This is going to be a follow-up, of sorts, to 010. Read that if you haven't.
The Great
[meta-rant, months later]
I heard a theory the other day. In the interim between DS1 and DS3 half of Lordran, one day and all at once, vanished and re-appeared in Drangleic as Heide.
That's it. That's the theory. I'd try to explain it better but they didn't.
Now, this wasn't some newcomer tentatively diving into the lore for the first time on some forum somewhere. This was a, again as much as it even is a community, a highly respected loresmith that probably turns their nose up at ideas like Solaire being the Carthus Sandworm EVEN THOUGH THAT IS A BETTER EXPLANATION THAN ANYONE ELSE HAS OFFERED.
This is why I don't promote the blog. This is why I don't engage with, or at this point even really like or respect the lore community, such as it is. This is why I don't have much nice to say about any DS3 lore video that purports to be about more than, like, a single character or location presented in a vacuum.
Because here's the fact, and pay attention because it might as goddamn well be the mission statement for this blog:
If you don't understand the story of Dark Souls 2 it is impossible to understand the story of Dark Souls 3.
So, anyway, I guess that means the two leading theories for what happened to Lordran are
A. Gwynevere and a significant amount of the old gods, at some point prior to the fall of Oolacile, left Anor Londo and founded a colony that would eventually become Olaphis. Olaphis, as outlined in Scholar of Scholar, eventually became Drangleic, which eventually became Lothric, which was eventually forced to flee Drangleic and attempt to re-colonize Lordran. The collapse of Anor Londo was already happening in the first game. The archtree that help Anor Londo is broken/burnt out, and is slowly decaying. Because it's a city built on top of a fucking giant tree.
Or
B. I mean I could retype the lazy-ass non-explanation I heard earlier but why?
The first "named" archtree we come across is the Great Hollow.
The Great Hollow appears to be an archtree common to the breed found in Ash Lake, remarkable only in that it has gone hollow, I assume in the same sense that an undead goes hollow.
Enough time has passed, when we come across it, that we find the inner 'cellulose' completely absent, leaving only the undying bark with a very healthy sapling growing safely inside. It's the sapling, whose branches/roots act as spokes feeding into the parent tree, that allow us to make our way down.
We find, between parent and child, a number of what I assume are lifeforms dating to the Age of Ancients: funguys, basilisks, and titanite lizards (I still think these are dragon whelps).
We also find the blessing of Chloranthy in the Great Hollow, which I hope you've looked up and contemplated the implication of. This 'blessing of chloranthy' is probably why the sapling is growing so quickly, although all that nutritious Blighttown blight is probably acting like fertilizer as well.
I need to point out that the out that the Great Hollow is actually two different trees: the larger, literally hollow tree we see in the picture above, and an internal sapling whose limbs we're dropping onto when we're inside the hollow. I suspect that because GH is beginning to canopy (and thereby helping to fill in the ground for the 'ground floor' level of Firelink Shrine and Undead Burg,) the internal sapling will serve as the base for another 'great hollow' to rise and begin creating another 'ground floor' canopy layer up around where Anor Londo's wall is.
It's possible the Great Hollow became something like a High Wall of somewhere like Farron, Undead Settlement, or Lothric (or some combination of same, I don't know how many flames they've tied into the system). The idea is that as the tree that held Anor Londo crumbled other trees would rise to power the same way saplings will 'race' to fill the canopy space left by the loss of an old tree in a forest.
Farron is clearly the Royal Woods/Darkroot, and it ended up on the same level and location as Blighttown, with Izalith and Ash Lake directly below it I would assume that this means the Great Hollow was squished up to form the Undead Settlement, along with the Undead Burg, which I'm sure was completely wrecked by the ascent.
This explains most of the elements of the Settlement: an early incarnation of a Dreg Heap-type area atop an undead archtree with disparate elements of the White, Demon worship, occultism, and a sort of mad obsession with becoming pure. In the Burg this manifested as the dissonance between the idyllic early-renaissance architecture and the fact that literally demons were mob bossing the place and trying to mount an assault on the church across the bridge.
