AI 009 - Profane Use

Alright I'm going to try to update this one. I'm terrified of this because it always effs the formatting all to hell and I like to cut paragraphs I think I don't need and then not notice all the references to the cut material until later. If this all looks like one of those newspaper scrap ransom notes I promise you it may have looked better before.

Cuz storytelling hard. 

2019 to 2023 here go.

I'm miserable. Lonely. Hair under my skin. I hurt and I want to fight and I want to drink and I want to throw a dart at a map and just walk away. From everything. Again.

Except I been where all the darts go and it ain't better and drinking would be a death sentence for me at this point anyway. Fix here. Try. There's no soil I would ever take root in anyway.

My partner really needed comforting and reassurance. I didn't have any to give. I feel so fucking rotten I'm gonna work on this stupid random off the cuff update until they wake up for work and try to have breakfast ready and be passable simulacrum of the person I should've been 3 hours ago.

Everythings good though. or as good as it's ever been for me, hard to imagine better. I don't know where I'm going with this update wish me luck.

Back to the show.

Look at this. It's the Old Dragonslayer. The Old Dragonslayer is Ornstein's hollow. He is hollow because he relinquished his lords soul when he left Anor Londo. He left some time after Gwynevere and seems to be waiting for word from her. Don't worry about that, that's not what's important right now. Look at this:

That's a Dark Lightning attack, right? Those aren't common. 

Now, look at this, same boss, same attack:

What looks to me like's happening is the Dark Lightning is being converted into some kind of blood/stagnation field attack. The visual effect/spell is called something like 'poison swamp.' Whatever it is, I've convinced myself that it is very important.

Right, one of the lead theories about this has it that Gwyndolin or somebody used O's soul to create the puppet Ornstein we find protecting Gwynevere with Smough. This would meant that the 'real' Ornstein - the hollow that had acted as host for the Lords Soul, could have begun a new 'life' as a starting character, only with the fading memories and muscles of a dragonslaying god. This is an echo of the journey that King Nameless took, because they're born from the same Lords Soul, which will always be a variation of the Heroes Journey. I don't think all of the Light characters are based on the Heroe's Journey, only the Lightning Spear/Sacred Oath characters. 

It led Nameless to Forossa, then to Archdragon Peak. It led Patches on a merry old journey that I promise i'll try to outline at some point. 

Ivory, Patches? Really?

It led Ornstein to Olaphis, where we find him serving a foreign religion and not even bothering to hunt a nearby dragon. because he isn't a dragonslayer anymore, he's a Princess Guard. THE Princess Guard, maybe.

Except he's using Smough's buttslam attack. The 'real' Ornstein lands superhero pose.

So...

Maybe we fought the real O in DS1, and that he THEN renounced his post after his defeat to Solaire (canonically for the purposes of this series,) and took up residence in Heide somewhat recently. Hell, given the timeline, it's possible the Old Dragonslayer may have passed Vendrick the Bastard (the canonical Dark Lord from DS1, again for the purpose of this series), on Vendrick's way to Lordran to fight a golem created from Ornstein's Lord's Soul. We'll call that the latest point in time he would have left Lordran.

In the last post I mentioned Gael, and how he's spent so much time playing around with his soapstone that he knows how to exploit a bunch of weird glitches only he knows about, like arriving after a delay when being summoned or summoning himself via soulsign to teleport. 

As an example, he really wants you to to kill Friede and Ariandel, but because of his slavely vows he's unable to raise arms against members of the White. On the other hand, if members of the White are found to be engaging in things like necromancy or igniting a forbiddened fire (both of which appear to happen) he would probably be free to act in his capacity as executioner and do what's best for the larger institution. 

Why bring that up? Because if you're broken the way I am you think EVERYTHING has a lore explanation, and when you believe that you start noticing things like that, which also includes things like ODS's overly-elaborate jump attack.

Fallen Ornstein, who may or may not have absorbed part of Smough the Cannibal, charges up a dark lightning attack, but rather than coming down on the spear, he flops on his ass and blasts out what looks like a kind of Wrath of God dark/blood magic attack. Which is still fucking impressive, just not very majestic looking and over in like 2 frames.

ODS, maybe, hasn't mastered his own Dark Soul yet. If he wasn't human when he started his journey, he is when we find him. It could be as simple as he doesn't have the stats to pull the attack off anymore. 

If it's even blood magic, but if not for insane theories we'd still be hearing the same boring af Vaati explanations.

I mean I love Vaati, but he's certainly not gospel and I personally would be horrified to think someone like him still agrees with parts of his early work at this point.

Lost Legends

So if the red/black thing indicates blood magic are red phantoms related to blood?

Unless I missed something, the first and most noticeable time we find allusions to blood magic in the first game is with all the Jeremiah the Impaler/notched whip stuff in the Ariamis Painting. Since the Ariandel Painting is an attempt to restore Ariamis, you could almost assume that the themse of blood and ice must involve a similarly forbidden fire being intentionally drowned in the first painting. At least until rot sets in, which it kind of looks like it is already, and they I guess all set up a ballot box and voted to burn their world down.

But do they burn it down with the fire in the painting? Because I really am starting to thing that the fire in the second painting is the first first flame.

Because the first flame went out. Extinguished. Doused. Faded, past tense. Not. Lit. There Is No Fire In Lordran At The Time Of This Writing Please Advise, Love Gundyr.

We find someone wearing Jeremiah's set in the Dark Chasm in the second game, but it's pretty clearly not the original King in Yellow. I mean they're called Pretenders aren't they? I don't know if that's the wiki name or in-game name. The thing is is the Dark Chasms are heavily implied, if not outright stated, to be the remains of the Chasm beneath Oolacile. The implication may be that Jeremiah left the Painting and gained some admirers, but Heysel and the Xanthous Scholars seem to be the product of a blending of the histories/sorcery of Jeremiah (and possibly this implied cult of Xanthous Prince Pretenders in the Abyss,) and Princess Dusk (and whatever story Elizabeth told everyone after we came through in the first game). Except the X Scholars aren't light sorcerers or dark/chaos pyromancers. 

No no non o NO IT"S TURNING INTO A JEREMIAH POST YOU HAVE ONE OF THOSE ABORT

-

We find the Bloodshield in Ariamis, which mentions the fact that blood is enchanted, and boosts resistances in the Painting.

