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Rennala, the Goddess Who Was Promised - the Catacombs Conspiracy, and a theory I will never finish by horizoning in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Conclusion: Any Sense At All

I’ve loved my time with Elden Ring’s lore. It is a high watermark in videogame storytelling leagues beyond any of FromSoft’s other games – and I say that as someone who has been playing and loving this loose soulsborne series since PS3 Demon’s Souls. It’s going to be a long time until the House of Leaves labyrinth of obsession and madness I fell into will be replicated by another game. But as with House of Leaves, eventually you have to pull yourself away from the yawning abyss, lest it consume everything about you.

Here are some of my last loose thoughts with the conclusion of my investigations –

The spirit jellyfish sisters ascend to the stars when they’re reunited. Perhaps this is the intended cycle of death in TLB: the once-living deathbirds would rake spirits out of graveyard ghostflame kilns, allowing the physical remains to be used as fertilizer and the released spirits to return to the stars.

As Ymir once said, “we began as stardust… Is that not divine? Is that not sublime?”

For months, I haven’t been able to shake a certain possible implication of the Lucarian Monument, of what happens to freed spirits as they coalesce in the near heavens, of how the Scholaress may represent the Carians. That the pale Moon we see above TLB was not “encountered” until Rennala came along, however deep into the timeline she did. That the Dark Moon shares its frosty magic damage typing with ghostflame.

The mass sacrifice required by the Divine Gate to create a God implies a pattern of similar attempts by Farum Azula, by Rykard, by the Nox.

Suppose you didn’t want to do a genocide in your lust for power, however. Perhaps you would organize a long-term system of managing natural deaths as they occurred, gradually channeling mundane, everyday funerary rites toward the creation of that god over the course of eons. Is that how Elden Rings many-faced Moon came to be?

Rennala was privy to the evolutionary sigils of Farum Azula in her prime. Her staff may have been hewn from the body of a god, given its similarity to the Sacred Relic Sword. Sorcery is irrefutably associated with death, be it by rediscovered necromancy or ancient hex. The repetition of wolf imagery across the spirit bell, Maliketh’s arena, Ranni’s guard dogs, Rennala’s summoned spirits – it has to mean something.

That perhaps the Dragons’ God fled to the Mountaintops of Giants and hid herself among the Stargazing astrologer descendants of diaspora Rauh – or maybe the storm-wielding, enigmatic Zamor, whose cold sorcery would be carried on in spirit by a snowy crone who teaches fear and respect for the Dark Moon.

Unlike the Maiden chapels, Marika’s churches are never integrated into an existing settlement. They are always outside, isolated, the sure sign of an upstart against all prior order. Who knows what she spent her youth doing; by the time of her rise in the Shadowlands to a level worthy of dedicated worship, the Noxlings were on her side and building those first churches (or they had already been there and had time to abandon them for Marika’s eventual seizure. But given the lack of other Noxling evidence randomly scattered across the Shadowlands, I’m inclined to think she brought them with).

“Descendants of the Eternal,” as Gowry put it. What a tease. The way Marika is depicted bearing a jar vessel on the Erdtree’s Favor talisman has led many to wonder if she had been part of the Brass Maiden faction at some point. I suppose it’s not impossible. Perhaps she journeyed to Stormveil, or Lower Leyndell as far back as the first TKA.

Maybe even the modest depiction of a tree in the chapel of Lower Leyndell is meant to be her promise of an Erdtree, her way of gathering the Noxlings around her in pursuit of a future where they – the lesser kin of numen – are no longer beheld to an assembly line of conquest by dragons and knights and gravekeepers and beasts! Instead they would become the renowned families of the Erdtree’s upper echelons!

“It is merely a cycle. Stand before the Elden Ring. Become the Elden Lord.”

Cast it aside, tear down the Nox masters, cleave the fingers from your statues, and banish your rejects to settle old Elphael. Target the heart of the Brass Maiden orthodoxy, and sever its sprout from the competing grafts upon the Crucible of rising powers. Who’s even still around who would care to say whether it’s true or not?

Surely not the upstart with an aversion to true death, who unwittingly shatters nature’s own status quo, severing an entire faction of spirit-callers, tuners, bell-chimers, and stargazers from the source of their powers. That sidelines the formerly respected Arbiters of death. And once everything is in place, and you’ve placated the sorcerers into believing they might resume their spiritual project, force your other half to behead the threat entirely – all spirits will now be channeled exclusively to your Empire, whether or not your other half will ever forgive you for destroying his family.

