So I've been thinking, and I think with the facts the DLC gave us, I've come up with a general outline of what I believe to be the full story of the Lands Between and its cosmology! Obviously there's speculation and assumptions here, but I'll try to keep to the known facts as much as possible.
We start with the Greater Will, an entity of supreme power, possibly an Outer God. It dwelt in the lightless abyss of space, alongside many other celestial beings.
The latent power given off by these distant beings is what is called the Primeval Current, a malleable power so distant and melded from their sources that it lacks an identity of its own, and can take many shapes, embodied in the substance Glintstone.
These beings included Gods and stars, and most notably, its daughter, Metyr.
Metyr descended to the Lands Between as a shooting star, and created life in her own image: Fingercreepers and Two Fingers, and presumably the Three Fingers as well. It's possible that Metyr had a certain amount of arrogance or narcissism in this regard.
However, she is described as 'broken and abandoned', despite longing for a message from the Greater Will, implying that she craved her progenitor's favor, but her efforts failed to earn it. Instead, the Greater Will intervened directly, sending down the Elden Beast as a second shooting star, which, in the form of the Primeval Crucible, began to produce life.
The ancient days of the Crucible are shrouded in mystery, including their timescale, but we know that the following things happened:
-All manner of life gradually emerged from the Crucible, starting with the dragons and beastmen and gradually forming more humanlike beings. The more bestial something was, the more it seems to hold the Crucible's inherent divine power, having natural abilities as opposed to the more mundane humans.
-The dragons rose to power under Elden Lord Placidusax and his god, brandishing the primordial form of the Elden Ring, whose composition determines the order of the world. The identity of this god, and how they ascended, is unknown.
-Other Outer Gods began to interfere with life in the Lands Between. The dead were burned in ghostflame, and the Scarlet Rot emerged and its Outer God was sealed away.
-Metyr began to impersonate the Greater Will through her Two Fingers.
-The Nox civilization rose, and either offended the Greater Will or Metyr-as-Greater-Will, which led to their exile underground and eventual destruction at Astel's hands.
-The Fire Giants arose thanks to the Fell God (potentially an Outer God), and started a longstanding rivalry with the humanoid ice warriors of Zamor.
-The ancient civilization of Ruah, Uhl, and Uld rose and fell, potentially due to the influence of the Rot Outer God.
-The astrologers of the Mountaintops begin to study fate in the night sky.
There was a time when the god of Placidusax 'fled', their whereabouts unknown, leaving the Elden Ring unclaimed, and we can presume for a time that the Lands Between were without a god. We can consider this the end of the 'ancient times', and a point in which recorded history starts to take on a traceable order.
A group of those blessed by the Crucible, the Hornsent, considered themselves divine and wished to pursue greater divinity. They began work on Enir-Ilim, trying to build a tower to reach 'the gods', likely referring to the Outer Gods or the Greater Will.
Living nearby were the shamans, a people who also had something of the divine Crucible in them-- the ability for their bodies to fuse harmoniously, as all life was fused in the Crucible (an ability that later become the foundation of the cruder art of grafting).
The Hornsent decided to exploit this ability, harvesting the shaman into saints, and using them to construct the Gate of Divinity atop Enir-Ilim, a concentration of divinity that was meant to turn mortals into gods.
However, there was a survivor of this slaughter: Marika. Somehow managing to escape the genocide, she met the Two Fingers in the Finger Ruins near her home, and together, they hatched a plan. With its aid, she ascended Enir Ilim and crossed the Gate. Perhaps because she was of the same stock as the shamans making up the gate, she could make full use of it, and became a true god.
Here the timeline gets a bit hazy again-- the Lands Between and the Realm of Shadow hadn't yet been split by Marika's 'obscuring', an act that presumably would require her to have claimed the Elden Ring. But that act would require her to have an Elden Lord by her side, and while Godfrey was her first Elden Lord, her firstborn son, Messmer, is clearly Radagon's son. Additionally, when the Erdtree (and its shadow) actually grew from the Crucible (and how long that took) is unclear. So I'm going to make a few assumptions going forward:
-Marika and Radagon had Messmer prior to ascending to godhood, but when they ascended, he became a demigod.
-Radagon was secretly the true 'first' Elden Lord (not counting Placidusax)
-The Fingers gave Marika a shadow in the form of Maliketh, who fought the Gloam-Eyed Queen who wielded the power of Destined Death, an aspect of the Elden Ring. She was an Empyrean chosen by a rival Fingers, like Marika's trying to earn the favor of Metyr. Sealing way Destined Death was an essential aspect of what she did next.
