Dark Souls Lore ► Explained!

after you finish a souls game you have questions why am i on fire what's the point of locking myself in this cave which ending is the right one and of course the age-old question and why do they call him big hat logan first let's start with the player character who is the chosen undead well they are who you make them whether you were a thief or a knight from astora or katarina it doesn't matter what's important is that you ended up in a cell at the right place and the right time for you head to

lordran in accordance with an old legend that speaks of a mission for a chosen undead hero this legend is by the way most likely a deception by the gods probably designed to lure powerful heroes to lordran but we'll get to that later is there a world outside lordran lordran is just the land of the gods and there is a wider world of man with many more countries therein the fate of the world largely revolves around lordran though so we never go to these other places but the characters we do meet in lordran often hail from

these foreign countries and you can tell that they've been designed to be accurate characterizations of their homelands what you're seeing on screen are the results of an art competition to depict these foreign places so check out that video if you're interested and subscribe to see the next competition really soon how did this world come to be originally the world had no disparity everything was just rock from the land to the trees to the dragons it was homogeneous static without beginning or end then similar to the big bang fire suddenly came to exist and it disrupted

this eternal monotony now there wasn't just existence but there were states of existence heat and cold light and dark life and death the result was a rock universe gradually changing into the world as you see it in game including its overabundance of souls what is the soul so when fire came to be and permeated the universe so did souls thus the soul is the power of disparity itself they are the means by which the first flame changed the universe and paradoxically they are both the fuel and the byproduct of that fire similar to in demon

souls a soul gives you clarity allowing you to think but also life allowing you to be and just as there are all kinds of life there are all kinds of souls of various shapes sizes and magical affinities many bosses are these special beings with special souls and the most powerful beings are the lords bearing lord souls who are the lords and what is a lord's soul the four lords are the first kings they were all attracted to the first flame having only ever known darkness before coming upon it each one discovered this massive concentration of

disparities power near the flame which they then used to establish a kingdom under their rule thus these massive souls are called lord souls of these four souls kath tells us that the pygmy found the dark soul and it follows that the other lord's souls all aligned with the other aspects of disparity so in contrast gwyn found the light soul nito found the death soul and the witch of izalith found the life soul these souls came to define them and they would soon ally together to challenge the everlasting dragons what is an everlasting dragon so they're

a part of the original race of dragons that predate life itself much like there are wyverns and worms there are also ancient dragons or arch dragons as later games coin it their race is the progenitor to all other dragon's subspecies and these are subspecies that adapted really well to a new world and new environments you still face some arch dragons in game but these arch dragons never are the original generation of arch dragons that actually predate fire the ancient dragons are commonly described as everlasting thanks to their stone scales of undeath granting them immortality however

when gwyn learned that his bolts of lightning could peel apart those scales the lords used their full might to hunt down the archdragons to nigh extinction ushering in the age of fire what is the age of fire it's the era you find yourself in it was sparked when the lords defeated the archdragons and even as far back as them finding their lord's souls could be denoted as the dawn or beginning of the age of fire so what follows is this period dominated by the lords much of this epoch is also denoted as the age of

gods since the three lords residing in lordran with their fellow deities are on the rise or at their zenith during it however this golden age can only continue so long as fire at the source of the god's power remains strong but eventually fire will fade and only darkness will remain this quote is what kath describes as the logic of the world and when that happens the gods are supposed to be replaced and their age of fire is supposed to become an age of dark in the original dark souls you find yourself at this crossroad the

first flame is about to go out even now its power is barely reaching the world of man and what follows is a proverbial night and in this twilight era the undead curse runs rampant okay so what is the undead curse ever since the first flame began to wane a dark ring of fire has manifested upon the bodies of certain humans a sign of the dark burgeoning within them this dark sign marks you as an ageless immortal though your endless revival comes at the cost of your own souls and sanity until you eventually hollow what caused

the undead curse this question is at the very heart of this series and the answer is really quite complex you'll have a better time with this though if you're familiar with all three games so when the world first began a creature called the pygmy found the dark soul who they were isn't known nor is it really important what is important is that they split the dark soul into fragments and these fragments came to be known as humanity which is a small black spirit found within every human kath refers to the furtive pygmy as your ancestor

thus we are descended from one of the four lords these games frequently question whether the dark force within humans is a positive or a negative thing your adventure through ullasil in the artorius of the abyss dlc is a great example of that here the darkness within man has gone wild it's endlessly consuming and corrupting the land and the souls of people around it and yet there is dialogue here that's supposed to give you pause i still think on that creature from the abyss that preyed upon me my faculties were far from lucid but i quite

