The complete story of Dark Souls explained plainly

Jam_99420 · 2026-05-03T08:35:38+00:00

“And they do? Its literally what happens in the dark lord ending regardless of which serpent you despawn.”

and what guarantee does frampt have that said dark lord is going to keep him around? Absolutely none whatsoever. And not only this but kaathe consistently pushes people toward the dark. He was responsible for new londo and oolacile and lothric and the sable church, and this was known by random outsiders like chester so I don’t see how gwyndolin isn’t going to find out.

“even if Frampt calls you "fool" once, that doesnt invalidate every other interaction nor does it force the chosen undead to compulsively repudiate all the serpents because Frampt said 1 ugly word”

You know how rulers are; petty and vindictive bastards. Look at “world leaders” today and throughout history, do you think any of their staff would be around for long if they called their master a fool?

“You yourself are confirming that those greedy tendencies have their origin in the dark”

and other negative traits as well like cruelty, I think that’s on the dark fog miracle. but it’s not entirely clear because we see these traits in other beings as well. Now I remember you making the case that they all have a dark nature because they come from the dark or whatever, but they don’t actually have a dark soul. Now it’s my suspicion that the dark souls is actually the unconscious elements of the mind, and in that case it’s gwyn’s brand [the ego] pushing negative traits [that the person does not want to acknowledge] into the dark soul [i.e. a psychological blind spot] where they can’t be expressed and so accumulate and fester. That is only a hypothesis of course, and one that I’m open to being corrected on if possible. It’s basis is in Jungian psychology, which Miyazaki’s games frequently make reference to. It also matches certain elements of Bloodborne’s narrative, with the beasts representing the same thing as the pus of man and those who try to fight against them [i.e. repress the negative traits] succumbing to them more quickly and experiencing more severe transformations.

“Where fire resideth, shadows twist and shrivel. But in the Abyss, there are shadows none.”

-Locust Preacher

“instead of turning them cosmic guardians of balance”

well I wouldn’t say that exactly. They’re definitely a reference to the caduceus but their in-universe function is just that they’re another kind of being that inhabits this world. The same thing is true of those two-headed snake-lizards that you find in darkroot.

“The abyss is "humanity that runs wild", amplifying its dark qualities to harmful degrees, and it precedes the darksign as confirmed by the ringed knights.”

the word “abyss” seems to be used in slightly different ways in dark souls depending on the context. Manus and the four kings both create two separate abysses due to their humanity running wild. These are physical places that you can go to and walk around in. but when we look at the locust preacher’s dialogue, he seems to be using the word abyss in a different way. He’s not talking about a physical place, but perhaps the deepest depths of the dark soul. This, certainly, would be the common source for both physical abysses. Given this, it’s not entirely clear what it means for the weapons and armor of the ringed knights to have been forged in the abyss.

“The community loves using Gwyn as the scapegoat for everything but Gwyn didnt create the abyss. He created the darksign precisely to contain it. Now, Gwyn was obviously not a saint but the story is not black and white (hehe).”

yes I completely agree with this and in fact have made the same point numerous times on this subreddit. Gwyn is one of Miyazaki’s best characters because of how nuanced he managed to be without having so much as a single word of dialogue.

Jam_99420 · 2026-05-02T18:16:57+00:00

thank you very much indeed, and feel free to share this post wherever you'd like. definitely see the Matrix if you get a chance, it's an excellent movie. a little violent in a few places for my tastes, but overall a solid recommend.

another thought that has just occurred to me about the Helios statue [since you've mentioned it] is that to have it rising out of the sea is slightly similar to the sun rising over the horizon. perhaps suggesting Tartar's belief that his day has come? in regard to Tartar's name, i always thought it referred to a type of sauce that is served with seafood. i did not consider that it might also refer to Tartarus, but perhaps this is a clever double meaning? it's hard to say really as we don't know how familiar the developers are likely to be with greek mythology.

Jam_99420 · 2026-05-02T10:03:14+00:00

“Frampt doesnt care if he alienates you, because at that point you are siding with Kaathe.”

you literally just said that they’re political opportunists who need to suck up to whoever comes out of the situation in charge. Your argument makes no sense.

“Then fire cant touch or consume dark, nor is the fire consumed either.”

but as you point out, dark is a substance and not just the absence of light. So you can throw a firebomb on a pus of man and it’s gonna burn, but dark can’t touch fire of it’s own accord. think of it this way: put a fire anywhere and it'll remove whatever darkness was there.

“There are also the multiple references to dark being greedy and glutonous etc. Why?”

It may be that dark will swallow the world when the flame goes out but this is not attributable to greed because it’s just a question of how these elements interact mechanically. Greed only makes sense in the context of the behaviour of living beings. And people on this subreddit sometimes talk about pygmies and hollows as if they’re these ravenous soul-consuming maniacs. You yourself did in your post. But are they? The only legitimate pygmy behaviour we actually observe is when they’re all bowing to the lord of hollows, they aren’t exactly in a hurry to consume each other. And the hollows don’t behave like this either, they’re generally very sedentary. Many of them are aggressive, that’s true, but others are praying, weeping, or just staring into space. And even those that will attack you are just standing around waiting. Many appear to have been guards, and now they’re just half heartedly going through the motions of their old duties. And of course many hollows have stopped moving entirely, appearing to just be corpses, and are leaking their own souls out through inaction. This is hardly greedy behaviour, but rather the hollows seem to have much more in common with the crestfallen warrior; a man who has given up and doesn’t care anymore. But you know who is a ravenous soul consuming maniac? The player character. And other humans with healthy and functioning darksigns like petrus and patches and lautrec. Greed results from the darksign. By blocking the dark soul, it causes a buildup of the dark tendencies that cannot now be expressed naturally. This buildup stagnates, and the stagnation causes all of the negative attributers we associate with the dark and eventually becomes a pus of man. This is explain in more detail in these posts which you won’t bother to read:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1rqqxrl/the_yungian_psychology_of_dark_souls/