Blood. Blood in the game Dark Souls. All of it's enchanted. Not important I guess.

I goeth whence I want, lady

Skeletons and katana users use bleed.

It makes sense for the Dead to rely on Bleeding, since not only are they immune to it, but blood loss seems to be required if an undead/undying is to achieve true death. At least until some kind of saturation point is reached, as we find in the third game around the Cathedral of the Deep where literally the ground is enchanted because of all the blood and the rockworms, remember them, they fucking love the stuff.

Like I said not important or somebody important would've noticed.

Katana users are a bit more perplexing, as they're almost all pyromancers, but there are enough non-pyromancers for me to not think of them as explicitly a weapon from Izalith and the Eastern Land/Jugo.

The Eastern Land is Jugo. Jeremiah's from there. Look, this all checks out you can roll your eyes and say I'm just making random connections and I totally don't blame you for not reading, like, the entire this because holy shit I can't even remember if I've explained the connections at this point in the series.

Katanas, as well as the Claw weapon, with the maybe exception of the Chaos Blade, come from the Eastern Land. It's not at all clear (No, it is clear there are lots of connections there is more proof that Jugo is the Eastern Land than there is proof that Big Hat Logan is called Big Hat Logan because he wears a Big Hat - Updater9000), but it could be that this Eastern land is actually Jugo, as the two ronin-archetype characters we meet in-universe, Alonne and Shiva, both have unusual relationships with pyromancy, look like Samurai, and have an animal charge on their pauldron: a lion for Shiva, an ant for Alonne.

Ants are really important to the story too. But not this story.

My personal best explanation is that Jugo probably borders the Great Swamp, and that a princess of Izalith (or possibly a prince or even a group of refugees,) fled Lordran shortly after the advent of Chaos, passed through the Swamp, and settled in Jugo. The Swamp pass-through planted the, ahem, seeds that would eventually give rise to Salaman and Quelana's school, while Jugo would eventually align with Mytha and Agdayne's neo-Alken/Carthus following the collapse of Drangleic. Jesus this must sound crazy if you haven't read the rest of this but people click on this post for some fucking reason go read from the beginning weirdo.

The problem, of course, is that Jugo is described as being east of Drangleic, and the Eastern Land is described as such from Lordran's perspective and, like, is the place literally called "Eastern Land" in Lordran even though?

Look, Jugo must also be south of Mirrah, which would put it southeast of the Dragon Shrine, on the other side of the southern mountains. If Mirrah is Balder, which I'm only slightly less certain of than EL being Jugo, then there's probably more we could work out.

Blood magic I'm supposed to be talking about blood magic.

Another, much more iffy example of blood magic in the first game is the Gravelord Sword Dance. If you watch close you can see your PC's hands light up red and blue as you go into the cast animation and you know how I feel about blues and reds. The spell literally has you pull the taijitu of a soul apart and use the energy to cause a Firestorm but Swords.

It says "Many eyes were offered" in order to create the miracle, which makes it seem like you gotta go full Event Horizon to even gain access to this technique, at least normally.

The Bleeding

 I don't have anything new to say about the Brotherhood, but I did notice - and think it's weird - that they don't seem to have access to blood magic. In fact, I don't think there are any characters from Alken, save for arguably Vendrick (he was half Anor-olaph-venn descended, which may be the X factor,) with access to blood magic (Vendrick has a blood magic attack). 

I mean, that doesn't mean Alken didn't have access to blood magic, it's pretty rare stuff, but it's also pretty common. Well, not in DS3. 

Elana, on the other side, seemingly does have access to blood magic, and can use it (and other stuff) to do things like create 'living ghost' soldiers.

They emit a 'bloodstain' style Soul effect when you break them. I bet it smells like 7-Up.

Alonne's sword's 'spirit' functions off of blood magic, but is associated with the pink aura of flame sorcery (Rapport, Demon Firesage's spells,) rather than the black and red (non-fire) effect we see with blood magic. 

Alsanna has access to the same flame-to-frost magic as Priscilla, which I'm gonna go ahead and classify as 'lifehunt' until I decide otherwise. I mention it because ice, blood, and Chaos seem to show up together a lot, and Alsanna is linked to a Champion of Chaos devoted to dampening a flame, just like Priscilla and Jeremiah, and El/Friede and Ariandel.

Because it's the same stories over and over.

Since Ivory was likely of Anor stock, if not a Heavenly Child of Gwynevere, it makes sense that we wouldn't find, like, obvious blood worship all over the place the way we do in the Paintings. The reason for this may be because a Chaos Flame has a different relationship with blood than the Flame of the bonfire, which doesn't seem to interact with blood at all, unless it's applied directly, in which case the blood will squelch the fire, while Chaos would render the blood to ash.

[HEY FUTURE FUTURE ME, PUT A PIN IN THAT RE GUNDYR'S MISSION - JUST FUTURE ME; will did, old future me, you're welcome and you've been so unhappy lately because you don't have a real creative outlet, old future me and also me from last night - Updater 9000]

Vendrick has an in extremis plasma orb attack he'll chuck at you once about every three thousand years. I think it might technically be a pyromancy, as it's palm cast, but that doesn't necessarily mean much, as it seems like the majority of caster bosses in DS2 are implied pyromancers/palm casters.

In case 'palm caster' maybe isn't self-explanatory: a lot of bosses (and other characters,) in the second game shoot spells directly out of their hands, particularly Soul Stream-style spells, rather than with a catalyst. I think the reason people use catalysts might be something like 'casting a soul arrow feels like having a soul arrow rip through your palm' or something. Second game palm casters include the Iron King, Nashandra, the Giant Pyromancers in the Giants' Memories, and Navlaan. [and Aava Lud & Zallen, poser - FM]

Can't forget about these guys and their blood obsession, either

Plasma Orb and Dark Lightning

So I'm calling the blood orb attacks, like what Vendrick or the Pilgrim Butterfly shoot at you, plasma orbs, and there's a reason for this despite blood plasma being, literally, xanthous in color. This could be misleading because plasma, apart from referring to refined blood, can also relate to matter in an ionized, superconductive state. Plasma is, well, fascinating and complicated, but involved with a lot of electricity-related stuff, like lightning, which is the end result of a channel of plasma being created from a storm cloud to the ground.

Also, I'm explicitly not talking about blue lightning or Deep/Maggot-based blood magic.