clearly sensed certain emotions a wrenching nostalgia lost joy an object of obsession and a sincere hope to reclaim it could these thoughts belong to the beast from the abyss but if that were true then perhaps it is no beast after all this same duality is seen in the descriptions of dark magic which are spells that are often driven by powerful emotions positive things like love and calm or negative things like hate and envy but whether it's positive or negative gwyn's pantheon fears the dark for one day as we mentioned earlier their age of fire is

going to end and only dark will remain this was the logic of the world until gwyn committed the first sin and he shackled the darkness within man this was a revelation we received in the ringed city dlc where the seal of fire around darkness on the dark side was finally explicitly stated to be a creation of the gods so for some like manus in the first dlc repression of their humanity causes it to writhe and go mad however this seal of fire was placed upon mankind so early in their existence that for most people their

shackles are all that they know as a result and this is really important humankind end up living their lives through souls that they hold completely separate from the humanity that's within them you only have to look to the white souls of adventurers that you find in game as proof of that living like this is the lie that aldia talked about in dark souls 2. all men trust fully the illusion of life but is this so wrong a construction of assad and yet a world and the scandalous now hello are you intentionally shattering you spoiling this

wonderful falsehood but in retrospect the most chilling dialogue aldia has was this once the lord of light had banished dark and all that stemmed from humanity and men assumed the freedom for we're led to believe that the dark sign cursed humanity with undeath but aldia's dialogue means this can't be true instead aldia says mankind's lives became fleeting when they were branded with the dark side so this means that they were originally immortals and indeed this is the state that you return to when you hollow what is hollowing humanity once stood proud within every human but

when the curse was put upon them humanity became bound lost and repressed so during this age of fire humanity came to rely heavily on their white soul for their sense of self and we can see this in the names of these souls when fire fades the seal of fire restraining the dark grows weaker thus when fire fades it follows that our dark soul starts to break free consuming the white soul that we've come to believe is the self and this process of losing the self is called hollowing dying or losing heart it accelerates this process

so an undead must maintain physical and mental fortitude in order to resist this process however as you might remember the hollows of londor in dark souls 3 believe that their hollow states are really the most honest shape of man this isn't an easy truth to face especially since the dark soul has become this ravenous repressed thing to stay sane as a hollow one may need to drain the life of others and the hollows of londor are universally reviled as a result of this ultimately it just leaves you wondering whether this is really the best path

for mankind or whether it's better to just accept the shackles of the gods or whether humanity's fate has been stolen by the curse either way how do we cure the undead curse well curse is an actual affliction just like poison or toxin you can experience its buildup in game and what this curse does is it locks the dark soul away from the self it's really about the barrier it's about the separation and the dark sigil explains this it says that as humanity leaks out the curse accumulates in exchange unfortunately humans are helpless against curses and

all we can do is redirect their influence for example when you use a purging stone what you're doing is not actually curing the curse you're actually just transferring the curse to this stone and this stone was or is another person in the original dark souls we do something similar to this process called reverse hollowing so this is a process that requires you to have humanity and it's easy to assume that we're just absorbing the humanity and restoring our humanity but what's actually happening here is kind of the opposite yes a humanity sprite is taken into

the self but it then acts as a sort of surrogate for the curse like a purging stone does and remember we offer this humanity up to the bonfire this keeps our white regular soul safe and it prevents us from going hollow further proof of this dynamic exists in dark souls 2 where using a human effigy is just like transferring your curse to a human surrogate and in dark souls 3 we found the purging monument which is this enormous vessel that's overflowing with offered curses why did the gods curse humanity so the logic of the world

denotes that fire will fade and only dark will remain naturally gwyn feared this and managed to enforce a fleeting form upon humanity the fate of mankind became irreversibly linked to fire and thus the logic of the world was changed forever what is the fire linking it's a ritual for preserving the first flame with the decline of fire and the rise of the dark and undeath the gods were thrown into disarray and the lord's peaceful relations ultimately collapsed before things broke down however they concocted a plan to revive the first flame with a powerful soul cultivated

through fire keepers and undead bonfires this soul would link itself to the fire and the fire would inherit a new fuel so gwyn was the first to link the fire and many others have taken up that role since then what is a bonfire it's your safe haven undead bonfires are fueled by the bones of your own kind and they're connected to the first flame as a part of a network through coiled swords the heat that their flames produce heal our injuries and can be collected in a liquid form called estus as for warping light is

