AI 015 - These roots these branches these dead and dying leaves

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.

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].

AI 011 - This New Motive Power

This one's about golems, but not all golems. Iron Golem I don't talk about, for example. I'm looking at several different 'schools' of golems.

[update: I'm an idiot, but Iron Golem is pretty central to understanding golems. Like, the facsimile giants are, I think, DS1-style giants that have been beheaded and whose corpse serves as the 'suit of armor'. Same dead with Iron Golem, picture it with its armor off, it's the same type of creature, only bigger. The Primal Knights of Drangleic and Stone Guardians of Oolacile probably a similar story.]

Path of Knights

The Silver Knights of Gwyn are the earliest recorded examples of golems. They are also arguably the best example, with subsequent attempts at golemry and puppetry falling short in some way. I suspect that they were created by either Gwyn or Gwynevere.

Named Silver Knights include Ledo the wanderer and (by way of the Age of Fire comics,) Dragon-killer Arkon and Knight Captain Siefer. Ledo was known as an eccentric, a friend of Havel and the giants, and a rare example of a STR-based Silver Knight. This last may indicate that he was one of the same 'models' that was sent into Izalith during the Demon War. He might also be one of the oldest non-immortal lifeforms in the entire series, if we assume he was created at the Dawn of Fire and survived until the collapse of Gwyn's final failsafe.

The Channelers, being scholars, respond all like 'technically that isn't a question hur dur dur'

I'm not going to go into the comics much, apart from recommending them heavily, and especially heavily recommending Legends of the Flame and Tales of Ember. However, since it does relate...

The comic makes it clear that the Silver Knights 'personality' is much closer to a Mr. Spock than a Lieutenant Data. By that I mean that the Silver Knights, while obviously bound to their purpose as much as their armor, are still intelligent, self-aware, and have personalities and so on, and are even capable of doing things like lying by omission or struggling with guilt and resentment.

Moving onto the Black Knights. There are two possible explanations I'd like to lay out:

Gwyn and Izalith were in opposition.

Gwyn and Izalith were in cahoots.

The first explanation is by far the more widely accepted theory, which goes something like

• Shortly after the Dragon War the Age of Flame gives way to the Age of Light. 
• Gwyn takes his throne as the High Lord, replacing Queen Izalith.
• Izalith isn't happy about this, but due to the nature of Fire (devastating but brief,) her powers had already dwindled to the point where she couldn't directly oppose the ascent of Anor.
• The Izalith nobility turns its focus towards creating a 'copy' of the First Flame.
• The Queen and the seven-ish princesses perform a ritual that went badly wrong
• The Chaos Flame that was created burned too hot to create sustainable life, possibly due to it having an inexplicably high concentration of the Dark Soul.
• Early demons emerge. Izalith and Anor fall to war.
• The Away team is led into Izalith by Arkon, the Home team remains in defense of Anor Londo under Siefer.
• The Izalith contingent is charred black by Chaos, but emerge more powerful than before.
• With the loss of the prime Life Lord's Soul fire begins seriously to fade.
• Gwyn, possibly improving on Izalith's formula, sets out to link the first first flame with the Light Lord's Soul serving as the proverbial penny jammed in the fusebox. Gwyn brings the blackened-Silver contingent with him.
• Upon re-ignition, the First Flame renders the souls of the blackened-Silver Knights to Ash: a state with neither purpose (light soul) nor will to purpose (dark soul).
• The Black Knights continue to exist as...it calls them 'disembodied spirits' but I'm willing to bet 'disemspirited bodies' is a better way of putting it.

