AISubs v3.7
Hey everybody. So now that I've finally completed my side quest through Dark Souls, I decided to make this retrospective lore follow-up video.
As all of you saw, my Dark Souls experience was a mostly blind playthrough, and Dark Souls as story isn't the kind that you wrap your head around completely the first time through.
Or maybe ever - a lot of it's up to interpretation.
Anyway, since I've completed the game, I've had some time to do a headfirst dive into the many excellent lore videos available on YouTube,
and I've begun to wrap my head around the general consensus interpretation of the game's setting and characters and plot.
Given that new perspective, I thought it might be fun to take a look back at my run through the game and take note of all the story that was happening around me as I bumbled my way through.
Because a big part of Dark Souls' appeal is the mythology and the story happening around you, even if you may not grasp it on your first playthrough.
And since my run didn't really capture that aspect of the Souls experience, I'm hoping that this postmortem will.
One important thing to keep in mind is that my run through the game only revealed a fraction of the story events this game contains.
A lot of the world's history is hidden in item descriptions,
but the story happening around you is largely revealed through interactions with the various NPC characters you meet at specific times and places in the game,
and I only found a handful of those interactions.
In fact, there are several characters I never once crossed paths with.
Still, we definitely gotta look at some interesting stuff, even if I didn't recognize much of its significance at the time.
So first, a few important things to mention.
One, it goes without saying, but this is gonna be spoiler heavy - I figured it's obvious, but...
Anyway, two, if you are a Dark Souls veteran, you probably know every single little thing I'm about to talk about.
In fact, you probably know it better than I do, so... sorry if I get anything wrong.
Third, know that nothing I talk about here is a new discovery.
All of this interesting lore stuff I'm about to share is thanks to the tireless efforts of the Souls fan community,
who have researched and compiled all of this information in various videos and wikis and... just all kinds of internet resources.
I would not be able to make this video without all of their hard work.
So, particular thanks to Vatividya and Epic Name Bros.' fantastic lore videos,
the Bonfireside Chats podcasts, which is really awesome.
and everybody who contributes to all of those wikis.
I will link to a bunch of this stuff below, I highly recommend checking them all out if you haven't.
Great way to spend a lot of time.
Now, before we get into what happened specifically to and around me as I played,
I think a quick summary of the world's history will provide context for the characters and the events we saw,
so let me skim through that real fast.
A lot of the most important information was contained in the opening cutscene, it turns out,
even if it is kind of difficult to contextualize all that information as a first-time player.
The world began in the Age of Ancients.
There were everlasting dragons and archtrees and that was about it.
Everything was shrouded in fog, everything was gray, everything was eternally still.
Then, for no explicable reason, fire appeared in the world below and broke that stillness.
Fire introduced disparity into that still world, bringing light and dark, heat and cold, life and death.
This is called the First Flame and its light drew the attention of the beings it illuminated.
Four of these beings found in the flame, four Lord Souls.
These Lord Souls contained such power that the four individuals who possessed them became as gods.
These four were Gwen, Nito, the Witch of Izalith and the mysterious Pygmy.
Using the power of the Lord Souls, Gwen, the Witch and Nito gathered an army and waged war on the everlasting dragons for dominance over the world.
With the help of Seath, an embittered, scaleless dragon who betrayed his own kind,
the Lords used their new power to defeat the everlasting dragons and usher in a new age - the Age of Fire.
It was a prosperous time, the Lord's domain came to be known as Lordran and many human settlements eventually grew around and within it.
Now, that is where most of the history explained in the intro cutscene ends.
It doesn't really go into detail about what happened between these ancient events and the start of our story.
Those mysteries are largely left for the players to uncover and the Souls community has been working tirelessly,
scouring the text and clues in the game to do so.
Here are the main bullet points as best they've deciphered.
Inevitably, all fires slowly fade and die.
So it was for the first flame and the age of fire it enabled.
As the flame diminished, so too did the lord souls, sending the gods into a panic.
The witch of Izalith thought to try using her lord soul and her knowledge of sorcery
to recreate the first flame. If she could pull that off, their age of fire could last forever.
This plan went about as badly as it possibly could. The fire she created spun into chaos,
consumed and corrupted all of Izalith, including her children, and birthed demons into the world.
The first flame continued to dwindle, and Gwyn grew desperate.