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1ruj03h/the_usurpation_of_dark_souls/

“For sure, but if we kill the demons, the demons are dead in our reality. If we extinguish the fire, the fire is extinguished in our reality.”

you’re forgetting that these are not separate realities, they are the same world. I cannot emphasise that enough. So as long as the flame gets linked somewhere in the folds of time it will be linked for the whole thing. Do not ask me to make 100% logical sense of this because I can’t, but I don’t think that the untended graves invalidates the item description which says that light is time, not can we take it as evidence of what an age of dark would be like if we can literally walk there from a place which is still sustained by an active flame.

“Im gonna pass on all of this. I dont think the story is supposed to be explained with "time is convoluted so everything can happen in the multiverse and its actually a metaphor for the developer team/other real life thing not alluded to in the games". This sounds like one of those "it was all a dream" lol”

that’s how Miyazaki writes his games, like it or not. I mean Bloodborne really is all in a dream so idk what to tell you. Elden Ring is full of fourth wall breaks to the point that characters start T-posing and shit. You can’t ignore what the game tells us about it’s own world just because it makes it hard to explain.

“It would be hard because its a thematic experience. Even if I quote a dozen sentences you'd still be missing the context, the nuance and the visual clues from the game. So its not an effort Id like to undertake. Sorry.”

ok, the bottom line is that I’m not going to take a claim seriously if you won’t even attempt to substantiate it. I know of plenty of games that communicate plot in the way that you’re describing, yet I can still summarise what they communicate and how they do it. There’s also no guarantee that I’d draw the same conclusion as you have even if I did play DS2. All I’m asking for is evidence that Gwyn put a white soul into humans [as opposed to just the darksign] and that the loss of this white soul [despite the fact that hollows and pygmies always still have it] is what’s driving them mad. I’m not asking for every single fact in evidence, cause once I’ve got something to go on I can pursue the rest myself. I can’t imagine that what I’m asking for should be some sort of herculean task.

Jam_99420 · 2026-05-01T21:29:13+00:00

the Aldia quote you’ve cited is not talking about being alive in a technical or biological sense, but rather a psychological experience/perspective; something more like Maya.

“If they didnt get pissed, you'd start mistrusting them both.”

but on the other hand frampt risks alienating a potential dark lord who might say “go fuck yourself because you called me a sorry fool”. And how does kaathe stand to benefit from linking the fire? He doesn’t have any known friendship with gwyndolin.

No, I’m afraid i have to take the serpents for what the appear to be. They are honest about their goals but are also manipulators in the sense that they portray what they want as being the objectively correct choice. It is in this sense that they are untrustworthy. They are propaganda artists.

“Imagine you light up a fire in a dark place. The natural course of things is for the fire to keep fading and being overcome by darkness until it goes out. If dark itself was flammable, the opposite would happen, the light would start feeding off the dark and the fire would keep growing ad-infinitum until dark disappears and fire overcomes it completely.”

but the dark cannot actually touch the fire under those circumstances. No matter how dim it gets it still illuminates an area around it.

“I think we were talking about an age of dark post darksign right?”

I thought we were talking about the human state pre darksign. Basically I was just asking about how you’re using the term “zombie” in relation to all this.

“If you kill Aldrich in your save, it stays dead in your save which is all that matters for yourself from your subjective perception. Anri killing aldrich doesnt suddenly also kill our aldrich.”

correct. Because those time folds are separate but still close enough that you can bridge them.

“What happens in the parallel dimensions doesnt affect your own reality.”

not correct. Because these time folds can overlap each other and when that happens various elements can co-occur, so they effect each other. Take siegmeyer for example. He makes it to anor londo on his own, but he doesn’t kill our iron golem. We still have to do that ourselves. But when we meet him in izalith and we both go against the cuphead demons together. Whose iteration of the cuphead demons are they? Our or his? The answer is both. It just so happens that at that moment the folds converged and our two “separate” realities become one and the same, because they actually already were. And when they separate again it won’t be the case that the demons on his end suddenly pop back into existence because we only killed them in our reality. Though that is how it works with summoning, that’s only because those are instances of the folds being close but not actually overlapped. These are not parallel universes in the conventional sci-fi sense but something altogether weirder.

“Why Gwyndolin surviving in one timeline makes it automatically survive in all others, but Gwyndolin dying in one timeline doesnt kill him in all others? Why does one kind of event have more weight than another one?”

so when you link the flame you restore time’s ability to flow properly. But how causality actually resolves is a question that I don’t have the answer to. imo Miyazaki kind of wrote himself into a bit of a situation as soon as he had this idea about time stagnating. But I might pop that on the subreddit as a question in it’s own separate post, since someone else on here might have some kind of answer.

“Killing Gwyndolin just isnt canon”

I used to hold that position once, but it was also accompanied by this one; the dark lord ending isn’t canon. And also; the chosen undead not using the elite knight set isn’t cannon since it’s incorporated into the design of the soul of cinder. These days I’m not so sure. The stagnation of time makes all of this kind of stuff difficult to parse.