The cahoots theory goes something like,

• At some point after the Dragon War Izalith hands her rule over to Gwyn amicably.
• Things remain peaceful and prosperous for a time.
• With Izalith in decline and Anor ascendant, Humanity becomes emergent.
• In other words: fires fade.
• Gwyn approaches Izalith with a plan to make the age of fire sustainable by essentially creating an irrigation and reclamation system for the Light and Life Souls: a second first flame to act as a feeder system for the first, overseen by Izalith.
• Gwyn's a deceitful old coward though like all boomers. Yes including  and probably especially the uncle your dumb ass thinks is cool.
• A covenant is made: fire of life, sword of light, bones of the dead, soul of humanity. The bonfire system is created, and work begins on the creation of the Second First Flame.
• Time will essentially be locked, with Izalith and Gwyn retaining their current roles, and humanity - by having the Dark Soul kept permanently atomized via kindling - will remain perpetually scattered and emergent, both literally and figuratively. 
• Gwyn figures he can kill several birds with one stone by rigging the system is a way so that the Dark Soul, instead of being reatomized or piped to Drang or the Ringed City or used to help Izalith maintain the system or whatever, is funneled directly into the feeder flame, so instead of golden rivers of pure Estus they get rock-melting sentient magma that can make Ninja Turtles.
• The Silver Knights were at once charred by Chaos and obliterated by Flame by the same event, as
• Gwyn, knowing what was going to happen, planned the assault on Izalith ahead of time as part of his failsafing, which included using the church/es and lesser nobles to portray the Advent of Chaos and the Firelinking as separate and unrelated events, rather than a single experiment that spanned the entire 'world'.
• Eventually an uneasy truce is struck between Quelaag and Nameless following the Demon War. 

So, for the purposes of this post, the critical difference is that either the Silver knights were first charred by flame and then later turned to ash, or both happened at once, just with some of them being near Izalith and others near Gwyn when the bomb went off.

If the Silver Knights were exposed to just Chaos they would retain their souls, minds, and purpose, although they may have been demonically warped into their current appearance (the wing crests becoming horns, etc.). The point is, they wouldn't have been 'free radical' Black (Ashen) Knights, which I guess is different than being hollow is that, once an undying loses the false self created by the interactions of the  Light and Dark aspects of Flame (goes Hollow,) the individual hollow is finally free to develop its own personality, assuming it doesn't get hypnotized, hijacked, possessed or rendered inert by any of the Flamebound assholes first. We see this outlined in Patches' former body's journey to becoming Lapp, itself a kind of dark shadow of the Nameless King's or Ornstein's Hero's Journey.

Black Knights can't do that. They just seem to retain a kind of animal-instinct-level echo of their former selves, like an actual zombie, with the Dictate of Gwyn (or possibly Gwynevere,) acting as the motive power. In DS3 terms, they're Ashen Ones that can't harbor a Sovereign Soul. It's unclear if they can harbor Humanity or Ember due to the influence of Chaos. Their having gained fire resistance from exposure during the war would seem to indicate the opposite is true. The description of Ledo makes it seem as if the original Silver Knights may have been more vulnerable to possession by Dark.

The Black Knights, as near as I can tell, not only qualify as golems, but also ashen knights, and maybe even forlorn. Ashen knights are, basically, if you burned a bunch of hollows down to powder and then made the powder into clay and baked the clay into a 'person,' that 'person' would essentially be a 'person' in a similar way Frankenstein's monster was a person if he had reanimated it without a brain, or with more of a 'shambling zombie' brain: a sort of sterile, clinical, lab-made, ready-to-program Flesh Golem 2000.

Path of Stone

Chronologically, the next type of golem we find are the Guardians of the Royal Wood. These are interesting, because they don't actually appear to be golems. Or at least not the same kind of golems as their Darkroot replacements.

I know I used the probably-not-canonical comics to establish the intelligence of golems, but these guys, if they are constructs, further exhibit it during their patrols. 

One of the most interesting enemies in the game, which I've always referred to as the pus prisoner, seems to be a Guardian, as it has the same kind of elephant feet as its counterparts up above. It's implied that they were originally laborers that were repurposed for battle.

