Elden Guess 03 - Eochaid's Wake

Eochaid is described as a lost Between Land. If you look at the map you can see that it looks like most of limgrave is under the ocean, and you find Eochaids Regalia in an area overlooking this area.

Eochaid, historically, was a fir bolg king. The fir bold, or bag men, were giant war wizards (equivalent to the Norse frost giants,) that ruled the world before Godqueen Danu overthrew them and ushered in the age of the Fey

Eochaid was the last king of the fir bolg. He was viewed, possibly, as a sun god.

Eochaid married Etain. Hypothetical long time readers and lore psychos may recognize etain as the star-crossed lover of Midir.

The story goes that Midir appeared to to long-lost lover Etain, who had married Eochaid, and tried to convince Etain to leave with him. Etain agreed on the condition it be with Eochaids Blessing.

Eochaid challenged Midir to a game of fidchell, something like chess, checkers, or go. Midir, being a brilliant fidchellist, let Eochaid win early on, let the king raise the stakes, and then sharked the king of queen and pride.

Eochaid, obviously, was furious and sent all his best men to kill Midir. They failed. The story continues but, well, this is the part I want to focus on and celtic mythology is even more impenetrable than souls lore and there's no way I'd make it less confusing. Long story short is the whole debacle brought the king and his kingdom to ruin.

Welp time for work hopefully I finish this later

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Elemer and Marias

Elemer kills patches, who dies, apparently, trying to rake the dancer's castanets. The spinny sword attack elemer thing does is described as a dancing blade. In fact, most of Elemer's connections beyond House Marais connect him to Volcano Manor.

Right?

The head of house marais and tanith both wear the zamoran-style death mask helmets associated with arcane-shading-to carian characters. Tanith's is based off of a queen. Tanith, who may have been Daedica at some point before the Long March, was flayed for adultery & hedonism, became a dancer in a foreign land, and went on to become the head of the volcano manor.

the head of house Marais is described as a castellan. A castellan usually refers to one of two things: an appointed governor responsible for overseeing a castle and environs OR

a jailer. Or gaoler. We find Eochaid's Regalia in a Gaol.

Elemer has killed patches and marias, and is implied to have killed or is trying to kill Bernal, Muriel, and at least two nomadic merchants. Elemer's shield, and it's hard to make out so I'm probably wrong, appears to depict a knight clad in red astride a bed of fire or vines, flanked by two skeletons. This could be a reference to the splitting of the Destined Death rune.

Elemer is described as a sinner who has been sentenced to death, and the briars are a symbol of this.

I think tanith may be from house marias. I mean she runs a prison town that is a castle and sends execution orders all day.

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Was wrong about the dragonflies; theyre not baby astels theyre baby rot priests. The worms are baby astels though.

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Bernahl sure is weird huh

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Radahn scourged the stars and his sister ranni because the stars were fucking up f azula. Chunks keep getting knocked off by meteors. The place is closely associated w godwyn, and radahn loooooooved godfreys clan. So he protected their sky castle, and this would have been after godwyn befriended the dragons, and now the sky castle is filling up with godwyns deathblight.

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Crucible knights gear and eochaid gear is made from primordial crucible gold. This material allows it to be manipulated by willpower. C knights use holy gold energy, eochaidians, or elemer at least, seem to use blood magic.




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The copper ore of the dancing blades allows them to be controlled by willpower alone. It always confused me how the valkyrie prosthetics worked, but I think it may be that they're made out of the same ore and utilize the same technique. We find Eochaid's Regalia in the gaol in western Limgrave. House Marias are described as castellans, a word that means both overseer of a castle and jailer. There's a picture of what I assume is Malais' father or grandfather featured in Volcano Manor (same robe, but with a bearded mask). This would probably mean that Marias' authority was derived from Rykard/Volcano Manor. Rykard, as Praetor, would have derived his power from Leyndell as a kind of head administrator for various unsavory activities Marika didn't want tied to the Capitol or Golden Lineage.