Plasma orbs fall into a couple of broad categories, and I am absolutely not certain what technically does and does not belong on this list. I try to be liberal w/r/t inclusion but supply explainers for why some things might not qualify. Plus I'm probably forgetting stuff. The two categories are body-based and earth-based.

Body-Based

• Vendrick's Spell
• Dragonslayer Armor's Keepers (includes a kind of blood-based Soul Stream attack)
• Ariandel, at least to some degree
• Ghru Leapers
• Gael (the skull orbs seem to erupt from inside him and then get absorbed by the earth. Or you)
• DS1 Catacomb exploding heads (these create a pink WoG style explosion I associate with the Flame Sorcery of Izalith. The non-respawning Mass of Dead enemies in lower New Londo also spit them out. I include them because they're clearly the inspiration for the Elder Ghru and Gael's blood attack).

Earth-Based

• Elder Ghru
• Gravelord Sword Dance (This may be one of those things where the color scheme was changed slightly between games, or it may be completely unrelated)
• Fallen Ornstein (inverting the plasma attracts lightning mechanic)
• Gael (demonstrating the plasma attracts lightning mechanic)

So, what about Black Lightning?

Apart from Ornstein and Agdayne (if I'm remembering correctly,) it mostly shows up in the Lost Crowns areas. Specifically the Fume Sorcerers and the Imperfect [I had a thing about the EL reindeer thing here, but I can't tell if they're shooting dark lightning or not HAIL SNOWFIELD]. 

I doubt that the Fume Sorcerers have much in the way of personal identities left, having been subjugated by Nadalia, and we know nothing about them except that they arrived after Nadalia [I think they may be related to the missing Eleum Loyce Priestesses]. Their use of the lightning, prayer circle, and Emitted Force schools miracles would tie them to...well, this is interesting, isn't?

df

Emit Force is described as a foreign derivative of the Wrath of the Gods tale in the first game. The foreign country being Catarina (from Catherine, one of Miyazaki's Favorite Names). 

In Drangleic Emit Force is told by Targray, as are Wrath and Force. This would seem to imply that, from the Way of Blue's perspective, Emit Force is gospel, so to speak.

Anyway, this kind of reunification of the High Anor diaspora is only ever seen in glimpses and mostly only in the second game, where the White are outlawed. And maybe most notably with the Fume Sorcerers.

And they're loyal to Nadalia, inasmuch as there's a they there.

On the other hand, they cast their miracles as a sorcery, and without a real catalyst apart from their daggers which, like all post-McDuff Olaph/Venn arms, are garbage at being actual weapons.

The Imperfect spit black lightning orbs as a kind of breath attack. Given their location and that they look like dragon/serpent/pus of man hybrids it might be an early example of some kind of Deep magic. It might just be the area they're in, but their orbs seem 'wetter' than the others, somehow.

I think Agdayne uses a dark lightning attack during the bossfight with Velstadt, but I don't know if Agdayne's ever actually finished casting it, for anyone, ever, before V clobbers him. Remind me to go back and try to see it, because it's probably important. I'm pretty sure he has a casting speed of 1 or something though. I should just have him beat up some hollows or something duh IM BRILLIANT.

So, from all of this we can then start making even shakier conjectures and say that blood magic and 'non-standard' lightning (blue and black variants) seem to have some kind of implied magnetic relation, possibly similar to that of plasma and lightning irl; a kind of inversion of the usual 'Dark pursues Light' truism caused by manipulating Dark in a liquid state.

So I'm sure there's more to this story, but I'm going to move on to the third game, as briefly as possible, before doubling back.

Luckily I'm limiting myself to Dark Lightning, so I ain't gotta explain this.

March of Droplets

The third game is loaded with blood magic. It's first on clear display in lower Farron. The Ghru Elders - the giant dog-faced guys using tree stumps as club/catalysts - can cause clusters of homing plasma skulls to spawn from the ground and pursue the player. These are probably related to the spirits of the fallen that the Watchdogs are charged with, uh, watching.

The Leaper Ghru also use blood magic. If they successfully grab the player they can be seen tearing at the Ashen One's face and throat with their beak, and when the player is released the Ghru gains an apparently blood-based Power Within style buff, minus the HP drain effect caused by overheating your actual blood.

The Ghru are a species reminiscent of donkeys and/or mules, in that they're both hybrids and have a hard time reproducing. It seems like Ghru with forehooves, rather than forearms, are crucified, while hand-having Ghru are allowed to live in some kind of Dr. Moreau of the Flies society. I say that because the 'acceptable' Ghru run a fairly wide gamut of 'civilized' behavior, with some behaving like hounds and others casting a combination of pyromancies and miracles.

The Leapers, if I had to describe them in a word, are rigid. They stand Straight Up. They Are Upright, Buddy. If you've seen the first season of Daredevil, and minor spoilers if you haven't, they remind of the dichotomy between the raging, violent, narcissist fail son Inner Child behind Wilson Fisk's facade of meticulousness, faux austerity, and seemingly bottomless calm.

The Elder Ghru and the Common Ghru look like different species. The commoners seem like a mix of Capra and Crow heritage, while the Elders look like a mixture of giants and wolves. The nearest connection I can make, and it's pretty iffy, is between them and the Millwood Knights, who are not only abnormally large but are associated with wolves and use earth-based magic attacks. Alternately, they may be descended from the Stone Knights of Darkroot, as they drop those guys's gear.

I think blood is probably one of the main components in the soil around both lower Farron and the Cathedral of the Deep. And probably the Painting as well.

In fact, we find the legendary Notched Whip as soon as we enter the area, in the gatehouse chapel as soon as we arrive. We also find Gael, who, at least in the distant future and in desperation and during an apocalypse, has access to a sort of reverse and Full Badass version of Fallen Ornstein's goofy clutch attack.

The third game WoW, at least around the Cathedral of the Deep, are obsessed with blood. I'm pretty sure this is what has led to the maggot infestation. Honestly, this part of the game is why I abandoned Prisoner of Ash.

Low blood pressure

Then we come to Carthus.

Carthus, near as I recall, doesn't have any blood sorcerers, but does have an obsession with blood. We learn in the Cathedral that dying from blood loss slows reanimation, likely due to the nature of reincarnation. since the blood would be in a different area than your body it might take longer to return to 'home' than if you died from something like internal bleeding. Probably that's what causes long loading screens amirite.

