Token recognizing that the owner
has traveled worlds to defeat others.
Simply carrying these tokens shows the bitterness
of the grudges the holder has accumulated.
The Honorable Path
The sky is holy to kings and crows both.
Look here's this I'll try to add pictures later you know how it is
It could be debated that the Red Sign Soapstone is the real treasure hidden in the Painting. I suppose the choice comes down to whether we'd rather fight a gang of bonewheels or fight a gang of pissed off corvians with every advantage. That staircase tho.
The sky is fake in that world, of course; a canvas stained by long dry blood letting in dim and difuse twice-filtered moonlight from the world outside.
Can a Darkwraith, or something approximating it, retain its honor in pursuit of its ends?
In the first game Kaathe gives you the red eye orb: for invaders seeking a deeper Dark. The Orb is absent in the the second game, but the cracked eye orbs, sold by Gren and dropped by torturers, inform us that the eyes belonged to sinners that succumbed to dark.
So would this make the orb the eye of a sinner that DIDN'T succumb to dark or to someone that succumbed to dark but WASN'T a sinner?
The purpose to which the orbs are put to use in the second game was to spill blood -- madly and indiscriminately slaughtering strangers if that's your thing, in honorable duels of skill between the likeminded if that's your thing. Blood spilt that's the important thing.
Paint the world in blood.
In the third game we get the red sign from the non-hostile Finger of Rosaria, but we had to kill him to get it, which isn't exactly dishonorable, he seems perfectly happy to let you do it. He even stands at the edge of the 'arena' as you battle your way through the other fingers to Rosaria's door.
If we prove ourselves competent invaders, Ringfinger Leonhard will give us his name and the key to an uncracked orb. The orb itself id dropped by the Darkwraith in the Lothric dungeon, who seems to be either a training dummy for Lothric Red Knights or a voluntary beheading machine for same.
So in the first game the Orb requires you prove your competency to Kaathe (donate ten soft humanity to the covenant,) which itself requires you to murder Sif and Ingward and the Four Kings before interacting with Frampt. Which is more hoops than Leonhard.
Further: Kaathe wanted the orb to be used to spread Dark, while Leonhard wants us to bring Rosaria tongues, which is gross but probably w/e for most fingers that don't volunteer for wormhood, but wormhood seems to be a requirement for earning the covenant's trust. The tongues may just be a way of keeping score with the real goal to spread the infestation, which may be a way of opposing the Deep faction in a way similar to the Rot or Burn factions of Ariandel.
...
crows again.
Of course Leonhard doesn't give you the orb and the Darkwraith doesn't willingly give you his. But, again, with the wraith: whether you think of yourself as invading his cell or challenging him to a duel: does it matter so long as the painting gets painted?
Of course killing the Darkwraith involves killing someone that jumped through Kaathe's hoops and we have no idea how Kaathe would feel about that or how Leonhard got the key and whether his actions with Rosaria -- any of them -- are sanctioned by or turned a blind eye by to either Anor Londo or Lothric. They're tolerated Aldrich and the Archdeacons but we don't know to what degree.
It's interesting that McDonnel, head of Alrich's covenant, doesn't have anything like these items. Mechanically there is no reason we couldn't claim the orb from Mcdonnel's corpse along with covenant membership. The covenant functions by auto-summoning, which was associated with the Blades/Sentinels, among others, in the first two games.
So what role does honor play in all this?
The corvians of Ariamis could be thought of as guarding a body holding the Red Sign that is being given an approximation of a sky burial. Eyeballs and blood don't last long with sky burials, which is probably why Eileen likes them.
There aren't any crows specifically guarding Priscilla's bridge. But we find Jeremiah there. Jeremiah who is down below spilling Vlad Dracul levels of blood on the other side of the gate.
Ariamis Crows = burn, which is honorable
Jeremiah+ Priscilla = rot forever, out of spite, in the alternative
How solid does that sound?
Titchy Gren, the faceless, possibly-crazier-but-also-kinda-maybe-sane Bellkeeper puppet guy speaking for Nahr Alma sells the Soapstone for 5k souls, and sells limited cracked eyes for same. on NG+ he'll at least sell unlimited orbs but charges twice as much. He'll sell the Delicate String for 20k, which can be thought of as an auto-invasion item put to both honorable and dishonorable use. Summon invaders for greater glory and thereby protect the innocent v. set up gank squads; the choice is yours!
So velka values honor and Kaathe values results. Gren doesn't care but recognizes that you shouldn't make 'results' too easy for people, you want servants after all.
Leonhard doesn't care, even if it means potentially crossing Kaathe, Carim the Deacons et al. We don't know if Rosaria wants this or if wanting this is even a bad thing in this context, but the way Leonhard acts it feels like Leonhard's faction is unsanctioned. The worm faction of the fingers would seem to prefer honorable duels, probably are somehow tied to Lloyd's duels of law.
Also, Patches spends his free time dressed like a Catarine trying to giant to death anyone that tries to access Rosaria but appears to be either neutral towards or friendly to the fingers as they ignore his presence. The difference, I imagine, has something to do with the thing in Rosaria's lap, as Patches was probably something like captain of the original princess guards before he turned undead and became the undead champion, if that's what his story is. I hope I wrote about that somewhere or it'll sound crazy.
The Champion's Gravetender is guarding ashes, wait hold on, bones, not ashes, that hold a blue lion banner. These are the bones of the Undead Champion. Lapp leaves them for us.
Gwyn rose to power as red oni. Gwyn trembled at Dark and switched to Blue oni, set up the firelinking and became lord of cinder. The Firstborn inherits the throne of the gods and goes full Bush Jr. with the military and disrespect of anything that wasn't strength of arms.
The Firstborn, at the height of his madness, is cast down, stripped of name, title, and godhood, and cast out -- alternately, he befwiends the wittle dwagons and makes everyone big mad because they're so mean. The throne then falls to Gwynevere, who is as much the primal blue oni as Nameless is primal red. This is, I suspect, the period when Patches filled the role that Gwyndolin would like you to think Ornstein and Smough fill in the first game and that Targray fills in the second: faith in Father Gwyn and Sister Gwynevere.
He, Patches, turns undead, at some point but proves to be uniquely resistant to hollowing. Gwynevere leaves at some point. Patches remains but doesn't seem to have any favor from or faith in the Gwyndolin/Seathe regime by the time the Chosen Undead shows up.
At some point he set up the original undead matches. The merit of an undead is number of deaths, so they should celebrate by beating the shit out of each other. This event appears to have happened a long time before the fall of Oolacile as the Gazebo is done in what I think of as pre-Fire Anor style, which is something like clay brick and wooden beams later upgraded with statues, devices, and additions, probably under Gwynevere's rule, as we see in Sen's Fortress.
Now, and I know this is gonna seem like a weird thing to close on,
Sword Master is the Last Princess Guard. But he'll help us kill the Dancer.
