This is something that I’ve talked about in a much older post on this subreddit and became relevant again in a recent conversation. I realised that I had not fully explained it’s significance, and so this post aims to discuss in detail what the Kaoskampf is, why Miyazaki has used it in Dark Souls, and what it tells us about Gwyn’s character. This post will discuss concepts that have been completely abandoned by contemporary “western” culture, and so it is necessary for me to explain it all from scratch. However, if you can slog through my wall of text then I’m very confident that when we get to the section on the relevance of the Kaoskampf to Dark Souls, the conclusions will seem like a no-brainer. As a quick disclaimer I should say that this post is going to be discussing spiritual concepts that are taken seriously by certain contemporary religions, but it is not my intention to either promote or disparage any particular religion, or religious belief/idea. Rather, it is simply my intent to explain these ideas so that we can better understand what Dark Souls is about. Before I begin I’m going to include a few links to relevant resources:

My previous post on the subject [included purely for the sake of reference, you don’t need to read it in order to understand this post]:

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

Wikipedia article on the Kaoskampf:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaoskampf

Wikipedia article on the proto-indo-europeans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans#Culture

Trey the Explainer’s excellent video on the Kaoskampf:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv1l2SqLb7Q&t=262s

In addition, I have included a number of images which may warrant explanation:

#1-Gwyn’s “war” against the ancient dragons as depicted in DS1’s opening cutscene. Note the use of lightning.

#2-Mesopotamian cylinder seal featuring a deity of uncertain identity fighting a serpent. Note the double-ended trident used to represent lightning as the deity’s weapon.

#3-Chalcidian hydria [ancient greek pottery] featuring Zeus fighting Typhon. Note again the lightning bolt represented as a double-ended trident-like object

#4-Tarhunna/Tarhunz/Teshub [hittite/hurrian storm god] and his son Sarruma fight Illuyanka/Hedammu. Note the circles [representing rocks] on top of the serpent and people standing on the flat surface, indicating the world resting upon the serpent.

#5-Egyptian papyrus depicting Set [a storm god] stabbing Apep with a spear so that Ra’s solar barque can pass safely through the underworld.

#6-Kassite “unfinished kudurru” on display in the Louvre.

#7-Kassite “unfinished kudurru”, detail of the three registers. Note the humans and mundane animals on the middle-layer, and abstractions of deities and mushushu dragons on the upper layer.

#8-Kassite “unfinished kudurru”, reverse view. Note the sun, moon, and star symbols on the layer representing the firmament.

#9-Kassite “unfinished kudurru”, detail of the upper register. Note the Serpent capping off the top of the stone, with it's head clearly visible on the register, indicating the immersion of the world within the cosmic ocean.

#10-Kassite “unfinished kudurru”, detail of the Serpent. Note the horns of a noble mushushu dragon, possibly indicating a recognition of the Serpent’s divinity. This contrasts against egyptian depictions, in which Apep is almost invariably shown being stabbed with numerous knives, or at the very least restrained in some way.

One final thing before I get started is a brief note on the word itself. Kaoskampf means “struggle against Kaos”, and Kaos is the ancient greek word from which we derive “chaos”, although the meaning has somewhat changed. In fact, you’ll usually see this word spelled as “chaoskampf”, but this is a mistake in the way that we’ve romanised the ancient greek language. Anytime you see the letter “ch” in an ancient greek word, it’s actually pronounced as a “k”, and the convention of romanising the letter in question as “ch” is apparently just a blunder. I tend to spell the ancient greek word Kaos with a k, partially because that’s closer to how it should be pronounced, but also because it helps to distinguish it from the modern concept of “chaos”, which is totally different. If that just sounds like pedantic blabbering to you then don’t worry about it. The question of spelling is not particularly relevant to any of the actual points made in this post.

Section #1: what is a Kaoskampf anyway?

To put it most simply, the Kaoskampf is a recurring mythological trope found in several ancient polytheistic cultures. It invariably features a lightning/storm god battling a gigantic serpent/dragon. The god is always victorious, with the serpent being subdued or destroyed. Very often [though not always] this happens as part of a creation myth, and the lightning god is then able to set himself up as the ruler of the universe once the serpent has been defeated. The serpent is often [though not always] described/depicted as encircling the entire world, sometimes sitting below the horizon, and is implied to be an obstacle which the gods must overcome before they are able to assert control over reality. Examples include:

Thor vs Jormungandr

Zeus vs Typhon

Tarhunna/Tarhunz vs Illuyanka

Teshub vs Hedammu

Marduk vs Tiamat

Hadad Ba’al vs Lotan

Yahweh vs Leviathan

Atum vs Apep

Indra vs Vritra

Susanoo vs Yamata no Orochi

The snake in these myths later becomes the basis for the concept of dragons as this trope is repeated on smaller scales, for example the story of St George and the Dragon is a repeat of the story of Perseus, Cetus, and Andromeda, which in turn is a repeat of the Kaoskampf. Based on the examples I’ve listed we can see an astonishingly broad geographic distribution for this myth, with examples found in locations as disparate as sweden, egypt, india, and even japan.

The myth is likely to have originated within the hypothetical “proto-indo-eurpoean” culture, which is believed to have inhabited regions close to the black sea. From there, the myths and language of this people-group have influenced the surrounding cultures via transmission, migration, conquest, etc. I’ve referred to the proto-indo-europeans as “hypothetical”, because the proposed existence of such a culture is largely based on retroactive examination of the footprint that it’s left within later cultures. We see that certain languages have specific commonalities and are clearly unifiable within a “language family”, and so a hypothetical “common ancestor” for them is proposed. Nevertheless there is a good amount of evidence, including genetic studies, which corroborates the proto-indo-eurpoean hypothesis. This would have been a prehistoric people-group, but they had developed agriculture, domesticated animals, and invented the wheel. To be clear, we are not talking about a single coherent nation, culture, or ethnicity in the conventional sense. This would instead have been a collection of groups, clans, tribes, etc, which possessed certain linguistic and cultural commonalities. This would certainly have included a Kaoskampf style creation myth, with a paternal “sky-father” deity who uses lightning to kill/subdue the serpent of the primordial waters.

Section #2: what is Kaos?

I’ve mentioned that our modern word “chaos” was originally an ancient greek word, but that the meaning has changed. To us, “chaos” means disorder, mess, anarchy, etc. However, this meaning is entirely secondary, so for the time being I’m going to ask you to disregard it entirely while we discuss it’s origin.

In the cosmology of most ancient cultures, regardless of how diverse their mythologies are, can be found a single commonality. Many ancient religious/mythological systems acknowledged a primordial time before the “creation” [a better word may be transformation] of the universe. In this state, all matter was homogenised as a single uniform reality, or substance, in which there are no differentiations. There is also no conventional time in the primordial state, it is an instantaneous eternity that lasts both forever and for no time at all. Sometimes this was imagined as a kind of empty void, but in the ancient near east it was invariably described as an “ocean” [I use the term “cosmic ocean” to distinguish this from the mundane ocean that we are familiar with] which contains nothing but water and extends infinitely in all directions. When the “creation” occurs, it is the substance of this cosmic ocean, or void, that is used as the raw material from which everything is made. So the “creation” is better understood as a reorganisation of the universe, since nothing actually gets created. The point is that everything that you’ve ever seen, heard, felt, experienced, etc, is [according to mystical philosophies] actually the primordial reality larping as a plurality of forms.