We find a similar civil war type situation in Lothric.
The tree of Izalith, I suspect, ended up inside the painted world, which I swear I'll talk about eventually. This led to the extinction of demons, as DS3 makes it clear that they did forge a pretty mighty kingdom after the events of the first game, but that some unexplained event caused their fires to go out, possibly all at once, as with humanity following Yhorm's firelinking.
In fact, if Izalith's tree was the same that was profaned by Alsanna and Venn, then the first event may have followed the second.
But this is conjecture and intended to spark reflection more than anything.
Another first game archtree worth mentioning is much more unassuming. It's the one where you fight the Sanctuary Guardian and Sif, across the bridge from the Royal Woods/Darkroot Garden area.
It's not connected to the rest of the Royal Wood: it is a separate and distinct archtree, not part of a single tree split in two as with the Valley of Drakes. It's also, in the Japanese text, much more obviously a grave for something important. I think this archtree might be where the third game Firelink Shrine is located. It even has a similar amphitheater design.
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In Aldia
In the second game there are innumerable trees, including an archtree sapling farm so vibrant the entire zone is filled with Fog.
But there's one tree, one tree right? Just him, just the Duke, Aldia son of Alken, brother of Vendrick, son of the undying poisonous mad witchqueen of the dead.
Did he become Ember? Was he the dying spark meant to elucidate young Lothric the Younger on how to destroy them both and save the world for the span of a sigh?
Right, Aldia's dialogue has been discussed to death. What hasn't really been discussed is the pattern to the various non-Aldia overlays in his audio mix. Below I've laid out some of his dialogue with two distinct characters - Aldia and First Scholar (my term for her) - separated by quotes. FS's dialogue is in quotes, Aldia alones is without.
Timestamps are relative to the Sir Fist video.
2:08
"Life is brilliant, beautiful, it enchants us" to the point of obsession
"Some are true to their purpose" though they are but shells, flesh and mind
One man lost his own body, but lingered on as a head.
Others "chase the charms of love, however elusive."
It almost seems like Aldia is responding to some kind of scholarly rival. You could imagine some kind of argument where Aldia is throwing these lines back at the female scholar with his criticisms attached. "Life enchants us." When people call something 'enchanting' they generally mean it in a positive way. Engagement rings and polished brass and candlelight, that kind of thing. But 'to be enchanted' is most definitely not a good thing, it's a synynomous with being mind-controlled, brain washed, possessed or similar. "Some are true to their purpose," except that, in the context of Souls, this means that they have no independent will (an aspect of dark,) and are no better than a golem (A shell with a soul (purpose) grafted onto it.
The next is obviously a reference to Vengarl, who was something like Vendrick's personal bodyguard in the early days (his name is a play on the words vendrick and vanguard). This seems to be Aldia speaking alone, almost as if he's substituting the missing 'third line' of FS's stanza with his own observation, before using what I assume is something FS originally said to Aldia to contradict her.
In other words, FS may have at some point recounted a cautionary tale to Aldia about remaining true to purpose and not becoming enchanted by the flame of life (the dialogue seems to be invoking the Flame of Life/Izalith, philosophically). Aldia's rebuttal is that purpose without reflection is a madness that leaves one as much of a shell as any hollow.
FS then says that "Some are true to their purpose." That's something a teacher says to a misbehaving student. "Gandalf wouldn't be trying to dig up a pygmy corpse or resurrect a dragon, you don't want to end up like Saruman do you?" That kind of thing.
Aldia then gets weirdly specific w/r/t Vengarl. This seems random at first, but Vengarl is very important to Aldia, probably for more than one reason.
Mytha was beheaded, you see. It's something that doesn't get commented on a lot because B team didn't know what they were doing.