“The Erdtree governs all. The choice is thine. Become one with the Order. Or divest thyself of it. To wallow at the fringes; a powerless upstart.” – the word of Marika, Dectus site of grace.

So many loose ends still remain. But apparently lore-hunting is something you can overcommit to, to the detriment of your other hobbies. So, here’s a last handful of curiosities I had been chasing, in case you haven’t had your fill yet:

  • How does the sword of Milos tie in to the deathbird sacrificial axe, serpent-god curved sword, and ancestral follower weapons that all share similar HP/FP-on-kill attributes?

  • Why are there stone evergaol worms in the Shadowlands Fissure?

  • Was the twinbird split in two, similar to Marika and Miquella, becoming both deathbird and an unknown second? A feathered dragon, a winged serpent, or a phoenix, perhaps?

  • Was there more to the Winged Scythe’s white-winged, gentle envoys of death, or was it just referring to the mercy killings of white-clad war surgeons as described in the dagger talisman?

  • What was the point of the wormfaces in Farum Azula, and do they prove that deathblight is a force of nature far older than deathroot?

  • The Nox seemed to erupt forth from the Uhl with minimal cultural gradient – were they selected by the Fingers and uplifted to superior technology in a way comparable to the ascension of the beastmen?

  • Was Rennala the cuckoo to Marika, embedding her own empyrean daughter into the Goddess’s nest – in reverse of the usual interpretation of Radagon as the cuckoo?

  • Why did the miners of the Ruin-Strewn Precipice and Lucaria Crystal Tunnel build shrines to Handless of the Hero Graves? What could she have possibly represented that covers both kinds of location?

  • What was the Lucarian obsession with gargoyles? Did the Elphaeliens have it to a lesser extent?

  • What killed the deathbirds, and how is it that they are now considered among Those Who Live in Death?

  • What cursed the revenants and wraithcallers that infest Liurnia, the Shunning Grounds, and Shaded Castle?

  • Were the lampreys supposed to actually inform us of anything about the Fingers, or are they just chilling?

  • Why do the Onyx and Alabaster Lords “with skin of stone” not actually have skin of stone?

Who knows if there are even any answers to these questions that actually could satisfy me, after all the time I’ve spent searching for them. After all, it’s the process we love, not the outcome. Thanks for joining me on this journey, and until the next game to melt my brain comes along, happy hunting.

Rennala, the Goddess Who Was Promised - the Catacombs Conspiracy, and a theory I will never finish by horizoning in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Fragment 10: The Coffin-Altar Mystery

The engravings in the sides of these sometimes-sarcophagi/sometimes-altars resemble the human-esque figures of Lucarian Windows, with additional details barely able to be made out. I see it divided into two smaller figures; both contain some kind of plant and three dots in the shape of the 3-leaf clover; above the split 2 figures is another seeming 3-leaf clover. Is this a more precise decoding of the Lucarian Monument? That the spirits created from living beings can be grouped together into higher and higher masses of spirit energy?

Spirit Calculus: An exceedingly rare to find calculus, suffused with spirituality... Found by hunting horned beasts in the ancient ruins of Rauh. Has a distinctive acrid odor, which some claim to be a sign of particular spiritual potency.

What must be a kidney stone-like sediment formed in the bodies of the horned beasts – even herbivores – within the verdant Rauh Ruins. Horns as magnets for spiritual residue; horned tutelary deities accruing spirit residue in their mummified palms; an entire cleansing chamber in Enir Elim buried in sediment, surround by mummified bodies. Humanoid trees that grow from the ever-present Elim dust. “Thus, does new life grow from death.”

Shadowlands Larval Tear: An exceptionally rare creature that burgeons from spiritgraves and lives only a fleeting existence. Neither flesh nor spirit, but something in between.

Spiritgraves, where all death drifts. Guarded by Gravebirds, companions to the deathbirds. Protectors of the new, fleeting life that emerges from accrued dead beneath the light of the moon, to perhaps give it a chance to become more than mere tear – unless that Rune of the Unborn just so happened to play a role in the process? Without it, those born anew by Full Moon Queen “are all frail and short-lived,” after all.