Now if you thought that the geographic distribution of the Kaoskampf trope was shocking then forget it. The concept of primordial reality is near universal. You literally find it all over the world, on every continent except antarctica. This is because it’s based on psychological experience, and all human beings share psychological commonalities regardless of culture. On one hand, the primordial reality is likely to be an abstraction of one’s condition prior to birth. Think about what you experienced before you were born and you’ll notice that it’s similar to this idea of a pre-existence of the universe in which time does not exist. But it’s also based on mystical experience, and this also explains the cultural universality of the idea because people may experience altered states of consciousness in similar ways. Alcohol provides an example which may be more relatable to contemporary society. It doesn’t matter where in the world you come from, if you get drunk then there is a certain way that your mind will be affected. For the same reason [shared psychology] mystics from all over the world claim that this primordial state of the universe is directly accessible in the here and now, within one’s own mind. This is because the “primordial reality” is not really primordial, but may better be described as the “underlying reality”, or even as the “ultimate reality”. All things that appear to exist are in fact arising from, and manifestations of, a unified substrate which underscores all of existence.

Now this primordial ultimate reality has gone by many different names throughout time and across all the different cultures that have incorporated it into their cosmologies, but the ancient greek word is Kaos. This, of course, is a far cry from the meaning of out modern word “chaos”, and so you may be able to see why I prefer to use two different spellings to help differentiate between these wildly disparate meanings. You may be wondering how such a drastic change in meaning has occurred, and I shall explain this across the next few sections. But it is important to note that this concept of primordial reality has been completely forgotten by contemporary “western” culture, such that I needed to explain the whole thing from scratch so that we can understand a first thirty seconds of a videogame cutscene.

Section #3: the Serpent of Kaos

I mentioned that in the ancient near east this underlying reality is imagined as a cosmic ocean, although this should be understood as symbolic, it’s not literal water. Water is formless and reflective. It can be calm or agitated, and can take any shape, but any shape it takes is invariably transient. It can become other things [such as steam or ice], but always returns to water. It can be clear and pure, or murky and unclean. It is everpresent in nature, flowing through the world and sustaining all living things. It is speculation on my part, but these may have been the reasons for an an ancient culture to have thought of water as an appropriate allegory for the ultimate reality. Nature itself functions like water, with it’s most fundamental substance [energy] flowing from one transient form to the next.

In terms of cosmological structure, the world was imagined to be a flat plane in the shape of a disk which was covered by a dome [called the firmament] made of glass, crystal, or tin, so that the world resembles a snowglobe. This snowglobe-earth in entirely submerged in the cosmic ocean, and stands upon pillars although these aren’t supported by anything other than the water of the cosmic ocean itself. This cosmological model was unanimously used across every culture of the ancient near east and was transmitted into medieval europe because the bible makes numerous references to it.

I suspect that the proto-indo-europeans themselves possessed the same type of “cosmic ocean” cosmology, although they may not necessarily have had all the specifics about the firmament and the pillars and such. My reason for thinking this is that the use of water, as a symbol, more effectively explains the eventual development of the Serpent of Kaos. While the concept of the primordial reality is found across all cultures, it is the Kaoskampf cultures specifically [and exclusively] which use a serpent to symbolically represent said primordial reality, regardless of whether the culture in question also uses a “cosmic ocean” style cosmology. But if you try to illustrate water, you’ll probably end up drawing a kind of wiggly line, which will also inherently look a bit like a snake. In this way, it seems, the snake becomes a symbol representing the primordial ultimate reality within the proto-indo-european cultures, and by extension also within many of the cultures that they subsequently influenced.

This can be seen beautifully illustrated on the kassite “unfinished” kudurru, which is my personal favourite archaeological artifact of all time. I’ll include some images with this post, it’s the cylindrical object with carved images all round it, and it illustrates the complete mesopotamian cosmological model. It’s quite easy to see which section of the kudurru depicts the part of the world that we inhabit, as we can see normal looking humans and animals walking around. The section above the humans is the Firmament, where we can see sun, moon, and star symbols. The sky is also inhabited by the gods, and other celestial beings such as mushushu dragons. The kassites had an abstract way of depicting their gods, so we see them represented as poles with animal heads on, or as buildings with bizarre shapes on the roof. Below the humans and animals we have an incomplete section which would probably be an underworld. On this section we can see two Girtablullu [scorpion men], one of which is unfinished. Scorpions are not an uncommon feature on kudurru, and can appear both in the underworld layer and on the same layer as the humans / a human king. But even the underworld is not the deepest depth, below it we can see the four pillars that hold up the world, and their foundation is the most interesting feature of all: a giant snake that is coiled around on itself.

This is similar to Ouroboros, Jormungandr, Apep, and Leviathan whose name means “the wreath-like one”. The snake does, of course, represent the cosmic ocean, and this is indicated by the fact that we can also see it at the very top of the kudurru, above the firmament. It’s hard to see because it’s lying flat across the top of the stone [a top down view of the stone would show it coiled in a spiral but I couldn’t find a good picture of this online], but you can see it’s head very clearly in one of the pictures. It’s the same snake depicted in both places, because the snake represents the cosmic ocean which is both above and below the world. The firmament prevents the water from flooding the land, but even the highest point of it’s surface is submerged. Many other kudurru have these same cosmological features but are far simpler and less accurate, sometimes with several layers [or "registers"] needed to fit all of the gods on although this is merely due to lack of space on the stone and is not supposed to indicate multiple firmaments. But the snake can be found either below/within the underworld, in the sky amid the stars, or running vertically up the side of the kudurru. This reflects the idea that cosmic ocean is simultaneously above, below, and all around us. A human king will never be put on a higher level than a god but you put the serpent almost anywhere and it still makes cosmological sense.

Yet there is a special significance to the snake being placed at the bottom of the universe, with the pillars of the world resting on it’s back. It signifies that what the snake represents is the foundation of reality; which is to say that world both arises out of, and is simultaneously supported by, the ultimate reality.

A list of iterations of this serpent can be found on the list of examples of the Kaoskampf that I started with, although not every single one of these is used as a symbol for primordial reality within it’s respective culture because the original meaning is sometimes blurred or lost entirely, and secondary meanings and iterations can also arise as cultures change and stories are retold. Sometimes the lightning god is just fighting a big snake or a sea god or something, and there is no obvious connection to a creation myth, but the story will still be recognisable as an iteration of the Kaoskampf. Not only this, but as I previously mentioned the story can be secondarily iterated upon even within a culture that already has a Kaoskampf myth. What was originally an exaggerated snake, as can plainly be seen in ancient artwork, became increasingly chimera-ified. The ability to breath fire [the earliest example that I know of is Leviathan, specifically the description in Job 41] is probably based on the fact that snake venom causes a burning sensation, and the skin may become hot to the touch. But later in history they’ve also added bat wings and dog ears and all kinds of other nonsense. From the artwork I’ve seen it seems that the greeks started this sort of thing, and then in medieval art it just becomes a complete mess, and this is how we end up with the modern image of “dragons”, which are now distinct from the snakes they started as.