Hypothetically, if all your blood dried up and couldn't return with your body you wouldn't be able to return home upon death, which may be the common characteristic common to all third game forlorn: when killed they eventually just respawn where they were killed.

When you consider how Elfriede and the Painting Girl talk about the bonfire it's almost like bonfires are invisible to them. This could have some kind of relationship with the process of becoming forlorn. If you don't know what I'm talking about exactly, look up the descriptions of Homeward, both the miracle and the bone. I'm saying if a corvian or Farron Follower tried to use a homeward bone they'd probably just rematerialize right where they were standing, which may explain how Gael's self-summoning 'glitch' works.

Now, if you read the other series you know I think that, following the events in DS2, the Age of Dark ushered in by the True King of Drangleic eventually evolved into the empire that preceded Lothric. The empire was composed of elements of Volgen-Lindelt, Way of/Blue Sentinel, Shulva, Carim, Foross, Olaph, and maybe even Mirran descent. This empire can be thought of as Neo-Olaphis, in that it was broadly a blue, Anor loyalist faction, although Elana was probably viewed as something like the first queen or founding deity.

Much like how Olaphis was originally founded, a large group of colonists, in response to a mounting threat, set off for Lordran and the legendary First First Flame.

The nature of this threat can be thought of as Neo-Alken: the large, red, Drang loyalist faction. This kingdom would become known as Carthus as it went on to become the new empire when it conquered Neo-Olaphis. Neo-Alken was composed of factions loyal to Alken (Unclear if this includes Nadalia,) Jugo, The Undead Crypt,

And, like the legendary Drang hero Sir Yorgh, they literally and figuratively drowned the old empire in blood.

Unlike Farron, who follows a path toward blood magic, Carthus followed a path towards pyromancy based on the Black Flame of Humanity. I don't even know what that means, really, still.

We find blood magic again in Upper Lothric. During the Dragonslayer Armor fight, the Pilgrim Butterfly unleash probably the most impressive display of the stuff in the entire series, including Plasma Orb barrages and something like a giant blood-based Soulstream laser.

In the Painting DLC we find, of course, Ariandel using a mixture of Dark Blood and bonfire fire to resurrect Friede - an act of necromancy that I suspect allows Gael to exploit a workaround in his enslavement and attack members of the church.

I ain't even gonna with the Ringed City right now.

Conclusions

It seems like there's something like an evolution of blood across the games. In the first we have Priscilla and Jeremiah, possibly guarding an unlinked Flame and keeping it dormant with the blood of humans and chaos pyromancers.

Later we find a split between magical and mechanical factions. On the one hand we have Shulvan priestesses - descended from Olaphis in their methodology, if not intent - using blood magic to create phantoms and, I suspect, Imperfects, living ghosts, Elana's 'mire,' and they may even be using it to sort of reverse engineer things like Chaos Pyromancy (Thomas, Elana,) and Black Lightning (Imperfects, Fallen Ornstein).

Bear in mind: they also have quite a lot of (septic) dragon blood to play around with, as did Mytha.

Mytha is not only more red/aggressive than Elana in her tactics, she's also incredibly blue in the sense that she's smart enough to be incredibly utilitarian, subversive, and cunning. She may have gained access to black lightning from Agdayne, who would probably be a dope paladin if he wasn't so terrible. Although she doesn't seem to have access to plasma based magic, she does have access to an apparently pure line of Izalith pyromancy, possibly in the form of a lost Chaos Sister in Jugo.

This diverging path of pyromancy would eventually lead Wolnir and his pyromancers down a path towards the Abyss, at which point Wolnir, and by extension Carthus, surrendered and the war that Lordran-Lothric-Farron were losing badly abruptly came to an end, with Farron and the Way of White victorious and they all lived happily ever after hooray.

The Way of White, under Carim, would inherit the mantle of the 'blue' Notched Whip/Shulva school of blood magic, but rather than using Bleed for-or-directly-against Flame, they used it to turn the stagnant mire of Elana into Aldrich's vision of Deep Waters. Ariandel the Totally Not a Big Crow is involved in this, I suspect.

The Watchdogs, then, become heir to the plasma orb/Sword Dance 'red' school of blood magic, save for the Pilgrim Butterfly's relationship, which I don't understand yet, but suspect involves Elana managing to stay just ahead of Mytha from the time of in-game DS2 through to the Fall of Carthus/Thorolund-Carim Merger.

I think I'm gonna cut it here, because I honestly can't go any further without talking about Blue Lightning and a bunch of other sort of unrelated stuff. The next post will probably be about Archtrees and the Age of Ancients, which I've been bumping that post for a while now because stuff keeps overtaking it.

Prisoner of Ash: Conqueror, Worm

Lo! ’t is a gala night

   Within the lonesome latter years!   

An angel throng, bewinged, bedight

   In veils, and drowned in tears,   

Sit in a theatre, to see

   A play of hopes and fears,

While the orchestra breathes fitfully   

   The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,   

   Mutter and mumble low,

And hither and thither fly—

   Mere puppets they, who come and go   

At bidding of vast formless things

   That shift the scenery to and fro,

Flapping from out their Condor wings

   Invisible Wo!

That motley drama—oh, be sure   

   It shall not be forgot!

With its Phantom chased for evermore   

   By a crowd that seize it not,

Through a circle that ever returneth in   

   To the self-same spot,

And much of Madness, and more of Sin,   

   And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout,

   A crawling shape intrude!

A blood-red thing that writhes from out   

   The scenic solitude!

It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs   

The mimes become its food,

And seraphs sob at vermin fangs

   In human gore imbued.

Out—out are the lights—out all!   

   And, over each quivering form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

   Comes down with the rush of a storm,   

While the angels, all pallid and wan,   

   Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”   

   And its hero, the Conqueror Worm

- E. A. Poe, 1843, In Advance for the Holidays

This is going to be the story of Dark Souls 3, as well as a continuation of Scholar of Scholar, the meta-analysis of the history/various lore theories of Dark Souls 2. Hopefully this will all result in a less incoherent narrative for the entire series, which is sorely lacking beyond the general (surface level) consensus around Dark 2, which I liken to the community's understanding of Bloodborne before Redgrave, JSF, Aegon and so on really cracked the code on how to think about these games.