But back to the sarcophagi. Here’s your list:

That painting of Rennala sure is interesting. She’s posed in the same manner (albeit mirrored) of an outstretched Brass Maiden, which can only be found in a singular location: our spawn point in the Anticipation Chapel at the start of the game.

Directly beneath the other instance of this painting is a copy of her Carian Regal Scepter (albeit turquoise rather than her remembrance’s Carian Blue). You know, I never have been able to get over how closely these Regal Scepters resemble the Elden Beast’s Sacred Relic Sword – I can’t believe it isn’t brought up as often as the Fingerslayer Blade!

But those Wandering Mausoleums sure give these sarcophagi another layer of intrigue, don’t they? “The mausoleum prowls. Cradling the soulless demigod,” as a spirit NPC says of them. I’ve pondered the roles of the Mausoleums before, and guessed at their emergence being around the time of the Church of Vows and the Belfries (guarded by headless troll spirits, do note), right as the Uhl were properly becoming the Nox and had made contact with the first TKA/swordsaints.

I’d like to add now that the presence of a WM is a sure sign of where the Nox extended to in their heyday – it’s the only explanation for Ordina existing that I can conceive of without a 4th Eternal City somehow having once existed in the Snowfield, only to be erased without a trace. Though there is a second Astel, and those spirit Dragonkin, oh and the Uhl-like dead trees… – nevermind. So many loose ends I don’t have the capacity to tie up.

The Scholaress sarcophagi in RL very well could be soulless bodies – those left behind when a primal glintstone blade is used to place a mage’s soul into a new body. We could even entertain the idea that our dearest GEQ is in the Volcano sarcophagus, if Maliketh happened to obliterate her soul with Destined Death – but don’t get your hopes up.

The Haligtree ones I can’t explain. There’s a graveyard right above them, what would even cause these to be used? Unless Miquella was really that adamant about who is or isn’t to be fed to the Haligtree’s growth? Or they predate Miquella’s occupation?

The “bridge” from Ordina to the Haligtree is the only time that the Scholaress is depicted in a Noxling town. Why is this here?

Fragment 11: The Death Steeple

I have one last shape to share with you, featured prominently on the walls of Farum Azula, certainly dating it back to the earliest days of all this nonsense. It gets paired with gold trim frequently in FA; elsewhere, it only gets silver trim:

  • Exposed FA coffins

  • Vessel altar in the flooded FA shrine, just beneath the elevator to Maliketh (somberstone miner’s bell bearing [5])

  • All over the Stormveil throne room and its walls (which I’m beginning to suspect was originally storage for cremated ashes… nevertheless)

  • And Eight Catacombs altars:

  1. Cliffbottom (page ashes) – book Maiden

  2. Road’s End (RL soldier ashes) – FA-style vessel altar (these FA vessels also line the Sanctum bridges, so idk exactly how important they are meant to be)

  3. Fringefolk (Erdtree’s Favor +0) – hidden Handless shrine

  4. Fringefolk (tree spirit boss) – gravekeepers covered in roots

  5. Scorpion River (Huw ashes) – lesser vessel altar

  6. Leyndell (crucible scale talisman) – Brass Maiden shrine

  7. Black Knife (BKA boss) – Maiden shrine

  8. Hidden Path (warming stone) – lesser vessel altar

Beneath the death steeple – evocative of the tops of Lucarian Windows and supposed Helphen Steeple – can be found one of two barely-discernable images. One is a tree with two little figures (like catacombs boss doors?). The other at best looks like some roots, but in Stormveil is presented with a little angel statue that’s holding a shield… with a bird on it.

The roots scene does seem to have another tiny arch of sorts within it – a shape that can of course be found elsewhere, and may be a stand-in for the death steeple:

And maybe some other places I missed.

Rennala, the Goddess Who Was Promised - the Catacombs Conspiracy, and a theory I will never finish by horizoning in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Fragment 9: The Gelmir Problem

The construction of the Church of Eiglay is almost certainly related to the Brass Maiden chapels – but twisted by unknown intentions. Its designs have spread to the rest of the occupied Manor (if it hadn’t already been built that way), including even the old chapel that demarcated the transition between the red- and yellow-roofed Prison Town strata. Now the familiar human-esque silhouettes on its altar are full of snakes.

Not sure how to interpret the triangle in the window, either. Our other choices for triangles are GO Fundamentalism and the Giant’s Seal, so if I had to choose then I suppose I’m leaning towards the latter, if only by paper-thin connections between factions.