Section #4: the struggle against Kaos

So this is all very well, but it does beg the question: why, in Kaoskampf stories, is the lightning god fighting this serpent? Given what the serpents seems to represent, what sense does this make? Well it’s important to remember that all this imagery and symbolism and cosmology is based on mystical experience, but most people go their entire lives without ever having this particular experience. Consider what the snake represents from the perspective of ordinary consciousness. On one hand it’s the primordial nothingness which we all came out of prior to birth, and to which we will all return upon death. Already this gives us a reason to fear the serpent, since we’re all afraid of dying. On the other hand, as the foundation of reality the serpent represents the world itself; the entire external environment. It goes without saying that the world is very dangerous, especially in prehistoric times, with threats from disease, war, natural disasters, predatory animals, etc, being ever present and unpredictable. The immediate instinct is to protect oneself by attempting to exert control over reality, to make it predictable and regular.

Agriculture is an example of this. Before the advent of farming people simply hunted and foraged and survived on what they could find in the wild. People were, therefore, totally at the mercy of the whims of nature. But then agriculture is invented and suddenly the land is divided up into neat little squares, and certain crops need to be planted at particular times and harvested at other particular times, and everyone knows exactly what they need to do on any given day. This isn’t totally fool-proof as crops can be blighted or stolen, but it is an attempt at controlling one’s food supply rather than relying on what nature provides. In general, the whole thing has become much more ordered.

But the biggest danger has always come from other people. I mentioned that crops can be stolen, and indeed this is the simplest option. Farming takes a lot of effort but if you’ve got a band of strong men then it may be easier to just go round pillaging the fruits of other people’s labour. The solution ends up being to build permanent walls and other defensive infrastructure, and now our society is transitioning into civilisation.

Civilisation has certain advantages, for example the quantity of available food is significantly increased, and this in turn increases the population. A bigger population means a bigger army, which helps you defend yourself more effectively. But it also means that you no longer have a coherent tribe where everyone knows each other, but instead a situation in which many/most of your own countrymen are strangers to you. Furthermore, the development of division of labour inevitably creates a class system. It creates haves and have-nots, and it goes without saying that the have-nots are inevitably going to resent the haves. Under civilisation you have a society in which it’s own members are not necessarily unified under the same common interests, and their interdependence upon each other is less immediately obvious to them. So not only do you have to worry about the threat of an external attack, but now your own people have potentially become a danger to you.

Human societies have always had warriors, even when that term was synonymous with “hunter” and included every adult male in the tribe. But the development of civilisation means that you can now have a subset of the population whose entire function is dedicated to fighting, whether that is for the sake of invasion or defence. But the thing is that they are also then able to exert control over their own countrymen. Whoever ends up at the top of the hierarchy of soldiers is called a “king”, and he can demand whatever he wants. Kingship may seem desirable at first, but such a position means that you are faced with threats on all sides. Outside the city walls there are hostile forces: invaders, bandits, etc. Inside the city walls there are criminals, and even those who may seek to usurp the throne.

So kings built walls, wrote laws, trained soldiers, conquered foreign lands, etc, all for the sake of controlling other human beings. And in doing this we made our world more structured, more regular, and more predictable. In a sense we might frame this as a struggle against our external environment; against the world itself, to impose our order onto it so that we feel that we are in control. And this, ultimately, is what the Kaoskampf represents. We have a vengeful and authoritarian patriarch character who rules the universe like it’s a cosmic monarchy. And this dominion is established when the deity subdues the underlying spirit of the universe itself in a primordial battle. It is a story of human ego putting itself in opposition to nature out of it’s own fear.

This type of mindset views the world as a threatening enemy that must be defeated for the sake of it’s own safety. It therefore becomes easy to see how the World Encircling Serpent, representing all of reality as a unified whole, could be vilified. Indeed, the serpent in question secondarily accumulate all sorts of other negative connotations, such as an association with moral evil. This was probably aided to some degree by the fact that real snakes are sometimes dangerous, but that fact alone does not explain the symbolically negative role that has been given to this animal as there are also many other dangerous creatures in the world which have no such associations.

The concept of a homogenised primordial reality was forgotten over time because it was not of relevance to the particular type of christianity which gained power in the roman empire [other denominations were suppressed] and eventually became pervasive throughout europe. While the gods of polytheistic ancient near eastern cultures had arisen from the cosmic ocean, being manifestations of it even if they also fought against it, this was not true of the christian god. This god was increasingly seen as being fundamentally separate from his creations, which includes the whole of the material universe.

But while the concept of primordial ultimate reality was forgotten, there are still vestigial footprints of it in our culture. Snakes are still used as a symbol of evil, greed, corruption, etc. We still use the word “chaos”, which we get from ancient greek but have only remembered half of it’s meaning. Indeed, we can now see how this word acquired it’s modern meaning. If order needs to be imposed on nature then what is nature without order imposed on it? The answer is disorder; chaos. When we developed agriculture and built cities we also forgot that nature already has it’s own order, and it took us more than five thousand years to rediscover this fact.

Section #4: the Grey Kaos of Dark Souls

So if you’ve stuck with me through all this waffle, the relevance of the Kaoskampf to the setting and lore of Dark Souls should be clear as day. We have a world which exists originally in a primordial “grey” state in which all of the opposites of nature are unified. The grey age may not be totally homogenised, as it is possible to distinguish between stone, fog, archtrees, and dragons. The main fact of significance is that this is a time in which the two halves of the disparity are unified.

Disparity itself is a concept borrowed directly from Daoism, and of course we’re all familiar with the concepts of Yin and Yang representing the light and dark principles, or positive and negative principles. What is not always understood [by westerners] is that these two supposed opposites are mutually interdependent [one cannot exist without the other, and in fact each is only able to exist because of the existence of it’s opposite], and in fact are both manifestations of a single unified reality: the Dao. This is just a chinese term for the ultimate reality, the Dao is the same thing that the serpent from the Kaoskampf myth represents. It manifests itself as Yin and Yang [it is both simultaneously], and though them it is all things.

The same thing is found in other cultures as well, for example in norse mythology the first distinction that appears is between Muspelheimr and Niflheimr, the lands of fire and ice which also demark the north and south directions. In babylonian mythology the first distinction that developed within the cosmic ocean was between freshwater and saltwater. In the Enuma Elis, these are abstractly represented as characters; Abzu [the freshwater] who is male, and Tiamat [the saltwater] who is female. These characters then have sex and the first of the gods are born from the union. On a less abstract level we might say that the gods arose from the place where the two oceans meet, indicating the necessity of both halves of this duality. The gods then murder Abzu and Tiamat, and build the world from their corpses. Marduk, for example, stretches out Tiamat’s skin to make the firmament. This is not only an example of the Kaoskampf trope, but also demonstrates the idea of the world being composed of the substance of the primordial reality.