As such, Volcano Manor probably oversaw the confessors (the emblems on the confessor and gelmir knight sets are very similar,) and definitely oversaw the inquisitors (Ghiza) before the Shattering. Why is that important? Because the confessors have a closely guarded secret magic they use for maintaining momentum while using twinblades (twinblade talisman) and the inquisitors seem to have access to the same technique (ghiza's wheel). The confessors and inquisitors seem to have been replaced by the Iron Virgins as Rykard descended into gluttony and, eventually, the inside of a giant snake.

So, if the above all holds, we have something like the following.

Rykard was given or pillaged the secret of Eochaidian dancing magic. Rykard, incidentally, seems to have a thing for dancers. This was then passed to the confessors and inquisitors, House Marias and, eventually, the Virgins. The technique is also used to forge Malenia's prosthetics. Malenia would go on to use one of these prosthetics to Destroy Caelid and Rykard's brother Radahn, Radahn being one of like three people Rykard seems to have respected judging from the portraits in the Manor. Eventually, Rykard becomes functionally absent and Tanith becomes the de facto praetor, but house Marias goes on to side with Malenia. This last part is especially interesting since Gelmir doesn't seem interested in killing Malias for what should be considered a betrayal of Rykard (Radahn utilized Virgins and is shown fighting Morgott in the Shattering). Tanith's reasoning may be something like "well, Malenia bested Radahn and our motto /is/ 'The strong take', so I'll allow it."

Getting back to Elemer. Elemer is marked as a sinner (thorns) and seems to wear them as a badge of pride. If it was Marias, under Rykard, that marked Elemer as a sinner and sentenced him to execution then it brings up one of my two big questions about the whole thing: Why doesn't Elemer show up anywhere on Mount Gelmir?

The second question: Did Finlay pass through the Shaded Castle on the way back to the Haligtree with Malenia?

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The world map has some s going on. We all, hopefully, knows its a big curls finger by now and that the finger is decaying.

The boats around the map represent, like, prophecy. If you don't understand prophecy it's like this, following the Weeping knuckle up to the Moonlight knuckle.

A parent and child sail towards the church of pilgrimage. The pair face scylla and chrarybdis coming into the outlet (I ain't looking up the spelling bite me mythology nerds). Yet, the pair, clad in blue, look behind them. The clouds behind them are distant but storming.

A similar pair, save these look ahead, make for Morne castle.

A third pair, poorly equipped and faded of color, sail away from Morne and towards maelstrom.

A large ship, sailors clad in blue flying under red flags, sails for Raya lucaria. The ship is doing well and seems to be making good progress.

A slightly less impressive ship, unflagged, makes for fort haight. The ship seems to be doing poorly, and at least half the crew currently appears to be naked.

Now,

I think these various boats and their crews represent outside influences and/or interests and their relationship with TLB. From what I can tell, theyre the only people on the map.

For example, I think one of the canoes probably represents godreys return, with the child figure representing nephili, as the Tower of Return seems the be where it is specifically to teleport someone powerful directly into leyndell.

I think the barrel of goods represents eochaid or another land lost to the waters, and the waves seem to be pushing the barrel towards either the dragon church or the well-equipped backwards, facing canoe.

Unfortunately, despite being in the navy for almost 6 months in the 1990s, I don't know fucking anything about boats other than to stay off them.

They might represent outer gods, or kingdoms, or individual champions/demigods, or some combination of the above, but I don't have any real ideas beyond the return of godfrey thing. There are a number of other boats/objects. Have fun speculating. 👍

Elden Guess 02 - Senescence

It seems like miquella, when he was young, cured Radagon of something. Radagon was grateful for this. Miquella's unalloyed gold blocks the influence of outer gods. In-game this mostly relates to the Rot God, but historically may have related to the Chaos Flame god. Connect back to the mimic tear mask and radagon being a w physicked mimic tear of Marika.

