 |
| Y'ALL POISONED THAT WATERFALL DUSK |
ALVINA: Is it not so that thou art new?
Thou fared well to find me.
But cometh thee not for the grave of Sir Artorias?
My advice true, forget this!
The legend of Artorias art none but a fabrication.
Traversing the dark?
'Tis but a fairy tale.
Have thine own respect,
Go not yonder knocking for nothing, I say!
Well indeed, thou art a strange one!
Nevertheless, I feel some liking for thee.
I am Alvina of the Darkroot Wood.
I command a clan of hunters, who track down defilers of the forest graves.
What dost thou say?
I am very glad!
And now thou art one of us!
Let us establish a Covenant.
If mine senses reveal intruders,
then I will summon thee.
Fend them off sir:
I beseech only this.
I shall summon others,
who will, by their honour, work tirelessly with thee.
Thou shalt receive great reward,
And whatsoever ye shall pillage
Will be thine own.
A true agreement, not so?
But thou must heed the golden rule...
The clan is thine own family.
To thine kinsmen forever stay true.
Dare'st not in any attempt to double-cross.
Have no doubt,
Such wretchedness,
never will we tolerate.
Perchance,
Hast thou met Shiva?
A lad cometh from the far East, strong of arm; now a clan leader of ours.
And yet, still I feel that boy hides something...
And that man that clingeth to Shiva like some shadow?
Ensure thou dost treat him with the same caution.
Oh, it is thee...
Thine kinsmen are betrayed by thee.
This doth bode most badly.
No rest will ease thy rotten soul whilst there is one clansman living...
Forever tormented thou shalt be, by our very howls...
Hellish villain, thou hast used us most foully,
Thine own family...
For thee, no mercy shall be shown.
If Only Hawkeye Were Here
Look, sometimes on here 'normal' font size is normal sized, sometime's it's completely random. Take it up with Google, it's their pos platform.
If you haven't read it, this is a sorta tangential follow-up to the Undead Legion/Farron Prisoner of Ash post. I set out to write the Aldrich 2 PoA but the breakthrough I was looking for ended up happening in Darkroot so hey there goes The Plan again.
The Forest Hunter area of Darkroot really is fascinating. And I can't believe how much stuff I missed.
This first section is going to outline some assorted stuff from Oolacile. It doesn't all tie together yet, but it will.
Undead Burg didn't exist in the Artorias DLC. Havel's Tower is inside of Kalameet's boss arena in the base-game, which also means the Occult Rebellion hasn't happened yet.
Beyond here we find Kalameet, who would have made construction difficult. At the end of the arena we find the Hawkeye note. If you look down the cliff you can see that the New Londo Gate hasn't been built yet. The whole Valley of the Drakes area, from what I can tell, is a lake. This might mean that NL was already flooded, but we should be able to see the entrance.
What I think happened was this:
The gate was built after NL was flooded. The flood was caused by destroying the cliff between the Valley and the city, draining the lake we find in the past into the settlement. With the Valley then accessible the gatehouses were built between the two areas.
Hawkeye could've stopped it. All of it. If the archer could see Kalameet would have been easily dealt with. Even blind, Gough can obviously hunt dragons with minimal difficulty.
So here's where all this is going: The easiest way to take out Manus is to snipe him from a safe distance. Now who would best be able to do that?
Nameless, who I suspect was king during the fall of Oolacile, probably had Hawkeye blinded. In a recent post I brought up how my thinking on Nameless' rule had changed. I no longer see him as a noble defender of dragons, but an incompetent bully with unlimited (and unearned) power and resources.
Think of the Iron King without the benefit of being born into struggle.
This would make Manus and Kalameet his problem. It would be peak Dark Souls to have Nameless, in his insecurity and conceit, blind the one person who could have stopped the Abyss.
As a final point: the chest containing the enchanted ember in the present contains a Blue Slab in the past. I'm not sure if this means that a Slab can become an Ember, but I'm certainly entertaining the idea.
