The post was inspired by the Sunken King's Garden episode of Aegon's DS3 Let's Talk Lore. About 18 minutes in there's a discussion of the Cathedral Knight Greatshield. What follows is a comment that got out of hand.
The eagle charge appears a LOT throughout the series. Among the oldest, lorewise, are the East-West Shield and the Eagle (great)Shield. The Eagle Shield is carried by Patches and can be found in upper Blighttown. This particular eagle is of a 'primitive' design and seems quite incongruous with the other charges we see in the game, save the Golden Wing Shield, particularly its elegant Twin Dragon heirs. Look up the stats on the Eagle Shield, it'll surprise you.
The East-West shield is a WoW shield and features a two-headed eagle. It also had basically identical stats and design of other small wooden shields.
We'll circle back around to Patches, the church, and pyromancy at the end.
The 'high king' eagle on the DS3 Cathedral Knight Greatshield looks like it's clutching what I take to be an inverted globus cruciger (cross-bearing globe). In the real world Catholic church these symbolize Christ's dominion over the world. The one on the shield, I think, is a Souls-verse variant meant to symbolize the world as being held up by a worldtree. We find similar iconography in various places, I think Gwynevere's bedchamber and the Balder shield in the first game being the most prominent.
We find birds of prey all over Drangleic. In Heide we find the giant Gwyn-as-Horus statues. The Pursuer, one of them at least, uses a giant eagle for transport. The Drangleic Captain's helmet we get from Drummond III features an eagle design. The Falconers, of course.
The Phoenix Parma and Golden Wing Shield from DS2 feature raptor charges. The Phoenix is quite elegant, the most distinct from the other birds, and is depicted with a crown clutched in its talons. It almost seems like a female version of the bird depicted on the Cathedral Knight Greatshield.
The Falconers have a fucking infamously confusing bird shield and are Sunbros. They're described as mercenaries currently employed by Volgen, but no one knows where they came from originally. We find one of their shields on a corpse with Allegedly Shieldless Lothian's Dragonslayer Axe. Lothian's axe ended up with Creighton of Mirrah, though, and all kinds of stuff from the eastern lands got mixed up by Vendrick and Aldia when they united all the recently-turned-to-banditry-and-mercenary-work warriors of the fallen kindgoms.
Right, so, but eagles falcons and phoenixes aren't the same thing, right?
Maybe. I think the Phoenix Parma might be so-named because of where and how we find it, rather than being a descriptor of the bird itself. Beyond that, I don't know. The Phoenix looks more feminine that the other eagles, and would most obviously belong to either Mytha or Venn.
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| Princess Venn was reborn as Ivory Queen while Alken was burning itself out |
The crown, obviously, denotes something approximating kingship or lordship. On closer inspection, the DS2 bird is wearing a small, three-pointed crown, with the much larger, four-pointed crown clutched in its right claw. This could represent something like a lord whose authority derives from a greater lord. The larger crown being in the right talon probably implies that this authority was martial, meaning that the figure was something like a duke or general. It might also represent a lord having usurped a more powerful lord.
The shield, I think, belonged to Venn, mostly because the design is so refined. Mytha seemingly has no noteworthy predecessors (a case could be made for Giant Smith) and was from a famously poor and underdeveloped kingdom, while Venn was heir to the glory, fallen as it was, of old Olaphis.
So this would seemingly be a point in favor of Eagle = Gwyn, as Venn is essentially his (possibly great) granddaughter. Venn would also be heir to Gwyn's wife, whoever that was, and Flame God Flann. She is also most likely to be Vendrick's mother.
She also also is confusingly associated with both a hunting bird and a big cat.
The descent of kings of Drangleic went something like
- Olaphis I; 'Flame God Flann' (Gwynevere and arguably Flynn still have claim to the throne)
- Olaphis II; Sunken King Flanson (Elana still has claim to the throne, as do heirs of Yorgh by right of conquest)
- Venn I; Queen Venn (Alsanna still has claim to the throne, as may other Foross nobles, also technically the entire Chaos Flame. Venn can be viewed as a continuation of Olaphis)
- Alken I; Iron King (Mytha still has claim to the throne, arguably Nadalia as well, although she'd be more of an usurper, having married a noble from Thorolund [maybe])
- Drangleic I; Vendrick the Greedy (Nashandra and Aldia still have claim to the throne)
Two through five have crowns associated with them, and uniting them symbolizes a kind of restoration of High Olaphis. From Vendrick, official kingship then proceeded along the proposed path of
- Olaphis III: Elana the Squalid (Possibly someone like Arstor, Lothian, or Dark Ornstein served as king of what was basically proto-Lothric)
- Alken II: Mytha the Baneful (this kingdom was concurrent from Venn II but mostly unrecognized until it suddenly exploded in a nightmare of blood and bones and poison and mind control and probably snakes and led to)
- Carthus I: High Lord Wolnir (Mytha's ambitions were vast and she was aligned with the Dead, so eventually Alken snowballed into the Carthus empire,)
- Lothric I: Gundyr the Failure (Gwynevere probably still has claim, if it was her)
- Lothric II: Oceiros the Ruined
- Lothric III: Lothric the Cursed
- Londor I: Lord of Hollows (could be thought of as Alken IV, with Wolnir being Alken III)
Lothric, of course, was a colony empire based near Lordran just as Olaphis was an Anor colony based in Drangleic. Aldia seemingly adored his mother as much as Vendrick did his, but Lothric was much more ideologically aligned with Aldia in terms of mad science and gaming systems.