Seeing no other solution, he left Anor Londo in the hands of his children,
departed for the Kiln of the First Flame with his knights, and linked his own powerful soul
to the fire, feeding it to stave off the darkness a little longer.
This brings us to the Undead Curse. Not much is known for sure about its origin,
but what is known is that this curse marks the victim's body with a dark sign and renders
them unable to permanently die. Upon death, these undead are reborn at bonfires over and over.
If they don't maintain their humanity, their bodies and intelligence will eventually decay,
rendering them hollow, mindless and aggressive. Undead are generally feared and despised by the
rest of mankind, and some groups have taken to corralling them in an asylum to the north,
imprisoning them for eternity. This brings us to the events of the game.
Centuries have passed since Gwyn kindled the flame with his soul, and it continues to fade.
Now there are only embers, and soon only dark will remain. But some undead tell of a prophecy
stating that one day a chosen undead will escape the asylum, pilgrimage to Lordran,
ring the bell of awakening, and learn the fate of the undead. And thus begins our story of the
chosen undead, Elise. Just so we can get a bird's eye view of what happened in our playthrough,
let's run through the bullet point version of Elise's journey, skipping all of the tangential
bits and the side stories. Don't worry, I'm going to come back to all of that stuff later.
We begin locked up in the undead asylum, awaiting the end of the world as we slowly go hollow in our cell.
When suddenly we are freed by a mysterious knight.
With his dying breath, this knight entreats us to carry on his mission.
To fulfill the old prophecy by escaping the asylum, ringing the bell of awakening and learning the fate of the undead.
It's not much to go on, but we're sure not gonna stay here.
We escape the asylum and are carried to Lordran, specifically to a safe haven called Firelink Shrine.
There we are told that we were given some incomplete information.
There are actually two bells of awakening.
One above us in the undead church, one far below us in Blighttown.
We fight our way up through the undead berg to ring the first bell,
and then battle our way down through the depths in Blighttown to ring the second.
And in achieving this goal we do several things.
First, we signal this here giant to open up the Gate Descends fortress, the only known path to Anor Londo.
Second, we awaken the primordial serpent Kingseeker Frampt back at Firelink Shrine.
And third, we finish satisfying all of the objectives described in the prophecy,
escaping the asylum and ringing the bells,
which means now we get to learn the mysterious fate of the undead.
And Kingseeker Frampt is happy to oblige.
He claims that he's a friend of Lord Gwyn and that he's been waiting for the Chosen Undead a long time.
He tells us that it is our fate to succeed Lord Gwyn,
so that we may link the fire, cast off the dark, and undo the curse of the undead.
Which sounds really good, if a little bit vague.
To achieve this, Frampt tells us that we will need to retrieve the Lord Vessel from Anor Londo,
and to get there we're gonna need to go through Sen's fortress,
something that a lot of people have tried and failed to do before us.
We do, eventually, survive Sen's house of traps and are brought to Anor Londo,
the forsaken realm of the gods, bathed in perpetual sunset.
At the top of the cathedral we find Gwynevere, daughter of Lord Gwyn, princess of sunlight.
She gives us the Lord Vessel and asks the same of us as Frampt did —
succeed Lord Gwyn, inherit his sunlight, end this twilight and the undead curse.
She says without the fire, all will be frigid and frightful dark.
Back at Firelink, Frampt bids us place the Lord Vessel on an altar below the shrine,
which opens up several barriers across Lordran.
Frampt gives us our next task - obtain the Lord Souls, the ones originally found in the first flame, and place them in the Lord Vessel to proceed.
The first Lord Soul we claim from its original owner, Gravelord Nito.
Gwyn's Soul... seems like it'd be a little harder to get 'cause he's gone,
but he actually granted fragments of his Lord Soul to several beings when he was still around,
including his confidant, Seath the Scaleless, and the four kings of New Londo - we claim all of those as well.
The last is that of the Witch of Izalith, which sits at the twisted site of her failure to recreate the first flame, the Bed of Chaos.
On our way toward Seath's archives, we stumble upon a hidden passage below the cathedral,
which leads to Gwyn's honorary tomb and, it so happens, his youngest child, Gwyndolin, who attacks us for profaning the tomb with our presence.
After defeating this god, we're led to believe that they were the last god actually remaining in Unerlando, and that the Gwynevere we met is an impostor - and indeed she is!
Dispelling this illusion causes the entire facade of Unerlando to crumble - the city is in fact forsaken, the gods are gone, and the city is shrouded in dark.
