I suspect it will be a thing that anywhere we travel in the Lands Between, we'll always be able to see the massive Erdtree towering over the land, projecting its golden light.
After feeling pretty dumb for not realizing earlier that "Limgrave" was "Limb-Grave," as in, the place where Godrick is sourcing all of his tarnished limbs to graft onto his body (and perhaps onto his followers) - and that it's Godrick we probably have to thank for taking us to the Lands Between in the first place - I had another thought: Grafting of course is used in human surgery sometimes. Someone with skin cancer who has a tumor removed will have a skin graft, perhaps replacing a bit of skin from the face with some from an area you don't worry as much about being scarred, like the thigh.
But grating is far more common in horticulture, where limbs from trees can be combined with one another, allowing a limb to grow on despite being disconnected from its original plant. Godrick's appearance is horrific, of course, but in some ways, the grasping arms coming off of his shoulders and upper arms are actually a bit reminiscent of the branches of a tree. Godrick has taken over Stormveil Castle after the exile of Godfrey the Golden - the progenitor, it seems, of the Tarnished - and he's specifically grafting the limbs of Tarnished to his body in his attempt to become the Elden Lord. It would seem that he's trying to claim the strength of Godfrey's line for himself, which makes his accusations that we are "playing at a lord" pretty hypocritical (a fitting attribute for a villain).
I find it interesting that the game insists on a few specific terms when referring to the Big Important Concepts of the game's world.
Naturally, I'm inclined to compare this to Dark Souls. In that, we know that beings discovered the Lord Souls, and also the First Flame. I was never entirely clear on whether Gwyn's Lord Soul was one and the same as the First Flame (probably not, as I think the first Dark Souls has you piecing together his soul from various bosses such as the Four Kings and Seath the Scaleless).
Elden Ring has a couple things that may or may not be directly related or even the same. We hear a lot about the Golden Order, which seems to be the kind of proper logic of the world. The Elden Ring seems to be the establishment of that Golden Order in magic Runes - and with the Rune of Death stolen, the entire thing shattered, sending the world into chaos.
Then we have the Erdtree. The Erdtree appears to be the source of Grace - itself a golden light that guides us, and I think it's tied to the Elden Ring given that when we collect our dropped Runes after doing a corpse run, it looks almost as if there's a small sapling made of golden light in the place where we fell.
But it seems that the Erdtree is not the be-all end-all of the world. In a ruined church east of the vast floodplain where the Academy of Raya Lucaria sits, there's a massive tortoise with a bishop's miter (yes, you read that right) who tells us about how the church was the site of a marriage between the founder of the academy, the moon queen, and someone affiliated with the Erdtree - seemingly indicating that the moon is its own power beyond all that. But that guy (and man I'm lacking names here) then left her to go marry Queen Marika and become the second Elden Lord, after Godfrey left and became Tarnished.
Oh, and another thing: this might be less about the game's specific lore than posing a question of underlying allegory. Anyone notice that Queen Merika's name is pronounced exactly like all but the first syllable in "America?"
Another thing I'm curious about is Melina - she's a pretty important figure to us early on, and in theory she's the one who is actually helping us level up, but I haven't really seen her in a long while, even after beating Godrick.
Another major visual motif is fingers. And once you beat Godrick (or, I'd assume also if you beat a different legacy dungeon first, its boss) a door opens in Roundtable Hold that allows you to meet and commune with the Two Fingers, which is way, way more literal than I had initially thought. And they are... super gross.
Now, I haven't come across this myself in my playthrough, but I'm given to understand that there's a kind of eldritch, forbidden faith (the two fingers being associated with proper holiness) known as the Three Fingers - one wonders, then, if there was originally a full hand in Roundtable Hold (or somewhere) and that there was some kind of schism.
Dragons are also a presence in the game. I've come across a Dragon Cult camp, but I don't really have a great sense of its import yet.
Knowing how deep and complex FromSoft makes its lore, I'm eager to continue delving into the lore and getting a better sense of the story.
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