As for Gwynevere, I suspect she fled Olaphis after a failed firelinking ceremony. This 'Lost Sin' resulted in the death of Olaphis I, the Curse being unleashed in Drangleic, and magic users being exiled from the sub-continent during a series of purgings that led to civil war with Alken (the indigenous Drang faction). In the broader timeline, the Lost Sin seems to line up with the fall of Oolacile, as Elana would emerge in Olaphis relatively shortly after.
As Queen of Olaphis, Gwynevere birthed at least one Heavenly Child, and probably several others outlined in an earlier Idol post.
Venn II, or Neo-Olaphis, is the kingdom that sprang up following the Cursebearer taking the Throne of Want. I propose that it's an alliance between surviving forces of Shulva/Olaphis, Heide/Venn, Forossa & Mirrah, Drangleic, Lindelt/Volgen & the Way of Blue, and Carim. In terms of might, it was to Olaphis as Olaphis was to Anor Londo.
Alken II, or Neo-Alken, is the kingdom that arose in opposition to Neo-Olaphis. It is also the kingdom associated with the 'Renounce the Throne' ending, and is the kingdom that would eventually become Carthus. Neo-Alken, I think, is made up of factions relating to Queen Mytha/Alken, the Brotherhood of Blood, Jugo, and the Undead Crypt/The Dead.
So...who is the Eagle?
In DS1 probably the most noteworthy mention of eagles we find is the WoW East-West Shield.
The twin eagle charge, historically, is associated with empire, particularly the Roman Empire's dominion over their relative East and West. In the Soulsverse, I suspect, it may represent the 'pact between gods and man' that was 'upheld in the dragonless age.' This covenant is, faintly, outlined in the journey of Patches from First Champion to Grudge-Fueled Serial Killing Graverobber.
The charge, or a variant of it, appears on the shields of some clerics. This, maybe, represents the gods' betraying the Ringed City pact and establishing a new covenant between the gods and the church, ushering in, essentially, a small-d dark age we're at the tail end of during in-game DS1.
Which Patches the Still An Eagle Loyalist is still mad about.
SO
If, in truth, the Twin Eagles represent the empire of early Anor Londo, when humans and giants were treated as slightly-lesser-but-still-relatively-equals, then it would basically track with Gwyn's rule.
We have cause to believe that Young Nameless was kind of a giant asshole. I know I made him out to be to the 'left' of High Anor in earlier posts, but I've been re-examining in terms of people like George Bush Jr. and the Trump Boys, including Donald.
I mean, that's the whole thing with the hero cycle, right? You start the journey with, basically, everything you need to be a hero, which are all the things that prevent you from being a hero. You got time and money to buy the best arms and receive the best training, but you also got the time and money to buy the best drugs and engage in the finest cheap thrills. Having never truly struggled you can never truly understand struggle, only its gross distortion in terms of persecution complexes and self-justifying sociopathy. And so, because of hubris, cowardice, tomfoolery, vice, arrogance, willful ignorance or whatever you, big hero, lose everything and have to start over, alone and with nothing.
The Iron King didn't even survive the fall.
So, the 'nice' reading of Nameless, King Anor II - and I've been reading it this way until now - is that his grand betrayal meant aligning with the dragons, ending the hunts, possibly introducing dragonriders and the like: heresy, to the dragonslaying traditionalists.
But, what if it was something darker?
Somebody blinded Gough. Wrote one of the few truly wise characters off as a mindless brute. Somebody, if we're following along, betrayed the Pact of the Ring between Gwyn and the Pygmy. We've all, hopefully, seen the statue just before the church in the Ringed City and, hopefully, finally all fucking looked up the goddammed word chloranthy and put the pieces together.