Imagine a hollowed elephant-headed giant with its tusks and trunk sawn off screaming at you like one of those Crucifixion Woods assholes jesus why do I smoke weed and think things like this

The Ool Prisoner has been chained and crucified, and is probably the earliest example of a pus of man outbreak in the series.

The important thing to remember is that he wants this, because he's staked everything on a belief. Only, unlike Gundyr or the Embedded, he waited until after the explosion.

Like if it were me doubt would set in at some point.

One explanation is that these golems are a product of necromancy. We know that Manus was at least partially created by Ool mystics attempting to resurrect a pygmy lord, so it's not a stretch to imagine them bringing back other species. I suspect these Guardians connect to the Primal Knights of Drangleic, the crucifixion woods, and possibly Gundyr and the Embedded via voluntary chained prisoners. 

Of course the Guardians obviously connect to the Stone Knights of Darkroot. They and their arms were created by an 'ancient magic.' Their swords are enchanted and can be used to cast a Tranquil Walk of Peace. This is an interesting miracle. It's foreign to Thorolund, meaning that the Stone Knights probably predate the rise of Thorolund and, by inference, Gwyndolin. 

Both the Stone Guardians and Knights have 'sideways' crests on their helms. We also see this style of crest on Velstadt (connects to stone knights) and on the statues near the entrance to Shulva (connects to the Walk of Peace, as well as Velstadt appearing as a type of golem).

Additionally, the Stone Knights and Guardians of Darkroot are rare examples of mesoamerican design, which also connects to the designs found in Shulva, as well as the Old Knights we find mostly around Heide.

Cuz of Fan Service, no doubt. Or the lack of Fan Service. Whichever one ruined 2.

The Old Knights are implied to be the oldest surviving golems in Drangleic. We find evidence of them from Brume to Shulva to Amana. The Design Works interview also states that they're somehow connected to the Throne Defender.

To kind of finish this path out, if it even is a path, we have Vendrick's Primal Knights.

I don't understand them enough to comment, but the connections to the Kingdom of the Rat, Syan, and the Forest Guardians seem fairly explicit, even if you gotta use gonzo journalism to make any kind of theory connections.

Actually I'm pretty sure the Primals are gonna show up in a Kingdom of the Rat post at some point.

Path of the Sentinel

This is another semi-ad hoc collection that's connected thematically more than it is mechanically or due to a common puppeteer.

The original Giant Sentinels were probably giants.

Not an original Sentinel.

The Giant Sentinels we find in the first game may be golems, but might also be some kind of incredibly powerful bunshin produced by Gwyndolin. It's of course possible that Gwyndolin's Sentinels were based off of an earlier model of actual giant golems created by Nameless, Gwynevere, Flann, Sen, Gwyn, Giant Smith, or...well, you get the idea.

These Sentinels do have the more common 'roman crest' helms associated with Havel and the Darkmoon Knightess, rather than the 'bell crest' helms of Velstadt or the (DS1) Stone Knights.

Which brings us to Dark Souls 2.

In Dark Souls 2 there definitely was a line of Gen X Sentinel golems based on an earlier model of living, breathing Baby Boomer Sentinels, that are also aped by a Millennial generation of bunshin Sentinels (assuming phantoms qualify as bunshin).

These are, of course, the Ruin Sentinels.

Absolutely fuck trying to get a decent picture of a real one.

Right, now, this is where one of the more controversial theories I like to push on here is going to rear its beautiful head.