So there's a rough sketch of Darkroot as it was then. No Burg, no Valley, no New Londo. The seeds of the Forest Hunters would have grown from this, based on tales of the three Knights we find, probably related by the gardeners, alleged golems, Elizabeth (maybe) and Alvina (who may not have actually been there in the past. She can use jikukan arts, as she demonstrates by using the white mist to teleport, and normally the mist is associated with time, rather than space, which is associated with soapstone).
Beyond here we find Kalameet, who would have made construction difficult. At the end of the arena we find the Hawkeye note. If you look down the cliff you can see that the New Londo Gate hasn't been built yet. The whole Valley of the Drakes area, from what I can tell, is a lake. This might mean that NL was already flooded, but we should be able to see the entrance.
What I think happened was this:
The gate was built after NL was flooded. The flood was caused by destroying the cliff between the Valley and the city, draining the lake we find in the past into the settlement. With the Valley then accessible the gatehouses were built between the two areas.
Hawkeye could've stopped it. All of it. If the archer could see Kalameet would have been easily dealt with. Even blind, Gough can obviously hunt dragons with minimal difficulty.
So here's where all this is going: The easiest way to take out Manus is to snipe him from a safe distance. Now who would best be able to do that?
Nameless, who I suspect was king during the fall of Oolacile, probably had Hawkeye blinded. In a recent post I brought up how my thinking on Nameless' rule had changed. I no longer see him as a noble defender of dragons, but an incompetent bully with unlimited (and unearned) power and resources.
Think of the Iron King without the benefit of being born into struggle.
This would make Manus and Kalameet his problem. It would be peak Dark Souls to have Nameless, in his insecurity and conceit, blind the one person who could have stopped the Abyss.
As a final point: the chest containing the enchanted ember in the present contains a Blue Slab in the past. I'm not sure if this means that a Slab can become an Ember, but I'm certainly entertaining the idea.
So there's a rough sketch of Darkroot as it was then. No Burg, no Valley, no New Londo. The seeds of the Forest Hunters would have grown from this, based on tales of the three Knights we find, probably related by the gardeners, alleged golems, Elizabeth (maybe) and Alvina (who may not have actually been there in the past. She can use jikukan arts, as she demonstrates by using the white mist to teleport, and normally the mist is associated with time, rather than space, which is associated with soapstone).
 |
Thine Own Family
Alvina doesn't talk the way she does for nothing. All the double and triple negatives are there to help weed out spies. Yes, she's a liar, but she's a very crafty liar. The only way to answer Alvina's riddles the 'right' way are to either have been paying unusually close attention, or to look up the answer online. In other words: in addition to be strong enough to make it through the gauntlet, you need to be either 'smart' enough to keep up with her intellectually or 'connected' enough to have been given the password.
OBVIOUSLY RIGHT BIG M AM I ON THE RIGHT TRACK YET?
OBVIOUSLY RIGHT BIG M AM I ON THE RIGHT TRACK YET?
Why would she tell you, a new recruit, that she was suspicious about Shiva, a clan leader? You would be an idiot to do that, because a spy would immediately try to either set Shiva up for a fall or take him out and claim he attacked first.
Shiva is probably Alvina's most trusted clan leader, if not Pharis.
Here's a weird fact, don't know if it's important: if you kill the sorcerer Hunter with a Combustion-class pyromancy he face-palms as he dies. The Great Combustion spell says that sorcerers mock the simplicity of these spells.
I learned that. When I betrayed them. My family.
Now, obviously, if you betray the hunters Shiva and Sharp Eyes come after you. When you dispatch them Shiva drops his arms, SE drops his ring.
Fun fact: Sharp Eyes uses the foreign Flame Surge pyromancy you get from Ariamis. That means I'm right, if you've been keeping up. Divergent, possibly convergent, school of pyromancy based out of Jugo, the Eastern Land, probably a scorpion demoness in charge, probably related to both Aldia and Mytha, and so on.