Gwyn's grand plan might not have originally been meant to screw over the other three gods. We, I submit, need to consider the possibility that the grand betrayal may have actually been the result of Large Adult Son: a bumbling, pampered, sheltered, alienated, insecure Meghan McCain poisoned by resentment and indolence, destroying their world in a desperate attempt to live up to the legacy of a slightly-more-honorable-but-not-really worldbuilder father.
I mean, Dark Souls 2 implies about as heavily as it can that the Iron King is a kind of reincarnation of Nameless.
Nameless was stripped of his godhood, remember.
That means his Lords Soul was stripped from him.
Then you think 'wait, but if Nameless is in Seath's belly how's he also in Iron King, who would have at least been a young literally-a-Sunbro warrior prince by this point?
But there aren't that many different kinds of souls, and probably not that many different kinds of vessels for them. Nameless isn't special, neither was Iron. Sure, the Nameless King of Anor Londo is special because of what happened to him, but you could have given any aspiring Red-aligned STR/FTH/DEX paladin build that strong of a Lords Soul in the same situation and they would've went through the same journey if presented with the same choices.
In other words, Prince Alken is what would have happened if Nameless had been born an impoverished, struggling lord, rather than a literal godking. Plus, he never actually claimed a portion of Nameless' soul until after Vendrick Ironson undertook the Dark Lord ending of DS1 and burned the souls founding Drangleic.
Nameless, of course, is associated with lions but not birds, unless you count the King of Storms, which, again, what exactly is and isn't a dragon?
The DS1 Tower (medium) Shield is the Red variant of a common Astoran soldier's shield, and is associated with protection. I mean I guess more than a shield normally is. The blue variant is decorated with a caduceus (twin serpent) and you probably picked up 500 of them trying to get a Channeler's Trident. As with the East-West and Blue Wooden shields, the pair are otherwise identical. In DS2, the Tower Shield has been slightly redesigned to look more eagely, and is named accordingly. The Eagle version makes it into 3. We find it in a chest in Lothric, which fits in with the Lothric-as-returning-colonizers angle.
The Caduceus shield isn't really relevant to this discussion, but features two 'ancient' serpents respectant (watching each other) or possibly combatant (fighting each other) across what looks like the hilt of a firelinking sword. iirc the small wooden Caduceus shield actually has a single long snake with a head at either end wrapping around the boss (the reinforced center part,) with the heads addorsed (facing away from each other). Yorgh's line, of course, is associated with the respectant twin dragon charge. This, of course, shouldn't be confused with the Twin Dragon Greatshield, heir to the Eagle (Great)shield, which features a single respectant/combatant twin-headed spread eagle dragon, rather than two separate dragons.
The Elite version of the Silver Eagle Shield is one of the 'blue' shields, sorta. It wasn't in the first game, and it's gold on green, rather than blue, it's called the Golden Wing Shield, and it has a design much closer to Patches' than Oscar's. In DS2 the Golden Wing Shield is associated with the Blue Sentinels, rather than Astora, which ties in with all the Elana/Carim/Volgen stuff. In DS3 it's dropped by Albert, which would seemingly support the Nameless = Eagle claim, except Albert isn't a Sunbro, and might even be a Bluebro standing in opposition to the Sunbros, even though it really seems like he could have just as easily been a Sunbro.
One weird reason for the shield being green rather than blue is that actual blue dye was incredibly hard to get until quite recently. Lapis lazuli, which made probably the best blue pigment until quite recently, was famously worth far more than gold.
Albert does bring us to a second, but equally important point in the grand scheme:
Nameless is associated with the Lion in Forossa. My suspicion is that Nameless was 'reborn' as Faraam (or Lothian or whoever,) after learning many important lessons from probably hog farmers and town drunks and the like and put the work in to be a hero the old fashioned way.
It could be that Nameless' redemption was, in some way, inspired by Ornstein, who may even have Reverse Apostle of Lloyded for his boss during the Dragon War.
Apostle of Lloyding: invoking a god's power and/or authority to advance one's political agenda
Reversed: Invoking a god's power/authority in order to advance the god's agenda, but only in cases where the invoker is actually more powerful than the god they serve. Suly probably RAoLed for Gwyndolin, for example, and Licia AoLs for Gwynevere.
Conclusions
My best thinking is that, at least in the first and third games, the eagle represented, originally, Gwyn's wife, but was absorbed by Anor Londo even though she was forgotten. It's also very very possible that Gwyn was the Eagle, and Nameless and Gwynevere could both be candidates. It's also possible that the distinctions between eagle, falcon, phoenix and other birds of prey really do represent distinct animals that line up with specific characters in-universe, and aren't just different ways of saying 'a big predatory bird from house Anor.'