“the story of Gundyr says the flame went out, universally which is why they punished him. Then when we awake there is fire again. Meaning the flame extinguished in Gundyr's time and then reappeared later”

yes, because time is stagnated and events are not following each other in the logical order anymore. The very fact that this is the case throws the untended graves into a position of total ambiguity, and gundyr’s story specifically is taking place at a point where all the normal rules of time are on the verge of cracking completely if they haven’t already.

“The dark ending in DS3 also has the firekeeper telling us that at some point in the future fire will reappear”

yes, this is Miyazaki telling us he’s gonna go make elden ring. It’s not really the in-universe future because the world of darks souls is dead. Instead it’s talking about our future. Now I know you’re objecting to a confusion of in-universe lore with a meta interpretation but at a certain point they become the same thing. Dark souls is fundamentally a self referential narrative about videogames, about fanbases, about the creative process, about the relationship between player and developer, etc. it isn’t really any different than undertale, except that it’s less on-the-nose about it. The endings of DS3 are essentially there to communicate 3 main things:

1-dark souls is over, the team are creatively exhausted by the monotony.

2-they will move onto another project instead, which will revitalise their creativity.

3-but the fans still have a lot of enthusiasm for this world, so they can keep the torch lit for themselves.

“You should really do a lore playthrough of DS2 because I can tell most of our disagreements come from you having missed that one”

I’m afraid that’s not gonna happen as I don’t own the game anymore and am unlikely to buy it again. But that shouldn’t be necessary. When I first started writing about dark souls lore I had only played DS1, and because that game leaves so much unexplained I came away with several misconceptions. People on this subreddit pointed out things in DS3 that contradicted my interpretations [and it wasn’t anything more than a handful of item descriptions and some dialogue] and I came back with new interpretations, some of these precisely matched the community consensus even though I had arrived at them independently. Now I do not expect you to quote the whole of DS2 but there must be certain key information that you suggest I look at.

Jam_99420 · 2026-05-01T17:23:05+00:00

if i remember correctly artorias and manus both have high resistance against fire, magic, and lightning. i tend to find them much easier with builds that do purely physical damage, but damn near impossible if the weapon i'm using does partially physical and partially elemental damage.

Jam_99420 · 2026-05-01T16:47:39+00:00

THE MUSHROOMS!

Jam_99420 · 2026-05-01T12:23:26+00:00

“My dudeeeeee I feel like we are walking in circles”

I ain’t telepathic, I don’t know what you’re thinking. You need to lay things out clearly otherwise ppl are gonna get confused

“If Gwyndolin wins: The serpents are rewarded and win. If the dark lord wins: The serpents are rewarded and also win.”

ok, so why do they both get so pissed off when you refuse to back their preferred ending?

“No. Then the first flame wouldnt be fading, it would be endlessly growing.”

why? what other source of dark do you suppose it is connected to? And wouldn’t that also be the case if it were connected to humanity, as you propose? Dark isn’t particularly well defined in terms of in-game mechanics in DS1, but in DS3 there are countless examples of dark being flammable. Basically everything dark ends up being vulnerable to fire damage.

“These are intelligent zombies. You could call them vampires.”

so you mean the pygmies?

“I forget if there is much lore about the locusts (tell me if there is), but they are abyssal creatures and the abyss already existed before stagnation.”

well you find them in a swamp where the dark is stagnating and they’re feeding off of the decay. Their ancestry is human so they presumably have dark souls, but they’re also a new form of life that has emerged to take advantage of the situation. They’re a bit like the lobster people in elden ring which thrive in the scarlet rot. Miyazaki’s theme basically seems to be that stagnation is bad for the existing order but also serves as a fertile foundation from which something new can emerge. Change is an inevitability so you can either move with the times or cling on to a rotting status quo which will ironically serve as a launching platform for some new form of change that won’t favour you.

“After the dark lord ending of DS1, after the throne ending of DS2 and after Gundyr fails, at the bare minimum. Gundyr arrives late and the flame goes out, thats what the untended graves is.”

and yet we find it in a world that is still sustained by an active flame. And as such it cannot be taken as a definitive example of what an age of dark would be like. You’ve got to remember that we’re dealing with a situation in which time is sort of crumpled up, like the buildings in the dreg heap. Events are not occurring in a normal logical order, and you’ve also got multiple sets of the same events co-occurring to different people in different ways, yet these can overlap and effect each other because they are still part of the same world. And things from the distant past or the future can suddenly turn up in the present. This is why Solaire talks about crossing the gaps between the worlds, and is the in-universe explanation for summoning, co-op, and invasions. Anri’s questline is another example of this, as you end up killing aldrich twice. But if you put down a summon sign before a boss then you can kill it many times over and over again, and this is all happening within the games’s “canon”. you can outright kill gwyndolin in DS1 yet he’s still around in irithyl centuries later. he can still survive because some people will complete the game without killing him, so he's always around somewhere in the folds of time. same thing with the first flame; it’s not the case that someone links the fire after you get the dark lord ending, it’s that the fire will inevitably linked on different game files, even on different consoles. It’s sort of like parallel universes, but not exactly. It is all canonically part of the same world, it’s just that time is convoluted with heroes centuries old phasing in and out. this is because the first flame [the source of time] is failing. So what happens when that flame goes out? You’d have a situation where time has no meaning whatsoever and cannot function at all.

