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?
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| 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
- Birth/Fire
- Growth/Light
- Decline/Dark
- 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.
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| 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.
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| The Great Public Health Hazard Tree Fort of Anor Londo. |
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| The Great Hollow is actually really really healthy for an archtree and because of its environment. |
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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| YOU KNOW I'M A NECROMANCER RIGHT? NO, WAIT, NOT NECK ROMANCE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU |
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.
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| There Jugo. |
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.
