires in black lordvessels. And we do this in a place that's heavily implied to be the remains of Oolacile. From a Lordran perspective this may have tied in with the Occult Rebellion, or even the Oolacile Mystics themselves. From a Drang perspective, it may have involved the Lost Sin that led to the eventual fall of Olaphis.

So, let's say Ool, Olaph, or the Four Kings had planned on bringing about a Dark Lord and ushering in an Age of Dark (two different things, remember, Vendrick did one but not the other) by performing a Firelinking involving an alternate, Dark or Black Flame.

You would need a whole lot of Dark to use as fuel for something like that.  

Also, Lurker vaguely resembles some of the UD Crypt enemies.

Hark Harald, Singing Angel

I'm gonna briefly go over angels in the third game, but most of it will be saved for some hypothetical future Prisoner of Ash post.

We find the Angelic Knights of Lothric pretty early on, and they're our first big clue that Lothric is in the late stages of a civil war. The knights seem to be modeled on a primordial serpent, and are loyal to Gertrude and the forbidden Angelic faith. This faith involves non-lightning light miracles similar to those used by Prince Lothric. The miracles are accompanied by feather particle effects, rather than souls, embers, or dark motes. In the Dreg Heap, obviously, we get bombarded by this stuff by actual angels, as well as a AoE light 'cloud' spell that causes curse buildup.

The Dreg Angels are Bunshin being projected by pilgrims, with the process being demonstrated by the Stone-Humped Hag. From this I think we're meant to infer that both the Pilgrim Butterfly of Lothric and Gertrude herself were similar projections, with Gertrude being the first. The descriptions of Gertrude after her visitation seem to imply that she became something like the pilgrim pupae that 'control' the Dreg Angels.

Sulyvahn, incidentally, would seem to have all the qualifications of angeldom (bunshin, jikukan, wings, holy status,) but is probably just doing a very effective impersonation of one.

Also, as an aside, 'herald' and 'harald' are different words. A harald is something like a duke or warlord, a herald is an emissary, diplomat, or messenger.

Wait what?

The Four Living Beings

Okay, so the idea here is that the Four Kings were failed attempts to create angels.

Gwyn did a strange thing. He divided a portion of his soul among four Anor loyalists in New Londo. Gwyn named them kings of men and charged them with shepherding humans along the 'right' path. And they did. And then Nameless pissed everyone off and a bunch of gods left and then Oolacile happened and a bunch more gods left and suddenly

There was a chasm full of the poisoned humanity of what was essentially a god basically directly next to the Settlement. This was a mass of poisoned humanity the size of a city traveling underground towards Drangleic. It saws off a good portion of the High Wall of Lordran on its way out. The wound from its passage - the abyssy parts of it - mostly resealed itself, save for probably the lakes beneath the Darkroot Hydra and in the CHLORANTHY farm dogleg near where you find the Wolf Ring, which probably you wouldn't want to swim around in that stuff.

And, of course, we can enter the Abyss beneath the New Londo Shrine, provided we have proof of a 'covenant with the beasts of the Abyss.' It's generally assumed that this covenant was originally established by Artorias with one or more primordial serpents (not Kaathe, obviously,) during the first Darkwraith uprising, an event I consider part of the Dark Tales that pre-date the Chaos War and the fall of Oolacile. We can seemingly follow the progression of Artorias via the evolution of his weapon, from the normal, 'majestic' version from the Dark Tales, to the weapon becoming Cursed as a result, to the weapon then becoming corrupted by the Abyss after Artorias went back to the well one too many times. In other words, as part of the covenant, or perhaps as a result of traversing the ancient abyss, Artorias became cursed. Likely this meant that his Lord's Soul was lost or corrupted in a way that made it susceptible to the Abyss, unlike the Four Kings or Darklurker who seemingly joined with the Abyss voluntarily, their Light Lord's Souls offered in service to the Dark, rather than by trying to game the system in order to act in opposition to it.

The scar from the Oolacile Chasm's passage is probably why the wall around the Undead Burg/Firelink/Blighttown part of Lordran is so screwed up: the same catastrophe that created the Valley of the Drakes sheared off a portion of the High Wall, meaning that a new wall had to be built, with ramparts being converted to bridges, Other Burg being abandoned, the creation of Blighttown, and so on.

2 and 3 are much closer to 1 in-game but you get the idea

In the Valley of the Drakes we find a bridge leading between the NL and Darkroot Basin gatehouses. They're very clearly set up in a way that doesn't imply there was any kind of friendly relationship between the two areas. Were they properly manned, the entire span between the gates would effectively be a death trap for anyone in missile range.

Just inside the NL gatehouse is the shrine leading to the abyss. After it's drained we realize that there is a literal mountain of drowned corpses in there, and that even with the floodgates open we can still only explore the upper levels.

It might bear repeating, but creatures of Dark generally seem to settle undergound. However, given the nature of the wall and the cave it's possible that the areas was originally much more open, and that the cavern itself was sealed either as part of the extermination or due to the reality-warping nature of the Abyss.

NL may have existed alongside Oolacile. If we assume Gwyn, and even Nameless, had already departed by the time the Artorias stuff happens then the Four Kings would have already been serving in their positions. After the Artorias stuff, well, things probably got quiet for a while, then Gwyndolin or Gwynevere or whoever was in charge realizes they haven't heard from NL in a while and holy cow Darkwraiths. Again.