Gwynevere, the guardian sentinels and knights - even the sunset were illusions spun by Gwyndolin, perhaps to protect the city, or perhaps as part of a much larger deception.
We follow Frampt's instructions, we place the gathered Lord Souls in the Lord Vessel, and gain access to the Kiln of the First Flame - the charred site of Gwyn's sacrifice.
This is where Gwyn fed his soul to the flame, kindling it and maintaining the Age of Fire just a bit longer - and this is where we finally lay eyes on him.
Sort of - the being we fight is more likely what remains of his soul, or maybe the hollowed husk of his body - whatever it is, we defeat it.
Then we kindle the final bonfire - the source of the first flame - the fire is kindled, the Age of Fire continues - if only for a little while - and we are consumed.
It's the closest thing Dark Souls has to a happy ending.
But what if we hadn't? What if we hadn't kindled the flame? What if we had rejected that mission entirely and let the Age of Fire end?
After all, it's not like we were given this mission by entirely trustworthy characters -
I mean, we were told the prophecy by various undead and knights, but
the ones who gave us specific marching orders were Kingseeker Frampt and Princess Guinevere.
One of them turned out to be not real, and the other was pretty tight-lipped about what information he shared -
I mean, "succeed Lord Gwyn", "cast off the dark", "undo the curse of the undead" -
that all really sounds good, but he never made mention of sacrificing ourselves to the fire.
And, actually, do we even do that third one? Like, "undoing the curse of the undead"?
It doesn't seem like continuing the Age of Fire is going to magically do that, I dunno.
And what does preserving the gods' Age of Fire ultimately achieve?
A half of 'em are gone already, either dead or have departed from Lordran.
Would letting this Age end and another one begin be as bad as we're led to believe?
It so happens that Frampt isn't the only primordial serpent in Dark Souls -
there's another one out there you can find named Cath, and he gives us a different mission -
"gather the Lord Souls", "defeat Gwyn", "let the flame die", and "usher in the Age of Dark", of humans.
But it should be noted there's no knowing if this is actually a better outcome -
Cath is just as untrustworthy as Frampt, maybe more so -
and even after you've researched everything there is to be found about the Dark Souls story,
it's still really easy to argue a case either way.
Such is the delightful ambiguity of Dark Souls lore.
But there's so much more to Dark Souls' story than just the central plot of our quest -
we met a lot of interesting characters on this journey,
each with their own side stories happening parallel to our own.
Now, there is a lot more detail to these stories than I have time to pack into this video,
but that's okay - there's a lot of other people who have already done a way better job at that than I ever could.
Again, I definitely recommend checking out those links in the description when you're done here.
What I'm gonna do instead is just kinda skim through the most interesting characters, places, and concepts
based on what we saw in my specific playthrough.
Okay, here we go!
This mysterious knight was the first character we met in the game.
and it turns out that he was once meant to play a significantly larger role.
Thanks to an abundance of additional recorded dialogue tucked away in the game's files,
we know that his name is Oscar of Astora,
and that he was originally meant to be crossing paths with us throughout the game,
always a step ahead, eventually becoming a rival.
It's assumed that he came here once he became undead
so that he could attempt to fulfill the prophecy himself
by escaping the asylum and taking the pilgrimage to Lordran.
And some fans have suggested that the reason he dropped the key into our cell to begin with
is that he was attempting to free as many undead as he could on his way through,
just in case one of them turned out to be the chosen undead from the tale.
Alas, some content always gets cut during development for one reason or another.
Oscar dies moments after we leave him and, the next time we see him, he's gone hollow.
I find it cool that this place, which is clearly in ruins now,
was obviously built here above the Kiln of the First Flame to honor the site of Gwyn's sacrifice.
It's the place the fire was first linked.
Firelink.
I don't know, it's the kind of world-building name significance
that you can't really appreciate during your first playthrough,
but it seems so simple and obvious in retrospect.
This hostile knight, who crushed us on more than one occasion,
is locked away at the bottom of a watchtower.
And he is locked down there — we had to open the door with our master key.
He never speaks, but he appears to be a man once known as Havel the Rock.
According to a combination of item descriptions,
it turns out that Havel was once a highly respected bishop
and a close friend of Lord Gwyn himself.
So why would one of Lord Gwyn's close friends be locked up all the way down here in Undead Burg?