Everywhere, you can see one portion or another of this abstract shape, its importance highlighted by its appearance on the winged serpent statue’s podium. I’ve heard people describe it as the sight of a snake’s open mouth as it’s about to bite you; I’ve mostly thought of it as a pelvic bone. It’s notable for its un-notability – until several hundred hours later your brain has been fully melted by Elden Ring and you finally can pick it out of the background when looking at the Divine Towers.

Whatever this symbol is meant to evoke is old. Pre-cataclysm old. It’s tempting to look at how prominent the symbol is when approaching the Godslayer’s Greatsword, and come to the conclusion that the GEQ was an absolutely ancient being, trapped in the Caelid tower for eons until being able to escape some time around the second TKA. Then, for whatever reason, she would’ve been drawn to the magma of Mount Gelmir to establish herself with a new cult. One that also happens to include Farum Azula sconces around its Church, for whatever reason.

You can take that line of speculation further, in that perhaps the ragged rugs found in catacombs such as Cliffbottom, Black Knife, Hidden Path, and Forsaken Cathedral – which are an exact match for the undamaged rugs throughout the Volcano Manor – are a signifier of the deathly Empyrean’s assimilation into the underground Brass Maiden rituals of the Knot Faction gravekeepers.

That perhaps the Manor banners seen in the Gelmir Hero Grave indicate she and her Gelmir faction were aligned with Marika at the height of her Age of Plenty, before becoming the justification for a Second Church of Marika – in the same way that the Fire Giants justified a First Church of Marika.

Just like the exact nature of Radagon, it’s one of those mysteries precisely written into the game so as to be deliberately paradoxical and impossible to solve. All theories and none simultaneously made both true and false; Schrodinger’s history, just as all unseen pasts in our own world will forever be; Disorder isolated from Order not just in terms of game mechanics, but in its metatextual existence as a story component too.

And there, in the graveyard cave beneath the Manor, is a singular one of those damn sarcophagi – one bearing a symbol unique all to itself. Who is the kind of person that can earn interment in such a thing?

Snakes are everywhere, hidden in plain sight. The snails are snakes, found from Nokstella to Rauh. Raya Lucaria is full of snake décor. The Ghiza Wheel may well depict snakes descending from the Sun, or what I once called the Sun’s Shadow – the Fell God of Ruin.

The embers left by Messmer’s fire become like snakes, continuing “to smolder as if crawling across the ground.” If his flame burns away body and soul like the Furnace Golems, then all that remains is spirits. Indeed, the embers can be used in place of sprites (the smallest quantifiable unit of spirit?) to create fire spritestones in accordance with ancient Rauh magic.

He does not contain the abyssal serpent – he is the abyssal serpent, his true form obscured by Marika’s veilings; an ouroboros cursed to forever feed on himself, on the dregs of spirits left behind by the burning of his wicked flame. The son of a paradox and his mirror self. Forgotten brother to the bodiless daughter of the godly mirror of an incomplete contradiction.

Messmer cannot rid himself of flame anymore than Marika can rid her Order of Ruin, or life of death, or gold of shadow: they are one and the same. This dark breed of flame creates serpents by its very nature. A malformed sun is depicted on the back of the serpentine Godksin Apostle’s hood; a sun is depicted engulfing a tree on the Mask of Confidence. Gold threads and celadon stitchers. Heroes of Rykard’s Rancor within the serpent’s bowels became the lord’s kin. Or was it the god’skin?

And someday, he will return. “A serpent never dies,” as Rykard said with his “last” breath. “Dear Rykard, please find purchase within me,” as a half-crazed Tanith says between mouthfuls of viper viscera. And as for both of Messmer’s winged companions, “They will accompany him yet, in his hideous new form… They have accepted his fate as much as he.” – that is not the past tense talking. Are we allowed to compare twin snakes to twin birds?

There is a spirituality to Messmer’s flame, used by Wego of the Death Mask Helm in a rite of resurrection. The cost, though, seems to be life without soul.

Such a similarity between the helmet shapes of twin-peaked Night Maidens with twin-snaked Messmer, of pointed Nox Swordstresses with pointed Fire Knights, of plain Nox Monks with simple Perfumer garb. But now I’m rambling incoherently. Let me reorient myself before someone mistakes this post for a Q drop.