• Gwynevere and Flann's exodus from Anor Londo in DS1 led to the founding of a colony in ur-Drang that would eventually become Olaphis (lit. 'Remainder of the Gods').
• When Olaphis reached its peak it attempted to light or link a first flame, possibly in order to usher in the Dark Age. This may have been done in opposition to the Anor-descended Olaph nobility. 
• This event, the Lost Sin, caused or exacerbated the emergence of the Curse in Olaphis.
• At some point the King of Olaphis sends the Sentinels on a mission to the Ringed City, where they are slaughtered and enslaved by Argo.
• The original Queen leaves at some point, and it's possible that the rulers of Olaphis during the decline were descendants of the founders, rather than the founders themselves.
• A civil war erupts between Anor/colonist and Drang/native factions, symbolized by Yorgh killing the Sunken King.
• The war led to the rise of two warring territories: Alken (native Drang,) and Venn (Anor loyalists). 
• Alken eventually claimed the Brume Tower, which may have originally been something like the Great Forge of Olaphis. This turned the tide of the war, with the remaining Venn forces trapped in the collapsing settlements of Heide and Shulva.
• The Princess of Venn, realizing that the war was lost, fled to Forossa, where she may have had familial connections via Nameless or Ornstein (as Faraam). 
• The Princess, who was granted or earned the title of general in Forossa, was also the 'rightful' queen of Olaphis. 
• This meant that she had to cover her face in public, obviously, for cultural and political reasons. I mean as near as I can tell the place is called Ferocious and probably had Astora-levels of toxic masculinity.
• She was also given the name/nickname Ivory Queen, for reasons that should be obvious.
• SHE HAS A CROWN FROM DRANGLEIC WHY WOULD SHE HAVE THAT IF SHE'S JUST SOME NOBODY GENERAL FROM NOWHERE VAATI HUH

Queen Ivory of Venn was also either a puppeteer or closely associated with one. Well, she definitely was a puppeteer, but the only golems she's directly credited with are the Mad Bellkeepers. The Bellkeepers are, obviously, quite short. I don't know why this is. Initially I thought it might be that they were flesh golems created out of Gyrm, but they don't look anything like Gyrm, really. They can exist as invading phantoms, which is interesting, but not unique among golems (Ledo, for example). 

A debateable point is whether or not Tichy Gren is a Bellkeeper-type construct that somehow became unshackled and/or was repurposed by Mytha or some other Alken-based Puppeteer.

But to get back to the MK 2 'golem' Ruin Sentinels of late-Olaphis

The Ruin Sentinels were created by the 'jailer'/'old king' in memorium of the Olaph Sentinels lost to the Ringed City, although the 'fable' of the journey falls into the category of what I call 'Dark Tales': those things intentionally buried in history by establishment powers, such as the truth of the Demon War, the rule of the Nameless King of Anor Londo, or the world pre-Flame. 

So, the obvious conclusion, barring mistranslations or actual plot holes/inconsistencies, is that the person that converted the Bastille into a prison for exiling undead and banishing ma/ju-jutsu practitioners to the bottom of the ocean (or Melfia, where they make a big point of pointing out that Gwynevere is fake news,) was also the king of Olaphis (because that's who Straid implicates, along with the rest of the Olaph power establishment) and also credited with the creation of the Ruin Sentinels and also (probably) the son of the person that sent the original Sentinels to the Ringed City (which he not only knew about but knew how to reach,) in search of the Dark Soul, which I'm sure Gwyndolin was fuckin thrilled to hear about.

It's possible that this king was not also the Sunken King, but the only way around that I can find is if the Sunken King was something like King Olaph's 'slovenly, hypocritical, cannibal scavenger Echo Boomer Yuppie' kid. You could look at the Presidents Bush or the protagonist from Metal Wolf Chaos as similar examples, where you had like a legitimate Cold War Bond Villian type followed up by his sheltered, incompetent Doctor Evil from Austin Powers heir after those surviving mean ole communist rice farmers and factory workers finally admit their ideas only work on paper.

If you're wondering about the hard left turn, I said something earlier pretty critical of liberalism that could be taken as...let's call it Trumpian, and I just wanted to make it clear that I don't particularly want any coward fascist bootlickers...anywhere, really, but you're certainly not welcome here.

The Olaph/Ruin Sentinels we find in the Bastille and Castle Drangleic, of course, look quite similar to Ivory's Loyce Knights, as well as Lapp. Lapp chose the armor to help hide the fact that he's a hollow. In other words, he chose an armor set that looks similar to two orders of knights: one who served a lord that hid her appearance, but became one of the most important champions in history, another that served a lord that hid everything but his appearance, and now almost no one remembers he even existed. Coincidentally, the hidden lord was probably the daughter of the forgotten lord.