As to how I come to the conclusions I do, I consider very little of this my own work, beyond the actual writing and screenshots, and maybe some of the connective tissue.

I don't think any of this is 'right'.

Dark Souls are the only video games I play anymore. I'm playing it now, by writing this. You're playing it by reading this. Even if you're reading this and have somehow never played Dark Souls: you don't know it, but you are playing Dark Souls. Or it's playing you, I don't know.

Dark Souls games are like the Sutter Kane books from the movie In the Mouth of Madness, with you, hypothetical stranger, the hapless Sam Neill way out at the edge of the vortex being menaced by crazy people with axes. Only real. Not the menacing axes, part, though, that's not real. But the rest of it. Well, maybe it's real, but probably not for a whole lot of people. Like I'm sure you could find anecdotal evidence of Nyarlathotep-based axe murderers that play Dark Souls, but that's, like, not representative of any kind of larger societal trend.

If you are somewhat familiar with souls-lore but haven't read Scholar this is going to sound like bad fan faction. If you've read Scholar this is going to sound like crazy fan fiction. Bear with me.

Like, I say 'oh I don't understand the story,' but that's me being self-deprecating and admitting I'm mortal and therefore fallible and all that. When I say 'I don't understand...' I mean I have a Logan-level understanding of the first two games, and that makes me sound crazy to anyone with a Griggs-level understanding of the first game and a, let's say, Benhart-level understanding of the second game, so there aren't many people I can hash this stuff out with.

Right up front: I do not understand the timeline of 3, and am half-convinced it's designed to not be understood. Sometimes I think I'll crack the code, but then always end up feeling like I'm completely wrong. Additionally, there's a possibility that some of these stories, such as Farron and Carthus or Aldritch and Lothric, overlap to such a degree that, even were time and space not collapsing, thinking of them in terms of before-and-after might not even make sense. I mean, the in medias res finds us in the middle of what looks like a war between Blue and Red Lothric factions, Sulyvahn's church, and Londor, but like no one really brings it up.

EMMA: Civil war? What civil war? Things are fine. Nothing duplicitous here. Mind the cleric beast monster on your way out, love. Under siege? Whatever makes you think that? Run along, Ashen One.

Some final notes before beginning: the binoculars in Dark Souls 3 are ass. Big stank ass ass. Any time you use them it extinguishes your light source, making them useless for screenshots, particularly for fine detail. Which the game is full of. So, basically: this series will probably have way fewer screenshots.

Like, I'm not a game designer and have no idea what the limitations of the hard and software they're working with is, but patching that would've been on my 'things we need to knock out the day after launch' list.
 

Hooraaaaaaaaay consoles

Consequently, there will probably be fewer screenshots, particularly early on, since I'm going through the game as I write this and Carthus comes after the Abyss Watchers, who I don't want to kill yet because I might need screenshots and don't have the time or patience to fuck with another playthrough or swapping around save states because, let's be honest, I work on this for an hour or two a day, two or three days a week, plus any free time I can scrape out, usually balls-ass early before the wife or kid wake up, and it'll take months to finish a single post if I want to get it 'right.'

I'm going to start with Carthus, and try to build from there. I have a feeling that, inasmuch as time makes sense in this game, Carthus was one of the earliest events that's still documented well enough to construct a narrative around.

To immediately repeat myself: time and space are collapsing, at least in the Ashen One's time. Physical relations are not what they were in the previous games. By that I mean they got their physics all fuckered up. Time doesn't mean what it did, space doesn't mean what it did. In 2 we had some indications that there was some time/space warpy stuff going on, but effects still followed causes and it was mostly related to things like dimensional portals and pocket dimensions.

My underlying assumption will be that all the mentioned lands, unless otherwise noted in-game, have existed as long as each other. For example, the Crystal Sages started in Lothric Archives, and one left to join Farron to train the Legion's sorcerers, so Lothric and Farron have both existed somewhat continuously for multiple cycles (if Farron's current state could be said to be still 'existing').

So with that,

Blood and Bone

Long ago (maybe,) in a walled-off land far to the north (maybe,) the dead queen of a fallen kingdom began to amass an army from the corpses of her fallen empire. The kingdom, a place that only ever knew war and want, had a great many dead.

The queen was an evil forbidden poisonous snake enchantress witch queen of the dead. Among other things.

The queen allied herself with the Grave Wardens-- stalwart defenders of the world's dead. She bathed in dragon's blood, united the dead and hollow of fallen kingdoms, redefined the limits of puppetry, and raised a legion of blood-crazed madmen to terrorize the lands of law and light.

And this all happened after she was beheaded.

In the first days of the Age of Dark (maybe) the queen's empire, fallen Alken, was loosed upon an unsuspecting world, even if the snake queen and her Empire of the Dead were to be buried in history (such as it is).

Because when the Dark Lord took his Throne Death became the Curse, just as Dark had cursed the Light before her.

The dead poured across the world as a storm unending. Where her armies marched only desert remained, and from those armies of blood drunk hollows and scoured bones rose a Champion, a warlord the likes of which the world had never seen.

Wolnir

valr - Old Norse; 'corpse, body, or battlefield'

nýr - Old Norse; "new" 

After the Cursebearer took the Ascend ending we can assume that some kind of kingdom arose in some kind of golden age in Drangleic. My current best theorizing leads me to conclude that this kingdom, at least to some degree, was modeled after High Olaphis, itself modeled after Gwyn's High Anor period. This kingdom, which serves at stepping stone from the Drangleic of the second game to the Lothric we find in the third. 

This post-Drangleic, proto-Lothric kingdom, I suspect, was overseen by a number of in-world factions, with Elana acting as something like queen. The factions include The Blue Sentinels (both Heide and Volgen factions,) Carim (they seem to have been building power in Drangleic when we arrive and have a heavy, for Carim, presence in Shulva,) elements of Forossa and Mirrah, and possibly support from Gwyndolin's Neo-Anor (the hypothetical golden age overseen by Gwyndolin and Thorolund following the Link the Fire ending of DS1). 

Since Drangleic always falls to civil war I find it fairly safe to assume that, if something like the above is true, then something like a Neo-Alken would arise in opposition to Neo-Olaphis.

