AI 011 - This New Motive Power

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

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

Path of Knights

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gwyn and Izalith were in opposition.

Gwyn and Izalith were in cahoots.

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

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

The cahoots theory goes something like,

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

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

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

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

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

Path of Stone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Path of the Sentinel

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

The original Giant Sentinels were probably giants.

Not an original Sentinel.

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

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

Which brings us to Dark Souls 2.

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

These are, of course, the Ruin Sentinels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Path of Puppets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Occasionally you'll find examples of blues becoming reds.

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

Mom? Dad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, are characters like the Fume Knight Golems?

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

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

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

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

So there you go. Definitively inconclusive.

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

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

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

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

Path of Dragons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI 010 - Immemorial

You could almost argue that it's archtrees all the way down, branches becoming roots becoming beds becoming canopies.

You travel down through all these caves and caverns, lava pits and lost cities, and realize all of it is cradled in the branches of two understory layers of like five archtrees, three of them broken or severely damaged, in a forest of archtrees.

So you gotta think: if we dug down beneath Ash Lake would we find another Journey to the Center of the Earth?

And then in DS2 all of the archtree branches have been replaced with roots. Places like Amana and FoFG are rampant with giant tree roots, many of them new. One of them holding a big weird metal spike thing I've gone on for ages about in Scholar.

We know that the Age of Ancients, from the perspective of a human or even a god, was static and unchanging. This is despite the fact that the presence of dragons, animals, trees, societies, and the other stuff clearly indicates that some kind of living and evolving ecosystem was undeniably present, but, because Socrates is mortal, the life cycle was occurring on a much slower timeline than for those creatures touched by Fire.

There are many obvious analogies you can draw: man harnessing fire, alien invasions, the nature of plagues, the Internet. The dodo are meeting White People for the first time, is what I'm saying, with the birth of the First Flame.

This post is dealing with stuff leading up to that. Probably not everything, because there's quite a lot, but the primary focus is going to obviously be archtrees.

So what is an archtree and how does it work?

Tah-dah!

Dual Phase Evolution

This is me basically paraphrasing the WP of the subtitle, only adapted for Souls physics, inasmuch as we understand them. The general idea is that, in relative terms, ecosystems tend to remain in a kind of stasis, called a 'global' phase, until some big upheaval happens, at which point everyone is scrambling to adapt -- the 'local' phase -- which eventually leads to a slightly-different global phase.

The global phase -- presented as timeless and unchanging -- was the Age of Ancients: where everything was more-or-less balanced, and any kind of evolutionary excitement was occurring in terms of very slow specializations within an established environmental niche. In fantasy terms: the elves from Lord of the Rings are presented as being creatures much more at-home in a global phase, as are dragons and hollows in Dark Souls.

And Then There Was Fire

An archtree explodes, or something. The Dawn of the Age of Fire.  

At this point the Souls-verse enters a local phase, marked by jockeying for position amid the new resources in the new normal, and the new normal seems to really, really, favor seeds. 

Four of these seeds (not really, but, but they're presented as such,) grow into four little bushes by virtue of being closest to the mortally wounded tree. They, mostly, decided how to divvy up all that pine tar and warmth and light.

Now, for what follows we need to understand that the Age of Fire, even though it's in a local phase from the perspective of archtrees and dragons, it is also in a global phase from the perspective of anything that doesn't have access to the four Flame-derived humours, and vice versa. Jesus that sentence made my eyes cross I hope it came out right. The Age of Ancients is still occurring, with Lordran's Age of Fire being a temporary aberration from 'normal,' but also the Age of Fire, by the time Gwyn took over, was the new normal as well. 

The 'cycle of Flame' seems to be

1. Birth/Fire
2. Growth/Light 
3. Decline/Dark 
4. Death/the Dead.

This means that the new local phase, referred to as the 'dawn of the age of fire,' and similar, was the period of Izalith's rule.  kingdom seems like it was the most culturally advanced at the time of the First Flame, so it would follow that she would have been the First Lord. 

I mean, when we first meet Gwyn he's in a fucking cave what's a sun god doing in a cave like a fucking frankenstein huh? He took over after the Chaos Flame, which was Iz's attempt to resolve the fade.

But the archtrees are still there, underneath it all, and because archtrees are still there everything else that was of the Ancient world is still, hypothetically, there. Or could be again. 

Except from the perspective of these new rosin-and-turpentine powered upstart bushes, none of this stuff is even alive because it can't even really die. Plus, when cellulose and petrified wood was all there was, the little bushes near the Great Sap Pine had fuck all chance of ever becoming big trees themselves, right, so fuck the big trees.

Plus who wants to be a tree? It's boring and everyone wants your sap.

A dragon is immortal. A hollow is immortal. Ground into dust, diffused as moonlight, carved up into armaments: a dragon is immortal. Maybe not sapient or sentient or aware, but alive in a 'Lord Cthulhu Lied Dead But Dreaming' sense. Because dragons, like archtrees and hollows, are Ancient. Things that are ancient behave, if anything, like a kind of cellulose-based amoeba that, over a long-enough timeline, can turn into a tree the width of, like, a planet I suppose.

Or a very exclusive nightclub.

An Archtree, in a sense, is its bark, same a real tree. You can cut a strip of bark off from around a tree, couple inches wide, and the tree will die. On the other hand, you can saw half the limbs off and, so long as it still have enough leaves and no parasites get in, the tree will probably be fine. But, like, the local/global phase thing again.

Trees are a circle and bark is a ring. That doesn't directly relate to anything, it's just important thematically.

So this amoebic, prokaryotic, mineral-based cellulose (soululose?) stuff that makes up archtrees behaves, in a lot of ways, like wood. In other ways it behaves like rock. it can take the form of tree trunks, branches, roots, and stalagmites & stalagtites.

