AI 016 - By Our Very Howls

Y'ALL POISONED THAT WATERFALL DUSK

A Curse Revisited Revisited

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 

• 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.

AI 008 - To Wander Eternally

There is a legend.

They say that,

If you are very good,

Or very lucky,
That when you die,

You become an angel.

As always, I try to stay away from certain parts of DS3 in these posts, particularly Londor and the primordial serpents, so there's stuff that's not talked about here that should and will be talked about. Just not here. 

[YOELS ENTHUSIASTICALLY]

I've mentioned it before, but this post will be discussing what I've been calling 'bunshin no justu,' or clone/doppleganger art/magic. It comes up a lot. I stole the term from Naruto. Well, the Naruto wiki, I've seen like two and a half episodes of Naruto, but it complements the Japanese-text framing of the various magic schools in Souls, with majutsu being sorcery, anjustu being hexes or dark arts, and jujutsu being pyromancy.

Plain ole 'jutsu' can refer to prehistoric or unexplained arts, as well as pyromancy, since all of it seems to have originated in Izalith, a lot of it probably even before the First Flame.

Also, 'jikukan jutsu,' or space-time art/magic would be another school. This is related to teleportation, summoning, and time-manipulation as a school of magic. The line between bunshin and jikukan can get a little blurry when you really try to hammer out the differences between, say, a Pinwheel clone and the illusory Gwynevere. I suspect that that's as it should be, as all of the arts we see in-game are probably descended from and interbred with the same 1-4 pre-Fire/Ancient schools.

Right, so, angels.

Moonlight

The Moonlight Butterfly is the first 'angel' we meet in Dark Souls. Haunting, alien, serene, and prone to nailgunning the curious into oblivion with soul spear barrages, it can be hard to notice the strange, mechanical implements grafted onto their bodies.

There is a ringed contraption that connects to their backside via a spoke. The outer surface of the ring, connected to the spoke via a hub, is covered in punk spikes. There is a 'double helix' contraption running the length of their spine and emerging as a 'horn.'

MB's share the same theme song and the same general spell set as Gwyndolin: a type of soul spear barrage and a magic-based Pursuer/Emit Force variant. The butterflies' 'home' seems to be inside the primordial crystal, and the ones we find there are neutral towards the player unless attacked. I'm guessing this means they're not naturally hostile. This could have a few different implications, which I'm gonna outline and then explore.

• The Butterfly is sentient, and has complex reasons for attacking us as we approach
• The Butterfly is not sentient, and reacts instinctively as we approach
• The Butterfly may or may not be sentient, but is being directly controlled by Seath, or possibly even Gwyndolin

With humanoid characters there's basically a 1:1 relationship between spell-casting proficiency and intelligence. Rosabeth had to switch schools at the academy because she couldn't learn sorcery, but she's implied to be a genius pyromancer, which doesn't require intelligence in the 'book-learnin' sense, but does require a lot of intelligence in the 'if they found themselves stuck in an abandoned cabin for a year they wouldn't starve to death due to not understanding how shovels or food or knots or water work' sense. We don't know if this is true with non-humans, and we also don't know what the game considers 'intelligence.' For example: Alvina is a lot more talkative than Sif and seems fluent in jikukan, but Sif remembers us 1,000 years later (or at least indicates this to the player). 

Dusk describes herself as having been snatched from Oolacile and 'banished to a plane of distortion' while inside the Crystal Golem. She was there for a long time. Long enough to completely lose hope, sure, but that can take like a week. From what I can tell she was in the golem for maybe 1000 years. Then escaped from the golem thanks to us. She wasn't free for long. Probably her release from the golem caused her to re-appear on some kind of magical radar jutsu accessible by both Manus and Carim, but by the time Chester arrived via the other half of the old pendant she had already been taken, probably snatched the way we were only right in front of Elizabeth the Racist Old White Lady Mushroom.

We can think of the crystal golems as two separate entities, the golem itself and the person trapped in the 'pauldron' crystal. The golem may be acting as a cocoon, in some way holding the person inside in stasis long enough for some kind of metamorphosis to occur. I hope you see where I'm going with this.

The moonlight butterfly looks like it's still a cocoon, is what I'm saying. That doesn't make more sense does it? 

ta tessera zoa

See what happened with Kaathe was...

Further into Ruin

Not yet. Not yet. 

I want to point out some changes between the Ruin/Primordial Crystal in the first and second games. 

In the Duke's Archives we find that the Ruin is converting the landscape into crystal and what seems like might be a mix of Blue and Twinkling Titanite, which both the golems and butterflies have blue titanite as part of their make-up. 

In Tseldora we find the Ruin slowly converting everything into sand, brightstone, and spiders.

Basilisks. In the first game they cursed us - caused one of our humors to crystallize - killing us instantly. Imagine your blood being flash frozen, then that times like ten. In the second game they petrify us, which you can't even reincarnate if you're a statue unless acted on by an outside force (gameplay contradicts lore here, obviously). Gin You Wine Petrified Wood. There's even a unique, 'eyeless' basilisk outside of Ornifex's house. I was hoping a point would present itself here, but damned if I know what they mean. Probably there's a system to their drops.