We find some possible answers to that question through items acquired later in the game.
Now we know that Gwyn and Havel were friends,
but it turns out that Havel had some strongly negative feelings about magic and dragons.
And we know that Gwyn was also good friends with a magical dragon.
Seath the Magic Dragon had started doing some pretty insane magical experimentation up in those archives,
and it seems that at some point Havel decided to do something about it.
The magic barrier miracles that we can find and learn are of Havel's creation,
and in a hidden room up in Anor Londo we find a stash of equipment that appears to belong to him.
It includes his armor, his dragon tooth weapon, and an occult club.
Occult weapons were used to kill gods, and here's one hidden among Havel's things in the god's domain.
It would appear that Havel was planning something and that perhaps that plan failed.
Whatever played out, he was locked up in the watchtower, quote "for his own good",
and by the time we open the door to his prison centuries later, he's gone completely hollow.
And then we kill him after several tries and feel pretty impressed with ourselves.
So it turns out we only saw part of this group's tale.
The party includes Petrus, whom we first met upon our arrival at Firelink,
two clerics named Nico and Vince, and Rhea, the priestess they're all here to escort.
They're tight-lipped on the purpose of their mission,
but if you talk to the right NPCs at the right times you can discover that their duty,
as undead members of the Way of White, is to recover a right which will allow kindling bonfires even further.
And why wouldn't they want that? I got one off Pinwheel and it is really useful.
Suffice it to say that their mission does not fare well.
Petrus becomes separated from the group, Nico and Vince both go hollow,
and Rhea is left helpless in the Tomb of Giants.
Fortunately, we just happen to be helpless in the Tomb of Giants nearby and come to her rescue.
Unfortunately, during the struggle with the hollowed Vince and Nico,
Rhea vanishes, most likely killed during the fight.
The only survivor of the group is this piece of work, who finds his way back to Firelink just fine.
There's a good bit more to Petrus and Rhea than our playthrough revealed,
but let's just say... he didn't get separated from the party on accident.
We first meet this cheerful knight from Astora near the bridge to the Undead Church,
and he offers to assist us throughout our journey.
Solaire is a warrior of sunlight, he reveres the sun like a magnificent father,
he says he's here on a quest to find his very own son - in fact, he became undead to do so,
which is interesting, as this suggests that one might be able to voluntarily become undead somehow.
He helps us defeat the Belgargoils that were giving us so much trouble,
and our paths cross numerous times over the course of our journey.
Each successive meeting seems to see him in lower spirits, though,
as continued failure to find the son he seeks begins to wear on his resolve.
By the time we find him in Lost Izalith, he appears to have sunk fully into despair,
and when we see him next, that despair will have pushed him fully into desperate madness.
Whether it's the emotional anguish or the sunlight maggot he's wearing,
Solaire's mind is lost and we're forced to end him there.
One of Dark Souls' bigger prevailing mysteries concerns the identity of Gwyn's eldest son,
a god of war who had his deific status revoked and was cast out of Anor Londo for some reckless mistake.
No one knows who this son might be, but Solaire is one of the favored candidates,
and it does kind of feel like there are a lot of clues to support that theory.
His obsession with the sun, his considerable power which doesn't seem to come from any of his equipment,
he even uses Gwyn's signature lightning bolt spell in combat.
It's never been confirmed as anything more than a theory, but it's a theory that I like.
True or no, he's one of Dark Souls' few loveable characters,
and the only other two I can think of that could possibly give him a run for his money are...
We bump into this jolly knight of Catarina numerous times as we travel,
always under similar circumstances.
He's run up against a barrier of some sort and can't figure out how to proceed,
so he waits until the problem solves itself - by which I mean until we solve the problem for him.
We open the gates to Sen's fortress for him,
we stop the fortress's boulder traps for him,
we kill a roomful of Anor Londo's silver knights for him,
and we give him some extra moss to survive the poisonous swamps in Blighttown.
After all that, when we catch up to him in Lost Izalith, above yet another seemingly impassable obstacle,
he feels an obligation to finally return the favor and help us,
and despite our best efforts to assist in the fight, this act of bravery was his last.
But unknown to Siegmeyer, he was being searched for.
We found his daughter Siegland captured and trapped in a crystal golem outside Seath's archives.
She was trying to find her father to relay some news about her mother,
and she bemoans his tendency to wander and get himself in trouble.