So, to switch to the third game, or rather the world that would become the third game when Neo-Olaphis were, eventually, forced out of Drangleic by something like a Neo-Alken following the Renounce ending:

Locations matter in Neo-Anor. For example, Lothric -- the kingdom founded by Neo-Olaphis in or near Lordran --  has a history rooted in a story rooted in the second game. Farron's history, on the other hand, represents a more-or-less unbroken continuation of the society of Forest Hunters that settled in Darkroot. In other words, the founders of Lothric, some of them at least, had an incomplete understanding of the history of Lordran but had first-hand knowledge of post-Cursebearer Drangleic, where Carthus first arose. 

Mythologically, the rise of Neo-Alken could be thought of as Nito/The Dead making a big move on the chessboard of history. It, of course, culminates in the Agdayne aspects of Nito (death as a kind of impartial Samurai Grim Reaper,) slowly falling to the more Way of White-esque aspects of Nito (death as a kind of slow process of stagnation and corruption).

Neo-Alken, eventually, produced a Champion, and before this Champion all the kingdoms known to Drangleic would be ground to dust:

Wolnir, king of kings, and beholden to no god, old or new.

Ironically this is the only picture I have of Wolnir. ARE THE MIRACLE CIRCLES A REAL LANGUAGE FROM ANSWER ME

Perhaps it was this atheistic conviction that led, indirectly, to the creation of the Sandworm. Lord Carthus, from lands long distrustful of faith, may well have repeated an atrocity born of ancient sin: condemning all who served the gods to death and burying them in a mass grave. I'm reasonably certain that this first event is what created the Rotten. This event repeated, in an Age of Dark rather than an Age of Light, had consequences.

It should probably be mentioned the possibility of the Carthus Sandworm being the remains of the descendants of the Lindelt Monastery, which would have probably pulled the strings for the Way of Blue in Neo-Olaphis. As far as I know this could be the case, but I think it's equally likely that it represents the Thorolund-era Way of White, and may have been the calamity that led to the WoW merging with Carim. The difference would be that, if it was Lindelt, the Sandworm would have been born in Drangleic and led Carthus to Lordran; if it was Thorolund it would have been born in Lordran and attacked Carthus before being driven back.

Warriors fought the ravaging worm in the crypts and hollow places beneath Drangleic (or possibly beneath Farron/Oolacile [if those are even different places). At some point the beast tumbled, or burrowed, into the ruins surrounding old Izalith, and the Army of the Dead followed to the lands of the First Lord.

The pyromancies of Carthus evolved in isolation, divorced from their own history by the purgings of lords past. The Throne that was taken by the Cursebearer had in all likelihood been created, or possibly repurposed, by a Daughter of Chaos; but that's the kind of rumor that was old when Carthus was young. Carthus' understanding of the roots of pyromancy was most likely rooted in whatever faith or history the Jugo pyromancers had. Jugo, like the Great Swamp, may have been a place with a kind of Astora-Anor relationship to Izalith pre-Chaos, or Jugo could have been visited by the wandering dark pyromancer of Oolacile 

But here before them, stumbled across by accident, was the Source of their war beacon: a land of demons and molten earth.

I'll be discussing things like why Smouldering Lake is and what happened to Izalith more in-depth later. The big takeaway here is that Wolnir came to Lordran from somewhere like Jugo or Drangleic, probably by an underground route, which set the stage for

• Carthus' takeover of Izalith/Demon Ruins
• The discovery of the Black Flame and the slide of Carthus into the Abyss.
• Probably a pretty big war between Carthus and Lothric/Irithyll that was eventually won (pyrrhically,) by the Abyss Watchers. 

Carthus pyromancies were crafted specifically for waging war, and The Carthus War Beacon itself is an internalized pyromancy. But rather than being used for self-protection (as with Iron Flesh or Flash Sweat,) it was crafted as an offensive spell, like Power Within, and like PW it relies on the caster's willingness to attack as an uncontrollable fire.

Their cloud spell, Acid Surge, was designed to break the arms and armor of their foes in combat, unlike the poison/toxic cloud spells of Eingyi, which would have been used to spread illness or dispatch foes while avoiding direct conflict. Cartus warriors 'attached great value to victory,' and the use of underhanded tactics like Acid Surge bothered them not at all, 'for where is the honor in death and scoured bones?' 

Of the pyromantic arts of Carthus, which were largely used to supplement their warriors' swordwork, the Flame Arc was seemingly the most traditional, and maybe the only Cart pyromancy that actually used fire. It's been theorized that Flame Weapon is a pyromancy so old that it's actually a flame sorcery (Old Witch Soul, DS2,) and the convergent evolution of the Flame Arc of Carthus likely symbolizes the 'return' of the distant heirs of the Lost Sinner to the ruins of Izalith.

It seems obvious, but needs to be stressed: Cathus was an army of the dead that primarily used life magic, that later went on to attempt conquer the fallen Kingdom of Life. That seems like at least two different kinds of necromancy. I say 'attempt' because we don't actually know how successful Wolnir was in Lordran, but we can assume that Carthus is likely the one responsible for the slaughter of the remaining demons.

 With that out of the way, let's skip back to Drangleic and try to figure out the Black Serpent.

Darkdrift

Carthus arose from the kingdom forged by Mytha and Agdayne, the Red faction to Elana's Blue. Mytha was, as you'll recall, turned into a serpent woman by Sihn's poison, and that Agdayne was a hexer that could have well been an incarnation of the Dead Soul. Agdayne, notably, was perhaps the first, Grave Warden, appointed personally by either Nito or some entity closely tied to Nito. Agdayne is also one of the most informed characters in the game. After meeting Vendrick he gives the Cursebearer Darkdrift as 'proof' of their visit to Undead Crypt and (presumably,) Agdayne's approval.

Darkdrift is a cursed sword with an unseen blade that, like its old master, 'exists imperfectly between planes.' The original owner was known as 'the one who gave us the first death,' and the blade was later carried by Yuria of Londor, who was 'said to have claimed a hundred lives' with the weapon.

Nothing can defend from Darkdrift.

This 'existing imperfectly between the planes' aspect of death is fleshed out further by Numbness, a hex that apparently moves the caster partially out of phase with their home dimension, says that 'if it cannot be observed it must not exist. Certainly a common conception, but one with far too many exceptions in this world.'