But that's not the point. The point is is that Shiva the Lion is honorable. Or doth not mosteth honourable countenance betoweth indeed do they not, as Alvina'd say.
Which means that Shiva's honor is probably why his Chaos Blade story was cut. Probably also why we find him and Sharp eyes where we do in the third game. The Shrine Handmaid in the third game -- a lady with complicated familial relationships herself -- sells exactly one unique weapon, after all: the Washing Pole. Shiva carries the Murakumo in-game, but he sells the Washing Pole, and judging by the price it's his favorite. a mosteth not incurious happenstancery is it not so?
Additionally, the Jugo Duo descended into Blighttown, which is even more interesting now that at least one of them is a confirmed pyromancer.
Additionally, the Jugo Duo descended into Blighttown, which is even more interesting now that at least one of them is a confirmed pyromancer.
You can find Shiva's armor on a corpse next to a cliff in the Garden. From this cliff you can keep an eye on half of Lordran. Havel's Tower, UDP, Lower Darkroot, Valley of the Drakes, probably even the main entrance to New Londo. Something about the corpse always made me think it was stabbed in the back by a compatriot. I think I know why.
He's in one of the hardest-to-get-to spots in Darkroot. If he betrayed the clan, and they backed him off a cliff, it wouldn't have been there. He would have had to run past the archer, the second knight, and about 900 bushmen, then turn around and try to fight his way back out, having not realized the cliff was there.
You don't get to be clan leader not knowing where the safe drop-downs are.
 |
| Sharp Eyes: Outland Pyromancer |
He was out there looking skyward, maybe watching us, the 'sick hollow,' running around fucking everything up the entire time HE'S STANDING WHERE THE ALLEGEDLY A GOLEM STOPS TO SCAN THE SKYLINE IN ROYAL WOOD HE TEACHES THE LOOK SKYWARD GESTURE WHICH IS A FACE PALM GODDAMMIT MIYAZAKI
So there you have it folks, big much revelation.
A Place of Swords and Flowers
Sif's arena -- the Sanctuary Garden -- as outlined in one of those goddamn tree posts, was essentially Mecca for the Forest Hunters that would become the Undead Legion. No, not Mecca. Mecca if Mecca was so holy that you weren't even allowed to look at it.
Why? Why's Ciaran there in our present, still watching his back? Why is Gwyn's sword -- or a replica there-of -- stuck there? And all those other swords stabbed into the ground? Why does Sif guard the place despite Artorias probably not being buried there? If she's acting as a replacement for the chimera guardians of old: what were they guarding?
Consider this. The waterfalls of the past were on the opposite side of Lower Darkroot, the Undead Burg side in the present. The water that flows into it in the present is coming from the river running past both of Artorias' graves. And Ciaran's and Gough's and so on. After we finish, Sif's essence is mixed in as well. The Wolf's Blood, that will one day serve as the Mandate of Lords in Lordran/Farron's darkest hour, right?
Let's really look at Alvina's position in the grand scheme of things.
She has lost, or is trying to wrest control of upper Darkroot to/from the Seath and Gwyndolin Darkmoon faction, who control the basin, Sen's Fortress, and Undead Parish. Undead Burg is controlled by the Chaos Servants, at least the lower areas are. Between the Taurus Demon and the Hollow Soldiers (whose shields bear the mark of Kalameet) a case could be made for either the Hunters or the Servants.
Everything is effectively at a stale-mate when we arrive. The Blades are flanked by the Hunters and Servants, who could possibly ally if they could meet in the middle. Andre tells us that the 'old church' connects to two 'forbidden planes.' Now, Andre is obviously an honest and incurious Astoran, so it makes sense he'd caution new arrivals away, but he also has the key to the seal, and he'll sell it to us, which is a fuck you Gwyndolin move, as it's not so much letting us in as it's potentially letting the Hunters out.