We never ran into her again after witnessing Siegmeier's sacrifice,
so who knows how her story played out.
I suspect her journey to find him has been every bit as much the adventure as his own.
Most everything about this punk remains ambiguous.
He's from Karim, his equipment suggests that he's a devout worshiper of the goddess Fina,
and he ends up murdering the firekeeper Anastasia,
stealing her soul and running off back to his own world with it.
Why did he want it? What did he want it for?
How did he get himself out of that cell in the undead church to begin with?
And what's with the cartoon villain voice?
All we have are theories.
Speaking of firekeepers...
So I think we met three firekeepers in total, right?
There's Anastasia below Firelink Shrine,
the darkmoon Naitess in Anor Londo,
and the fair lady near the demon ruins.
The game gives very little explicit information about firekeepers.
It calls them "corporeal manifestations of their bonfire"
and "a draw for the humanity that is offered to them"
and that their souls are "gnawed by infinite humanity"
and that it just swarms within them, just beneath the skin.
Removing the firekeeper extinguishes the bonfire,
but then not every functioning bonfire in the game appears to have its own keeper,
so... your guess is as good as mine.
How does one become a firekeeper, I wonder?
I mean, none of the keepers we met were born to it,
in fact I'm not even entirely sure they chose it.
And another interesting question, so...
we know that firekeepers drop the "firekeeper's soul" item when they're killed,
and we find several of those scattered across Lordran during our travels,
often in dangerous areas, like the Undead Church and Blighttown and New Londo.
Presumably there were once firekeepers in those places,
so were those areas safe havens like Firelink Shrine at one point?
Maybe they were overrun.
[thunder]
This cesspit is the worst, and you get the sense that it's always been an unpleasant place,
even before the Blight, or before the Undead Curse even.
I mean, it's clearly a shantytown, it rests in the valley beneath the Undead Burg sewer system,
and now the ruins of Izalith below it are infested with the literal demons.
This place is the fetid center of an evil sandwich.
Screw Blighttown forever, never again.
When the Witch of Izalith failed to recreate the first flame,
her ill-fated effort corrupted all of Izalith and birthed demons into Lordran.
Among those corrupted by the chaos flame were all the witch's children,
two of her daughters, transformed by the chaos into these spider-like monstrosities,
fled the ruin of Izalith, set up shop outside Blighttown, and took on the sickly locals as servants.
By the time we arrive on the scene, just trying to ring a bell and get on with our lives,
one of the daughters is hidden away within the ruins of the Blighttown church,
and the other one's camping the bell, waiting to murder us.
It would appear that Quelaag, the murdery one,
preys on Undead who wander down into her domain to harvest their humanity for her dying sister,
who is only referred to as "the fair lady."
She had at one point taken pity on the plagued residents of Blighttown and attempted to cure them of their blight pus,
infecting herself in the process.
The constant supply of humanity provided by Quelaag is the only thing keeping her alive.
I'm, uh... I'm sure it'll be fine.
This goofy thing is one of the primordial serpents.
He's an ally of Gwyn's family and he's got quite the selection of half-truths for us.
He's one of the few characters in the game to give us explicit marching orders,
but it turns out that he was withholding a lot of crucial information,
and I'm pretty sure it's not out of ignorance.
I would talk more about him, but...
A) much about the primordial serpent character is shrouded in mystery,
and B) I find the person he's working with so much more interesting,
and I'm gonna be talking about them pretty soon here, so I'm just gonna move on.
These clowns stand guard over Gwynevere's chamber,
and they're an even odder pairing once you learn more about 'em.
Ornstein was one of Gwyn's four elite knights - their captain, actually.
He was even given a tiny fragment of Gwyn's soul - like, seriously,
this was one of the most highly revered warriors in the entire Age of Fire.
Executioner Smough, on the other hand, is just psychotic.
He aspired to be one of the elite knights, but Gwyn wouldn't take him - and for good reason,
he enjoys his work way, way too much.
He even grinds the bones of his victims into his food, like he is actually a nutcase.
So what are these two doing working together now?
I mean, it could be that Smough was made a knight later, after Gwyn's passing - or
maybe Gwyndolin promoted him - after all, Gwyndolin's godly duty is punishing sinners,
and this is Anor Londo's Executioner, so I could see a connection there.
Or maybe Ornstein thinks more highly of Smough than Gwyn ever did - and made him an honorary
knight just to get some help guarding the princess.