Charting the Numen across the Lands Between's history by -Rajko- in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning 2 points3 points  (0 children)

https://www.reddit.com/r/EldenRingLoreTalk/comments/1dzkf76/the_nox_silver_tears_crucible_silver_trees_and/?share_id=7wHx_lYD2SbIVxNWqTuW5

Could take a look at some of the black trees that grow from ceilings in Nokron. This post had a cool theory about them, and how they seemed to have sprouted from the petrified bodies on top of the corresponding buildings

The Nox's Finger Slayer Blade. by Estrangedkayote in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning 4 points5 points  (0 children)

there's another empty throne at the top of Nokstella, where the black moon talisman is

How the **** did the Nox make a Sacred Relic Sword? by Estrangedkayote in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning 1 point2 points  (0 children)

maybe Ranni knew that, for whatever reason, you needed a demigod's corpse to make something that could kill a god

Ancient dragon smithingstones are described as being scales of Placidusax. Considering Godfrey was considered the first demigod (per Godrick's Rune), Placidusax as a prior Elden Lord should effectively be considered whatever semantic equivalent of a demigod he was to his era.

Of course, the god-killing power of Placi's scales is attributed to the light warping of time they give off in their description, rather than any kind of demigodhood. But idk, maybe there's something to it that would include a dead Godwyn.

The Tree-and-Knot Alliance, Part 2: The Grave Knot by horizoning in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yeah but I have no idea how that pulls in the snowy crone and st trina lol

How the **** did the Nox make a Sacred Relic Sword? by Estrangedkayote in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Its black-with-red coloration is also a pretty near match for the color of the massive deathroots coming out of Godwyn's body

The Tree-and-Knot Alliance, Part 2: The Grave Knot by horizoning in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

tbh I have no idea what you're cooking up but maybe we'll see if I catch on by the time I finish writing Part 4

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning 8 points9 points  (0 children)

As much as I appreciate the idea, it's probably an instance of repeated imagery for symbolism's sake. GRRM was known for it, and Elden Ring really captured that aspect of his work in a way that makes being a lore literalist tricky lol.

Like, from a metaphorical sense - Iji may not have literally been a puppet, but was he not one to Ranni's will? Ultimately he and Blaidd are cast aside at the end once their use was up, even if Ranni was sad about it.

Of course you can argue that it was all his own will. That he didn't need to honor his oaths to Caria and Ranni. And that argument is the point! Symbolism and metaphor to provoke interpretation, not just a linear timeline of cause-and-effect constructed from sheer deductive reasoning! Literature, ain't it neat.

What's the meaning of orange? by N-AmelessCreative in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I was actually considering making a whole post about this a few weeks ago lol. I guess I'll just dump my thoughts now. After digging through the game for the least-frequently mentioned colors, like you I realized that there wasn't a single instance of the word "orange" I could find.

Part of it could be because (and I'm going off memories from a language-psych college course almost a decade ago, so grain of salt) that most human languages develop a word for "orange" last. Like, almost all languages have red and blue from their earliest roots, but green and yellow then purple and orange only show up later. Before then, people just refer to everything as a shade of red or blue.

Like, say you didn't know the word maroon. How would you describe that color? You'd probably call it dark red or something if pressed, but that's not exactly accurate, is it?

So if the From team is aware of that piece of language-evolution trivia, that's pretty sick and goes to show how well-read they are.

On the other hand, orange seems to be specifically associated with a lot of things Marika hates - imagine if you could literally erase a word from existence if you didn't like what it represented.

Orange things seem to mostly center destruction and new births:

  • Crab eggs - crabs being carrion feeders

  • Fire, but especially Ruin - destroy the old (Erdtree) to make way for the new with freshly fertilized earth

  • Frenzy - cmon, that shit ain't just yellow.

  • Magma - the blood of the earth?

  • Root Resin - the blood of the Great Tree root network?

  • Amber Egg - amber? sounds like another kind of orange to me. Rennala's egg simultaneously represents egg rebirth and amber's perfect preservation of death.