Finally, we find non-hostile butterflies all over the Crystal Caves, which obviously both those and Seath have kind of 'angelic' aspects to them. In Tseldora we find the spider people, which I attribute to Aldia's obsession with Izalith/pyromancy. They look quite similar in profile to an angel. I think they might technically be pyromancers, even if they obviously can't cast.

Historically, however, witches have been quite opposed to the appearance of angels.

HELLO I AM AN ANGEL WELCOME TO TSELDORA HAHAHA WHAT SPIDERS?

Latent Dark and a descent into madness

I've talked about the Darklurker a lot on here. The Lurker uses both jikukan (the teleporting Resonance hex,) and bunshin techniques ('mitosis,' the wiki calls it,) as well as mixtures of the two (teleporting itself while cloned, jikukan spells in its bunshin form). I'll discuss both, since it's not immediately apparent, but these are actually two different high-end secret magics this character is proficient at.

The first art is a bunshin technique that creates an exact copy of itself with a shared healthpool. This may not, in fact, be literally be a bunshin technique. The Darklurker's Mitosis functions more like a plant figuring out how to split itself into two plants which is, like, way different from what Pinwheel  and Shanalotte do.

The jikukan technique involves opening a portal, like a Portal-the-game portal, firing a spell into it, and having the spell exit the other sides tracking the player. There's not much to say about it beyond how unique it is. 

The Darklurker is implied to be the original Manus, which I've discussed elsewhere. The Dragon Chime reinforces this, as it is a similarly 'pure' artifact that remained uncorrupted despite being steeped in the Abyss for centuries. Lurker has 8 limbs. As with bunshin and jikukan, creatures with 6, 7, or 8 limbs could fill an entire post. As far as the Lurker goes, I think it might be related to the shrine at the Rise of the Dead, which shows two burning figures either merging or splitting. This may be related to Londor and the fire of Ariandel, but that's way far ahead of where we are now.

So, if the Darklurker is an angel, and before that he was Manus of the Abyss, and before that he was the corpse of a pygmy lord, and before that he was a pygmy lord sorcerer brought back by the Ool missionaries to the Ringed City, at what point does one become the other, and should we consider the 4 Queens of Drangleic Lurker's siblings or descendants, and should we consider Lurker, Manus, and the Pygmy Lord to be separate characters?

I don't know.

I do know that we have to perform a pretty elaborate ritual of pilgrimage to even gain access to Darklurker, involving 'linking' three sword-less bonfires in black lordvessels. And we do this in a place that's heavily implied to be the remains of Oolacile. From a Lordran perspective this may have tied in with the Occult Rebellion, or even the Oolacile Mystics themselves. From a Drang perspective, it may have involved the Lost Sin that led to the eventual fall of Olaphis.

So, let's say Ool, Olaph, or the Four Kings had planned on bringing about a Dark Lord and ushering in an Age of Dark (two different things, remember, Vendrick did one but not the other) by performing a Firelinking involving an alternate, Dark or Black Flame.

You would need a whole lot of Dark to use as fuel for something like that.  

Also, Lurker vaguely resembles some of the UD Crypt enemies.

Hark Harald, Singing Angel

I'm gonna briefly go over angels in the third game, but most of it will be saved for some hypothetical future Prisoner of Ash post.

We find the Angelic Knights of Lothric pretty early on, and they're our first big clue that Lothric is in the late stages of a civil war. The knights seem to be modeled on a primordial serpent, and are loyal to Gertrude and the forbidden Angelic faith. This faith involves non-lightning light miracles similar to those used by Prince Lothric. The miracles are accompanied by feather particle effects, rather than souls, embers, or dark motes. In the Dreg Heap, obviously, we get bombarded by this stuff by actual angels, as well as a AoE light 'cloud' spell that causes curse buildup.

The Dreg Angels are Bunshin being projected by pilgrims, with the process being demonstrated by the Stone-Humped Hag. From this I think we're meant to infer that both the Pilgrim Butterfly of Lothric and Gertrude herself were similar projections, with Gertrude being the first. The descriptions of Gertrude after her visitation seem to imply that she became something like the pilgrim pupae that 'control' the Dreg Angels.

Sulyvahn, incidentally, would seem to have all the qualifications of angeldom (bunshin, jikukan, wings, holy status,) but is probably just doing a very effective impersonation of one.

Also, as an aside, 'herald' and 'harald' are different words. A harald is something like a duke or warlord, a herald is an emissary, diplomat, or messenger.

Wait what?

The Four Living Beings

Okay, so the idea here is that the Four Kings were failed attempts to create angels.