I mean, the other three elite knights are out of the picture - Ornstein was all that was left.
Whatever the case, when we finally do take Ornstein down,
Smough makes it perfectly clear that he is the same bloodthirsty psycho he always was.
I wonder if these guys knew they were guarding an illusion.
It seems hard to imagine Ornstein not being aware of it - Smough may have had no idea.
Then again, maybe he wouldn't really have even cared that much.
The painted world gets really fascinating once you learn that it was created to lock
away things which the gods feared - and that's why the painting is so heavily guarded.
So what all is in here and why are they afraid of it?
The most prominent of the painting's occupants is Priscilla.
Priscilla is a half-dragon crossbreed,
presumed to have either been fathered by Seath or just created by him.
She also possesses an ability called "Life Hunt" which apparently terrified the gods,
so into the painting she went.
She's not the only thing to be found in here, though - one of the most important
pieces of loot you can find in the painting is an ember used to smith occult weapons,
weapons used to hunt the gods.
Kinda makes sense that the gods would choose to toss that in the painting.
The painting also contains what appears to be a ton of iconography relating to Velka.
Velka is a goddess of sin and punishment, a character very rarely mentioned in Dark Souls,
but the few items that mention her do still give you the sense that she's really important.
She's described as a "rogue god," and now you find a lot of stuff relating to her here,
in the place where gods put everything they fear. There's a set of gear bearing her name,
uh, spells attributed to her, statues that might depict her, maybe? And also,
crows are generally associated with Velka, and there are crows everywhere in here,
including full-blown crow demons. And, come to think of it,
weren't we first carried to Lordran by an enormous crow? The plot thickens.
I think Gwendolyn might be the most fascinating character in the story for me.
They get very little actual screen time or attention in the game, but I think that,
as the last remaining god in Anor Londo, they might be one of the most important figures in
the story. I mean, the Age of Fire is slowly burning out, and it's only lasted this long
because Gwyn sacrificed himself to kindle the flame. All the other gods have left,
leaving Gwendolyn alone to find some solution to this problem.
If we look critically at the mission that we're given as the "chosen undead" or whatever,
we find that it's ultimately meant to serve the god's purpose by prolonging the Age of Fire
further. The entire journey is about getting a powerful undead to the Kild of the First Flame
to replace Gwyn as fuel for the fire, and every contact we have along the way guides us further
down that path. We start down the path by following a mysterious prophecy. We are given
further instructions by Frampt, one of Gwyn's allies, who sends us to fetch the required lord
vessel from Anor Londo, a city illuminated by a false sun to keep up appearances. The darkmoon
knightess, one of Gwyndolin's followers, greets us and directs us down the correct path toward
Gwyn's palace, where an illusion of Gwynevere created by Gwyndolin gives us the lord vessel
and tells us to continue following Frampt's instructions. Frampt has us gather the lord
souls and open the door to the kiln, where we can fulfill our role and kindle the flame,
having proven ourselves a powerful enough soul to survive all those trials.
Everything about this journey has Gwyndolin's fingerprint on it -
the illusions, the friendly faces who are all loyal to Gwyn's family,
and considering the fact that every step of the pilgrimage described in the prophecy
was designed to lead us along this path,
it seems reasonable to assume that the prophecy itself was created by Gwyndolin as well -
just a ruse to steer undead candidates along the path until a powerful one survived
to serve as worthy fuel.
I think Gwyndolin's the mastermind behind all of this -
or if not the mastermind,
then at least the main one pulling the strings in collaboration with Frampt.
My point is, Gwyndolin is a badass and they are easily one of my favorite characters in this game now
despite the snake feet -
though seriously, what is up with the snake feet?
I want to do a section on this guy, but there's just so little solid information to go on.
We don't even know for sure what "first of the dead" means exactly -
is he death himself or just the first thing to die?
Who knows?
After the war with the dragons,
while the Witch of Izalith and Gwyn were forming cities and doing all kinds of cool stuff,
Nito apparently wasn't doing much of anything -
he just went back to his tomb and... sat around for centuries.
The only other times he gets mentioned is when someone robs him -
like occultists try to use his power against the gods,
a pinwheel stole the rite of kindling from him to practice necromancy,
and meanwhile Nito's just be sitting there in that coffin, not doing a darn thing.
I-I give you Nito, ladies and gentlemen!
