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