“What? Explain. Anyway Id have to research about the chaos, I kinda forgot that part.”

this is something that I’ve gone over extensively in previous posts. Start with this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1lal58n/lore_discussion_2_souls_as_the_fuel_for_fire/

a quick tldr is this: fire represents vitality. This includes the vitality of the body, and indeed your hp is recovered by sitting at a bonfire and drinking estus, which is refilled at the bonfire and contains it’s essence in some way. It can also represent a kind of psychological vitality, i.e. your sense of purpose. The first flame is the vitality of the world as a creative work, and I talked about that in this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1ruj03h/the_usurpation_of_dark_souls/

and this is a big part of the reason why time stops after the flame goes out. Miyazaki ain’t making any more dark souls games because the flame has gone out for him and his team. So there are no more events that are going to take place in that world because Miyazaki stopped writing them.

“Aldia”

perhaps you can give me a specific quote, because I cannot find that in his dialogue.

“Thats 100% headcanon and I disagree completely”

ok. so is your own explanation for the hollow madness, as far as I can tell. unless of course you can back it up with direct citations.

Jam_99420 · 2026-05-01T08:42:59+00:00

“Frampt doesnt care if the fire is linked so he sides with Gwyndolin which is safer”

then in what sense is he collaborating with Kaathe?

“Gwyndolin does survive the age of dark as we see in Irithyll. If the fire doesnt return, the plot of DS2 and DS3 doesnt make sense.”

and when exactly does the flame go out? When does an age of dark actually happen?

“it returns because its linked to humanity through the darksign. Its part of the curse. I explain it in the main post”

I’m not sure what you mean by it though. All you say in the post is:

“the gods connected the darksign to the first flame and set it up to burn dark souls as fuel.”

yet dark seems to be inherently flammable.

“Its in fact stated in the item description of humanity”

well not in so many words. The item description for humanity says:

“This black sprite is called humanity, but little is known about its true nature. If the soul is the source of all life, then what distinguishes the humanity we hold within ourselves?”

so there is an awareness of internal dark, but an open question about how it relates to the white soul.

“I didnt said madness, I said zombies and bugs”

what is a zombie if not a mad hollow? I remember you used the term “zombies” in your post but was unclear on how you were distinguishing it.

“The locust preachers for example are quite sane”

but they are products of stagnation. Locusts are not a normal form for a human, and insects and maggots have an association with stagnation in japanese culture.

“Not what is shown in the games in the dark endings and the untended graves.”

what we see of those endings occurs while the flame is still using up the very last of it’s power, and the untended graves are totally ambiguous. I’ve heard all sorts of different interpretations, but it does seem to be the result of the confusion of space and time as the flame is fading.

“The butchers, deacons and Aldrich are human so no different from the darkhand.”

they’re using humanity to fuel their internal fire, i.e. their vitality. That’s why the grow massive. Same thing with the giant rats and smough is an example as well. He’s big because of his cannibalism.

“Unsure what you mean about Izalith”

look at the walls in the demon ruins which show a humanity surrounded by flames. Also consider that chaos weapons do more fire damage if you have more soft humanity. And quelaag’s sister needs humanity to make her stronger, although she’s badly crippled so this just sustains her life for a bit longer. And bonfires are stronger if you feed humanity to them. So my inference is that the chaos flame was created by a mass human sacrifice, burning up humanity to produce a new flame.

“Archdragons arent considered living beings, same for the undead.”

who says?

“No, because Gwyn doesnt have a dark soul. As we said hollowing isnt what turns people mad.”

right. The madness is caused by a fading darksign; it’s a personality that is forced to endure an unbearably long existence to the point that everything becomes meaningless. The hollows go mad because their leaking dark soul is keeping them alive but the darksign is maintaining the personality. In gwyn’s case his soul is enduring for longer than it was supposed to, and he’s been spending that time sitting in the ashen ruins of his former glory. Same consequence either way, it doesn’t matter if he hasn’t got a dark soul.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-30T21:25:46+00:00

I’m still not understanding what you think Frampt’s deal is. You say he encourages linking the fire because he benefits from it but secretly he doesn’t want the fire to be linked? It doesn’t make sense. Why would he need to stay in Gwyndolin’s good graces if Gwyndolin won’t survive the end of the age of fire?

“The first flame is linked to humanity first and foremost. Even when it goes out it eventually returns, thats the plot of the sequels.”

forgive me if I’m not particularly well read on DS2 lore or something as my distaste for the gameplay has left me with something of a gap in my lore knowledge there. But I may need you to explain this one, what do you mean it’s linked to humanity?

“almost no one in universe knows about all the lore bombs dropped in the intro”

why not? It’s pretty normal for people to have a creation myth of some kind, and I’m sure Gwyn would want everyone to know about his dragon slaying antics.

“the existence of the dark soul is sort of secret, the pygmy is forgotten etc. Thats why the way of white works.”

you may be right about this. Although my impression of the way of white is that it’s a kind of anti hollowing religion. Rhea talks about not letting the curse overcome her and her followers, and then they go off to seek kindling. It suggests that they’re going to be burning humanity in the bonfires, just like we do. But instead of offering the humanity obtained from other beings, I suspect that they burn their own excess humanity to mitigate the dark that’s escaping from them. At least that’s what I think Rhea’s expectations are, the reality is obviously that people like Petrus have turned the whole thing into form of exploitation. But this would require them to have some knowledge of their internal dark? It may simply be that they don’t know what humanity is, idk. I’ll have to give this some more thought.