First of the dead, and second-laziest skeleton in all of video games.
As I had surmised when we first wandered through the place,
some heavy stuff indeed went down in New Londo's past.
The place was once a thriving city of humans - an extension of Anor Londo.
Gwyn had chosen four worthy kings from among them,
and granted them each a small fragment of his lord's soul.
But everything went south when the other primordial serpent, Kaathe,
appeared to those kings and offered them the power of life drain -
the ability to drain an individual's humanity from them.
With this new power, the corrupted kings and their darkwraith minions went on a humanity-draining spree,
and the entire city began to fall to the darkness of the abyss.
To contain the darkwraiths and prevent the abyss from spreading,
a trio of sorcerers flooded and drowned the entire city.
By the time we get there, the place is a literal ghost town,
only one of the sorcerers is still around standing watch, and the kings await us in the abyss below.
It's anybody's guess what the serpent koth stood to gain from corrupting the kings and fueling the abyss through them,
but one thing that is for certain is that New Londo is not the only place this happened.
The Witch of Izalith failed in her effort to recreate the first flame and prolong the Age of Fire,
and everything we find in Lost Izalith is the ultimate result of that failure.
Ruins, all manner of demons, and at its core the Bed of Chaos, the source of every demon and lordran.
And kind of a pain in the ass boss fight, if I'm honest.
Back in the Age of Ancients, the everlasting dragons' stone scales are what granted them immortality, and Seath lacked them.
He betrayed his own kind and allied with Gwyn during the war, and was awarded a dukedom in Anor Londo for it, and a fragment of Gwyn's lord soul.
Taking up residence in the archives, Seath delved deeply into sorcery and magical crystal research on a quest to achieve immortality for himself,
and he went mad over time, turning the archives into a prison and kidnapping and experimenting upon lordran subjects.
It's not really until later in the game that you realize you've been seeing Seath's influence all over the place.
The channelers you run into are his agents, tasked not only with being his eyes all over the realm, but also with finding suitable test subjects.
The crystal golems are his creation too, used for capturing and transporting individuals, as we see a couple of times firsthand.
The moonlight butterfly is also his creation, and it's interesting that we see a lot of Seath's handiwork wandering around Darkroot in general.
Darkroot was once the land of Oolacile, after all.
There's also the fact that we find the broken pendant inside a crystal golem in Seath's archives,
the same pendant that eventually gets us yanked back in time to Oolacile.
I think it's safe to say that Seath had a fairly heavy interest in this place.
Speaking of which, now is as good a time as any to talk about what went down in Oolacile.
So, Oolacile was once a kingdom in Lordran, and I was correct in guessing that it was
located where Darkroot exists now. Due to the meddlings of a certain primordial serpent long
ago, its inhabitants fell to the corrupted dark of the Abyss — the same threat which
New Londo was flooded to contain. Oolacile was lost and ultimately forgotten. An effort had
been made to stop the spread of the Abyss there, though — which is where Artorias comes in.
Artorias was one of Gwyn's elite knights, alongside the assassin Ciaran, an archer
giant who I never happened to run into named Gough, and their captain Ornstein. When Oolacile
started falling prey to the Abyss, Artorias was given the task of going there to handle it.
He ventured into the darkness with his wolf Seath — who I also never ran into in the Abyss,
I don't know how I didn't manage to find any of these characters. Sadly, Artorias failed in his
mission — he was corrupted by the Abyss, and only just managed to defend Seath from it before
losing himself completely. Then we arrive on the scene, put down the corrupted Artorias,
and complete his mission in the Abyss ourselves — although he'll still get credited for it, which...
fine. He was mourned by Ciaran, and in the present day we find a body resting against his gravestone
that is most likely hers. He's also mourned by Seath, who stands guard over his grave for
centuries — until we show up and are forced to kill Seath because, as we all know, it is very
difficult to effectively negotiate with a giant wolf once it has pulled a sword on you. That's a
good life lesson. We first found Dusk trapped in one of Seath's golems — actually, I guess
chronologically we first found Dusk trapped in... you know what, it doesn't matter.
Given the fact that she's a princess from a kingdom lost centuries ago,
she's probably been in that golem for a long time.
I didn't realize it while I was playing, but after you've freed her you can actually summon
and speak with her more in Darkroot to find out more about Oolacile.
Upon venturing into the past, we learn from Elizabeth that Dusk was in need of rescuing,
and indeed she was. When we did manage to free her, she was traumatized beyond speech.