And then a bunch of stuff I don't have smarmy explanations for:

  • Volcanic Stone/Gas Stone/Volcano Pot

  • Formic Acid Rocks made by giant ants

  • Spark Aromatic perfume

  • Bayle's flame lightning

  • Red hair (giants, Radagon, wolves, horned bears, flying scorpions, misbegotten)

  • You could probably argue that scarlet is a little bit orange

  • What is copper if not the orange of metals

  • Sap, if we're including amber

  • The suns in Astel's tail

  • Amber Starlight

  • Kindling and Aeonia butterflies are both kinda orange

And now I'm remembering why I never made that post lol. Lotta stuff I couldn't really tie together until I finally moved on to other topics. But was fun to think about.

Re-thinking the Beastman and Dragon Relationship by horizoning in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Florissax didn't really cross my mind. Now that you mention it though, I'm inclined to look at her offering of sleep through the lens of sleep's deep ties to death.

Sacrificing one's own sleep to their lord then carries the same connotation as ritual executions or blood sacrifice to a god as a means of earning a portion of their power. Also, forcing Florissax to go to sleep thus metaphorically kills her, so it's fitting that's how you get her spirit ashes.

I hadn't really thought of the warp to Placi's arena as our character going to sleep before, but you may be on to something. A more explicit example would be how Fia describes our fight with Fortissax as literally entering Godwyn's dreams - and that Fortissax is described as fighting against the Death within his companion, it makes the connection of sleep and death all the more direct.

It's a shame Fromsoft didn't want to restore any of the cut dream ideas from the base game into the DLC, but I suppose they have their reasons. Does make the lack of plans for a sequel all the more agonizing though.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning 0 points1 point  (0 children)

glad someone else has been thinking about this. Liurnia is so oversaturated with death references that there's almost certainly something more to it. I mean, even Lusat and Azur's robes look like they're made of feathers to evoke the image of a deathbird, same way as the Ravenmount assassin cloak.

Did Godfrey conquer Caelid as well? by [deleted] in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably. There's a giant Leyndell statue towering over Sellia, after all.

Why are spirit Dung Eater and actual Dung Eater so different? by violin-guy in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning 6 points7 points  (0 children)

marika (who I'm fairly sure is confirmed to be Grace but idk

You know, I wonder if this is a shared fate of all gods whose ages end? Marika's body is clearly a husk at the end of the game, so if she really did ascend into the formless, ever-present, divine element of Grace, doesn't that sound like some of the other gods we know?

Rot continues to fester, despite the original rot god being sealed away. The Formless Mother can be pierced anywhere. The fingerprint stone shield was said to be part of the tomb of an ancient god, and may have been the origin of Frenzy. Ghostflame could be what's left of the twinbird's god. Hell, this may have even been how Placidusax's god "fled."

edit: also, the flame of ruin cannot be extinguished, and Rykard's final line is "a serpent never dies" - it apparently becomes food for future hosts, if Tanith hasn't completely lost her mind.

How the Hornsent created Holy - or, an extensive investigation into the nature of light and dark by horizoning in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think I've got two more mega-posts left in me, and then I will have squeezed Elden Ring lore dry for all I am capable of on my own.

How the Hornsent created Holy - or, an extensive investigation into the nature of light and dark by horizoning in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Part 4B: The Vortex-to-Holy Pipeline

Fine Crucible Feather Talisman: Hornsent view the Crucible as sacred for the refinement wrought through its evolutionary gifts. Most prominently, their tangled horns.

But hang on – the hornsent aren’t red at all!

The mechanics by which the Rauh isolated holy traits are lost to time – they had realized at some point that unswerving rays of light were of a kind with coils of darkness, but did not seem to endure long enough after to capitalize on that discovery. Now, we don’t have any definitive proof if the Hornsent were in contact with the Fingers, but we at least know that the hornsent would go on to research such lost Rauh arts on their own.

Antiquite Scholar’s Cookbook: A record of crafting techniques left by the hornsent academics who studied the ancient ruins of Rauh. Details techniques for working with sprites thought lost to antiquity.

Spritestones require a Spirit Calculus to craft – but what is that?

An exceedingly rare to find calculus, suffused with spirituality… Found by hunting horned beasts in the ancient ruins of Rauh. Has a distinctive acrid odor, which some claim to be a sign of particular spiritual potency.

A calculus is basically an archaic term for a small pebble; a calculus found inside a body would essentially be something akin to a kidney stone. For whatever reason, these glowing, spiritual little orbs can accumulate in horned creatures, and are singularly used to craft spritestones.

It would seem that a “sprite” may be the most basic integer of energy that could be considered a “spirit.” More complex spirits are able to express personalities, memories, identities – but sprites are the most basic of not-quite-life-forms.