-Marika's act of making contact with the Elden Beast/Ring and claiming it was the birth of the Golden Order: it grew the Erdtree to provide blessings to the Lands Between, and grew the Scadutree to split off and confine the Realm of Shadow.
She sent Messmer into the Realm of Shadow to rain burning retribution down on the Hornsent, a vicious crusade. However, Marika found herself ashamed of what she'd done-- she abandoned Messmer in the Realm of Shadow as a scapegoat, and divorced from her other self, as Radagon was her aspect of desiring order and vengeance. He would go on to the north to fight for the Golden Order, coming into conflict with House Caria, descended from the astrologers, and eventually become Renalla's husband.
The creation of the Erdtree was an unmistakable challenge to the powers of the world, and Marika took on Godfrey as her Elden Lord to lead her armies against any challenger. These comparatively valiant wars in defense of the Golden Order didn't need to be expunged, and hardened Marika to the exercise of power to sustain her authority. Now unnecessary, Marika discarded the brutish Godfrey and his armies by revoking the Grace of Gold, banishing them from the Lands Between as she reunited with her other self, though they'd been apart long enough that the melding wasn't yet perfect, and there remained disagreements between them.
By now, Marika was starting to have some suspicions about the Two Fingers and the Greater Will, unaware that the Fingers had essentially used Marika to usurp the Elden Ring on behalf of Metyr, giving her indirect authority over the world her progenitor had taken from her.
But all was well, for the time-- she had godlike power, dominion over the Lands Between, and those marked by the Crucible were oppressed as vengeance for what the Hornsent had done to her. More than that, she had a family again, people she cared about so much that she extracted the concept of Death from the very order of the world in order to preserve. There were some issues:
-A group of nomads was accused of summoning the Flame of Frenzy, and terrified by childhood stories of the Three Fingers and its Abyssal Woods, Marika buried them alive. Unbeknownst to her, this only secured the Fingers' summoning.
-Some of her own children with Godfrey had been born Omen, which horrified her but she couldn't bring herself to kill them.
-Her new children with Radagon were born afflicted...
...but they and Ranni were Empyreans, candidates to take her place one day, and the future seemed secured.
And then someone killed her favorite son. Godwyn the Golden, murdered by a piece of Death itself that she'd assumed safely hidden away, suffering the most horrifying and repugnant kind of death imaginable. Perhaps she even learned it was the doing of one of her own daughters, it's impossible to know.
This sent a message of despair to Marika: No matter how much she fought and killed, no matter her godhood, she could not make herself immune to loss-- for all its power, for what she truly needed, the Elden Ring was utterly impotent. And she knew that (at least what she thought of as) the Greater Will and its vassals did not have her best interests at heart.
Bringing all the divine strength granted by the Gate of Divinity to bear, she shattered the useless and hated thing, ruining the plans of both Metyr and the genuine Greater Will in one fell swoop.
From there, the Shattering ensued, and the rest is the story of the game and DLC!
Here are some things that I couldn't fit anywhere:
-I've been trying to nail down some essential difference between Sorceries and Incantations, and while it's hard to say anything for sure, I think I have a promising concept:
--Incantations channel the power of things that are present in the world, either with a direct connection to, or a presence of some kind under the influence of the Erdtree. They're close, so to gain their power, you need to offer fealty in the form of Faith, or profound insight into their being in the form of Arcane. Incantations are from things that, like it or not, exist inside the Order.
--Sorceries channel the power of distant things, and things that predate the Erdtree. The pure powers of death, powers derived directly from Metyr, or the Blood Star, or the Primeval Current/Glintstone/all things associated with that malleable blue power. Even the Scadutree, which is the symbol of exile from the Erdtree's influence. These things only require the knowledge with which to channel the latent power they give off-- they don't require fealty to or consent from their sources. Sorceries are from things that deviate from the Order.
---The Staff of the Great Beyond unifies these things: As it's derived from Metyr, who is both outside the influence of the Erdtree and a direct connection to the Greater Will, it makes no distinction between the two powers.
-I have no idea what to do with Mt. Gelmir and serpents. They seem pretty disconnected with everything else. Presumably they have a connection with Messmer and his snakes? If there's some common entity there, it eludes me.
One of the most consistent things about Conservatives is not even having a surface level understanding of things until it happens directly to them.
You can tell them over and over and over again that the stove will burn their hand if they touch it, and they'll laugh and call you a snowflake until they do... and then they scream and say that NO ONE should touch hot stoves, it's just not right!
And then if you tell that the microwave oven over there will also burn their hand if they touch it, they'll laugh and call you a snowflake cause 'that's not a stove!'
How horrifying is it that tens of millions of Americans are apparently willing to destroy democracy in order to give this person unlimited power?
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