Gwyn did a strange thing. He divided a portion of his soul among four Anor loyalists in New Londo. Gwyn named them kings of men and charged them with shepherding humans along the 'right' path. And they did. And then Nameless pissed everyone off and a bunch of gods left and then Oolacile happened and a bunch more gods left and suddenly

There was a chasm full of the poisoned humanity of what was essentially a god basically directly next to the Settlement. This was a mass of poisoned humanity the size of a city traveling underground towards Drangleic. It saws off a good portion of the High Wall of Lordran on its way out. The wound from its passage - the abyssy parts of it - mostly resealed itself, save for probably the lakes beneath the Darkroot Hydra and in the CHLORANTHY farm dogleg near where you find the Wolf Ring, which probably you wouldn't want to swim around in that stuff.

And, of course, we can enter the Abyss beneath the New Londo Shrine, provided we have proof of a 'covenant with the beasts of the Abyss.' It's generally assumed that this covenant was originally established by Artorias with one or more primordial serpents (not Kaathe, obviously,) during the first Darkwraith uprising, an event I consider part of the Dark Tales that pre-date the Chaos War and the fall of Oolacile. We can seemingly follow the progression of Artorias via the evolution of his weapon, from the normal, 'majestic' version from the Dark Tales, to the weapon becoming Cursed as a result, to the weapon then becoming corrupted by the Abyss after Artorias went back to the well one too many times. In other words, as part of the covenant, or perhaps as a result of traversing the ancient abyss, Artorias became cursed. Likely this meant that his Lord's Soul was lost or corrupted in a way that made it susceptible to the Abyss, unlike the Four Kings or Darklurker who seemingly joined with the Abyss voluntarily, their Light Lord's Souls offered in service to the Dark, rather than by trying to game the system in order to act in opposition to it.

The scar from the Oolacile Chasm's passage is probably why the wall around the Undead Burg/Firelink/Blighttown part of Lordran is so screwed up: the same catastrophe that created the Valley of the Drakes sheared off a portion of the High Wall, meaning that a new wall had to be built, with ramparts being converted to bridges, Other Burg being abandoned, the creation of Blighttown, and so on.

2 and 3 are much closer to 1 in-game but you get the idea

In the Valley of the Drakes we find a bridge leading between the NL and Darkroot Basin gatehouses. They're very clearly set up in a way that doesn't imply there was any kind of friendly relationship between the two areas. Were they properly manned, the entire span between the gates would effectively be a death trap for anyone in missile range.

Just inside the NL gatehouse is the shrine leading to the abyss. After it's drained we realize that there is a literal mountain of drowned corpses in there, and that even with the floodgates open we can still only explore the upper levels.

It might bear repeating, but creatures of Dark generally seem to settle undergound. However, given the nature of the wall and the cave it's possible that the areas was originally much more open, and that the cavern itself was sealed either as part of the extermination or due to the reality-warping nature of the Abyss.

NL may have existed alongside Oolacile. If we assume Gwyn, and even Nameless, had already departed by the time the Artorias stuff happens then the Four Kings would have already been serving in their positions. After the Artorias stuff, well, things probably got quiet for a while, then Gwyndolin or Gwynevere or whoever was in charge realizes they haven't heard from NL in a while and holy cow Darkwraiths. Again.

The city is then sealed, the genocide carried out by the city's own healing sorcerers. With the loss of the settlement's healing arts the path was now open for a religious organization - based roughly around the faith of Oolacile - to come through offering healing miracles and spreading the gospel of the New New Good News.

The Oolacile connection to the WoW comes from Lokey's translations. Elizabeth and Dusk both offer the PC the 'may the flames guide thee' blessing associated with the WoW in the third game. In the Japanese script, Reah gives this blessing as well, rather than the confusing 'vereor nox' line.

Source

Kaathe seems to have masterminded both NL and Oolacile, which makes sense, and maybe even the ancient Darkwraith incursion that originally gave Artorias his reputation. He, Kaathe, may not have even had to try very hard with NL. It's possible that the NL Darkwraith uprising was a part of the Occult Rebellion, which would put NL and Kaathe on the same side as Sen, Smith (unless Sen is Smith,) Havel, Vamos' people (possibly,) the followers of Velka ( and Carim, by extension,) and maybe even Real Ornstein. Since the statue outside the NL Shrine - Mother & Child II - is the same statue in the Ariamis graveyard we could even infer that Priscilla and/or Jeremiah were involved.

Of course, then there's the problem with Velka and Gwyndolin being aligned as Darkmoon Blades. I mean, you have a Carimite Pardoner acting in a far more official capacity than anyone in the WoW in the Undead Parish, proudly displaying his goddess' name for all to read, but then you find another Pardoner in Gwyndolin's Painting of Forbidden Things Mostly Linking Back To Velka.

Maybe they made up after New Londo or something. Or maybe she retains some kind of rights of covenant in Lordran despite being aligned against Lordran's rulers for centuries. This is still not about angels jesus you probably figured out where I was going paragraphs ago.

We find the Parrying Dagger and the Cursebite Ring in New Londo. It could be that a Carim Knight was poking around after the fact, or it could be evidence that Carim, or Velka at least, were working with Kaathe and New Londo, which ties in with the Painting stuff, plus the statue again. I'll go more into all that in a later post, but I really need to get to the point.