Patches is getting his own post, don't worry.

A fine dark...turn up the goddamn backlight or something you can't see anything in this game

I think that's about it with Ruin Sentinels. Weirdly, there's not much to say about the golems themselves, save that they serve as a shadow tale to the hypothetical 'three generations'  of Anor Sentinels from the first game.

Path of Puppets

Alken had as few as one and as many as five puppeteers. Mytha definitely was, Eygil probably was, King Alken maybe was, and Armor Dennis probably was, but I'm very doubtful that he's from Alken, and Nadalia, who I think only qualifies if you consider the Fume Knight or Possessed Armor enemies golems. Mytha first.

Mytha is credited with the Manikin: fast, humanoid 'dex build' constructs that rival Silver Knights for sheer lethality. The Manikins also serve as one of the connections between Mytha and Londor.

[The Manikins are headless. This is probably important considering the update at the top.]

There's a big kind of meta-discussion around the masks of the Manikin. In some pre-release DS2 footage there was a scene of a Forossan Lion Knight being harassed by several 'Manikins,' save that they had heads and were wearing masks, but not the Manikin mask we find in-game, which looks like, well, like an old-timey mannequin's face. The trailer version features a much sexier and more sinister looking 'SMB2 Shy Guy after prison' design.

I suspect the change may have been for narrative reasons. It's hammered home over and over that Alken is a poor territory, both in terms of natural resources and political influence, and the in-game implications we find are that Mytha is taking this kingdom of blood and bone and poison and loss and resentment and defiance and forging it into a kingdom that will, depending on your interpretation of the third game, rival all others combined, at least in the Drang hemisphere. Or canopyisphere or whatever.

I suspect she, or possibly her husband, are responsible for the Artificial Undead enemies we find around. They carry sickles that are pretty clearly meant to invoke the Darkmoon Blades, and we find these same sickles being used in Aldian experiments that seem fairly necromantic in nature.

Basically they're Frankenstein's Monsters created as a kind of early experiment by Mytha, probably to spite Olaphis-Venn and her cutesy fucking Bellkeepers. Gren may even have been the proverbial 'crashed spaceship' that allowed Alken to reverse-engineer Anor golemry into what in Drang is called puppetry, with the Flesh Golems serving as the MK 1 Puppet.

Alternately they may be somewhat new, and if so I suspect that Alken, under Mytha, would just auto-puppet anything that managed to die.

“It is the coming of the New Motive Power, the Physical Savior, Heaven’s Last Gift to Man, New Creation, Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age, Philosopher’s Stone, Art of all Arts, Science of all Sciences, the New Messiah”.

We next come to the Ironclad, which I see as a diverging evolutionary path in puppeteering, with Mytha's Manikins being one and the assorted Iron Golems being another, likely created by Eygil.

I hope you're familiar with my Red and Blue system. Any 'White' character or territory will, over time and almost always, shift in tendency towards red, and then blue, unless the character begins as a red or blue. The Firstborn is sort of the prime example of natural Red tendency, and Gwyndolinevere of a natural Blue. Gwyn, the prime example of a white character, behaved during and after the Dragon War as a Red, which correlates with Strength, Faith, and ascendence. Gwyn, by the time of the Firelinking, had a Blue tendency, which correlates with Dexterity, Intelligence, and decline. Red territories and characters are generally warlike and religious, Blues are generally insular and scholarly.

Blues tend towards things like defensiveness, scheming, and relying on puppet institutions, while Reds can be summed up as generally being what people mean when they use words likes savages or barbarians or zealots: a kind of mindless authoritarian puritanism that generally turns into fascism but doesn't start out as fascism, right, which sometimes it can be really hard to tell if your social norms are directly upstream from fascism when, like, you're at war, even if like the war is unjustified and you know it's an unjust war but, like, you can only see so much of the horizon right we can't all be Thomas Sankara most of this stuff only exists as abstract ideas and second hand accounts floating around in our brains what do you want.'