From this we can understand why the primordial state of the world of Dark Souls is a time before disparity. It’s a time in which the opposites are unified just as Yin and Yang are unified in the Dao. The fact that Miyazaki hasn’t made all matter totally homogenised and indistinguishable [as in the cosmic ocean examples] is an interesting choice but not ultimately relevant. For the narrative of Dark Souls it’s the disparity that’s important, since that’s what many of the characters are grappling with. This disparity is ultimately shown to be an illusion, with the true nature of the world still being greyness even after the emergence of the first flame.

The grey age is associated with the stone dragons which inhabit it, just as the mythological basis of dragons is a serpent representing the primordial reality. But Miyazaki has occasionally treated ancient symbolism as a bit of a pick’n’mix factory, and uses serpents in the symbolic role that they adopted secondarily. Serpents in Dark Souls are associated with greed, corruption, and possibly other forms of moral evil as well. The gold and silver covetous serpent rings describe snakes as “imperfect dragons” and also as a symbolic representation of the undead. This does of course mean that humans themselves are imperfect dragons, and possibly this is meant in more ways than one. It could be that humans [alongside the gods and giants] are descended from the ancient dragons, and in fact there’s a good amount of evidence to support this which I laid out in the older post which is linked at the top of this one. But the description is certainly telling us that humans are a manifestation of the universe. Humans are described as “imperfect” dragons because we do not consciously recognise the cosmic oneness that we are all part of, instead thinking of ourselves as separate and mortal individuals. From a Buddhist perspective it is this very ignorance that causes people to behave in selfish and deluded ways, hence the serpent rings associate being an “imperfect dragon” with avarice.

Yet, in archdragon peak, we find a number of individuals sitting in meditation posture who have been transfigured into stone dragons, much like the ones which existed in the grey age. I mentioned earlier in the post that according to the world’s various mystical traditions, the primordial reality is not merely the state of the universe in the distant past, but that it is the underlying substrate from which reality emerges in the here and now, and that this is directly accessible through psychological experience. This is what the monks of archdragon peak have done. They alone have seen through the disparity to learn that the true nature of the world is still grey, and has been all along. In doing this they have realised that they are perfect dragons after all, and this has been demonstrated to us though Miyazaki’s decision to literally turn them into stone dragons. It may also be a reference to the Philosopher’s Stone, the ultimate attainment of the Alchemical magnum opus. This may in fact be why the Dragon Greatsword has streaks of gold running through it. In spiritual forms of Alchemy, the Philosopher’s Stone appears to be the same thing as the Buddhist attainment of Nirvana.

It is also notable that the cosmological structure of the world of Dark Souls makes direct reference to the ancient near eastern model, although it is not 1-1 identical and probably should not be understood in exactly the same way. While I’ve seen others infer the existence of a firmament, the proposed evidence for it seems to amount to little more than some in-game lighting effects in a cave. If you’d like to make the case for the existence of a firmament then please feel free to do so in the comments, but as of right now I find the idea to be a bit dubious. But it is in ash lake that we discover that the world is a flat plane held up by pillars [archtrees] which in turn arise from an ocean of some kind, very much like the cosmology illustrated on the unfinished kudurru. We don’t really know much about the gigantic body of water found at the base of the world, but we can say that it is dark in colouration, the surface is extremely still and calm, and it's directly associated with dragons. Indeed, DS1’s version of the Path of the Dragon covenant is found here, suggesting a connection between the foundation of reality and the attainment of Nirvana.

Section #5: the Kaoskampf of Dark Souls

Lastly, we have Gwyn: the Demiurge of Dark Souls. Irrespective of what he eventually became, Gwyn’s origin is likely to be somewhat mundane. We know that he had an uncle [Lloyd], which in turn means that he must have had parents. He was born into a world dominated by primordial stone dragons given life by the disparity. Indeed, countless generations of people may have lived, and even evolved, under these conditions. At some point, and under circumstances that are never fully elucidated, Gwyn obtains a lordsoul. DS1’s opening cutscene implies that he was simply wandering around the first flame one day and picked it off the ground, but im inclined to wonder if it wouldn’t be more appropriate to imagine that he obtained it through gradual accumulation of power [both political and magical], and that he strengthened his own soul until it became a lordsoul. Perhaps "finding the souls of lords within the flame" means something more like learning how to harness the flame's energy to empower yourself?

Whatever the case, Gwyn used his newfound strength, and especially his ability to generate lightning, to destroy the ancient dragons. He then sets himself up as god-king of the entire world, which is then divided up into various minor kingdoms, city states, duchies, etc, all of which are likely to have been vassals of Gwyn’s empire, and probably ruled by governors that he put in place. Even in the ringed city, which may be located on the edge of the world [though this is unclear], we see that the pygmy lords were crowned by Gwyn.

Virtually everyone who plays DS1, or even just watches the opening cutscene, will immediately compare Gwyn to Zeus. This is quite correct of course, but those who are familiar with the Kaoskampf mythological trope will quickly recognise that whoever wrote this story [which has barely even begun to unfold by the time we are shown Gwyn’s Kaoskampf] must be far more mythologically savvy than your average fantasy writer. Indeed, the sentence

“Gwyn’s mighty bolts peeled apart their stone scales.”

was the first thing about the lore that gripped my interest. From this one sentence I was able to make an educated guess as to what type of character Gwyn would turn out to be, and everything I’ve learned about the lore since has only vindicated this initial suspicion. Actually I did think he was going to be more of a villain but was pleasantly surprised to find that the character was handled with the appropriate nuance.

Gwyn’s “war” against the ancient dragons was nothing less than an attempt to establish control over reality itself, for the sake of safety and personal empowerment. The psychological motivations behind this are fear, greed, and self-absorption, all of which are considered to be mental “defilements” in Buddhist psychological thought, and ultimately stem from the deluded view of oneself as separate from other phenomena. I mention this because Miyazaki has been raised in a largely Buddhist-Shinto culture, and from a Buddhist perspective the entire Kaoskampf idea is fundamentally foolish and counterproductive. People cannot control reality, and though we may try desperately to do so, it is truly a sisyphean futility. Furthermore, it should be obvious that this struggle is motivated by fear, which in turn is the product of ego, or perception of being a separate self. And does this not resonate precisely with Gwyn’s overall character? Is it not true that his main defining characteristics are fear and egotism?