In my mind this is both explaining how the Dead Soul works and telling players that 'look, if you've puzzled your way down this far you're probably also the type to figure out that an old man doesn't really live in the sky and that your government lies to you about everything and that people believe a lot of dumb shit for no good reason and so on, so being hyperskeptical about BS-sounding explanatory mechanisms is probably second nature to you, but that kind of thing can be taken to far, especially when you start using it like a hammer to shut down new ideas or perspectives or potentially better explanatory mechanisms or, yknow, trying to figure out Nito's story.'

The One Who Gave Us the First Death: Agdayne references this character. It's unclear if this is the same character as the Great Dead One referenced by the Milfanito. I'll refer to these entities, which might just be one, as First Death and First Dead.

It would seem obvious that First Death means 'Nito,' but we don't know that it means Nito. To use a Biblical analogy, if Nito is Abel - the first person to lose a life - then Darkdrift's original master, the First Death entity, may have been Cain - the first person to take a life - if you see what I'm saying.

Unity becomes duality in the Soulsverse. Quelaag and Quelana, Nameless and Gwyndolin: I think this might also be true for Death.

First Dead - the murdered - is the more straightforward Nitoan entity. It gave birth to the Brightbugs, which grant comfort to those afflicted with death and dark. S/he also first introduced song into the world, granting it to the Milfanito that they might bring peace to the dark. This, I think, is also the stagnation/corruption aspect of Death embodied by Elana or the old Way of White.

Anyway, enough making myself crazy.

From Agdayne we learn all kinds of things.

• The dead view Dark as a kind of peaceful cradle to be embraced.
• In the past, humans were one with the dark, but 'the former King of Light...feared humans. Feared that they would usher in an age of dark.' This could refer to either/both Gwyn or King Olaphis.
• He finds it strange that humans never bother separating truth from fiction.
• 'Death is equitable, accepting. We will all, one day, be welcomed by her embrace.' 'Her' is likely used in a poetic sense, but I can't help feeling like he's referring to a specific deity, possibly Galib.
• 'May you find your peace one day.' 

Agdayne, a Fenito, was granted guardianship of the Undead Crypt. This is symbolized by the Crypt Blacksword, a weapon that has never seen the light of day and is 'steeped in dark.' This is the sword Agdayne actually uses in combat, not Darkdrift. We wouldn't even know Agdayne was carrying Darkdrift unless he gave it to us as 'proof' our visit and, probably to a lesser degree, of fuckouting Velstadt the Fucking Cleric.

The Crypt Blacksword that symbolizes Head Grave Wardenship is created from the Old Dead One Soul, which we pick up from the Rotten, who is clearly not a Grave Warden. I've outlined the Red and Blue factions of the Dead extensively in scholar, but this split seems especially noteworthy, mostly because I find it confusing. If the Rotten's Dead One Soul was used to craft Darkdrift and Agdayne gave us the Blacksword as proof of our visit to the Crypt the whole thing would, seemingly, be more parsimonious.

Which makes me think that there's some reason why this is not the case.

Anyway, I'm sure Nito and the Dead Soul will be talked about again, a lot, throughout this series. To get back to Carthus, this next section will discuss another Grave Warden from another age, Wolnir's squire.

He is described as an old man that 'began as a squire' that carried his 'master's accoutrements' until the end of his days. He seems like he's also the pyromancer that became a grave warden, as he seems to have survived Wolnir (sorta, we find Wolnir next to his body in the Abyss). His Umbral Ash unlocks the following items:

Carthus Rouge - probably the same substance labeled Bleeding Serum in the previous game, it's a substance obtained from 'viscous scarlet plant secretions,' harvested from a 'carnivorous plant' [bleeding serum]. 'Carnivorous plant' could refer to some kind of cannibal witchtree, but I'm only saying that because it's obvious. The bleeding caused by this secretion is standard bleeding, as opposed to Rotworm-based bleeding.

Kukri - 'Small throwing machete' that causes bleeding. Possible connection to Earthen Peak, as the Manikin's falcata-style saber was kukri-shaped. Although it's not a concrete connection, Gilligan sells lacerating knives and bleeding serum, and is first found in EP.

Yellow Bug Pellet - medicinal pill made from crushed insects. 'Used by Carthus Grave Wardens to repel a great sand worm. The worm tumbled to the catacombs and proceeded to dominate...Smoldering Lake.' This sandworm seems to be mostly made up of corpses, and its proficiency with lightning may have had something to do with Wolnir's disdain for the gods. As these pellets are implied to date to the grave warden's earlier days serving Wolnir, this gives us some idea of a timeline, with the Sandworm occurring before the Black Serpent, with the implication that the Sandworm led Carthus to Izalith, where something something black serpents and shadowless flames.

Wolnir's downfall was predicated on his discovering this 'Black Serpent' - a pyromancy that infringes on humanity, releasing black flames that traced the ground towards ones opponents. This would seemingly be the pyromancy long sought by Eygil and may serve as a connection to Brume and Nadalia, thematically if not narratively. It also puts Wolnir into the pyromancer category, which calls attention to the fact that he's an apparently highly-intelligent skeleton using life magic. With the history of pyromancy suppressed in Drangleic even more heavily than the history of the church or sorcery it's no surprise that Carthus gave rise to a completely divergent school of pyromancy completely ignorant of Izalith.

This black serpent was discovered by Wolnir from the Abyss, and inspired the arts of the grave warden/squire. Its creation may have been inspired by the 'light serpent' Wolnir had previously hunted.

The Grave Warden's pyromancy tome appears to have been burned, quartered, and reassembled, before being lost to and returned from the Abyss. It would not surprise me in the least if it were bound in flesh and inked in human blood.

The pyromancies discovered by the grave warden inflict dark damage and strike with 'weighty force.' The black flames 'born from the Abyss, bear no shadow,' and are 'the impenetrable fires of humanity.' I assume the same is also true of Elfriede, in some sense.

It's notable that these Black fireballs are the first 'traditional' lobbing-a-glob-of-basically-napalmed-bug-poop-at-someone pyromancies associated with Carthus, as they weren't devised until after their discovery of the Demon Ruins.

Wolnir was 'supposed' to Link the Flame and usher in the Age of the Dead, at least from the perspective of the Cycle of Flame. It's possible he, Wolnir didn't even know about Linking the Fire, or didn't care, or was intentionally misled by someone-or-thing. Wolnir was an atheist, though, so it's not like the Way of White would have had his ear, at least until the very end.