When left undisturbed in an 'unformed' (free of Flame or direct sunlight) location, a tree will just grow straight up, as with the Great Hollow, until it is either injured or finds (plain ole regular) sunlight, at which point it attempts to take branch. Probably water or soil, as well, at which point it attempts to take root. In the presence of sunlight branches will appear as they do on real world trees, but when underground it doesn't exert the effort, and, yknow, the inverse for being above ground and finding water.

The Tree Is Dead Hail New Tree

Archtrees die. This is, like, the equivalent of a dragon becoming inert. What seems to happen is that either the bark will become too thick, old, or damaged and will petrify, or the core becomes hollowed out, I suspect due to infection or its sub-systems turning parasitic.

When the bark dies or is severely injured the exposed core will begin to behave like bark and attempt to take both branch and root through the old bark, using it as both nutrients and an anchor to grow the new canopy/understory.

When the core dies/is injured it begins to hollow. This is experienced as a gradual, or possibly very sudden, drop in elevation for the 'top' of the archtree. This is probably also fatal for the exposed bark as well, unless there are sufficient nutrients around, but that generally requires the presence of other archtrees.

The Great Public Health Hazard Tree Fort of Anor Londo.

The Great Hollow is actually really really healthy for an archtree and because of its environment.

So archtrees, even leaving out the 'potentially infinitely respawnable given enough time' are pretty sturdy, but not indestructible. We see fields of them being burned down by Izalith, we find their smoking remains at the end of the Dragon War, craggy fingers fused into stone, we find an endless plain of lava in Drangleic where some mad, prehistoric engineer found a miraculous way to make titanite by rendering an entire forest down to charcoal and smog.

Archtrees can also be unmade, corroded out of existence, by the abyss of Manus. This mechanic is referred to in the sequel as Dark Fog, and seems to be the result of humanity existing in a vapor, rather than a liquid, flame, or distinct motes. In other words, a dense fog of disembodied willpower desperately seeking purpose that, like a drowning person, drags anything it can into its clutches.

I don't know what causes it to unwrite geography, but the 'lost' sections seem to be gone forever, although if the tree is healthy enough the wounds will at least be able to seal themselves. The closest equivalent I can come up with for what might be happening is what Nito does to that root in the intro cinematic.

Within and Upon

Trees need ecosystems. Bugs to carry pollen, animals to carry seeds, the right balance of microbes and decaying plant matter and sun and air and water and so on.

So who served the Ancients?

I've mentioned, many times, that I think hollows and giants come from seeds. The seed/larva, if unable to take root/branch, will instead develop limbs and sensory organs, 'hatch,' and begin looking for a way to either take root or perform some suitable service to the parent tree/ecosystem.

Fallen Giant birthing a tree.

Hollows live both above and below 'ground,' but in their natural state seem to prefer subterranean environments. It's possible that the division between the gods and men originally came down to this kind of dwarf/elf dynamic.

The presence and implied presence of an entire world's worth of mammals and birds would seem to indicate that at least some of these creatures predated Fire. It's possible that they're different breeds of evolved sub-tree, or the result of seeds grown under certain conditions. Includes things like rats, dogs, wolves, birds, horses, steer, goats, sheep and so on. Many of them may have been bred by colonies of seedlings in societies ranging from nomadic hunter-gatherers to early agricultural communities.

I mean, you don't see many wooden castles anymore, but they used to be everywhere.

Seeding Giant Tree

Another hypothesis is that any big, healthy branch or root of a large enough tree could itself take root/branch/leg, and thereby become a 'descendant' of an archtree. Given the nature of the hollow log in Ash Lake, we could be looking at something like the birth of a giant.

Mushrooms, of course, probably predate the First Flame. They seem to occur naturally and flourish under the right conditions, such as in the Great Hollow, beneath Huntsman's Copse, and probably in the caves around Darkroot/Farron. This might be because of the relationship between blood and lightning, as mushrooms are the source of Gold Pine Resin.

Elizabeth, famous racist and liar, is generally credited, in Drangleic, as being the godmother of alchemy, and in the Lothric period they were widely known as scholars (although this might be them stealing credit from the 'elves' of Oolacile).

YOU KNOW I'M A NECROMANCER RIGHT? NO, WAIT, NOT NECK ROMANCE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU

It's a contentious point, but I think I know what happened to the mushroom people outside of Darkroot.

There is a particularly opaque class of enemy in the second and third game. They appear in groups in seemingly random locations. They're weak, but have a lot of health. Their melee attacks involve kind of ineffectually leaping at their much taller foe and trying to headbutt them with their lure.

More often, they'll rely on their 'ranged' attack, a short-range AoE 'breath' class pyromancy that can inflict poison or, sometimes, corrosion. They are insects, which also predated the First Flame, and they are parasitic, although often symbiotic and even familial towards their host.

In profile they look like mushrooms.

There Jugo.

Which transitions use nicely to Izalith, who had a royal family before the Age of Fire, and were the kind of society that could create the Gold Hemmed Black Robes that, if they really are the same as the Prayer Set, were really incredibly well made.

Plus they demonstrate that the bugs that live in and on archtrees took hollows for hosts/partners before disparity. It's possible that, yknow, the bug was Master and the hollow was Blaster, but in a much more, yknow, Ferngully-esque environment.

The people of Izalith seem to have been, like, spiders, ants, maybe even weevils and scorpions, but there were probably other invertebrates present in the unformed world, crabs and oysters and so on. Other vertabrate species, of course, were things like serpents, lizards, and dragons, and possibly amphibians as well.

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.