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@nylazor I shall do my best!!

It's a world co-designed/written by Hidetaka Miyazaki (the mind behind the whole souls/borne series) and G.R.R. Martin.

So in very short it's set in a place with a very fucked divinity system. When you arrive as the player, things have been going tits up for untold centuries, lots of big players locked in a stalemate, Demigods and other sus beings at each other's throats, in possession of fragments of power, but unable to conquer all.

That's your job. You come in to mow them all down and either fix the system or erase it and go for another one.

Whether you play the game or not, there's a lovely community that does amazing lore videos! I recommend this guy, these two, but the current "go to" for a complete story would be this video :

youtube

But who are the puppers?

Well, there are three puppers, who all have somewhat unclear origins, more under the break, for your dash's sake!

Blaidd the Half Wolf, your average vanilla monster lover dream boy, who is a friendly NPC associated with a main quest...

Maliketh the Black Blade, who made so many gamers cry in the early days, it was glorious. He's not optional either, and a player who ranked all bosses in the game by difficulty rated him as toughest.

The last is Red Wolf of Radagon, with his sexy earrings... He knows magic. I'm not going to touch on him because I'm too uncertain.

The short of it is that the world of Elden Ring, a place called "The Lands Between", has been sort of invaded by a divinity. You can picture them as alien. They're "an outer god" with lovecraftian flavour, almost. There are several outer gods, and some characters follow others instead (a major no-no).

The god currently "ruling" the LB is called "The Greater Will" (TGW) and is never featured in the game. You only see their envoy/vessel, which is a big beast and one of the most gorgeous bosses I've ever seen. That beast came along with a seed, for the Erdtree, the pretty golden tree you see everywhere in the game. This is a source of power, and things get EXTREMELY HAZY lore-wise, so I'm going to skim and let the lore videos clarify that.

The envoy of TGW, the "Elden Beast" can't rule itself, and invested the powers of the "elden ring" into a woman, who rose to the position. She's called Queen Marika, and you may recognise her from the promo :

She IS the Elden Ring, literally. By *becoming* the Elden Ring (depicted as a set of magic-like runes) she became the local "god", but in effect is a vassal of TGW. Her children are the various demi-gods.

She had quite a few, not all as cute as the others!! They're the ones warring among themselves after the Elden Ring was shattered, and are in a stalemate when you start the game. Marika herself is nowhere to be seen.

How do the puppers come in? Well, Marika may be a "god", but she's under a fair bit of supervision. In order to ascend, she had to have a consort (the Elden Lord) and a "shadow". They're basically prerequisites.

Enter her half-brother, Maliketh! YES. They're apparently related lol Although... the lore can be very vague, and often leaves a lot for the imagination (or the DLC...) so is he adopted?? Or was Marika's mom a monster lover degenerate like us? Who knows.

Anyway, Maliketh became her "shadowbound beast", supposedly a sort of champion. However, they also server a darker (secret) purpose, unknown to them.

I have neglected to introduce a gross yet major player in this already mad political structure : the fingers.

They're LITERAL big, creepy ass FINGERS. They're the vassals of TGW, can apparently talk to it directly (though it takes thousands of years lol), and they meddle in decisions of succession and how the show is run down here in the LB.

They're the ones who "gave" Maliketh to Marika as a shadow.

They're said to have "created" Blaidd to gift to Ranni as well.

Radagon's Red Wolf is more uncertain (not even getting into this), but I guess he's also a shadowbound beast.

Why the darker purpose? Because if Marika, or Ranni, were to rebel against the Greater Will, their shadow would turn on them and kill them, the drive overriding their entire personality in the process. It's sad shit.

Who's Ranni, you ask, and why does she get a pupper? She's a type of being called an Empyrean, which qualifies her as replacement for the God job position. She was chosen by a set of fingers to one day replace Queen Marika, but didn't want that fate.

She SO didn't want it, she got into some serious shenanigans to get out of it, including killing her body, and kickstarting the events of the game.

What was going on?

Well, when Marika got into power and became the Elden Ring, she decided it was time for sweeeeeet immortality, baby! She plucked from the Elden Ring (aka, herself??) the rune of Death. She became "Queen Marika the Eternal" in the process.

She made it into a "black blade" and entrusted it to Maliketh, her shadow.