OKAY SO, all of that is afoot, and you have the Four 'Kings,' leaders of men granted a portion of the Lord's Soul, would have been essentially set up to become angels by Gwyn himself, even if they did end up a group of ungodly fucked up looking biological and graphics engine mutations with, like, horns and wings and tree root legs and sad white boy faces. Overall, though, they do look very angelic, and are presented like Darklurker. Also like Lurker, the Kings share a life bar, a point that may become more significant later on. Unlike Lurker's bunshin-esque mitosis, the Kings use a jikukan art that looks like they're hopping fissures between worlds as easily as most people just regular hop. Except I've died a whole lot trying to just regular jump in these games, so much easier than hopping.

Both the Four Kings and Darklurker bosses are born out of the remains of Manus. Both bosses have pure Light souls despite being in the Darkest place in the world. Both bosses seem to have become a kind of 'cold fusion reactor' of Dark, created by taking a human lord, granting it a light soul, and dunking it in the Abyss. It didn't happen to Artorias because Elizabeth's a fucking liar and a racist Artorias was, like most everyone is, a confused mess of a bunch of the same stuff most everyone is, rather than some unsulliable holy scion of some master race bullshit.

The Kings use a mix of melee and spell attacks, and are lethal at range. Luckily they follow karate movie rules and don't just, like, stay at range and Amana the player to death. Their swords look like a ragged 2-dimensional plane. Like if you made a sword out of something so thin it didn't even have a third dimension. Their attacks are the usual variety of telegraphed chops and pokes, but given their arms and, well, other kinds of arms, their overall strategy is incredibly similar to Elana from the Sunken King expansion. I don't know if I'm meant to draw that conclusion or not, but it's almost identical.

To drive home the point that the way you're supposed to get in these guys faces during the fight, their weapons do far less damage if you stand close enough that they hit you with their arms. Sometimes they'll use either a grab attack or a WoG variant. The first has a white/blue effect and involves the PC being grabbed and 'sucked' by the root clump. The AoE blast has a slow windup, during which the King will cover itself, as much as it's able, with its wings and unleash a dark purple blast with a pretty considerable range.

Their root-clump/wings serve as their catalysts, capable of launching giant, physics-defying Dark Homing Soul Greatsword projectiles? If they cast it it's gonna hit you, basically. I think I've had one slowly circle around the arena like three times before it caught me on NG+, which they're the hardest goddamned thing in NG+ because the stupid game cheats.

But what is an angel, anyway?

Conclusions

There aren't any. That's the point of this. The story of Dark Souls is a big jigsaw puzzle made out of jigsaw puzzles and Ashen Idols is just a place where I can like, try to assemble some of the big chunks that might help make sense of one of the puzzles, which can then be plugged into other puzzles and become something like a story with a point and a beginning and end and so on.

Instead it's just like 'and that's what we know about angels unless I forgot didn't notice or was wrong about something the end,' and we move on to the next post which I have no idea what that'll be. I had a planned list of topics I was gonna cover, but those ended up changing every time and now it's not at all the series I had planned because, like, the next planned post is 'archtrees', but I'm not near ready to talk about archtrees, but then again this post was supposed to be about the Painted Worlds but I need like two more Painted World Lead-Up posts before I'm ready to dive into that. 

Pyromancers, maybe? 

Prisoner of Ash: A Curse Revisited

This is the one about Farron's Abyss Watchers.

And also Oolacile/Darkroot/Dusk/Manus. In part. And also Astora because I need to put it somewhere and here seems suitably aspirational.

Artorias, in the third game, has been mythologized to such a degree that his story seems to be synonymous with the story of both the Chosen Undead and Pharis, a likewise mythologized figure that was originally tied to Alvina's Forest Hunters. Pharis, in the second game, had become known as Evlana, goddess of the hunt, who seemed to be a blend of both Pharis and Alvina.

This clouding of Artorias' narrative first began with Elizabeth, one of very few that knew the truth of what happened to Artorias, and the only one whose council would have been heeded by any Anor powers. Gough literally didn't see anything, Ciaran faded from History, Dusk was insensate, and Chester was probably from Carim.

Elizabeth describes herself as the guardian of the Oolacile Sanctuary (but not the Sanctuary Guardian, if you see what I mean,) 'something of a godmother to Princess Dusk,' and 'one with the sorceries of Oolacile.' In DS2 she's credited as being the saint responsible for, basically, inventing medicine. These tales, that appear in the troche items, among other places, claim that her virtue was matched only by her beauty, which is true because she's a fuckin racist.

Which is not to say all mushroom people are racists. But Elizabeth sure was.

Anyway, it's Elizabeth's mother-knows-besting that likely leads to Artorias eventually becoming mistaken as the first Chosen Undead by the populace at large, since the Player Character would have been virtually anonymous in Lordran and, having traversed the Abyss twice, was already impersonating Artorias to a large degree.

As a further example of this twisting: it was the Chosen Undead that slayed Sif, leaving the 'Wolf's Blood' to eventually be found by the Legion in honor of Artorias, whose tainted blood they may have inadvertently drank.