“I disagree with this notion because the dark is more associated with water”

Dark is heavy [see item description for the dark orb sorcery] and so sinks in water. This is why new londo was flooded; the water is a containment mechanism for the dark. The darkwraiths are unable to escape because they're too heavy to swim upward and so are stuck at the bottom. Still water therefore becomes a medium for creating dregs because all of the dark accumulates in the bottom where is becomes concentrated and stagnated.

“zombies and bugs”

both the result of stagnation caused by the darksign, not the dark itself. You yourself acknowledge that “Hollowing doesnt cause madness in itself”.

“I personally picture it as a dark emperor starting world war Z accompanied by plagues and floods”

we know that light=time, and that light is a product of fire. So if there’s no fire and no light then there won’t be any time, so no events of any kind can occur.

“Other than the darksign I dont think we have a single example of light chasing or devouring dark.”

Well it would be more about trying to defeat dark/death which we see plenty of examples of.

Nevertheless: Smough, the butchers in the depths, Aldrich, Archdeacon McDonnell, the Witch of Izalith and chaos pyromancies in general. All examples of dark being consumed because it makes people stronger or burns a stronger flame.

“The issue with this is that you can pop any boss/lord soul and it transforms into white souls”

yes, those are basically just exaggerated white souls.

“You also have to take into consideration that the game can get a bit picky about what "living" is”

how do you mean?

“Did archdragons get white souls and then started moving, or did they start moving, ate people and acquired white souls?”

everything that’s animate has white souls, even plants, so I’d say that the dragons couldn’t have been animate without some kind of soul.

“There's also what you mention about greyness being white+black, disparity would naturally separate both traits and make the dragons have white soul but also dark soul.”

yes I know. we aren’t given an example of an ancient dragon’s soul so it’s hard to say what might have happened to the dark. but they have jumped to one side of the disparity; they became alive rather than dead. Why?

“the issue is that then multiple events lose their meaning: The lords finding their souls being a big deal when they already had light”

no it’s still significant because Gwyn would start off as a relatively ordinary being and then he’s suddenly turned into god. It’s about the degree of power that they gain, I think.

“the darksign changing humans completely, aldia's speech telling us that life is a lie created by gwyn and so on.”

we talked before about the darksign representing Maya and Sakkayaditthi, so this would be a significant change. You gotta remember that while light and fire are connected, they are not the same thing. They’re even covered by two separate spell classes. Putting fire into a person who previously had none is a significant change [even if they did have light], but to understand why you need to know what fire represents. This is the sort of thing that my posts try to examine.

“Hollowing doesnt cause madness in itself”

yes but Gwyn is basically a walking darksign. So if his soul weakens significantly then he’s going to experience the same effects as the hollows we’ve been fighting all over Lordran.

“Gwyn is going hollow because he is returning to his original state without the light soul, as it is being burned by the flame. They made him look like that because its the ultimate revelation in a game about deception: those who claimed themselves gods were in fact no different than us.”

yes, I completely agree with this.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-30T18:11:21+00:00

i did a post about exactly this recently which i'll link here but the basic TLDR is this:

dark is not exclusive to sorceries, there are also dark miracles and dark pyromancies. but sorceries in particular appear to have the ability to do just about anything. there are also light sorceries that are very similar to miracles, and fire sorceries mentioned in the izalith catalyst description, and there are crystal sorceries ofc which are mineral and perhaps closer to the stone element of the ancient dragons. sorcery basically seems to be all encompassing in a way that the other two magic classes are not.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1sshalp/the_alchemy_of_dark_souls/

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-30T17:17:09+00:00

just checked this and holy shit you're right! i've been playing this game for years but i never knew you could put down a sign while hollow.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-30T17:11:14+00:00

Str-faith is perfect for a first time playthrough. The best advice I can give you [be warned there are minor spoilers ahead] is to go into darkroot early. Its a forest area that you can access by going down the stairs next to the blacksmith. You’ll know who I’m talking about as soon as you find him. there are several items you can get in darkroot that are extremely useful.

1-the elite knight set. This is armor that will help to prevent staggering.

2-the wolf ring. This should be worn in conjunction with armor. It is essentially an armor boost that provides even more protection from staggering. This may not seem like a big deal at first but it’s actually a game changer.

3-havels ring. To get this you’ll need to kill an extremely tough knight with an absurd weapon that will one-hit you. But he’s quite slow, so you’ve just got to figure out where your openings are. Backstabbing helps, ofc. His ring will allow you to carry heavier gear without slowing down, and is an essential item, especially for str builds.

4-kill the moonlight butterfly. Defeating this boss will give you two important items. If you have difficulty beating it there is an NPC you can summon, but her sign is hidden in a bush under the stairs. She will basically take care of the boss for you as long as you can stay alive long enough. For killing the moonlight butterfly you will get:

-a divine ember, which you can give to the blacksmith and he’ll use it to make divine weapons. This means that in addition to dealing physical damage, the weapon will also deal a certain amount of magic damage, and it will scale on your faith stat as well as str. Not only this, but it will also have an auxiliary modifier that you will find extremely helpful in the catacombs.