tied to time in this series so you can reason that a bonfire's light allows you to warp across time and space to other bonfires in the network bonfires and their fire keepers promote undead reliance upon fire and they promote fire's reliance upon undead thus the gods are almost certainly behind their creation as for who went out and placed them in the world it's hard to say but it seems like they can be placed anywhere where there are undead bones since we create one ourselves in filing shrine and even in early versions of the game you

were supposed to be able to place them yourself however it's important to remember that bonfires are primarily a checkpoint mechanic and gameplay can't always be explained away by law for example you might think that all undead respawn at the bonfire just like you do but they don't according to the crestfallen merchant what actually happens is that undead will lay dead for a while and then later rise where they fell what is a fire keeper they're a woman who acts as the living incarnation of a bonfire in order to preserve its flame so long as the

fire keeper lives so too does her corresponding bonfire and vice versa these women are thus vessels for the countless humanity that is offered to the bonfire which means that they receive the dark spirits along with the effects of the curse in the transfer the humanity wriggles beneath their skin nipping at body and soul and this causes great pain and horrific scarring though not at extremities like the head or the hands fire keepers bear this suffering so that you can benefit from the bonfire and it's through them and by extension the bonfires that you can strengthen

your soul with whatever traits you desire so be sure to always thank your [ __ ] your [ __ ] [Music] what is wrong with you what is a god well they're really whatever humans believe a deity to be in most cases the gods refers to members of gwyn's pantheon since they're the most widely worshipped in the world of man but even those cast out like gwyn's firstborn are still called a war god simply because some people still worship them as such however just being worshipped doesn't mean that you have power an example of this

is faris who humans retroactively deified as the goddess of the hunt evlana in dark souls 2. she was just a heroic bow woman but her story got twisted over the years until she became a god people get kind of hung up on the god term because they're trying to define the race of beings that carry power in the series for most of these characters i quite like the term medial which is a term proposed by loki what are medials well many of the god's followers and descendants aren't human gods or giants so we kind of

have to make up a term for these beings medials is good in terms of size they're often between humans and giants and these are beings like the daughters of izalith or priscilla and so on what are the dead the dead are corpses that decay without the power of life sustaining them however some like skeletons are often a product of necromancy and there's evidence that others like the ghosts of new londo become warped by the strong lingering emotions of the deceased what is a demon anything that can be loosely classified as a monster is called a

demon really in most cases though demons refers to chaos demons who were born of the flame of chaos but there are also titanite demons and dark souls 2 introduces covetous and smell to demons as well as a demon of song it's a common argument that a demon in dark souls is a chimeric creature bearing the traits of multiple animals but this isn't a given what could be called crow demons are actually called crow men or corvians there are also snake men maggot men and lion men all of whom are never called demons like with gods

the term is somewhat arbitrary basically a demon is whatever humans would consider to be a monster what is chaos chaos is the nature of fire and life life is rooted in the soul the soul is a product of fire's disparity therefore life like disparity is chaotic the witch of izalith found the lord's soul that represents this and she tried creating her own fire of life to match that of the first flame unfortunately this sparked a flame of chaos which creates and transforms new often grotesque forms of life these became known as the chaos demons and

they threatened gwyn's rule so you'll notice that they're stamped out at every turn in all chapters of this series the witch of izalith's yearning for flame became the basis for pyromancy and pyromancy is one of her strongest surviving legacies what is pyromancy pyromancy is a physical form of magic pyromancers carry along with them a piece of flame that's passed down from teacher to student stretching all the way back to the witch and her daughters deriving the art from chaos and sharing that with the humans pyromancers then use that flame to conjure their spells and despite

the name pyromancy isn't actually limited to casting fire and it can actually conjure all kinds of elements like iron or poison but these are rarer arts since pyromancy is a religion that reveres flame just so you can manifest pyromancies like miracles with your faith or actually even learn to perform them like sorceries with your intelligence what is sorcery it's a mental form of magic sorcerers study the natural laws of the world to actually comprehend what they are and how they function they then use this knowledge to manipulate their power and formulate the process as spells

which we call sorcery they're basically magic scientists and academics and there are sorceries from anything from souls to light to the dark of the abyss what are miracles they're a spiritual form of magic you cast miracles by reciting legendary stories which either feature the spell in question or embody what the miracle manifests most miracles are thereby based on the power of the anor londo gods but there are also dark miracles and hexes that achieve similar results your faith in the story's truth makes it a reality what is the abyss it's the power of the dark