But why didn't radagon succumb sooner? Miquella didn't even exist until after radagon returned from liurnia. We know that radahn is old enough to have served Godfrey directly and ranni old enough to plot the Night of Black Knives, and that whooooole time Radagon is sitting there with the mark of chaos branded onto his pre-formed Silver Tear essence, and then not being consumed by it for centuries until Marika recalled him, made some even weirder kids, waited til the perpetually youngest worked out a cure, and then millicented Radagon just in time to "die" smash-fixing the Elden ring?

The butterflies relate to marika and radagons children; nascent, aeonian, smoldering = miquella, malenia, Melina

Malenias second bloom, the aeonian lake, looks like a butterfly

The even ring was already fucked up when the golden order was founded. They excised the death rune, hid it in malekith and maybe gurrang if that's a different person, and then established the Order to, at least in part, cover up this crime. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out godwyns throne feeds directly to the dead portion of the erdtree.

I got real confused about the death rune. Malekith still has it, or what's left of it. The hallowbrand/cursemark Mending Rune fia makes w godwyn and rannis runes is a replacement, a new rune made from the "corpse" of the old.

So who killed ranni?

Godwyn is known as the first demigod to die, but ranni is described as having died at the same time.

Ranni has maybe the most unique ability in the game: she can instakill you. And will if you help seluvis too much. And when I mean instakill I mean she just turns your and his asses off with a thought. I don't even know how she smells things, but it was probably the dung eater puppet she was picking up, not my breath, I want that on record.

Can Mohg access the 3 Fingers and chooses not to, or is he trying to gain access but can't?

He carries a trident, which, yknow, ina game about 2s. His agents are being hunted/hunting yura, who becomes host to Shabiri.

Unalloyed Gold, as a concept, may revolve around the idea of trying to "breed" the erdtree with itself. The tree is a single-celled entity, and breeding it with Godfrey worked great, once, and then started producing omen, like it couldn't figure out how to advance the idea beyond blind evolution using the "genetic code" for stuff the tree god already had in its satchel - claws, horns, scorpion tails, monkey limbs, etc - but is unable to arrange logically. Or what we would think of as logically.

In this sense goldmasks ending is the only "good" ending for the tree god. Mask's rune is of an internal cell wall. Old goldibeast still won't be splitting any time soon but she'll at least make the jump from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life and, yknow, organelles and really big mitochondria and who knows, give it a billion years, maybe more for scale, and it may start to see some real progress.

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If we try to work out what Guidance is telling us it seems to have a meta-narrative take on directions. As if it's looking at the Lands Between from outer space, which it probably is, and is able to predict the actions of those loyal to the Golden Order.

First it wants us to get to RTH (the final Storm Plateau guidance points out to the ocean where the Roundtable icon is), which involves making it to Stormveil to trigger Melinas "I guess Torrent was right" dialogue. Guidance, near as I can tell, really wants us to fuck up edgar twice, investigate Caria Manor, Radahn, Fort Faroth, and Volcano Manor, then beeline AROUND Leyndell to the Giants' Forge. If you make it to Castle Sol it would like you to collect the Haligtree Medallion. It makes a point of pointing around Leyndell to the Forbidden Lands site and then a straight line until the frozen lake, cross the lake to the First Church of Marika, then around and up to the Forge.

Guidance wants to burn the erdtree.

Guidance seems to be unable or unwilling to offer guidance in southwest Liurnia, the Dragonbarrow, Farum Azula, or anywhere underground. I don't have a character with the full Haligtree grace map unlocked and too stubborn to open a tab and look one up online. Will update.

FUck I said I'd update.

Rennala had a plan for Radagon. If you compare the statues of Radagon in Rennala's chamber and the Gardening Monk on Bellum Highway it seems like Rennala reckoned Radagon's Mesh - the replacement for the Roots in the actual Elden Ring - could be used to, basically, rebuild something like the original Greattree that became the crucible that produced the Erdtree.

The Twins took this idea and, lacking the Mesh for support, used each other's trees for support.

And it would've worked to if it wasn't for