So, how does one survive a beheading in a souls game? not counting having your body possessed or infected with like a big mosquito or centipede or haunted and self-aware maggot colony or having your head replaced with an unstable wormhole into the place nightmares go or whatever.
Well, here's the thing.
The Light Soul resides in the head. It's literally the 'brain' of the undead, probably housed in a cranial cavity.
The Dark Soul resides in the heart. The Life Soul the bowels/uterus, the Dead Soul the bones/marrow.
The Mound Maker covenant makes it seem like there's a definite anatomical separation point somewhere in the hollow's neck dividing the domains of Light and Dark. Probably it's something really hard to break, like that bone Epstein managed to break by kneeling real hard with a paper towel.
But, if you were smart enough to work this out and mad enough to attempt to turn it into a standardized surgery you would need test subjects, right?
Well, who has subjects?
So, maybe, Aldia caused Vengarl's dual personalities as a sort of practice ritual for whatever led to Mytha's current condition.
Consider that Vengarl tells us that, even in his madness, he held Vendrick in great regard. He also tells us he was killed shortly after a war, and that war was all he had ever known.
Here is Vengarl's head, one of the wisest Light Soul characters in the Soulsverse, cursed with a body filled with a mad Dark Soul that wanted only carnage and violence.
On one hand, the perfect soldier: just sane enough to be controlled long enough to get to the battlefield. On the other hand: what does someone like that do when you finally run out of enemies to kill? One imagines you drink, probably a lot. Start arguments. Fume. The anger, the fury, the howling river of endless rage can only be dammed for so long.
Maybe Vengarl really wanted to lead that advance mission to face the giants. Maybe Vendrick, in sending Syan, knew Vengarl was too much of a liability to send on a scouting mission. Maybe Vengarl took the matter up with Syan.
Vendrick and Aldia's wills - their desires, not their purposes - clashed. Maybe it was over this. Vendrick - a loyal fighter who had lost many loyal fighters - forced to choose between letting a loyal fighter live to, eventually, kill other loyal fighters, have him executed or permanently imprisoned, or hand him over to his insane brother for experimentation.
The experiment worked, though. The body retained the berserk Dark Soul, the mind retained, well, a mind trained for decades in militarism and trying to hold Vengarl's body in check, finally at peace.
The Cursebearer arrives, one of them, later, and finds the head, and sparks a dialogue that reawakens Vengarl's Head to a new outlook. CB then meets Vengarl's Body and, maybe, delivers the killing blow that destroys the raging humanity, allowing it to be safely reunited with Head to end up at the Throne and Eleum Loyce and maybe goes on to be mythologized in Lothric the Kingdom.
Aldia, however, may have went on to perform a similar procedure on his mother (I don't think either of the Alken boys liked their father,) bringing her raging body and, well, also raging mind into alignment. The body fights like a healthy titanite demon, a combination of whips from the tail and stabs from the bident/trident. Mytha uses her own head as a catalyst, and it's a catalyst that can spam cast Soul Geyser, which is a spell that spam casts Soul Spears.
So she kind of went in the opposite direction as Vengarl, but considering the weight of her grudges it's no wonder.
Aldia went on to become a bonfire system, which is a type of tree.
Now, I don't know how bonfire systems work, really. But I think it's something like this.
The bonfire system all over Lordran, except for the fires of Ariamis and the Duke's Archives that are cut off from the rest, are connected via a network of roots. The roots hypothetically all connect to a central archtree, although I don't know if this archtree is the Bed of Chaos, the Kiln of the First Flame, or even just that big bonfire we place the Lordvessel on outside of the Kiln.
In DS2, in Majula, we find a broken Lordvessel near the Far Fire of Majula. It could be that this is meant to convey that the bonfire system of Drangleic was built by Olaphis, who could have brought a lordvessel with them (I don't think they were common, but I don't think there was just one of them either). It could also have been brought back by Vendrick when he 'defeated the four old ones' and founded Drangleic.