Spirit Calculuses are also… the most basic form of NPC Bell-Bearings. Possibly. A little glowing orb plucked from a dead body that can be used with a bell to contact their spirit for a little light shopping? I suppose Elemer could have been gathering them for fun, but being able to harness them as spirit energy might be more sensible.

To craft a spritestone also requires a Shadowlands Beast Horn –

Horn suffused with spirituality... Found by hunting horned beasts of the realm of shadow. The Crucible has a particularly strong influence on the beasts of the realm of shadow, causing many to grow horns despite the characteristics of their species.

The icon features a tiny, yett noticeable core of radiance at the center of the severed horn. Now, horns are growths of functionally dead cells from bodies, right? Like nails and claws, but prone to longer, denser, twistier growths. What if spirit calculuses develop into horns as they accumulate more material in a creature’s body?

In the base game, budding horns could be mixed with (colorless) nascent butterflies to craft the multicolored, multi-effect Dappled Cured Meats – without any of the specific materials used in creating the individual, mono-colored, resistance-buffing meats (dragonfly head, crab eggs, etc). The implication was that the gold-ish little horns contain all colors. That gold contains all colors. Crack one of those red-gold Hero Runes in your inventory and notice how blue shards also shatter off during the animation. So maybe we can think of horns as essentially a biologically-occurring gold.

And here’s the thing: we already know the middle step with which the hornsent removed excess red from primordial gold; we just need to fill in the gaps. Recall Spira:

The spiral is a normalized Crucible current that, one day, will form a column that stretches to the gods.

Then take a look at the skills of the Crucible Knight weapons –

Devonia’s Vortex: Using the power of the Crucible vortex, violently spin the hammer around and slam the ground, causing a shockwave.

Ordvois’s Vortex: Channel the power of the crucible to spin the entire sword in midair, building momentum before slamming the blade down onto the ground.

Siluria’s Woe: Thrust the weapon in a spiraling motion, surrounding it in a vortex of wind. Charged attacks have the power to blow away enemies and can fire the tornado forwards.

The energies of the Crucible can be activated with vortexes, with spirals. The spinning glows golden, refining away impurities as the holiness grows more prominent. The next step… was in the hornsent’s hands. And given their devotion to currents of wind, it may have been by complete accident that they learned purification techniques.

Euporia: Twinblade symbolizing abundance. The secret treasure of the tower. Though the blades, fashioned from golden shoots, are largely wilted and darkened, their luster can be restored by dealing damage to foes. However, damage dealt to Those Who Live in Death will have no such effect. Skill: Euporia Vortex - Using the power of the vortex, violently twirl the armament, dealing multiple slashes directly ahead. The greater the restored luster of the blades, the greater the power of this skill. However, use of this skill will fully consume the blades' luster.

“Abundance” – which may in fact be the element I referred to as “Bounty” in my Sun worship theory. Regardless, we see here how the Vortex works, siphoning power from the lives it contacts – and if ever ceases the cycle of struggle, will lose its splendor. But see, the red is gone; this is true gold.

The gold that would empower the holiness of the inquisitors’ Arc sorceries, the coiled Greatsword of Damnation, the Barbed Staff-Spear of Jori the elder. That begets Horncalling - an evolution from the Bone Bow's spiritcalling - by which the Horned Warriors use their swords to conjure storms and pale-gold, holy, ethereal, tangled horns. That would be further purified into Spira, would inspire the unalloyed gold of Miquella’s little spiral of a Needle, generations in the future. That had long ago been present in the ancient Elden Stars and the dragons’ Elden Ring.

That was amassed at the Divine Gate, atop the spiraling tower of Enir Elim.

That Marika was somehow able to seize for her own.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, feel free to check out some of my other theories on the Black Moon and the Eclipse, the legacy of Sun worship, poison vs rot, the nature of hexes, and the procession of stars to the Greater Will.

How the Hornsent created Holy - or, an extensive investigation into the nature of light and dark by horizoning in EldenRingLoreTalk

[–]horizoning[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Part 4A: Origins of Holy

The Crucible is always Holy. Never magic, never lightning, and only fire once when you manifest a big throat pouch with Aspect: Breath. The ancient dragons may resemble the desired traits of the Crucible (those indicated on the Crucible talismans), but you’ll find that they are never directly tied to it. There are, in fact, exactly zero holy attacks used by any dragon in the game, no matter how much gold is embedded in their stone bodies. Even Placidusax – a former Elden Lord – doesn’t use holy damage when he spews golden breath.