The gate, sealed with an enchantment on the Burg side, functions basically the opposite of the gate to the Forbidden Woods in Bloodborne, right? In BB, the forest people have the city people locked in if they ain't got the password, in DS1 the city has the forest people locked out.
Change must come, right? Lordran needs an Abysswalker, regardless of whose side you're on, apart from the Wraiths. But you can't let just any old asshole take a shot at it.
You have to sacrifice for the key. You have to run the gauntlet. You have to face Sif and the divine sword of Artorias.
You have to sacrifice for the key. You have to run the gauntlet. You have to face Sif and the divine sword of Artorias.
 |
| Don't worry about the dog, she's fine, look at the sword. |
Artorias' Sword, lest we forget, is
A. Alive, and
B. Cursed
We take Sif's Soul -- representing the Divine Shield and Cursed Sword -- and the Covenant of the Abyss out of the Sanctuary. This doesn't just mean we leave the Sanctuary without a physical guardian, but without divine protection as well.
Much more than Artorias has been buried in the Sanctuary Garden. Much more than Artorias will be. This melange of dead gods, demons, giants, elves, men, and the Abyss would, I suspect, become the Wolf's Blood that granted the Abyss Watchers their strength.
We take Sif's Soul -- representing the Divine Shield and Cursed Sword -- and the Covenant of the Abyss out of the Sanctuary. This doesn't just mean we leave the Sanctuary without a physical guardian, but without divine protection as well.
Much more than Artorias has been buried in the Sanctuary Garden. Much more than Artorias will be. This melange of dead gods, demons, giants, elves, men, and the Abyss would, I suspect, become the Wolf's Blood that granted the Abyss Watchers their strength.
Mush and Boots
The two big mushroom people in Darkroot are guarding the Enchanted Ember. So are the little guys. The little guys know they don't have a chance of stopping you and probably know that they don't even have a real chance of escaping if the big dudes get taken out. So they, at least sometimes, run towards the chest.
Fun fact: if you don't chase them to the chest they'll run back over to you, then run back to the chest. They only ever mount an offense near the chest, because they know that the ember, the secret blue flame of Oolacile, shouldn't be allowed to fall into the hands of something or someone like Seath or Vinnheim.
The little mushrooms know that, if they can't protect the ember, they have to try to destroy it.
Now I mentioned up top how I thought it might be possible for a slab to evolve into an ember over time. So what is an ember, and what could an ember potentially become?
In DS2 we find a dearth of blacksmiths. Rather, a dearth of 'divine' blacksmiths: smiths capable of working with an ember. Which is just as well since there's but a single smith ember in the entire game. The Dull Ember is described as 'nearly exhausted' but displaying an 'eerie resilience.'
Right, tinfoil hat time. I think an ember might be something that can be used to trigger something like a first flame or bonfire system. Something like a fuse for a bomb or a spark to kindling.
MacDuff seems to be a likewise fading ember. His dialogue and behavior kind of imply that if he were given a powerful ember his senses would further return to him.
The Enchanted Ember of Oolacile is contrasted with the Large Magic Ember of Vinheim and Seath's Crystal Ember. The Crystal Ember we can leave aside for now, as it relates more to Seath's curse than sorcery or the geopolitics of Souls.
The Enchanted Ember increases INT scaling but lowers base damage. The Large Magic Ember of Vinheim offers lower INT scaling, but retains STR/DEX scaling properties.
In other words: The embers behave the opposite of how they should. Oolacile magics, including the light magics associated with the Ivory Queen, do not scale with intelligence. Dusk flat out tells us this. Vinheim magics, on the other hand, scale.
So that's interesting. And if you're wondering why I'm not talking about the coals from the third game: they'll be in the PoA: Sunless post. This is just the set up for that.
So a Titanite Slab, depending on the conditions, can turn into a demon or it can turn into a smith's ember. Given that they're heirlooms of Giant Smith, the blacksmith deity, this would all seem to make sense, inasmuch as anything does these days.