Artorias was described by Elizabeth as 'having nary a murmur of Dark,' with the implication being that this meant that, since he wasn't even a little bit human, he stood no chance against the deeper Dark of Manus' poisoned Abyss, as humanity seems to act as a vaccine against the corrosive Dark Fog effect, at least to an extent.

At some point long before Oolacile, Artorias slayed the original, ancient Darkwraiths, who were said to be able to drain the humanity of a 'replete saint' in the blink of an eye. This art - with the surprisingly straightforward name of Lifedrain - was forbidden by the gods of Anor Londo, as the one thing they absolutely could not tolerate was non-clergy stockpiling humanity, especially for potentially Dark Lord-y purposes.

In order to combat this, Artorias made covenant with the creatures of the Abyss so that the Wolf Knight could become the Abysswalker. Little else is known about this story, save that it was probably the event that caused Gwyn to 'tremble at the Dark' and 'resist the course of nature,' as Kaathe describes the emergence of the original Dark Lord as having been in a past much more distant than New Londo, and that this Dark Lord was cheated of their throne by the coward Gwyn.

When Manus was slain the Abyss Chasm that was produced began to dissipate. This corrosive, twisted Darkness began to spread below ground as pockets of Dark. Eventually a new form of Humanity arose from these shrines as fragmentary reincarnations of the tortured corpse of the pygmy lord the Ool Sages experimented on.

These Children of Dark played integral roles in shaping the history of Drangleic (and by extension places like Forossa and Lindelt).

As for the original pygmy/primeval human that became Manus:

• They may have gone on to become an Angel
• They may have been the corpse of the original Dark Lord referenced by Kaathe.
• They may have been a pygmy lord from the Ringed City brought back as part of either the Ool Mission or as part of whatever deal Gwyn struck with the Pygmy.
• The pygmy was dead when Ool began their experiments, meaning that there was a necromantic aspect to their work.

In the third game we return to Oolacile many, many years later.

Farron

Farron is what became of Darkroot. That's fairly obvious, of course, but it's important to remember that a kingdom, of sorts, rose and fell in the interim.

After the fall of Oolacile, when the area became known as Darkroot, we found a band of Forest Hunters that acted as grave wardens for a legendary hero. These hunters were mostly undead itinerants - bandits, outcasts, and the like - and as such the title of Forest Hunter would have been one of the few an undead in Lordran would have been able to openly aspire to that didn't involve actively working against other undead or humans.

Ironically, the problem with being a grave warden in these games is that you end up creating a great many new graves that then have to be watched.

Put a pin in this, he's important.

These Hunters were led by Alvina ("Elf Friend,") a cat that has existed since the early Age of Fire. She speaks in a tongue so flowery and archaic that a good number of people need to consult a wiki before answering her questions.

When encountered she tells us that the legend of Artorias is a fabrication (not in the 'Elizabeth lied' sense, but in the 'it never happened' sense,) that traversing the Abyss is a fairy tale, and that we shouldn't waste our time looking for his grave.

If we answer her questions correctly she offers us membership with the Forest Hunters, who hunt down intruders and grave robbers. The Hunters mostly only follow one rule: the clan is family, never double-cross another Hunter.

Other Hunters of note are Shiva the weapon collector and the legendary archer Pharis, who 'ranked alongside Hawkeye Gough' despite being human [HEY LOOK AT THIS, FOOL . 

Eventually, a larger order seems to have emerged in Darkroot after the Chosen Undead came through. This city, or state, or city-state, was called Farron. The ruins we find in the third game belong to an advanced civilization, and the presence of the mushroom people would have meant that the people of Farron would have had access to what seems to be the most advanced medicine and 'pure' sorcery in existence.

It was probably a nice place for a while, is what I'm saying. Certainly it was nice by Souls standards. I wish we knew more about it.

Because a very old curse emerged from some very old graves, and Farron would go to war.

Legion
A couple of points:

• The Undead Legion predated the Abyss Watchers, and included more than the Abyss Watchers, though the Watchers were certainly the most proficient of the various groups that made up the Legion.
• I won't be discussing the Ghru until later, other than to point out that they're descended from the Legion acolytes.
• Heysel will also be discussed later, but I need to point out that she was the daughter of the head acolyte and is closely tied to Farron, and after betraying her family may have attempted to rebirth herself as a copy of either Elizabeth or Dusk[THIS IS GARBAGE GO HOME - FM].

The Forest Hunters watched the grave of the original Abyss Watcher and, in a sense, were the original Undead Legion.

Sworn to a wolf that speaks through a cat in a human tongue. A kingdom of itinerants and thieves made into a family with one rule:

The family is all.

So where's Alvina's stand in in the third game?

As time progressed the Darkroot Hunters coalesced into the Undead Legion. Probably the Hunters languished during an ahistorical peace during a kind of High Farron. As time further progressed, the Legion became less concerned with protecting their land and fallen 'kin,' and more concerned with combating the Abyss.

So why the change?