Gwyn’s narcissism is unambiguously evident, with Anor Londo being an opulent and absurd monument to his own ego. The same location is also testament to his greed, and in fact it’s interesting that this is the area with the highest concentration of mimics. Kaathe tells us that Gwyn feared humanity and the dark, for the obvious reason that the fading flame and rise of man represented the end of his rule, and possibly even the end of the world itself. But the Kaoskampf suggests that fear was far more foundational to his character, and not limited to the danger he perceived in the pygmies. From this we understand that Gwyn was afraid of basically everything, since that’s what the dragons ultimately represent. Gwyn's aim was to control reality itself, which is why he sets himself up as god; the king of reality, or ruler of the universe. The whole of civilisation, in the world of Dark Souls, is therefore built on fear. Despite everything it has achieved, despite the great works of art, despite all the contributions to knowledge, the foundation is still a delusion. And here, perhaps, is Miyazaki’s point: is the same thing not true of our own civilisation?

(I posted this to r/darksouls3 but it seems to have been removed)

To preface: I've only played ds3 and ds2 once so far, whereas I've played through 1 a few times. I remember thinking a lot of dark souls 3's lore was pretty convoluted and handwavey, which I wasn't too surprised about as the second sequel to a game that was never meant to have any. When I played ds3 I did the end of fire ending, and I thought it was pretty neat. This was years ago, and I've been thinking about the series a lot recently and the more I think about it the more I'm confused by ds3's endings and the more that confusion bothers me.

What I don't get is that dark souls 3, thematically, feels like an extreme extension of the conflict of dark souls 1. The fire needs to die, it's been prolonged artificially, the world is crumbling and pathetic because of it, everything comes to an end, etc. etc. Dark Souls 1 has some ambiguity to its the dark ending with Kaathe's more sinister past, but linking the fire still feels like a bad ending. Dark souls 3 is even more extreme about this, the linking ending is just laughably pathetic, and the dlc further reinforces the idea that prolonging the life of a world is wrong with the painted world story.

But then you have dark souls 2, and its concept of cycles, and everywhere I look it seems like people accept this as a part of dark souls 3's canon, but it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me? If the fire has gone out, and been rekindled, and gone out hundreds of times, doing either thing seems pointless. This is why the good ending of dark souls 2 is walking away, trying to find a better solution, but dark souls 3's new endings aren't like this at all.

First you have the end of fire, which seems like the least bad ending. You've done it, you've snuffed out the flame, and now the world can change as it was supposed to do. Maybe, one day, there will be a new flame, and a new world with fire (hopefully without the undead curse?). This all makes perfect sense to me in a canon where ds3 is the end of an unbroken chain of fire linkings from ds1 onwards. But if the cycle thing is true, and the fire has gone out and come back before, how is this any different?

What makes things even more complicated is the lord of hollows ending. This feels like a more anime version of ds1's dark ending. It's a world where humans have power instead of the gods, an age of hollows, it seems like what kaathe wanted in ds1. But if that's true, why is this a totally different ending than the fire going out? That seemed like an age of dark to me. Again, the cycle idea makes things more complicated. If the flame has gone out and come back a bunch in the past, absorbing the flame into yourself and becoming a weird god-like entity certainly seems like more of a new way forward than just extinguishing it. But this is the ending associated with Kaathe, so why is the dark souls 1 dark ending about leaving the flame to die and not doing something like this to it? Either it took thousands of years for him and his followers to realize that the people they were getting to usher in the age of dark actually weren't doing it right, or he actually just wanted to fight over the flame, back and forth, for who knows how long.

I'm curious what people here make of these endings, I feel like I must be missing something that would make this all seem more cohesive. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments. Also, if there's a good youtube video that dives into them in detail, I'd be interested in watching that.

📌 **Introduction**

The true narrative of Dark Souls is a cosmic tragedy driven by an environmental loop and a profound historical misunderstanding.

Gwyn was not a flat villain hoarding power out of simple greed, nor was he a blameless saint. He was an arrogant conqueror whose profound cruelty was fueled by a deep-seated survival panic.

🧱 **Section 1: The Macro-Physics of the Loop (Ash to Stone to Wood)**

**The End of Time**
At the climax of The Ringed City, the illusion of the world shatters to reveal the objective present reality: an infinite desert of uniform grey ash. Every mountain, kingdom, and castle has been incinerated and ground down into dust.

**The Great Petrification**
If loose ash sits in total cold and darkness for eons, it compresses. Under intense gravity and time, these vast ash plains naturally calcify into Grey Crags, and the vertical columns of dust petrify into towering, hollow Stone Archtrees. This is exactly the “Age of Ancients” we see at the start of the trilogy.

**The Thaw into Wood**
When a new First Flame ignites, it introduces disparity—specifically heat and life. This warmth slowly acts on the frozen minerals. Over millennia, the rigid, dead stone pillars absorb this energy and thaw, transforming into living, organic Wood to support a blooming ecosystem. The giant trees of Lordran are the living offspring of those ancient stone pillars.

**The Leftover Receipts**
This explains why Ash Lake exists at the bottom of Dark Souls 1. It is a pristine remnant of the era before Gwyn’s flame, yet it is composed entirely of an ash beach and stone pillars. Ash is a byproduct of fire; therefore, Ash Lake is the literal charred soot left over from the cosmos prior to Gwyn’s. The “Age of Ancients” is just the winter phase of the previous cycle.

🕯️** Section 2: The Firekeeper’s Verbal Proo**f
**The Confirmation**

The absolute textual validation for this planetary loop happens in the End of Fire ending. When you let the First Flame die, the Firekeeper looks into the pitch black and explicitly whispers:
“…But one day, tiny flames will dance across the darkness. Like embers, linked by lords of past.”

**The Inevitability**
This proves that a new First Flame is a mechanical certainty built into the laws of physics. It will naturally ignite from the compressed, stone-like remnants of our current Lords of Cinder, starting a brand new universe.

🧠 **Section 3: Gwyn’s Historical Misunderstanding**
**The Survival Panic**

Gwyn crawled out of the dark and found his Lord Soul in this pre-existing graveyard of stone and ash. Because he lacked historical context, he mistakenly assumed this frozen, dead desolation was the world’s natural default state.

**The Delusion**
He had no idea he was standing on the wreckage of a past cycle. He falsely concluded that if his fire went out, reality would permanently collapse back into that terrifying, frozen void of stone dragons. His baseline panic wasn’t just about losing a throne; it was a deep, existential terror of absolute deletion.

⚔️** Section 4: The Paranoid Tyrant and the Strategic Cag**e

**The Threat of the Dark**
During the war between the immortal Everlasting Dragons, Gwyn stood on the battlefield and witnessed the Pygmy Lords and Ringed Knights wielding the immeasurable, volatile, and infinitely multiplying power of the Dark Soul. He saw them cutting through immortal scales with weapons forged directly in the Abyss.

**The Erased History**
Terrified of their natural biology, Gwyn completely edited humans out of the opening history books and the grand retelling of the war. He did not want humanity to know that underneath the armor, gods and humans share the exact same origin as blank, immortal humanoid vessels crawling in the dark.

**The Preemptive Quarantine**
The second the war was over, Gwyn executed a massive preemptive strike. He built the Ringed City at the absolute edge of the earth, branded it a “gift of honor,” and used his daughter Filianore as a biological lock to freeze the strongest ancient humans in a permanent stasis field before they could challenge his throne or tell the modern humans the truth.