I guess two or three centuries stuck in a crystal golem gave her plenty of time to recover.
Down in Lower Oolacile, in the chasm of the Abyss surrounded by rampant sprites of humanity,
we find the source of the corruption - Manus, the warped image of humanity spun out of control.
But Manus was once human - in fact, a primeval human, one of the first in existence.
Oolacile's residents - urged on by whatever serpent was messing with them - dug up this human
and experimented upon it, and the wild humanity they unleashed from this ancient being brought
forth the Abyss. There's a lot of heavy speculation on the internet about who this
primeval human might have been, but I'm just gonna jump right to the larger point.
I find it funny that one of the most core elements to the Dark Souls universe - and
the thing that the game is actually named after - is so difficult to find hard details about in
the game's lore. What is this "humanity" stuff? Because, I mean, it's a weird thing in this game.
Humanity is what makes us human - which makes sense - and maintaining it keeps an undead from
going hollow - which also kinda makes sense - and yet it's also something that you can pillage,
because it's an actual object in this universe, and that's the part that's hard to wrap your
head around. Like, here it is - this is what humanity physically looks like - just a little
black sprite that you can hold in your hand. You can find it on corpses and just pick it up and
take it. You can find it on rats and dogs, too, presumably because they've been eating the
corpses. Like Souls, humanity isn't just an abstract concept in Dark Souls - it's an actual
physical substance, an element - and understanding it is key to wrapping your head around the larger
mythology of Dark Souls.
So you remember waaay back at the beginning of this video, when I was telling the ancient history of the world about when the ancient lords found the lord's souls in the flame?
Nito, the Witch of Izalith, and Gwyn - and the pygmy, so easily forgotten.
Information you can find much later in the game reveals that the pygmy was probably the ancestor of mankind, and that the soul it found was different than the others - the dark soul.
This soul spread and multiplied - while the other lords waged their war on the dragons and used the power of their lord souls to forge an age of fire,
the pygmy simply sat in secret, splitting off fragments of the dark soul and spreading them among its children.
And so as mankind spread and multiplied, so too did these fragments - these little sprites which we know as humanity.
The age of fire and the lord's souls are waning, but the dark soul only continues to multiply and spread.
The age of dark which the gods have worked so hard to delay is the inevitable age of humanity.
But even knowing that much, so many aspects remain ambiguous - it's hard even to know if the age of dark would be a good thing.
I mean, if humanity and mankind are ultimately the children of the dark soul, then you would think that an age of our own would be a good thing, but
then when we see the examples of humanity run rampant - of humanity spun out of control - of the abyss - it doesn't look so promising.
But we still know it's going to happen, because the fire fades, all we have left are embers, and soon only dark will remain.
I know it's clear by now, but I have thoroughly enjoyed this game, and the more I come to understand it, the more I love it.
It's a similar feeling that I had with Undertale, actually.
I hope this quick overview of the mythology and the stories of dark souls have helped to better show the appeal of this game's lore.
I've certainly had a great time learning all of it, and I am so looking forward to future playthroughs of this game,
because not only is there so much more mechanical depth to enjoy and slowly master in the combat, but there are so many different paths that one can take through this.
I mean, there are so many "what ifs" to ask after this one playthrough.
What could I have done differently? What should I try next time?
What if I had chosen to attack Lautrec at Firelink Shrine before he had a chance to murder the firekeeper and flee with her soul?
What if I never attack Gwyndolin or destroy their illusion over Anor Londo?
What if I can manage to save Rhea in the Tomb of the Giants?
What if I give the Fair Lady enough humanity to keep her going?
What if I can act quickly enough to save Sigmayr?
What if I managed to save Solaire?
Or what if I played REALLY differently and killed every one of these characters on sight?
Having done all of this lore research, I already have a general idea of the outcome to all those questions,
but I'm excited to play the scenarios out anyway.
Anyhow, I just wanted to thank all of you one more time for joining me on this journey into Dark Souls.
I remember once feeling so intimidated by this game's early challenges,
and now I can just tear through the first few hours of the game like it's nothing.
And I wouldn't even describe myself as good at the game yet — just... better.
And what's more, I've learned the true appeal of these games, which is really what I wanted from the beginning.
I can't wait to play the other ones!
And if you are interested, I hope that some of you will join me for that as well.
So until then!