The Black Fog of Manus dissipated after the fall of Oolacile, meaning that that particular curse left Darkroot/Farron, to reappear in Drangleic in various forms.

The end result of these forms was a country that had been at war with itself for so long that the largest army was made up of the dead, who eventually united the entire continent under the banner of Carthus.

And by chance, these conquerors found their way to Izalith, almost directly underneath Farron.

Carthus slayed the demons, or what remained of them. The piles of demon corpses we find littering the area are testament to the ruthlessness of the Dead.

Bear in mind: not even Gwyn could conquer the children of Chaos, and in the first game the demons seem to be attempting to take over Undead Burg [no, they control it, but it's debatable if the Servant faction was cut off from Quelaag - fm].

In the second game the Chaos Flame was altered by Ivory and Alsanna, in defense of the lands of men. We don't know what effect this had on Izalith, but it may have been the catalyst for things like the death of the Fair Lady, who seemed, in the first game, to be about the business of converting humanity into demon eggs.

What we do know is that due to the actions of Ivory and Alsanna (and possibly also the Cursebearer,) the Chaos Flame took on properties described in the third game as 'profane,' and that I can only describe as 'like a black hole, but for heat.' Andre, when given the Profaned Coal, describes it as having the Abyss in it, so it may be that Alsanna had more of an effect on the Old Chaos than Ivory. I'll talk more about the Profaned Flame in later posts.

Carthus had the good fortune of not only facing an Izalith much weakened, but of happening upon a Lordran completely unprepared for an attack. Whatever resistance the demons would have mounted would have been relatively minimal in the face of Death Itself. From here, Carthus set her sights on the lands above.

The Undead Legion, or something like it, predated Carthus' arrival in Lordran, and with the arrival of Wolnir's forces the Legion was likely the only existing force capable of mounting a serious opposition to the skeleton hordes.

There's no clear indication of it, but we can assume that by the time Carthus and Farron clashed Wolnir had already discovered the Black Snake, creating a vector for the Curse of Manus to re-infest Farron in a literal, as well as metaphorical, sense.

Sorry to bury the lead there.

Farron, of course, triumphed, but likely only because of Wolnir's fall. The Cart forces were driven back underground, and their crypts sealed.

Watchers

The Abyss Watchers, who I imagine were the best of Farron's best, gained their power from what they think was the blood of Sif, the wolf that served alongside Artorias [YES THEY KNOW WHO SIF IS THANK YOU].

Maybe it was. I doubt it, but maybe.

Source, or Why I Miss Bonfire Ascetics Reason #17

This Wolf's Blood...can best be described in terms of the Healing Blood of Yharnam, but this isn't about Bloodborne. It granted the Watchers powers. Among these was the strength to face the creatures of the Abyss, to fight effectively as a pack with an almost psychic connection to other Watchers, to channel flame, to wield greatswords with the speed and grace of curved swords. And all at the low, low price of eventually succumbing to the very thing they hoped to prevent.

They valued literal strength, as evidenced by the Heavy Gem, and contrasted with Carthus' use of Sharp Gems. They foreswore shields, opting instead to rely on an off-hand dagger specialized for parrying and shield-pulling.

Joining the Legion was a relatively simple affair that involved the prospective Legionnaire symbolically defeating the three 'Great Ones' - Izalith, Nito, and Seath - in emulation of 'Artorias.' Surviving as a Legionnaire, on the other hand, was quite an ordeal.

They were described as a caravan - a group of travelers united by a common purpose - and Hawkwood implies that they've buried more than one kingdom. This would seem to indicate that, after the discovery of the Wolf's Blood and the vanquishing of Carthus, the Legion set out to quash Abyssal outbreaks anywhere they could be found, a far cry from the original mission of the Forest Hunters.

They were said to have 'acted in the dark.' This could have several meanings.

• They dated to the Dark Age or
• The Dark had grown so thick due to Gwyn's perverted Age of Light that it was literally always dark, similar to the Untended Graves area.
• They traversed the Abyss a la Artorias and the Chosen Undead from the first game.
• They were ignorant of the effects their actions were having.
• They were pawns being used to further the ends of whatever person or group oversaw the Undead Legion.

All or none of those could be the case. Eventually, of course, the tainted blood of Sif or Artorias or Whoever began to betray them.

Arise ye lords of edge

The Abyss of Manus could not be contained, not by playing whack-a-mole with its incarnations. Realizing that this was, to a large degree, an exercise in futility, that the poisoned Dark of Manus would seemingly always re-emerge, taking new shapes and finding new power to twist to its own ends, the Watchers' tactics became more and more ruthless. Rather than re-evaluating their overall strategy, the Watchers doubled-down, shifting to what the Blood Ministers of Bloodborne would call 'preventative medicine.'

Eventually it infected the Watchers. Well, it had infected them from the beginning, but the side effects became more and more apparent and prevalent the longer they were exposed.

This gave rise to a new faction in the Undead Legion: the Followers.