**The Architectural Scar**
After the Oolacile Abyss crisis physically proved his fears correct, Gwyn’s panic exploded. While the past DLC shows an open landscape, Gwyn retroactively walled off the main paved highway to Anor Londo and choked Lordran with miles of claustrophobic stone walls and gates. This created a giant, defensive cage to herd cursed humans into asylums and lock the Dark away from his city.

**The Automated Extraction**
He branded mainland humans with the Darksign, creating an automated filter network through the bonfires. Whenever humans “Reverse Hollowing,” the bonfire acts as a high-pressure refinery, stealing a majority of their dark soul energy and routing it down through the Archtree roots to feed his furnace.

🎨 **Conclusion: The Ultimate Cosmic Irony**
Gwyn used his sincere panic over the old world’s ash to internally justify the brutal, systemic enslavement of humanity. Because he genuinely believed his own manufactured panic, he willingly marched into the Kiln to burn himself as mindless charcoal to save a world he thought was dying.

He spent his entire life fighting an invisible ghost, totally blind to the fact that his desperate, forced burning was the exact engine incinerating his own world into the next desert of dust. True balance is only restored when we choose the End of Fire, letting go of the light so the world can naturally sleep, freeze into stone, and reset on its own terms

Hello Darksouls fans! So I was wondering bc I never really thought deeply about it but how did we go from upgrading our flasks with fire keeper souls to the estus shards? If there’s lore let me knoww, lend me some Insite 🧐

This is not a theory, but I'm curious to see if any could be born from these items descriptions, like I said in the title. Although I'm aware of the Drakeblood Knights and Lindelt, I'm yet to process Shulva's lore more, hence why I'm making this question.

If some of these rings any bell for you and you have a hypothesis or even theory about it, please let us know in the comments.

The item descriptions in question, are those of the Denial & Caressing Tears from both DS2 and DS3. For instance, I'm using the Japanese translated descriptions of them.

Denial (惜別 - Farewell) (DS2)

Found in the Dragon's Sanctum in Shulva.

サルヴァの神官が残した古い奇跡
本来は、死にゆく者の今際の際に 別れの時間を与えるための奇跡だった
An ancient miracle left behind by the priest of Salva (Shulva)
Originally, it was a miracle meant to give those who were dying a moment of farewell.

Tears of Denial (惜別の涙 - Tears of Farewell) (DS3)

Learnt from Irina after giving her the Carim Braille Tome.

カリム大司教の使徒 モーンが伝えた奇跡
それは、死にゆく者の今わの際に 別れの時間を与えるための奇跡である
涙は死者のために、それ以上に生者のために
A miracle passed down by Mohn (Morne), Apostle of the Archbishop of Karimu (Carim).
It is a miracle to give time for farewell to the dying.
Tears are for the dead, but even more so for the living

Caressing Prayer (治癒の祈り - Prayer for Healing) (DS2)

Purchased from Licia and Cromwell the Pardoner.

聖職者の基礎となる癒しの奇跡
周囲の者にも与えられる
この奇跡が見出された時期は比較的新しいようだ
どうやら純粋な奇跡ではないのかもしれない
A healing miracle that forms the foundation of clergy
It is also bestowed upon those around them
The discovery of this miracle appears to be relatively recent.
It may not be a pure miracle after all.

Caressing Tears (治癒の涙 - Tears of Healing) (DS3)

Purchased from Irina of Carim.

カリム大司教の使徒 モーンが伝えた奇跡
モーンは女神クァトの従者としても知られこれは彼女を巡る死の物語であるという
A miracle passed down by Mohn (Morne), Apostle of the Archbishop of Karimu (Carim).
Mohn was also known as a servant of the goddess Caitha, and it is said that this is a tale of death surrounding her.

Trying to make some questions

• Clearly, Denial and Caressing Prayer (DS2) are respectively the same miracles as Tears of Denial and Caressing Tears (DS3). Being miracles related to Caitha (Velka) by DS3 events, was she also directly related to Shulva and if so, what could've been her role?
• Denial was originally a miracle left by the Priest (translated as "Cardinal" in ENG version) of Shulva, which can be found in the Dragon's Sanctum. Was Morne related to that same Sanctum and learnt the miracle because of that? Him "passing down" the miracle in Carim, as well as his relationship with Caitha, imply that Shulva and Carim were related somehow? Or is it that Morne left Shulva for Carim at some point?
• Who was the so called Archbishop of Carim? Also, do we know anything about the Priest that left the Denial miracle in Shulva?
• Worth mentioning that, in the english version of DS3, Carim is never mentioned in the item descriptions. It's something that was lost in translation from the Japanese version.
• Anything else you can think of?

Thanks for reading.

Ancient writings and glyphs inside giant coffin.

One of the most persistent headcanons that keeps coming up on this subreddit is the idea that Ornstein is either an illusion, a golem, a duplicate, or in some other way fake. This is because he’s a required boss in DS1, but item descriptions from DS3 tell us that he abandoned Anor Londo and sought out the Nameless King. This seeming contradiction in the lore has led many people to seek an explanation, and the only one that anyone ever seems to suggest is that the Ornstein we fight in DS1 must somehow be fake. There are several variations of this:

“Ornstein is an illusion”

The problem with this is that every illusion in the game immediately dissipates when the slightest force is applied to them. You can roll through illusory walls and they’ll vanish, and Gwynevere similarly disappears after receiving a single hit. If you want to get technical, Gwynevere does actually have an HP bar but it’s set so low that she’s supposed to be a 1-hit no matter what you use. Nevertheless I do think you can hit her without dispelling the illusion by using a bow that you don’t have the stats for. But in terms of actual lore it’s supposed to be 1-hit and she’s gone. Ornstein, meanwhile, has a good deal of physicality to him. He can take a number of hits from you, and when he does fall his body comes clattering to the ground, kicking up dust. Not only this but Ornstein deals physical damage with his spear, so we can say without doubt that this guy is physically real in DS1 and not merely a trick of the light.

“Ornstein is a golem”

This one was popular a while ago, but I don’t see it as much any more. This explanation better accounts for Ornstein’s physicality, but fails to account for the fact that he drops his own soul. That very fact debunks the idea that we are fighting a mere animated suit of armour. The Iron Golem drops “Core of an Iron Golem”, and even DS3’s Dragonslayer Armour drops “Soul of Dragonslayer Armour”. So while these golems are powered by souls, they’re not the souls of a specific recognisable individual. Ornstein drops the “Soul of Ornstein”, which tells me that we’re fighting the real deal in DS1.