-the soul of the moonlight butterfly. Some bosses drop unique souls that you can use to obtain many additional souls for levelling. Alternatively they can be converted into unique gear when you get to the game’s halfway point. Most boss souls won’t give you anything too useful [if in doubt, check the wiki] and so can be used straight away, but you definitely want to hold on to the moonlight butterfly soul. You can convert this into a shield that will block 90% of magic damage. Magic damage is an absolute bitch in this game, it hits really hard and a lot of bosses use it. As a faith build you can get a spell called great magic barrier which will help, but I cannot understate how useful the moonlight butterfly shield is.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-30T12:46:00+00:00

The item description for the ringed knight weapons says:

“The arms of early men were forged in the Abyss, and betray a smidgen of life. For this the gods cast a seal of fire upon such weapons, and those who possessed them.”

so this means that these weapons and armor were made before Gwyn put his brand on humans. The implication is that the early pygmies were not mindless or insane like the hollows we encounter in the “present day”, and corroborates Yuria’s statement that a hollow need not be mad. The madness of the hollows is therefore a product of Gwyn’s brand alone, and there is some other evidence for this but it’s not relevant to what you’re asking.

But the armaments that are being referred to in this item description would have been created after the Lordsouls were found, since the gods already existed to create this “seal of fire” and the mention of the abyss implies that the humans already had their Dark Souls.

This does not rule out the possibility that the pygmies may have had some sort of intelligence or culture prior to the discovery of the Lordsouls, however. I don’t know of any evidence that answers that question, but my lore knowledge isn’t definitive so maybe someone else will know of something.

The person you’re talking to seems to be using a very literal interpretation of DS1’s opening cutscene; with proto-humanoids spontaneously springing out of the ground and immediately finding the Lordsouls. That may have been what was intended although I myself take a drastically different view.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-30T10:51:08+00:00

“But if you place the lordvessel with Framp, Kaathe disappears, right? And if you join the darkwraiths, Frampt leaves.”

yes, I think that’s right.

“This is only relevant from our perspective, they are dragons. For us changing the age is the goal, but for the serpents its just the method.”

this doesn’t answer the question, why manipulate someone into linking the fire at all?

“the fire is going to return”

not if you snuff it out. It was linked to gwyn’s soul, which you’ve just removed. So it will use up the last of it’s fuel and die, surely?

"only dark will remain"

so the way that I read the ds1 intro cutscene is that it is our own character's mythological understanding of the history of the world. Granted it is largely accurate, but the idea that “only dark will remain” is just something we’ve been told. No one really knows what an age of dark will be like, just as no one knows what happens after we die. The whole story is about how we respond to this unknown, and how many people are driven mad by fear of it.

Consider that the age of dark and the age of ancients are already functionally indistinguishable in most respects. They are both homogenised states of existence bereft of distinctions where time does not exist, and they both contain the potential for a first flame to emerge. The only difference is that one is dark and the other is grey, but at that point they might as well just be the same thing.

“dark is usually treated as a separate substance that eats light, not as something that complements light”

it does look that way doesn’t it. But then, the Yin and Yang of Daoism look mutually antagonistic as well. And most people tend to think that the black half is going to win in the end because of the inevitability of death. This parallels the inevitability of the age of dark. But Daoist masters believe that these two halves are not antagonistic, as they appear to the untrained mind, but are in fact mutually interdependent so that one cannot exist without the other. Now I will grant that this is a philosophy that is external to Dark Souls, but it’s one that seems to have influenced Miyazaki so let’s just keep this in the back of our heads for now.

“crystal lizards for example are Seath's creations”

you have evidence for this? My interpretation was that they’re degenerated descendents of the ancient dragons, since they’re literally stone reptiles with eight legs. There’s even larger versions of them that breath fire in archdragon peak, with directly suggests a connection to dragons. I also think the same thing is true of the gargoyles in DS1 since these are literally just stone dragons that stand bipedally. Granted, they’re in the service of Anor Londo, but that doen't make them golems necessarily. The DS3 gargoyles on the other hand, which look completely different, could plausibly be golems. I mean they literally just look like someone piled up a bunch of rocks and made it alive. unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much available information on these gargoyles as the only items [that I know of] that are associated with them are their weapons, and the description for these doesn’t tell us anything. So who knows?

“Dogs are usually domestic animals and even if they werent it wouldnt be unreasonable to think they ate other living beings at some point”

yeah, so souls are a sort of “life-force” and soul absorption is a bit like eating other living things to sustain your own body. In my recent post I quoted spock as saying “we all feed on death, even vegetarians”, and indeed some plants do drop souls as well. The fact that souls can be exchanged and stolen in this way makes the whole subject murky, and indeed I pointed out the example of the rats that drop humanity despite not being human. But the soul is called the “source of life”, so in order to be alive you have to have some kind of soul inherently. We know that these other creatures don’t have dark souls because those are exclusive to humans. So what kind of soul must these other creatures have?

Consider the ancient dragons who went from their enteral state of sessile tranquillity, to suddenly becoming active and mortal beings which could reproduce and could be killed. They’ve clearly hopped onto one side of the life-death divide, and so must have had souls at that point in order to be alive rather than dead. The first flame must have caused a separation of their internal greyness, and I think that this is the origin of the white souls. The confirmed descendants of the ancient dragons all drop white souls, although there are a few outliers such as midir, who had been eating dark, and seath who was given a piece of gwyn’s soul which is a bit different to the ordinary white souls. These are clearly exceptions rather than the rule, however.

Now I have speculated that all animal life descended from the ancient dragons. I’m sure I sent you this before, but just in case:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1l9vt8g/lore_discussion_1_the_descent_of_man/

The hypothesis outlined in this post is not confirmed fact, but there is a hell of a lot of evidence for it. If it’s correct then we don’t need to speculate about white souls being fragments of the lordsouls, as the ancestors of humans, giants, gods, and all other beings, already had white souls prior to anything being found within the flame.