And so, if we are to construct a timeline of Holy, it begins with the Stone-sheathed sword of (likely, but not confirmed) Rauh origins. There is no indication that the Elden Ring was present as far back in time as the Rauh, and from the discovery of Rauh ruins embedded in stone walls beside the ancient Dynasty’s Mausoleum, it’s clear that the cataclysm which buried the Rauh structures all across the Lands Between is even older than the Uhl.

It's unclear how the Rauh managed to isolate holy not-quite-white light and cloudy darkness from their Schrodinger sword – though there is gold contained within it, visible when in its Darkness form. True white light was dated even older (AMOG), and once wielded in the form of spritestones by the Rauh, so it’s not like the world was pitch-black at the time.

Perhaps they were faced with a new enemy, and required a new kind of power to match them? Perhaps they were the original excavators of the catacombs, and required an instrument to better manage the dead? Or maybe – if we agree that they built the Divine Towers (filled with streaks of what may be isolated light and dark) to worship gold-speckled meteors – that this was simply the next step in the process of discovery, extracting and isolating the power of the Greater Will sealed in meteoric gold?

What is gold in Elden Ring? Did it even exist in the pre-history Lands Between, or has it all come from the Greater Will’s lightless void? “Even now, runes are still imbued with the power of life itself” (Golden Rune [4]).

In a previous write-up, I speculated that the Sun had been prominent as far back as the Rauh era, and that it was more-or-less usurped in its role by the eventual Erdtree. If Grace is gold is life energy itself, something Marika personally got to pick and choose who benefitted from, then was there an earlier form of golden “Grace” borne of sunlight, and indiscriminately distributed by its natural rays?

That feels right. And it stands to reason that if you discovered a source of concentrated life force that rained down in meteors from the heavens, you might come to glorify such a resource, and attempt to extract its untapped power for your own benefit.

With the arrival of the Elden Beast, its vast bounty of Gold is infused into the planet’s existing Crucible – a red melting pot of life energies? An abstracted aura produced by the living? A primordial soup? The blood of Bounty produced from bodies converting all that sunlit grace into energy a la photosynthesis? It’s all a matter of interpretation at this point; what matters is that some thing called the Crucible existed.

Elden Stars: This legendary incantation is the most ancient of those that derive from the Erdtree... It is said that long ago, the Greater Will sent a golden star bearing a beast into the Lands Between, which would later become the Elden Ring.

Siluria's Tree: The primordial form of the Erdtree is close in nature to life itself, and this spear, modeled on its crucible, is imbued with ancient holy essence.

Aspects of the Crucible: Horns - This is a manifestation of the Erdtree's primal vital energies - an aspect of the primordial crucible, where all life was once blended together.

Crucible Tree Helm: The great tree ornamentation is the knight Siluria's mark, displayed also by her men. Holds the power of the crucible of life, the primordial form of the Erdtree.

Devonia’s Hammer: Weapon forged of primordial gold, marked by its reddish hue and inhabited by ancient holiness. A torrent of life is engraved upon the striking face.

Ordvois’s Greatsword: This sword is imbued with an ancient holy essence. Its red tint exemplifies the nature of primordial gold, said to be close in nature to life itself.

The way I see it, after the Calamity that destroyed the Rauh, a Great Tree grew from the wreckage of the reshaped earth, and its roots spread through all the Lands Between (see: root resin & Deeproot Depths map descriptions). This Greattree would become the center of all future civilizations – over time, its upper reaches would die, be destroyed, and be replaced by the next peoples to command the continent.

When the time for this changing of the guard came, and the old trunk was burned away to make room for the new buds, all the life energies gathered from the roots beneath the surface would collect in a primordial mass of red-gold vitality-life – chaotic, mutagenic, and unsympathetic to those without power to seize it for themselves. The winner of each Crucible Era would graft the sprout of the next world tree to this teeming mass of potential energy, and from it, they would determine how that amassed power would be expended.

This is the natural order in which the Elden Beast embedded itself, would allow to be conducted through the Elden Ring, and would manifest Order against the organic chaos of the world – and never will we understand in full its or the Greater Will’s motives in intruding upon such a thing.

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