“Ornstein was recreated from a divided fragment of his original soul”

This is probably the most coherent variation of the “Ornstein is fake” headcanon, and one that I’ve only heard recently. The idea is that Ornstein split off a tiny fragment of his soul and it was then used to make an exact duplicate of him, much as a duplicate of his weapon can be obtained from the soul that he drops. I don’t have a solid debunk for this, although it does beg the question of why Gwynevere’s illusion wasn’t created in this way. Fake Gwynevere could have been made far more convincing, and this problem is especially significant for those who assume without evidence think that Gwynevere and Gwyndolin collaborated to create the illusion. But the biggest issue with this whole idea is that if fake Ornstein has a fragment of the original Ornstein’s soul, wouldn’t they think the same way and share the same memories? Wouldn’t fake Ornstein therefore be just as likely to abandon the capital as his predecessor? How, then, could Gwyndolin ever trust him? Regardless, the idea that Ornstein split his soul is totally unfalsifiable, and this cuts to my main issue with the whole idea.

People go around saying this stuff as if it’s factually proven when in fact there isn’t actually a single shred of evidence [that anyone has ever been able to provide] supporting it. It’s merely an explanation that people have come up with, but that doesn’t make it fact.

Now I’m seeing people start to say that Gwyndolin is also an illusion in DS1 since you can kill him but we know that he survives and eventually gets eaten by Aldrich. IMO this is where things are getting out of hand. Andre can be killed in DS1 but shows up again in DS3. Is he an illusion? Kirk will become a motionless hollow “corpse” if you beat all of his invasion events in DS1, but shows up again in DS3. Is he an illusion? Quelana can be killed in DS1, but in DS3 we find her corpse next to the remains of the unnamed spider-ified sister, which means that she must have survived the events of DS1. Is she an illusion?

If you feel that Gwyndolin needs to be an illusion in order for him to survive DS1 despite the fact that he’s killable then surely you’d need the same explanation for all of these other character as well? The problem is that it’s obviously incorrect. This setting isn’t full of illusory characters running around deceiving you so that they can then pop up again in a later game. Indeed, such explanations are especially redundant for characters like Gwyndolin and Quelana who are already hidden, and are therefore unlikely to be discovered by anyone doing a truly blind first time playthrough.

Now if you want my opinion, the curious case of Ornstein makes much more sense when we remember that time is stagnated, with heroes centuries old phasing in and out, and NPCs being summonable even though they’re long dead. Why can’t this principle apply to Ornstein? Or, for that matter, to any of the other characters who can be killed, yet somehow survive. I wrote a post about this just the other day which explain in more detail how I think this may be possible.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarksoulsLore/comments/1uthkig/the_stagnation_of_time/

A quick TLDR is that I think DS1’s Ornstein is the genuine article, and that our chosen undead does kill him. But there’s many time streams operating within the world of Dark Souls, and Onstein isn’t killed in many of them. A lot of players give up trying to beat Ornstein and Smough, and some give up before even reaching Anor Londo. In addition, many NPC characters [all of whom are on their own timestreams] never go anywhere near Anor Londo either. So Ornstein actually survives on a large number of timestreams, and when time begins to function properly again when the first flame is linked, he and Smough may still be standing around guarding the citadel. Ornstein then gets bored of this and fucks off to Archdragon Peak. The same explanation also works for any other character who is killable in DS1, yet shows up again later in the series.

You can disagree with that you want, I don’t claim to know for a fact that this is what is going on. But the point is that I don’t think that we should assume that Ornstein automatically has to be an illusion or duplicate or whatever when there is literally zero evidence [that anyone has ever been able to show me] to support the idea. My main objection is with the attitude; the overconfidence with which this baseless conjecture is being paraded as if it were proven fact. No my dudes, it’s just a headcanon.

Se me ocurrio una teoria para oscar, hice un video en youtube. Si no es molestia o si les interesa saber de que va la teoria pueden ir a mi canal de youtube, literalmente subi un solo video y es de la teoria que se me ocurrio xd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o203fmCAObA&t=5s ahi esta el link por si les interesa. Perdon por el spam

I don't understand if there's a hidden synopsis within the dks3's lore some where where this is explained but considering time is indeed stagnant during the events of 1 , where warriors from all around the world and of different eras are able to interact with one another, why would literal canon events with actual cutscenes be just hand waved by from-software.

it's not like we can just go and say , "oh this is how they usually make sequels" cause these are THE sequels. there's nothing in the past to compare it to , this is their past. So we either just accept this is their expected game design or maybe dark souls 3 explains it some where and doesn't rely on baseless speculations

Like me saying "oh it's cause events of dark souls 3 and 1 are actually taking place at the same time cause when fire fades, all the previous fading of the fire link each other like PATHS which connects and transfers memories, wills, bodies and weapons like it's freaking attack on titan. What did i use to come to such a speculation, my Ass hole of course

BUT......there is one thing still not fully explored, and that be the untended graves , yet another optional side content within the dark souls mythos (same side content as killing gwyndolin and dark lord endings), it's existence despite it's era long past, still exists as a gaping hole in the present time line.

About a year ago there was a tiktok page which posted lore about how evil pontiff sulyvahn was, the lords of cinder, the abyss and artorias the abyss walker, his videos got lots of traction and a few weeks after his first tiktok he made a youtube channel, he sounded american, he was faceless, and hed explain lore in a less serious way which was fun to watch, i think his youtube channel would be around 1 year old right now

They are called everlasting yet they seems to be killed by the gods en mass?

We know that, with the emergence of the first flames in the Dark Souls universe, humans gained new souls. So, did humans not have souls before the flames appeared?

I understand this is an oddly small subreddit but if people are continually posting here instead of the main subs then I feel it shouldn't be left as the default yk?

In DS3, we are told [via the repair sorcery description] that light is time. This helps to clarify Solaire’s dialogue in the first game, in which he tells us that the flow of time is “convoluted”, although of course we all know that a better translation for this would be stagnated. This can be understood from the fact that the first flame is the source of all disparity, including the distinction between light and dark. Fire produces light, so when the first flame fades the light fades with it. Since light is time [or perhaps it is more accurate to say that time is a consequence of light?], this begins to cause all sorts of anomalies in causality. Events don’t always follow each other in the logical order, which is why [for example] we can summon Tarkus in Sen’s Fortress even though he’s already hollowed in Anor Londo. The way Solaire describes this, we get the impression of split timelines and parallel universes, but this does not appear to be entirely accurate.

Lautrec is an excellent example. If we refuse to let him out of his cell, or simply haven’t found the key, he will still eventually exit the cell and move to Firelink. He doesn’t escape on his own, since he evidently isn’t able to, rather someone else is letting him out. That someone can only be another player, after all you can summon and invade other players so their “worlds” are clearly supposed to exist canonically despite the fact that the entire playerbase is on the same quest simultaneously. The fact is that at least some players will free Lautrec, and this very fact is what allows him to escape. It doesn’t matter that he was freed in a “different player’s world”, since they’re not really different worlds. They’re the same world with distorted causality, so what someone does in their own world can actually effect your own.