and whether that's a pitch-black void like the realm of the four kings a viscous dark swamp like in the ringed city or a malformed pus like the creatures of lothric the abyss can manifest from any humanity and it produces new life or twists old life into new forms the abyss is commonly unstable and like with manus in all a seal it can go wild devouring and corrupting the souls of every other form of life but it was not always this way the gods placed a curse upon the abyss and while humans have largely lost connection

with it there are multiple sources that suggest the abyss can offer great comfort to humankind however it appears that path was lost when the abyss was banished and now it simply hungers what is black flame black flame is the impenetrable fire of humanity inspired by the power of our quote unquote untouchable soul in kind of a similar way to how pyromancy is inspired by izalith's soul what is the deep as the age of dark continues to be delayed some dark stagnates into the deep and here the weight of humanity sinks into a horrific abyss like

a deep sea where no light reaches many worship the concept of the deep as these dregs are seen as the bedrock of the world and you can almost view the deep as a sort of abyssal religion its leader aldridge concluded that if the world continued to darken then there would eventually be an age of the deep sea why is time convoluted with the first flame waning the power of light also fades and since light is related to time the flow of time has stagnated in a land where the flame is located due to this instability

time spaces known as other worlds can randomly intersect here and this allows you to briefly meet people from long before your timeline and with the help of magic you can cross the gaps between worlds usually as spirits why is everything in the world hostile to me after watching this video you'll enjoy my video talking about all the bosses of dark souls 3 if you've played it i'll just list a bunch of reasons on screen though because every enemy does have a reason for attacking you after all except priscilla i mean why did you hurt her

that's actually really [ __ ] up what is the painted world the first painting we're introduced to is the painted world of ariamis which is hung in an orlando it was a place to hide all the things that the gods feared and so it's filled with many references to sin and the occult in the ashes of aryandel dlc we learn that the paintings are a mirror of the outside world and so are burned and reborn to mimic the linking of the fire just so there are those on the inside who would prefer to let the

painting rot what is the meaning of each ending so in dark souls you're presented with two choices after you defeat the lord of cinder either you inherit the fire and join the line of succession preserving the current world order or you leave the fire to die without fuel allowing the universe to reach its natural conclusion by becoming a lord of cinder you sacrifice yourself to restore the light by becoming a dark lord you choose to lead mankind into a new dark age with an uncertain future in dark souls 2 fire still wanes while the curse

still flourishes you assume a throne inside of a kiln which takes you to the first flame and the lord of cinder where you'll make one of these two choices turns out neither of them really matter for the world will continue to ebb and flow between light and dark so maybe you should heed a certain scholars proposition instead a new ending here is to neither rekindle nor squelch the first flame just simply embrace this twilight era and see what it has in store as if to follow the consequences of this choice dark souls 3 shows you

a world where the future lords of cinder refuse to either save the age of fire or usher in an age of dark and in the tumult that followed you are again presented with a choice do you continue to link the fire despite the ritual not being as impactful as before do you use the dark of the curse to subsume the flame and lead the undead into a new age as their lord of hollows do you let your fire keeper snuff out the fire and herald in the darkness only to learn that embers survive amongst the

countless lords who linked the flame before you or do you betray her and take what fire remains all for yourself you are unkindled ash after all what is unkindled ash these are undead who previously tried and failed to link the fire you weren't strong enough to bear the flame that you inherited but you weren't weak enough to stay reduced to ash either and so you became ash devoid of flame but still requiring embers as well as souls to heat your cold cursed frame hence unkindled are destined to seek the fire that remains in the world

how does the series end well it ends with ash literally as the world burns out again and again ash itself arises this is a new being a new species really that's composed of a thousand failures who had tried to link the fire over the years but ash doesn't really belong in this world and honestly they have more in common with the beings of the painted world instead where all of fire's discarded things reside so they fight for a new purpose to reunite the dark soul and paint a new world with it so that we can

finally escape this ashen wasteland that gwyn has created so a slave knight called gale hollowed beyond belief sacrifices himself for a new world and the painter paints a world called ash a cold dark and very gentle place this video is too broad i want specifics join the club subscribe check out other creators in this space and enjoy endless hours of content that has been made in the years before you saw this video before i go i wanted to give a shout out to one of my favorite twitch streamers 39 daff i watched her watch my

videos after she completed dark souls 3 and you know it really helped me i felt like i really understood some of the sorts of questions that people must have after they watch my videos who's the chest who is the big great chat i had her confusion was why i decided to sign you all up to extra classes today so follow her stream and thank her for that thank you for watching and i'll see you next time when is elden ring being released i actually have the answer to this one recently i had it leaked to

me so i figured i put it right at the end of the video while no one else is watching so just quickly don't tell anyone the release date of eldon ring is