My main problem with this whole thing is that these characters, at least with Gwyn's extended family, seem to be represented by lions (tigers in Venn's case). The thing about being associated with a specific animal in court and on the battlefield is that it should be really difficult for anyone to get confused about which animal it is because lots and lots of people can die when that happens.
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| Sanct you |
Head, chest, and fore limbs of a lion. Horns and hind limbs of a goat. Wings: two pair. Red eyes, an the ability to breath so much lightning, and has what I assume are either two pups or some kind of Darklurker-esque mitosis ability I totally don't understand.
Oh, yeah, and a big poisonous scorpion tail.
So, in a sense, she's a lioneagle. In another sense she's a goatscorpion cunningly disguised as a lioneagle. She is a leal defender of Anor Londo, fears the spread of the Abyss, and is succumbing to the Abyss herself. She is the guardian whose watch Sif took up following the death of Manus.
Okay, so really obviously this is not a natural creature, even by the Ninja Turtle standards of the Chaos Flame. We find scorpions, two of them, in the second game, and one in the comics. They relate, as near as I can tell, with a missing Daughter of Chaos based out of Jugo/the Eastern Lands. If so, this would add Tark and Najka to the list of characters from the place, alongside Benhart, Aurous, Shiva & attendant, Sir Alonne, Zoey's forebears, and the queen ant creating all the mushroomancer bugs in the gutter.
There was a pyromancer that walked the Abyss and discovered a Black Flame.
But anyway, Gwyn/Nameless' regime would have wanted something like a lioneagle to help, I think, seal the accord between whoever the original lion and eagle were. Personally, I'm beginning to suspect that Eagle may have been Gwyn's wife and the mother of all Anor nobles to come, and may have been from/of Izalith, something like a Freya Frigg (Lady Beloved) to Gwyn's Odin (Inspiring Rage). I know it's a really loose connection, but Freya Frigg (who may actually be two separate wives of Odin) was an oracle and sorceress that would have held a high rank in Odin's warband. Essentially, the queen served to predict the wisdom and outcome of the band's chosen course, and used her arts to influence the outcome. Frigg also had a feather that allowed her to turn into a bird and was the mother of Baldur. So just think about that before pointing out how easy it is to register false positives with this kind of stuff.
Of course OF COURSE we also have to consider that the actual in-game Eagle and Lion may actually be Nameless and whoever his poor longsuffering wife was.
Lion-eagle-goat-scorpion.
In the DLC, killing Artorias causes the two lesser Guardians to appear. Artorias' death, of course, marks the ultimate failure of Gwyn's Plan, as his ultimate weapon not only bounced off of Manus, he bounced off and became a weapon of the Abyss. We can't know for sure, but barring Oolacile the bonfire system might have worked: relative utopia forever and ever so long as you don't think too hard amen. But, of course, just because one champion goes hollow doesn't mean they all will. Somebody probably woulda borked it eventually.
The actual spread-eagle shield in-game is associated with Thorolund, which may have arose out of the ashes of an older iteration of the Way of White practiced by Elizabeth and Dusk. Balder, too, likely rose and fell in the interim, if we're gonna continue the Frigg connections.
Alright, so, the fall of Oolacile marks the end of the spread-eagle, empire period of Summer Anor Londo, and enters the long decline of Autumn overseen by Gwyndolin, Seath, and whoever else. Probably new alliances had to be struck with neighboring kingdoms, like Thorolund & Berenike, while other neighbors, Carim & Balder, maybe, took the catastrophe as an opportunity to begin making attempts to assail the Wall.
Patches, I suspect, was something like Eagle's human Champion, maybe even was something like a Ring-less Ringed Knight that led her troops in battle against the dragons, depending on how sensationalist you want to be. He eventually turned undead though, as all humans must. He, like Gough, may have fallen into disfavor with Anor when the Great White Nameless Lion took over and/or the Lordran Exodus.
So what's a jolly undead outcast Eagle loyalist to do but declare a fight?
Meta
This post took forever to write. At first it was because I had writer's block, which led to like twenty different Idol scripts that are in various stages of being written, and is also why this post is such a patchwork. Then I got real busy and probably will be, so I've got about half the time I used to have to split between researching/writing and playing these games and any other games I want to play, like Sekiro or Lapis Labyrinth. Like I literally could have had this post up a week ago, but I wanted to play Sekiro again instead of getting fucking Guardian screencaps and this week I still don't want to get Guardian screencaps so I just yoinked something from Reddit because oh well.
