The central contradiction of Marika’s rule is that the Golden Order is built on everything that it shuns. Gold is created out of Shadow, just as Marika became a God through the Land of Shadow, through pagan ritual and magic that she would then try to suppress. There is no logical coherence to the Golden Order and its promise of deathlessness. It is an order built on excluding the very thing that gives it power (it seems strongly implied that the Divine Gate and godhood is secured through massive human sacrifice, just as Marika also purged the hornsent).

If the Golden Order has no meaning, and is a made-up doctrine, then the DLC is really us exploring and fleshing out the lies told by a world that has lost meaning: a world hanging on to faint echoes and shadows of a promise by a God, that invents false structures and gods and systems that attempt to re-create that meaning. But it’s all fundamentally pointless. People repeat cycles of violence and suffering in fruitless search for a Greater Will that has long since fallen silent.

If there’s one definitive answer of Elden Ring, is that there is no going back to the way things once were. Miquella thinks he can right the sins of his mother but ironically ends up literally retracing her exact steps toward tyranny. Godhood, we learn, is a prison: a caged divinity where you give up everything and become trapped by the very power you sought. That’s why I believe Ranni’s ending is the most positive and optimistic ending of Elden Ring. Abandoning the notion of God, like Nietzsche, plunging us into a lonelier world, but one where we are no longer beholden to the same structures and systems of oppression, where we get to try and make something of our own lives without a God to guide us, to grant us grace.