Or, it could be that the Olaphis built the bonfire system, it was 'decommissioned' or whatever following the fall of Olaphis (which could have led to the Red Firekeepers retiring,) to be later 'recommissioned' by Vendrick and re-recommissioned by Aldia.
Again, this is all speculative, I'm just trying to get a feel for the possibilities.
4:22
"I lost everything, and remain here," patiently.
"The Throne will certainly receive you."
But the question remains:
"What do you want? Truly?"
Light? Dark? Or something else entirely?
"Many monarchs have come and gone.
One drowned in poison, another succumbed to flame,
still another slumbers in a realm of ice."
Not one of them stood here ("stood here",)
as you do,
now.
I can't really make sense of the relationship in this part, I don't have the best headphones, but it seems like this might relate to the 'all of this will play out again' nature of firelinking, with the same storylines playing out with different characters in different circumstances. If you dig deep enough into the lore it becomes fairly apparent that an ancient civilization - maybe Giants to be succeeded in failure by Olaphis, maybe just Olaphis - attempted to link a/the First Flame in ur-Drang, and failed in a way that led to the collapse of the kingdom. From there successive iterations of this Great Sovereign, a kind of Dark Gwyn, have come and gone. Any of them potentially could have made it to the True Throne, but didn't for various reasons I tried to begin outlining in the last post.
One possibility is that Aldia is completely aware of more or less everything has happened and is happening in Drangleic, in real time. He also seems to be either powerless to do anything or too detached from mortal experience to care, apart from serving as a weird, anticlimatic final final final roadblock in front of the clearly unstoppable Cursebearer.
The female scholar, though, seems to be having a much different discussion than Aldia. She sounds like she's being attacked. If she's meant to represent some kind of historical 'lost scholar' that Aldia learned a bunch of secrets from, and Aldia is using the equivalent of mp3 samples of the voices of people he knew, then...well, you can draw your own conclusions about their relationship, but this is Aldia we're talking about.
Aldia is missing an eye. Shanalotte has different colored eyes. Is that important?
The female scholar, if she's meant to be something like the inspiration for Shanalotte, and Shanalotte was like Aldia's greatest success and biggest (or second biggest,) failure, then it's conceivable that someone with Aldia's psychology would have done something insane like give her one of his eyes so he could always see what she saw. This might even relate to the missing/extra eye we find between Nadalia and Loyce Priestess. Or not, who knows.
Blood Tree of Alken
At the end of the world there's a single healthy archtree. This singular specimen has its roots in ancient Alken's Castle of Earth. The tree is obviously feeding on the blood of the Undead and the, uh, 'blood' of Sihn, which is being pumped up by the windmills to fuel their pyromancy.
Alken's still a kingdom, during the Dreg Heap era. The hypothetical heart of the dark empire of Carthus. They even have a queen, Zoey, the beautiful and unassuming lord of slaves, criminals, and the final huddled orphans of forgotten Izalith.
The Harald Knights seem drawn to the tree, and are of course neutral towards any native factions. Actually, I don't know if they have friendly fire with Zoey or the ascended pilgrims and I'm not going to try to find out.
I still don't know who the Harald (basically a warlord; not to be mistaken for 'herald') was, but I've worked out that the H. Knights are probably inverted/red tendency Winged Knights, although I of course don't know if that means that they're from Lothric or if that would imply a paternal or fraternal relationship with their 'branching' blue faction.
I mean, we do find a lot of evidence of an incursion by Lothric, led by Lorian, that made it as far as the antechamber to Midir's lair. It was this incursion that led to one of the demon princes 'dying,' resulting in the pair having to pass a single flame back and forth.
Probably the most Occam's Razory answer is that the Harald Knights were the same faction of Slave Knight that Gael is sworn to. Their armor looks similar, Gael knows how to get to the Ringed City, implying he's been there more than once, the WoW Corona talks about the slaves wishing desperately for a return of the Gods and their Glory, which would seemingly date them to after Gwyn's sacrifice.