The Followers arose to watch the watchmen, as it were. An Abyss Watcher driven mad by warped humanity (or, in keeping with the philosophy of prevention: was suspected of possibly being susceptible to being driven mad at some point in the future,) would have been incredibly dangerous, as it's implied that a handful of Watchers could have felled a kingdom. If one of these one-man siege engines was dangerous, imagine one augmented with the power and speed of Manus after their humanity ran wild.

Hunting a Watcher, therefore would have been a likewise incredibly dangerous task, even if they were still human. The Followers - who also took heavy inspiration from wolves - devised a system that allowed them to hunt their former comrades relatively effectively. This involved lead defensive warriors armed with spears and shields boxing the Watcher in, at which point offensive units would move in with sabers and torches. When the Watcher fell they were given an 'honorable send-off' by means of a spear thrust through them and into the ground. This show of respect - a weapon thrust into the earth - seems fairly wide spread in the game-world. The Followers will probably be discussed more in the Ariandel section in a later post.

A final point: this method of dispatch would have led to the Wolf's Blood being drained into the soil of Darkroot/Farron and, as someone that used to specialize in irrigation, drainage, and water management: nobody ever thinks about drainage until it's too late. People be having their yards sloped towards their house like 'what, this foundation? Why would I care if it's constantly wet? I'm gonna put a sprinkler head in a depression so it doesn't really water anything and then the runoff eats a hole in it IDGAF mister.'

I'm not saying this is the Profaned Capitol but it looks a lot like the Profaned Capitol. Note the gatehouse with circular towers on either side.

The Legion was falling apart. The Abyss was spreading. Something had to be done.

The remaining Watchers realized that the only solution yet untried was to link the flame, to burnish the sickly light of Gwyn's flame in an attempt to drive out or weaken the Dark of Manus.

Except they were using something very much like the Blood of the Dark Soul to fuel Gwyn's Flame.

In the land of the Gods the Age of Light cannot end, no matter how dark it gets, and when the Abyss Watchers linked the flame Lordran became darker still.

Farron became a festering, poisonous swamp. We don't know much of what else the period of the Abyss Watchers firelink involved, but it can be assumed that none of it was good, as the Watchers seem to have unwittingly accomplished what Nashandra set out to accomplish in Drangleic.

As an aside: the crucified Ghru have hoof hands, which may be related to why they were strung up.

This Age of False Dark would have been a nightmare for almost everyone, and the only saving grace would have been that it probably didn't last long.

Astora 1

Regrettably, I have failed in my mission, but perhaps you can keep the torch lit. There is an old saying in my family: 

Thou who art Undead, art chosen. 

In thine exodus from the Undead Asylum,

maketh pilgrimage to the land of Ancient Lords. 

When thou ringeth the Bell of Awakening, 

the fate of the Undead thou shalt know. 

Well, now you know. And I can die with hope in my heart.

The Chosen Undead was supposed to be from Oscar's noble Astoran bloodline. That's the tl;dr of the first game. Astora is a land whose nobles are related to Gwyn's family, and is the country outside of Lordran most directly connected to Anor Londo, despite what Thorolund would like us to believe.

Gwyn's intent was for someone like Prince Ricard or Oscar to undergo the journey of the Chosen Undead and link the fire, but Ricard was destined to follow a Lightning Spear narrative, while the rest of the nobility either weren't interested (Andre describes people attempting to access Anor Londo or Oolacile 'lunatics,') or complete balls at fighting (Oscar, corpse in Valley of the Drakes, corpse in Darkroot Garden).

Big Pilgrim's Key – Oscar was carrying this, and was carrying it when he left Astora. The Asylum Demon picked it up when it squashed him. If you kill the Demon unarmed Oscar still has it. Oscar is the pilgrim, and it's the key to what seems to be the main and only door to the 'outside,' such as it is.

Oscar also gives us his Estus Flask. Estus flasks are described as 'precious,' and their creation apparently involves the use of a lot of humanity. The Firekeepers' Souls used to reinforce them are done so by apparently transmuting the Keeper's Soul (a heavy concentration of humanity/the Dark Soul) into the Estus Flask to enlarge it, rather than the Soul being used to strengthen the Estus created at the bonfire, or something. In subsequent games shards of broken flasks are used in the same fashion.

I say this because the mechanics are reversed in the first game, and I'm pretty sure it's an oversight or one of the few examples of gameplay contradicting lore. Firekeeper Souls give the Flask+ effect, meaning that the flask is collecting more potent estus, while offering humanity as kindling gives more uses, meaning it makes the flask literally bigger.

In two and three, flask shards – which can be thought of as petrified firekeeper souls, in that they're made from the same stuff – are used to make the flask bigger and grant more uses. Bone dust is used in the sequels to give the Flask+ effect, meaning more potent Estus.

Oscar's shield would seem to indicate he expected to take magic damage. This may connect to Seath, as the crystallized hollows guarding the Archives carry a 'blue' shield sold by Andre. The Caduceus Kite Shield seems to be...christ, hold on...

The Knight starting class starts with the Tower Kite Shield. This shield is functionally identical to the Caduceus Kite Shield, with the design being the only difference. The Knight's set describes the character as 'low ranking.'