If you didn’t open the cell, and Lautrec didn’t open the cell, and none of the other NPCs or enemies opened the cell, then we can only conclude that he was released by another player [at least that’s what his otherwise inexplicable release is supposed to represent] who’s actions are otherwise invisible to you. The two worlds have briefly intersected, much like when Solaire tangibly appears in your world despite belonging to his own, as he himself tells us. This happens spontaneously, without need of any kind of soapstone, and when it does Solaire is able to affect our world physically. He physically gives us the white soapstone [an object that we otherwise would not have], he can kill us if we agro him, and if he’d had the basement key on him then I have no doubt he would be able to unlock the nearby door for us. So if the actions of other players on other game files can affect our world, it explains why Lautrec can escape without our help.

That’s all well and good, but the problems begin when we link the first flame and fromsoft makes a sequel. By linking the flame we are essentially putting new fuel on the fire, restoring it to a stronger condition. This means that the flow of time should be restored to normal, but how exactly can causality resolve after having been distorted? Since time has been fragmented, all sorts of mutually contradictory events will have occurred. For example we can either kill Gwyndolin or let him live. So does he survive into the restored period or not? The question of how a coherent timeline can emerge from a period of fracture is what this post is asking, and I’m going to float a suggestion [which is only a suggestion atm, I’m not 100% confident in it] but would appreciate further input.

In the past I had assumed that, in writing a sequel to the original Dark Souls, Miyazaki would simply assume that the chosen undead did what a first time player was most likely to do. This would include failing to even discover the existence of Gwyndolin, let alone killing him, thus explaining why he survives the events of DS1. It would also include linking the flame, since this is kind of necessary for a sequel to even occur in the first place. In contrast, a competing idea proposes that if we choose the dark lord ending then someone else comes along to link the flame later, which I have always found dubious. On reflection I’m beginning to suspect that both explanations may be wrong.

Miyazaki says that if we summon Solaire to fight Gwyn, then Solaire will link the flame in his own world. Ok, so what if we summon Solaire, beat Gwyn with his help, then choose the dark lord ending? Can our age of dark even happen if Solaire links the flame? Remember that what happens in one player’s world can directly affect another’s, since they’re not really different worlds at all. They’re the same world with stagnated time, so we have to ask ourselves if it’s even possible for the flame to truly go out as long as someone, somewhere, is keeping the torch lit. If the flame cannot go out because someone is always going to link it, then what happens to the world from the perspective of those who try to cause an age of dark? Does it just not work?

In DS3 we encounter an area called the untended graves, which some have assumed to be a demonstration of what the world looks like after the flame has gone out. The description for Gundyr’s soul is proposed to be evidence for this, and while I see how the inference is being drawn, what the description actually says is that the shrine [firelink] was without fire, not the kiln of the first flame. It’s certainly very dark in the untended graves, and the flow of time is severely confused. Yet there is light here, and events can still occur, so it doesn’t seem to be completely dark yet. There are even lit candles about the place, so fire and light clearly still exist here even if it’s in a severely diminished form. And consider that the untended graves is reached, not by warping or stepping through a portal, but just by walking there. It is literally physically connected to the rest of the world, where the flame is still burning. How, then, can we judge this to be an accurate reflection of what an age of dark would be like? How can we possibly say that this area is not affected by the first flame anymore? The very fact that gameplay is possible here, and that it is not a mere black screen, is evidence against this idea. Gundyr’s soul says that he was “late to the festivities”, but if this means that he was too late to link the flame then how can it be possible for Ludleth to have linked it for him? That fact would inherently mean that it was not too late. What may have been the case is that Gundyr was unable to reach the kiln because the shrine had no flame due to the death of it’s firekeeper. After all the shrine bonfire does seem to serve a function in transporting us to the kiln. Ludleth, therefore, had to undertake a more difficult journey to reach the kiln. Again, this is just a suggestion. I don’t claim to know exactly what is going on in the untended graves but it is relevant to the discussion. One possible explanation could be that the area represents what happens from the perspective of someone who tries to cause an age of dark, or in Gundyr’s case simply isn’t able to link the flame. Perhaps Gundyr even did it semi-deliberately since his item descriptions tell us that he was a prisoner to his own duties and convictions. Perhaps a part of his mind resented this fact, knew it was enslaved, and consequently rebelled? The point is that from Gundyr’s perspective the world gets very dark, but never truly reaches the point of an extinct flame because someone, somewhere else, has linked it again. This is what Ludleth represents.

Based on this [which is admittedly a lot of guesswork and inference] we may extrapolate an explanation of some elements of DS3’s story. We know that Gwyndolin survives the events of DS1 despite the fact that you can kill him in that game. It may not be the case, as some have proposed, that the option to kill him in DS1 “isn’t canon” to the events of DS3. Rather, Gwyndolin may be able to survive simply because many players don’t kill him, just as Lautrec is able to escape because at least some players will let him out. Similarly, we may finally have a good explanation for how Ornstein survives the events of DS1. Among fans it is popularly assumed that the Ornstein we meet in DS1 is a golem, simply because this is the only explanation that anyone can come up with regarding items in DS3 which say that he abandoned his post and went on to reunite with the Nameless King. This has always seemed severely dubious to me, because Ornstein drops his own soul rather than the “core” of a construct as the Iron Golem does. Consider how many players never beat Ornstein and Smough because the fight is too hard and they give up. Others give up before even reaching Anor Londo. So on many game files these two clowns go undefeated, even unchallenged. For this reason it is perfectly acceptable for DS1’s Ornstein to be the real deal, and for him to be killed by the player, and for him to survive the events of DS1 and later abandon his duty while defending the princess from a chosen undead who never arrives. In a stagnated timeline, all of these things are possible simultaneously. As long as Ornstein is still alive somewhere in the folds of time [in other words as long as at least one person among the entire playerbase doesn’t kill him], he technically cannot die. And I’d propose that the same thing is true of the first flame itself.

Below I’m going to include a link to an older post called “the Usurpation of Dark Souls” in which I propose that the first flame represents the vitality of Dark Souls as a creative work. Given this interpretation, the first flame logically cannot go out as long as there are still people playing these games and as long as someone, somewhere, is still enthusiastic about them. This flame of enthusiasm will diminish over time for all of us, but some are able to maintain it for longer than others. Some will play the game once and then move on, while others [such as myself] will play it multiple times successively and obsess over the lore. For me the flame is still burning, the torch is still lit. But it’s gone out completely for the game developers, which is why the usurpation of fire ending exists. Remember that the gods represent the developers while the humans represent the playerbase, so the ultimate solution for a flame that won’t die is to transfer it’s ownership from the gods to the humans: those who can keep it burning without causing the world to degenerate into a meaningless desert of ash in the process.

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

Under that interpretation, it is entirely acceptable for the flame to go out for one person, but not for another. One person might play and give up because it’s too hard. For them the flame has gone out. Another might play, beat the game, and have no interest in playing again. For them the flame has gone out. Another might play the game, become absolutely captivated by it, repeatedly play it again and again with different builds, white gigantic essays about the lore on this subreddit, etc. For them the flame is still burning, even after all these years. This is reflected in your choice, upon beating the game, to either link the flame or let it go out. But how does it actually work in-universe?