So, rather than taking some hypothetical Throne of Peace and reducing himself to something as finite and mutable as the Lord of an Age, Wolnir sought to usher in the Age of the Dead himself, mechanically and personally and perpetually, desiring as he did to rule the world until the end of time. This madness was, in all likelihood, what led him to tampering with humanity, whence the birth of the Black Serpent, which seems to be a metaphor, or whatever, for Mytha and Agdayne's Kingdom of Blood and Bone faction in the second game.

So, by not becoming lord and granting death to the Flame, Wolnir helped to turn the Dark Age into an Abyssal Age, assuming somebody hadn't already managed to do that.

The forces of Carthus were unlike any army before them: they were motivated by victory. This should be an obvious motivation in battle, but it's not the one generally used. 'Why do they fight?' generally returns answers like 'for glory,' or 'for the greater good' or 'in defense of their people' or 'to punish evil' or 'to amass power' or 'because they have stuff we want.' Certainly these may all have been motivations for Wolnir/Carthus, but they were secondary to the primary goal: 'to win.' Which they did.

I hope that gives us pause.

Law and Cast 1

Bishop - English derivation from the New Testament of the Christian Bible (Greek epískopos: "overseer", "guardian") is an ordained, consecrated, or appointed member of the Christian clergy who is generally entrusted with a position of authority and oversight.

Thorolund and the WoW have been documented as well as can be documented elsewhere, but my goal with this series is to plug the third game into the previous two, so I'll need to hit a few points I think are critical before discussing the merger with Carim in a later post.

The Way of White, in the first game, was overseen by a head bishop, which I take as a synonym for archbishop, charged with upholding the teachings of the gods and acting as guardian of law and caste. The bishop reported to Lloyd, Gwyn's 'uncle' and all-father of the gods, allegedly. Lloyd was seemingly the source of many of the Way of White's miracles, as well as the estus-inhibiting hunter charms, all of which seemingly came down to the larger church via the Allfather's apostle, the head bishop.

One reading of this is that there never was an all-father Lloyd, that is was the archbishop the whole time mwahahahaha, or that AfL was a basically decent if misguided, physically unimpressive person that had big ideas but needed someone like a bishop to see them realized.


A bishop was generally someone that acted like the governor of part of the larger church's territory. In the third game this larger church is headed by a Pontiff, or Pope, but the early Way of White was probably something more like a sect of pre-Nicaean Council Christians, where it was just gangs of Trump Supporters tearing society apart over whether or not cutting their dicks off to please father was to be compulsory, or just heavily encouraged.

And some of the sects were, I assume, good people, but because the vehicle of faith is so easy to pervert for evil even good acts would eventually be perverted, as those kinds of power levers can only be controlled for if you actively plan for it in advance, which no one ever does, or at least not well enough that the mechanisms to prevent corruption aren't being exploited by the original planner's spoilt-fuck kids and their toadies inside of 40 years.

Havel, of course, was the only named bishop in the first game, though not specifically tied to the Way of White, and his moniker 'The Rock' is shared with the Biblical Peter (from 'petra,' same as Petrus,) whose faith was such that it was to be the rock upon which Jesus founded his church. Whether Havel was the Bishop of Thorolund or not, we can assume that the Thorolund bishop would have aspired to similar ideals.

By the time we come across the sect in the first game the White has clearly entered 'spoiled' territory, where the wolves are far more murderous and sadistic than real wolves could ever be, while the flock is far more docile and useless than actual sheep ever are.

This iteration of the Way of White is obsessed with Nito, and their teachings have become so ambivalent towards which god they follow that one wonders if Nito was originally one of the 'real' church founders.Among other things, the Way of White of Thorolund seemed to be intricately linked to the creation and maintenance of the bonfire system, as is Nito via the Rite of Kindling. In fact, it would seemingly only be possible to create an item like Lloyd's Talismans if one started with a thorough understanding of the bonfires and estus.

These talismans, additionally, are used to put mimics to sleep, implying some connection to the church. Mimics are described as members of a 'long lost clan' that were branded and exiled for their sin of avarice. The Symbol of Avarice headpiece describes an 'incorrigibly covetous ancient deity' whose brand became a symbol of shame. The seemingly obvious connections here would be to either the Primordial Serpents or the Evil Eye of Astora, as Thorolund is also closely tied to Astora.

This Way of White is contrasted with Carim, a seemingly Chaotic Evil country with a church devoted to (possibly,) 3 dark goddesses: Caitha, Fina, and Velka. The relationship between the two countries, in the first game, is best outlined in Anastacia and Lautrec's storyline.

Lautrec - a murderous, selfish, irredeemable bastard - was embraced by the goddess Fina in his journey to Lordran. Whether he was exiled or was considered a 'right and proper' knight on mission is unknown (an echo of the WoW's 'missions,') but Fina's love came semingly with the charge of freeing Anastacia and delivering her to her goddess in Anor Londo.

Doesn't sound so bad when you put it like that, does it?

But consider Anastasia's position - a tortured, hobbled, muted prisoner whose only crime was being born an unwanted daughter of Astoran nobility - and you soon realize that death is the only freedom or peace Anastasia will ever know, and is a mercy that the WoW will almost certainly never grant her, to say nothing of the unlikeliness of Thorolund allowing her to be united with her Goddess, such as she is.

Consider also: the Black Eye Orb, though not an object related to Fina, ensures that once the Keeper's soul is delivered to the chapel, the fickle goddess's favor no longer embraces Lautrec.

Of course some asshole could always bring the soul back to the body like 'hey, you have a tongue now, how about using it to thank me,' but what kind of asshole'd do that?

"Oh boy back to being cursed thanks chosen one"

This relationship between Carim knights and Maidens of the WoW carries through to the third game, after the Way of White is usurped/merges with Carim.

As a final note: Ana's name literally means 'resurrection.' Although I can't find anything to connect directly to it, it's possible that this makes her the/a Firekeeper that 'went beyond death' and/or 'returned from the Abyss.'

Closing

That's that. Next up will be Farron, from Oolacile through to the Ghru and the Watchdogs. I don't know how much sense it will make. I'll probably also have a section outlining Astora in the first game, to be plugged into Thorolund, Carim, and the third game in a more distant post. If you're reading this after it first posts: it will probably look somewhat different, as I consider it a work in progress. Mostly because I need pics of the Catacombs and Wolnir, but also because I'm sure I'll change my mind about things.