So, if the TK shield is a shield for a low-ranking Astoran Knight, then so might the CK shield be. The difference could relate to a Tower being a symbol for defense and a Caduceus being a symbol for messengers (Caduceus means 'herald's staff'). So, in Astora, you would have (at least) two orders of these low-ranking knights. Tower Knights were probably something like the city guard, police, or defensive militia, while Caduceus Knights were those sent abroad on missions or attached to the military.

Red and Blue, as always.

The designs on the C and T shield are far less ornate than the crests of other Astoran Blue Shields, particularly Oscar's. This could be because they belong to knights of a lower rank, but could also indicate more primitive designs. The CK shield is described as 'ancient,' for example.

So, Astoran nobles have been making attempts to fulfill the Chosen Undead prophecy for a very long time. Gwyn, seemingly, wanted one of them to eventually succeed, while Seath would seem to want them to fail. Not in the same sense that 'Seath's crazy and wants everyone but Seath to fail,' but Seath seems to have specifically targeted CKS bearers.

This information would seemingly place Astora far back on the timeline. We knew that the land had already been ravaged by the Evil Eye in Oscar's time, but this would seemingly make it clear that the Astoran nobility predated the Firstborn being crowned king of Anor Londo, as they seem to have at some point been in somewhat direct contact with Gwyn.

In other words, Astora may have at one point known more about Anor Londo than Anor Londo knew about Anor Londo because Anor Londo made such a habit of forbiddening their own history.

That Astoran nobles are related, possibly literally related, to Gwyn's family is particularly interesting because Astorans are otherwise humans/pygmy.

Let's say Ricard and Oscar are examples of the nobility, while Solaire and Andre are examples of commoners. Clearly Andre and Soliare are physically capable of kickassing their way to the First Flame and doing whatever they want with it, but Andre chooses not to, and while Solaire seemingly does link the flame he doesn't really understand why, mostly because he is a very strong idiot.

Ricard and Oscar, on the other hand, fail-stated at Sen's and Northern Asylum, respectively, like a couple of games journalists, and while Ricard eventually moved on, it wasn't as someone attempting to link the flame. Oscar seemed almost relieved to go hollow at the start of his adventure, especially since we happen along to assuage his cowardice-based guilt.

Contrast this, and the other Elite Knights we find around the area, with someone like Andre, who just legit want to help strangers because it makes them happy and has no grander ambition than to be allowed to do what he's good at: forging weapons and helping travelers.

Consider also Solaire: a brave and stalwart knight soaked in a tragic loneliness, a gay/bi-sexual man undergoing a kind of mid-life crisis after having been brought up in the undoubtedly hideous Dark Ages-ass culture of Astora during or after the hardships of the Eye. Despite being raised in a culture that would have been rank with homophobia, a place that would have given him every reason to grow bitter and nihilistic and spiteful, Solaire still manage to be absolute gold, to literally outshine the sun. These, rather than the nobility, are the things that mark Astora's greatness.

So what does all this mean?

We can assume that Gwyn knew that eventually the Dark Age had to happen, so when it did, he wanted it to be as controlled as possible. This could be why Gwyn allied himself with Astora to such a degree that they were involved with the creation of the bonfire system, with Astoran nobles being possibly related to the gods of Anor Londo (as well as being human): Prince Ricard, or someone matching his description, was supposed to link the flame until the time came when they were then supposed to usher in the Dark Age under the guidance and control of Gwyn's descendants.

Except it never worked out that way. Gwyn's kingdom fell to civil war, Astora fell to the Evil Eye, and everyone who survived has a much less complete understanding of Gwyn's Plan than they did before.

Even so, Astoran nobles still hand down the tale of the Chosen Undead, a champion meant to rise from their bloodline, ring the bell of awakening, and learn the truth about undeath.

BALLS YEAH IM CULTURED I BEEN TO A MUSICAL

Moving Forward
As I said above, there will be further discussion of Farron in a later post, which will discuss, among other things, Heysel, the Watchdogs, and the nature of Ool sorceries.

As always, if you're reading an early version of this (01/26/2018,) it will probably change over time.

Some final points about Farron's Undead Legion:

• I have no idea when the Crystal Sage joined them, but assume it was after the firelinking.
• Likewise I have no idea when, where, or how the Ghru, beyond being descendants of the Legion's acolytes, but also assume it was after the firelinking.
• The mushroom people probably had an amicable relationship with the people of Farron.
• The 'red skull' magic used by the Elder Ghru is similar to Gael's magic during his second phase. They are implied to be the spirits of dead warriors.
• The Followers and the Watchers wore peaked helmets. Hodrick wears a similar helmet, implying that whatever holy order he was/is a part of could be related to Farron. Gael, similarly, may have a pointed helm under his hood.
• Chester uses the word 'Juniper' as a mild swear. It could be that Juniper is a regional variant of Jennifer, itself a regional variant of Gwynevere.

The next post will outline Yhorm and the Profaned Capitol. [The 016 post of Ashen Idols is a direct follow up to this one]