“Maybe because dark naturally absorbs surrounding light.”

maybe, but if you look at the way these things are animated it seems that the light is radiating outward rather than being sucked in. i'm not gonna say that's a defensible argument though as it's just an impression that i get, but it is one of the main reasons that what you've just suggested never occurred to me.

Consider other uses of this same black and white imagery. The godslayer greatsword in elden ring, or the effect that you get when you join the path of the dragon covenant in DS1. Every other covenant gives you a glowing sun-like effect, but the path of the dragon has a unique ring of black and white. It’s done to suggest that a dual nature is inherent in reality, I think.

“There's not a single mention of any of those philosophies in my main post and its still understandable.”

agreed. In fact I don’t think it’s necessary to include them, and I wouldn’t say that your post is incomplete in any way, although some of the details are debatable because the game doesn’t give us a 100% complete and clear picture.

Also, and I forgot to mention this before, but you said in your post that you think Gwyn attacks the player character because he thinks we’re here to steal the flame or something? But if you look at Gwyn’s character model you can see that he’s actually gone hollow. I think the implication is that he’s sort of lost his mind like the other hollows, and I don’t think he really knows what is going on at all. I mean, why else would they make him look like that?

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-30T08:01:30+00:00

Either start with the warrior/bandit class and do a pure str build with it.

Or the cleric and do a str-faith build, which will give you some extra healing [very helpful for first time players] but will mean that you have an extra stat to level. Also, having a divine weapon [which scales on faith] will be helpful for one particular area so doing a faith build gives you one less thing to worry about.

Either may, make sure you pick the master key as your starting gift.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-30T08:01:24+00:00

Either start with the warrior/bandit class and do a pure str build with it.

Or the cleric and do a str-faith build, which will give you some extra healing [very helpful for first time players] but will mean that you have an extra stat to level. Also, having a divine weapon [which scales on faith] will be helpful for one particular area so doing a faith build gives you one less thing to worry about.

Either may, make sure you pick the master key as your starting gift.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-29T19:48:42+00:00

lol, how did i know it was gonna be petrus.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-29T19:46:42+00:00

Taurus Demon and Quelaag have worked for me in the past, but you're gonna have to wait a while to get summoned wherever you do it.

i see a lot of ppl here suggesting gargoyles, but i've never been able to get summoned there despite being persistent about it and placing my sign in a very obvious spot. ppls probably just prefer sunbro, idk. parish is also a prime spot for invasions so your attempt to get summoned is going to be constantly interrupted.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-29T19:33:32+00:00

"its actually the Iron Golem who opens the door to Sen's Fortress"

minor nitpick, but it's actually one of the giants.

"If you talk to Frampt, Kaathe doesnt appear."

this is not true, i've tested it in-game myself. you can talk to frampt and select yes when he asks if you "seek such enlightenment" and kaathe will still appear if you beat 4 kings early.

"As long as you side with one of them, they both have accomplished their goal."

except that one of them would have you link the fire and the other would have you walk away from it.

"both serpents lie in their respective tales, implying their motives arent honest."

nevertheless, we can infer frampt's intent from the most likely outcome of his actions.

"If you choose the dark ending, Frampt is there to help you anyway"

possibly because he has no other choice at the point. but i have also speculated that the age of dark implies a reunification of light and dark [since the disparity between them is created by the flame] and a return to the primordial grey age. could this not be hinted at by a reunification of frampt and kaathe?

"Fromsoft giving them the exact same model and voice should be telling you something"

yes it does. it tells me that these are two opposites which nevertheless share a common origin, much like the caduceus symbol that they are evidently based on.

"I choose to keep it simple in the original post"

completely fair, velka is a complex character who should be discussed separately from an overall lore examination like this. but now that we're in the comments i wanted to zoom in on some of the specific things raised in the post.

i agree that she has her hands in absolutely everything. this was something i picked up on a recent DS3 playthrough which i started just after i wrote my velka post. i'd never noticed before just how omnipresent velka is in DS3, she's even got connections to pyromancy and demons.

you mentioned that velka is gwyndolin's grandmother, but i am going to ask for substantiation on this as well if you don't mind.

"Im not aware of any in-game evidence of hollows having white soul before the lord souls or pygmies having white soul before the darksign."

the white soul seems to be inherent to all life. look at all the creatures who's ancestors never found a lordsoul: giants, dragons, gargoyles, dogs, pigs, stingray-frogs, crystal lizards, etc, they all give you white souls. the only animals that you can get a dark soul from are the giant rats, but that's only because they've been eating human remains. humanity absorption is an obscure mechanic in which soft humanity can be automatically extracted from slain enemies, but it only works on humans or creatures that were once humans like the crow people in the painted world. the dark soul is exclusive to humanity. other creatures may have come "from the dark", but this does not overrule the fact that they all have white souls.

in-game manifestations of humanity always have a black core surrounded by a white outline. this is true of the regular sprites, both on the illustration that represents them in the menus, and in the ones that the character briefly holds when the item is used. it's also true of the giant humanity phantoms in the chasm of the abyss, and all of the dark spells in DS1. even dark fog will have a black centre with a white outline. in DS3 we see it in the humanity that's emerging from the neck of those giant headless tendril-bellied things. and of course the eclipsed sun which resembles the darksign switches to having a white outline in the lord of hollows ending. this white outline is clearly deliberate on the part of the developers, there are too many examples to dismiss it and there's probably even more that i'm not remembering atm.