In the first game we have non-standard examples of the Way of White, which is a Blue institution pretending to be Red, and Carim, which is a Red territory that appears Blue from the outside.

Occasionally you'll find examples of blues becoming reds.

Vendrick pretty clearly had some issues with his heritage. His early life, until around his split with Aldia, is characterized by him being king of ashamed or resentful of Iron (Red,) his father, and almost Norman Batesy about his mother, Ivory (Blue).

Mom? Dad?

After the arrival of Nashandra, Vendrick's nature shifts from Red to Blue we find him repurposing the Ironclad of Alken (Red) in support of the misguided war against the Giants.

The Ironclad were pretty clearly designed to be immune to backstabs. Commentary on the relationship between the two kingdoms.

This brings us to the Alonne Knights. These guys I can make the least sense of. I mean of like anything. I'd say Alonne should get his own post but, like, maybe?

The captain variants have a 'lightning blade' attack, and their pauldron features the Twin Dragon charge I associate with Yorgh's bloodline. We find some of them (presumably) repurposed in Castle Drangleic.

The confusing thing about them is that in the base game they were said to have been created in honor of Alonne, but that Alonne abandoned the king and the kingdom as a result of the King's slide into hedonistic narcissism. 

Yet, in the Memory of the Iron King, which we access through Alonne's...either his haunted sword or the ant head on his armor, but we find Alonne at the end of a gauntlet, in what seems like the Iron Keep, protected by Alonne golems, and himself protecting a Smelter Wedge on an abandoned Throne of Alken. We find almost the exact same thing after defeating the Fume Knight, except that it's an inert Ashen Idol on the throne.

The king is nowhere to be found in the memory. Unless I'm missing something. I mean he's pretty noticeable.

In other words, Alonne never left Alken, and was alive after the golems were created.

Later, after a time-travelling Chosen Undead slays Alonne, the traitor Raime arrives in Brume, welcomes the Black Fog, and is reborn as her champion the Fume Knight.

So, are characters like the Fume Knight Golems?

Maybe. If a golem, traditionally, has been a suit of armor with a Light Soul grafted onto it, making it a kind of mind without will, then Fume et al could be thought of as a suit of armor with a Dark Soul grafted onto it, making it a kind of will without mind.

Eygil, who predated and possibly eventually discovered Nadalia, seems like a prime candidate for the King's 'primary' puppeteer. He was a pyromancer, and was obsessed with the idea of granting will to fire, of devising early iterations of what would eventually come to be known as the Black Flame/Serpent, something that I suspect plays a much larger role in the plot of the third game than anyone yet realizes.

Finally, we have the Smelter Demons. I don't understand them much better than the Alonne stuff, but I feel like they're the kind of thing I could at least potentially understand at some point in the future.

The original Smelter is animated by the mysterious Blue Flame. I've talked about it before, but I still don't know what it is, other than it was associated with the Leydia sect in the second game and the Undead Match in the first. I don't think it's related to the Profaned Flame, but I do think it relates to Ivory. I do think its presence in New Londo is important, but I don't think it's necessarily related to Kaathe's influence. I do think it's related to sorcery, but I don't think it's related to Seathe or Moonlight. I do think it's related to the third game's Ashtus, but I wish that I didn't because that makes it even more confusing.

So there you go. Definitively inconclusive.

Blue Smelter, I think, was probably either created by whoever created Brume, or was an instrument responsible for Brume's initial fall. The demon's appearance is clearly meant to evoke dragons and giants, but giants and dragons are generally associated with Red concepts and characters. The Blue Demon is in much better condition than the Red, who has a broken horn.