The city is then sealed, the genocide carried out by the city's own healing sorcerers. With the loss of the settlement's healing arts the path was now open for a religious organization - based roughly around the faith of Oolacile - to come through offering healing miracles and spreading the gospel of the New New Good News.

The Oolacile connection to the WoW comes from Lokey's translations. Elizabeth and Dusk both offer the PC the 'may the flames guide thee' blessing associated with the WoW in the third game. In the Japanese script, Reah gives this blessing as well, rather than the confusing 'vereor nox' line.

Source

Kaathe seems to have masterminded both NL and Oolacile, which makes sense, and maybe even the ancient Darkwraith incursion that originally gave Artorias his reputation. He, Kaathe, may not have even had to try very hard with NL. It's possible that the NL Darkwraith uprising was a part of the Occult Rebellion, which would put NL and Kaathe on the same side as Sen, Smith (unless Sen is Smith,) Havel, Vamos' people (possibly,) the followers of Velka ( and Carim, by extension,) and maybe even Real Ornstein. Since the statue outside the NL Shrine - Mother & Child II - is the same statue in the Ariamis graveyard we could even infer that Priscilla and/or Jeremiah were involved.

Of course, then there's the problem with Velka and Gwyndolin being aligned as Darkmoon Blades. I mean, you have a Carimite Pardoner acting in a far more official capacity than anyone in the WoW in the Undead Parish, proudly displaying his goddess' name for all to read, but then you find another Pardoner in Gwyndolin's Painting of Forbidden Things Mostly Linking Back To Velka.

Maybe they made up after New Londo or something. Or maybe she retains some kind of rights of covenant in Lordran despite being aligned against Lordran's rulers for centuries. This is still not about angels jesus you probably figured out where I was going paragraphs ago.

We find the Parrying Dagger and the Cursebite Ring in New Londo. It could be that a Carim Knight was poking around after the fact, or it could be evidence that Carim, or Velka at least, were working with Kaathe and New Londo, which ties in with the Painting stuff, plus the statue again. I'll go more into all that in a later post, but I really need to get to the point.

OKAY SO, all of that is afoot, and you have the Four 'Kings,' leaders of men granted a portion of the Lord's Soul, would have been essentially set up to become angels by Gwyn himself, even if they did end up a group of ungodly fucked up looking biological and graphics engine mutations with, like, horns and wings and tree root legs and sad white boy faces. Overall, though, they do look very angelic, and are presented like Darklurker. Also like Lurker, the Kings share a life bar, a point that may become more significant later on. Unlike Lurker's bunshin-esque mitosis, the Kings use a jikukan art that looks like they're hopping fissures between worlds as easily as most people just regular hop. Except I've died a whole lot trying to just regular jump in these games, so much easier than hopping.

Both the Four Kings and Darklurker bosses are born out of the remains of Manus. Both bosses have pure Light souls despite being in the Darkest place in the world. Both bosses seem to have become a kind of 'cold fusion reactor' of Dark, created by taking a human lord, granting it a light soul, and dunking it in the Abyss. It didn't happen to Artorias because Elizabeth's a fucking liar and a racist Artorias was, like most everyone is, a confused mess of a bunch of the same stuff most everyone is, rather than some unsulliable holy scion of some master race bullshit.

The Kings use a mix of melee and spell attacks, and are lethal at range. Luckily they follow karate movie rules and don't just, like, stay at range and Amana the player to death. Their swords look like a ragged 2-dimensional plane. Like if you made a sword out of something so thin it didn't even have a third dimension. Their attacks are the usual variety of telegraphed chops and pokes, but given their arms and, well, other kinds of arms, their overall strategy is incredibly similar to Elana from the Sunken King expansion. I don't know if I'm meant to draw that conclusion or not, but it's almost identical.

To drive home the point that the way you're supposed to get in these guys faces during the fight, their weapons do far less damage if you stand close enough that they hit you with their arms. Sometimes they'll use either a grab attack or a WoG variant. The first has a white/blue effect and involves the PC being grabbed and 'sucked' by the root clump. The AoE blast has a slow windup, during which the King will cover itself, as much as it's able, with its wings and unleash a dark purple blast with a pretty considerable range.

Their root-clump/wings serve as their catalysts, capable of launching giant, physics-defying Dark Homing Soul Greatsword projectiles? If they cast it it's gonna hit you, basically. I think I've had one slowly circle around the arena like three times before it caught me on NG+, which they're the hardest goddamned thing in NG+ because the stupid game cheats.

But what is an angel, anyway?

Conclusions

There aren't any. That's the point of this. The story of Dark Souls is a big jigsaw puzzle made out of jigsaw puzzles and Ashen Idols is just a place where I can like, try to assemble some of the big chunks that might help make sense of one of the puzzles, which can then be plugged into other puzzles and become something like a story with a point and a beginning and end and so on.

Instead it's just like 'and that's what we know about angels unless I forgot didn't notice or was wrong about something the end,' and we move on to the next post which I have no idea what that'll be. I had a planned list of topics I was gonna cover, but those ended up changing every time and now it's not at all the series I had planned because, like, the next planned post is 'archtrees', but I'm not near ready to talk about archtrees, but then again this post was supposed to be about the Painted Worlds but I need like two more Painted World Lead-Up posts before I'm ready to dive into that. 

Pyromancers, maybe?