Plus also all the headless knight symbolism surrounding Lothric Knights, that too. I can hear you getting all hyper-skeptical about it like you don't still probably believe in money and think Biden is a good candidate.
However, the Dragonslayer Armor seems to hate them. But then again when we find the Armor in our time it's pretty clearly being controlled by the butterflies, which are pretty clearly tied to Londor but see it makes sense just not yet because nobody figured out the actual story of the first two games because men are blind and cowards and fear true revelation
Right, so
probably this means that the end of the world is, in some sense, locked in the same civil war it's been locked in since Gwyn linked the Fire, with Red and Blue constantly gaining the upper hand on each other until it reached a deadlock that, at least to the red paladins and blue clerics of the city, resembled peace. Or not. Who knows.
Okay, so let's try to tie this together.
At the end of the world we find that all the lands of Fire are collapsing in on themselves, seemingly caught up in a kind of 'slow black hole' phenomenon originating in the Ringed City, where the Dark Soul (mass) has been pooling up since forever ago, and is not drawing light (time) into itself.
So, from the meta-perspective of this 'time outside of time' timeline: Alken is between Lothric and the Ringed City. Lothric was founded, if you've been keeping up, by neo-Olaphis/Lothric refugees fleeing the mounting threat of neo-Alken/Carthus.
You need a nice, fat, healthy, moderately large archtree to make a kiln, right? Gwyn's 'throne' sits atop an archtree half-melted to slag. The Throne of Want, in its 'cold' state, seems to tie in (somewhat literally I imagine,) to the Shrine of Amana (Altar of the Faithful [People] is a possible re-translation) and the Lost Sin of Olaphis.
The Lost Sin, again, may have tied into an earlier failed incursion into TRC by King Olaph or the Sunken King (if they were separate rulers).
So, Alken - a right and proper kingdom surviving - thriving, relatively - at the event horizon of a black hole, harboring the exact thing you would need if you wanted to harness the power of the black hole once you get sucked in.
We can assume by this point that the Ashen One's journey to the Ringed City represents, in some way, the foundation myth of Londor, the kingdom that would rise in the wastes depicted in the cover art, intro cinematic, and Gael's arena.
In other words, and there are several threads discussing this idea, the events surrounding the Ashen One's journey are as distant from the roots of Londor as Lothric was to Anor Londo.
Londor would have, therefore, been founded by (probably subterranean) survivors of Filianore's Awakening (we know that Dark, Light, and hybrid creatures can survive as evidenced by the enemies we encounter). Additionally, characters like Yoel seem to be very old versions of the already very old blue clerics in the Ringed City. In fact, given that you find the Ringed Cleric's set in the Undead Settlement being guarded by a Thrall it could be that Londor has made multiple attempts over the 'centuries' outside of time to settle the bubble universe of Lothric in order to lay the groundwork for whatever Invasion of the Pilgrims Out of Time scenario is playing out in Lothric when we arrive.
So,
If all the various timelines and kingdoms we find in the Dreg Heap ultimately collapse either into or around the base of the archtree holding the Ringed City, then we could assume that this Bloodtree of Alken would eventually end up down there, with (judging by the Lord of Hollows ending,) the Order of Sable already waiting for it. Presumably from there they could, between the remains of TRC, the Age of Fire, the Bloodtree, the First kiln of the First Flame, a True King, and the combined expertise of Elfriede, Yuria, and Lilliane, usher in an Age of New Ancients or Deep Waters or True Death whatever.
Assuming I'm not way off on everything, which I assume I am.
Alright, I'm gonna leave it there since this post, appropriately enough, keeps trying to branch off and loop back in on itself like the Mothman Prophecies. I keep wanting to finish a post about Alken and Brume but never had enough info to tie everything together, so maybe that will be next [IT ISN'T AND NEVER WILL BE GIVE IT UP HACK NADALIA HAS DESTROYED YOU].