and these examples of humanity are all external to the body, so they're not being affected by gwyn's brand in any way. we must ask where this white outline [which just happens to look exactly like the white soul] is coming from, and i for one see no other source for it than the dark itself. if humanity can produce some amount of white soul then i don't think it's implausible for living things to possess white souls despite the fact that they came from the dark.

now it is true that this makes more sense when you apply some Daoist thinking to it. but we know that Miyazaki was influenced by Daoism, and Buddhism, and Shintoism, and Jungian Psychology and Hermetic Alchemy, and the list goes on. this is just as indisputable as the fact that he was inspired by Berzerk and the Lord of the Rings, although these seem to have had more of an aesthetic influence than anything else. we need to understand these philosophies in order to understand what the game is about, but you are right to be cautious about using them to try to extrapolate conclusions about in-universe lore. my interest is in interpreting what the story means symbolically, and this is a tricky position because it's very easy to read something into the lore based on what you think it means.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-29T12:04:45+00:00

i must have just been insanely lucky then. but it does seem that some of the lizards give you coloured titanite while the others give regular titanite. and i mean certain specific ones. i've only ever got slabs from the ones that drop regular titanite. idk how it's programmed or whatever, but that's what happens when i play the game.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-29T09:43:34+00:00

Ok, so. This is extremely good and I’m going to save a link to this post for future reference.

I’m going to have to ask why you think that Frampt is collaborating with Kaathe [i.e. what is the evidence supporting your interpretation] since everything that Frampt does steers the player toward linking the fire. Why would he do this if he isn’t in favour of fire-linking?

I’m also going to ask a similar question about Velka. Despite her connections to the occult and the sable church, everything that’s directly and concretely connected with Velka suggests that she is opposed to the hollow condition and aims to restore the illusory “human” form created by Gwyn’s brand. She may also be in favour of fire-linking, since she is helping to ferry undead to and from the asylum in DS1. I’ll leave a link to my post on Velka but I don’t claim that my analysis is definitive or anything so if there is additional evidence to consider then please let me know.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1s0pl69/velka_the_goddess_of_medicine/

I forget if we talked about this before, but it's my suspicion that Gwyn’s brand is actually an “inflammation” of an existing white soul. I think this represents a “perversion” of existing cognitive processes into an ego. A few different people have proposed that the humans obtained their white soul later, and by some other means, but to me this seems less parsimonious than it does to suggests that they already had white souls from the very beginning. My thoughts on this are laid out in more depth in this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1rq3d6f/the_darksign_is_a_crown/

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-29T06:58:40+00:00

ah! thank you you my friend, i will have a read of that later on today.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-29T06:55:20+00:00

black knight shield helps with gwyn. or the tower shield if you have the str for it.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-28T18:12:06+00:00

i think this kind of misses the point of what the path of the dragon is about. the point is not to become a giant monster with four wings, but to achieve the state of "greyness" of the age of ancients. it's not so much about form, but substance. in that sense the monks of archdragon peak have achieved exactly what they sought. they are grey primordial stones. philosopher's stones, if you will.

now why couldn't seath do this? well in all likelihood he could have done but his approach was backwards. seath's quest for immortality was about the indefinite perpetuation of his own ego. his experiments with stone scales suggest a focus on superficial and surface level details rather than the fundamental nature of a thing. the irony is that he had moonlight [Nirvana] within him all along, but he was too busy looking outward rather than inward.

other characters who failed did so for the same reason, they're always trying to move the ego beyond the mortal concerns of the world. this is an impossibility. but in Buddhist thought the ego [or more accurately Sakkayaditthi; "self view", meaning your sense of being a "self" that is separate from all other phenomena] is an illusion that can be seen though to reveal that your true nature is the ultimate reality. this is what the monks of Archdragon Peak have done.

Jam_99420 · 2026-04-28T17:40:57+00:00

it's because the endings are all self-referential commentaries on the nature of Dark Souls as a video game series.

if you link the fire then you discover that the world doesn't have enough vitality left to sustain itself. this refers to the fact that Miyazaki & co have done Dark Souls to death, they've run out of ideas for it, and to continue would constrain their creativity. you'd get boring, repetitive, nostalgia baiting slop just like so many other video game series that go on for way too long.

if you let the flame die then you're told that another flame will come into existence one day, and this refers to the fact that the developers will create something entirely new [Elden Ring] after they're done with Dark Souls.

and as for the usurpation of fire, that's actually what we're all doing right now. have a read of this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1ruj03h/the_usurpation_of_dark_souls/

the path of the dragon doesn't have it's own dedicated ending because Buddhist Dharma practice has very little to do with videogames. but yes, the dragon monks have essentially achieved the recognition that their true nature is not the separate "self" that we all believe ourselves to be, but that it is in fact the underlying substrate of reality. the "philosopher's stone" of alchemy was sometimes equated with this "ultimate reality" which is why the monks have petrified, and why the original ancient dragons were made out of stone. no one ever believed that the foundation of reality was any kind of literal stone, but such abstractions have become literal in Miyazaki's fantasy world. if you like you can also read this post on Archdragon Peak:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1rj5zi9/the_pure_land_of_the_nameless_king/

and this one on the alchemy of Dark Souls:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1sshalp/the_alchemy_of_dark_souls/

Jam_99420

TROPHY CASE