In the Dark Souls trilogy, the character players create are explicitly undead, but Elden Ring, the newest FromSoftware action RPG, doesn’t explicitly state why the Tarnished can’t permanently die within the narrative of the game. To solve this mystery, players really have to dig into the lore of Elden Ring through exploration, NPC dialogue, and item descriptions, understanding the nature of Death within the Lands Between and how the gift of golden Grace lets Tarnished circumvent it.
In video games where players can save and reload, developers will sometimes give their PC the narrative ability to rewind time (a major plot element in Fire Emblem: Three Houses/Three Hopes, Undertale, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time). The modern Souls RPGs of FromSoftware take a different approach, discarding the save-and-load feature of most video games in favor of a constructed fantasy setting where the player character is immortal or at least incapable of permanently dying.
Differences Between Immortality In Elden Ring And Other Souls Games
In the Berserk-inspired Dark Souls series and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the main characters are explicitly cursed by an affliction that severs them from death – respectively, the Brand of the Darksign and the blood of the Dragon’s Heritage. In Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, player characters are explicitly unable to permanently die because their spirits are bound to a mystical refuge/hub area – the Nexus for the former dark fantasy RPG and the Hunter’s Dream for the later gothic horror RPG.
FromSoftware’s latest, in contrast, simply describes its Tarnished protagonists as “dead who yet live” in the opening cinematic, then throws players into the world of Elden Ring‘s Lands Between. Understanding why certain Tarnished are immortal, and whether that’s a blessing of course, requires no small amount of lore-hunting and pursuit of intriguing quest-lines about the nature of Death in Elden Ring‘s setting.
Elden Ring’s Queen Marika Sealed Away Destined Death
The metaphysical concept of Death, symbolized in-game by flames of black and red that cause lingering damage to an enemy’s health, lies at the heart of nearly all the major events in Elden Ring. When the Golden Order was founded, Queen Marika the Eternal plucked the Rune of Death from her Elden Ring, forging it into a fearsome sword for her shadow-bound beast Maliketh.
A secretive conspiracy stole a fragment of the Rune of Death from Maliketh’s Black Blade in Elden Ring, forging said fragment into twisted Black Knives used to permanently slay Godwyn, first of the Demigods. Near the end of Elden Ring, the Tarnished defeats Maliketh the Black Blade in his sanctum, and in doing so, unleashes Destined Death upon the world once more. This chain of events raises two questions – what is the concept of Destined Death, and what happened to the world when Queen Marika sealed it away?
Based on certain obscure item descriptions and dialogue from NPCs, Destined Death in Elden Ring seems to be no less than the potential of life to die in a permanent, irrevocable fashion. The black flames of Destined Death, wielded by Elden Ring‘s god-murdering Godskin cults, Black Knife assassins, and Maliketh himself, are capable of bringing death to immortal beings like Gods, Demigods, or the Erdtree itself. By sealing away the Rune of Death, one of the fragments of the Elden Ring now known as the Great Runes, Queen Marika altered the metaphysics of her reality, granting those subjects of her’s blessed with the Erdtree’s golden Grace the ability to cheat death.
Elden Ring’s New Cycle Of Life & Death Under The Golden Order
Roderika, the traumatized Tarnished NPC players first encounter in Limgrave’s Stormhill area, eventually becomes a Spirit Tuner after taking refuge in the Roundtable Hold and befriending Hewg, the imprisoned blacksmith there. Roderika is capable of upgrading the Spirit Ashes Elden Ring players carry to strengthen the ghostly spirits they can conjure to aid in battle. The Glovewort upgrade material Roderika needs for spirit tuning is found in Elden Ring‘s Erdtree Burial Catacombs, where ghosts linger and roots from the massive Erdtree slowly consume corpses buried within them.
After progressing Roderika’s questline, which is rather short compared to other side quests in the game, the humble Spirit Tuner talks about how she can now “see how and why immortal essence exists as spirit under the Golden Order,” handing players a vital clue about why ghosts, tombs, and graves exist in a world where the gift of Grace lets Tarnished turn back the clock on their gruesome deaths.
Within the story detail-filled gameplay of Elden Ring, the golden light of Grace, stripped from the Tarnished and returned to them upon their first deaths, undoes the consequences of any and all violent deaths, reconstructing a player’s slain body at the nearest Site of Lost Grace checkpoint or Stake of Marika. Notably, the killable Tarnished NPCs in Elden Ring frequently talk about how they’ve lost the ability to see the guiding light of grace, and with it, their ability to resurrect in both spirit and body.
That said, the Tarnished of Elden Ring do seem to capable of aging and growing old, as suggested by the elderly NPCs players can encounter. All these details together paint a picture of a two-part cycle of life and rebirth, created by the Elden Ring goddess Queen Marika to create a realm and nation as eternal as her. Her gift of golden Grace, bestowed on those who swear fealty, resurrects those who die before their time to violence or disease.
When someone with grace dies of old age, their bodies or cremated ashes seem to be interred in special catacombs and absorbed by the Erdtree’s many roots, there to be preserved as Remembrances for eternity or to be reincarnated as new, young forms of life. If these twin gifts of immortality were indeed available to all who served the Golden Order and the Elden Ring, it’s little wonder so many flocked to Queen Marika’s cause in the days of yore.
In a recent interview, George R.R. Martin revealed Elden Ring‘s world was shaped by events thousands of years before the game takes place – the backstory FromSoftware hired him to design. If pivotal events like the Night of the Black Knives and the civil war known as the Shattering did indeed take place so long before the start of Elden Ring proper, this could explain why the game’s humanoid enemies look so withered and sound so delirious; they’ve lived for centuries in a half-dead state, unable to return to the Erdtree or reincarnate.