You could imagine that the Titanite Demon in the private Anor Londo chapel may have started out as a slab (as outlined by Hawkshaw) but the intention may have been to let it evolve into an ember. Except that the conditions weren't right.
The Hunters seem to have succeeded in evolving an ember by leaving a Blue Slab submerged underwater in a magic-rich environment, far away from the direct influence of gods and men.
I could of course talk about the other embers, and I will, but not now because jesus this is a lot of information to try to parse already.
Alvina, we can assume, is masterminding all of this, and maybe can infer that she has a not-unfriendly relationship with Andre. You could possibly even come to the conclusion that Alvina is connected somewhat directly to Sirris' family, given
In DS2 we find a dearth of blacksmiths. Rather, a dearth of 'divine' blacksmiths: smiths capable of working with an ember. Which is just as well since there's but a single smith ember in the entire game. The Dull Ember is described as 'nearly exhausted' but displaying an 'eerie resilience.'
Right, tinfoil hat time. I think an ember might be something that can be used to trigger something like a first flame or bonfire system. Something like a fuse for a bomb or a spark to kindling.
MacDuff seems to be a likewise fading ember. His dialogue and behavior kind of imply that if he were given a powerful ember his senses would further return to him.
The Enchanted Ember of Oolacile is contrasted with the Large Magic Ember of Vinheim and Seath's Crystal Ember. The Crystal Ember we can leave aside for now, as it relates more to Seath's curse than sorcery or the geopolitics of Souls.
The Enchanted Ember increases INT scaling but lowers base damage. The Large Magic Ember of Vinheim offers lower INT scaling, but retains STR/DEX scaling properties.
In other words: The embers behave the opposite of how they should. Oolacile magics, including the light magics associated with the Ivory Queen, do not scale with intelligence. Dusk flat out tells us this. Vinheim magics, on the other hand, scale.
So that's interesting. And if you're wondering why I'm not talking about the coals from the third game: they'll be in the PoA: Sunless post. This is just the set up for that.
So a Titanite Slab, depending on the conditions, can turn into a demon or it can turn into a smith's ember. Given that they're heirlooms of Giant Smith, the blacksmith deity, this would all seem to make sense, inasmuch as anything does these days.
 |
You could imagine that the Titanite Demon in the private Anor Londo chapel may have started out as a slab (as outlined by Hawkshaw) but the intention may have been to let it evolve into an ember. Except that the conditions weren't right.
The Hunters seem to have succeeded in evolving an ember by leaving a Blue Slab submerged underwater in a magic-rich environment, far away from the direct influence of gods and men.
I could of course talk about the other embers, and I will, but not now because jesus this is a lot of information to try to parse already.
Alvina, we can assume, is masterminding all of this, and maybe can infer that she has a not-unfriendly relationship with Andre. You could possibly even come to the conclusion that Alvina is connected somewhat directly to Sirris' family, given
- The Firelink Handmaid's anomalous behavior regarding DS1 Darkroot stuff (unique dialogue for Dreamchaser, unique weapon for Shiva)
- Sirris wears the Silvercat Ring
- Along with Hodrick, all three have an obsession with their anachronistic 'family,' that manifests in different ways.
The Handmaid does not like Sirris. The two character's lines about 'cordial intrusion' make this clear fairly early on. I don't think they hate each other, at least not at the start of the game. The handmaid probably told Sirris that we were heading towards Darkroot when she related how kind we were to poor Anri [I haven't played 3 in a while, so I might be misremembering Sirris' first trigger].
The Handmaid will also sell Sirris' note -- attached to a Blossoming Green Blossom [CHLORANTHY] for less than the sell price of a regular Green Blossom.
Because the clan is family and family is all.
Skip over to Prisoner of Ash to see if I have the followup out yet. This series will probably pick up with Shiva and Sharp Eye's inquisition into Blighttown which, hopefully will finally start working its way towards the damn Brume Tower post.