The second, Red Smelter, I think, is a more straightforward creation, probably something like an experiment by Eygil, based on the first Smelter, in an attempt to realize the Iron King's vision of creating a dragon out of iron. The experiment probably involved a lot of titanite, the illiterate, a-historical pyromancy of Alken, and hexery, meaning that the Demon is something like a Titanite Demon animated by the equivalent of a 'suitcase nuke' version of the 'worldender nuke' that was the original Chaos.

The Demon/Golem immediately struck the Iron King down. Officially, at least, I'm starting to suspect Alonne may have been the actual culprit. Or maybe even the Blue Smelter.

More will be revealed, maybe, but that's the Iron Kingdom for you.

Path of Dragons

Aldia and Vendrick, Ancient Dragon, Aberrations, Najka & Tark, Navlaan, LGK, Syan & the Primal., facsimile giants

Aldia was a monster in life. It was him, probably, that sentenced Tseldora to death. That big pool of acid is the blood of giants he mutilated, the Aberrations are Bellkeepers he did something horrible to, he mind controlled his students, on and on.

But he didn't seem to mess with golems much.

Arguably the Ancient Dragon is a type of golem, and the Aberrations at least might have started out as golems, but other than that I don't know what would qualify.

Vendrick, on the other hand, took to puppeteering like a regular Jeff Dunham. Only he was good at it.

Apart from apparently repurposing golems spanning the entire continent and history of Drangleic, he also may have been behind the Looking Glass Knight, the torch-bearer and 'door' golems, and, of course, the restoration of the Primal Knights.

We might also consider the possibility that Syan was a golem. Leal service is almost definitional to a traditional golem's personality, and the madness of those that donned replicas of his madness may be related to whatever enchantment bound Syan.

Additionally, the motif on the cape of the Primal Knights matches closely that of Syan's.

The Primals are described as having been brought about through unspeakable means. Assuming this process in some way mirrors the creation of the Stone Guardians of Oolacile it could be that Vendrick learned of the art during his hypothetical journey through Lordran.

Interestingly, the key to everything for Vendrick as well as the Cursebearer, is the Giant's Resonance, which we claim from the Giant Lord.

Presumably this is because the facsimile giant golems around the Throne of Want, and the throne itself, was originally built by/for giants.

These golems are interesting because they're inert, unless they absorb the appropriate resonance. For the Throne facsimiles this is the Giant's Kinship/Resonance, but for the ones in Castle Drangleic and Eleum Loyce this is attained via absorption of any stray 'sovereignless' souls.

I think it's pretty clear that these guys were created by giants, and may predate the Olaphis colonists. It's also possible that these were the original golems created by the Olaph settlers that were later refined into the Old Knights and Ruin Sentinels, although even if this is the case I still suspect a giant craftsman.

The facsimile giants of Eleum Loyce, wherever they originally came from, possibly served as precursors for the rampart golems we find around the area. These last come in two variants. The first is a 'knight' type golem that attacks with a lance and crystal/ice magic, the other is more of a 'basic humanoid,' but more refined than the facsimile giants and capable of multi-tooling its limbs into a variety of weapons, almost like one of Seath's Crystal Golems. I didn't discuss the crystal golems because they're different enough in design that they're both easily understood and apparently unrelated to other golems, save for this slight similarity to the frost golems of EL.

[They look like nekkid The Iron Golems now that I think about it. - fm [LOOK AT WHAT IS IN FRON TOF YOUFOOL WHATS MISSING]]

Right, so, I think that does it for the basic overview of the first two games. Golems in the third are either less prevalent or less commented on. I outlined my thoughts on Ashen Vessels, and the only other 'golem' I feel could qualify for discussion is the Dragonslayer Armor, which seems to have originally been created as a kind of remote-control gundam piloted by a primordial serpent (and later by the Pilgrim Butterfly and later still by the Abyss of the Ringed City.

The next post, I suspect, will center around the knights of Drangleic, or possibly outline Patches' story [no, didn't, haven't. It's something else].