So if Maliketh hits you with that sword of his, he gives you a "Destined Death". Forever death of body and soul. No reincarnation. (You know, lore wise. He doesn't "game over" you for real, although it'd be MAD shit if he did lol).

However you have to realise, a lot of that lore is hidden in tiny little item descriptions! So the item that tells you about that, also tells you that Marika's "only use" for her shadow was as a holder for the rune of Death, and "even then, she betrayed him"

And I'm like... WHAT?? Hoooowww??? TELL ME MORE!!

But we don't know, not yet. That's a fun element, mind you. Different people have different understandings of the lore, also because they haven't found all the items they could! The soulsborne series basically turns its players into archaeologists, and it's both a blessing and a curse for fic writers, for obvious reasons. My fun theory today can be "wrong" tomorrow when someone rocks up with a fucking rusty spoon with an item description that brings in new lore!

Basically, what went down is explained in the lore videos far better than I could, but the short of it is that Ranni REALLY didn't want to be the local "god", aka "slave" of TGW, and in order to escape her fate, she had to "discard" her flesh.

So she stole a fragment of the rune of Death from Maliketh (emphasis on stole, he's insanely OP and she couldn't take him one on one), and with this fragment, got involved into a plot to craft a set of black knives, imbued with Destined Death.

It's extremely unclear if Marika was involved, as the knives were given to assassins who were all women of the same origin as herself, and she was up to some really dicey stuff that smell like a long con...

What we know for certain is that on the same night, Ranni kills her flesh, and simultaneously, the assassins killed Marika's firstborn son, a demigod called Godwyn the golden.

This dual, simultaneous strike was necessary, as it "split" the rune of Death's power into two : it killed Ranni's flesh, but not her soul, and killed Godwyn's soul, but not his body.

If a demigod had not been killed, Ranni would have taken the full brunt of Death and died in body and soul.

Godwyn's death is one of the most disturbing cutscenes in gaming history...

He becomes "the Prince of Death". Major yikes.

Was Marika involved? Was she grief stricken? We don't know. Some sources say she was, but there's a TON of unreliable narrators in the game, and people will tell you stuff they believe but don't know for sure, or straight up lie to you!!

What we do know is that she shattered the Elden Ring (aka herself. When you see her body, she's all broken and fucked up), and as a result of this treachery was imprisoned within the Erdtree.

And her pupper? Maliketh? He went pretty apeshit.

After Death was stolen from him, he sealed the remainder into his own flesh (can't be healthy) so it couldn't be taken from him again. After Marika betrays TGW by shattering the Elden Ring... We don't know, but we can assume Maliketh went insane.

When we meet him in the game, "an age" has passed. Over a thousand years, during which Marika's kids fought over the runes/fragments of the Elden Ring. They were all deemed traitors basically, and lost their "grace", aka, support from TGW. You're actively encouraged to hunt them down and kill them to get their runes (that's... the goal of the game).

Maliketh is in hiding as a clergyman called Gurranq. He's clearly a bit deranged, roars in the night, and begs you to feed him "deathroot", like eating the by-products of that death leakage would somehow help... (it does, kinda, he grows more lucid the more you give him).

But then you confront Gurranq and realise, through his major mid-fight glow-up, that he's in fact Maliketh, and that depending on your level and character set up, you might be here a while lmao.

In the end, it seems like he's aware that Marika betrayed him in some way, but he's also very apologetic and guilt-ridden. This whole time he's remained loyal despite the madness. He still wants the Golden Order to be restored... But as far as we know, it doesn't seem to be something Marika wants.

It looks a LOT like she kept him in the dark and plotted behind everyone's back.

Blaidd, the other shadowbound beast, is also victim of a tragic storyline. It's not good to be a shadow to busy-body godling women. :-/

Although this fight with Maliketh is incredible, I really enjoy people who fight him with a friend or a summon, because you get to see his super cool moves from afar when is attention isn't on the player.

youtube

A large part of his charm is how dope he looks, and how mesmerizing he is in his movements. He caught my eye in the original gameplay trailer, and just captivated me from that video. I picked up all the lore I know solely in my quest to understand Maliketh's story, and the world just became fascinating.

There's a lot to it, and it's really cool that it lends itself to videos you can enjoy from the comfort of your armchair, even if you can't play the game yourself.

I hope this helped, but I can't stress enough how much watching the videos will help. I've completely skipped a LOT of the lore here to focus on the puppers, but the vids will give you a more rounded overview of the world!

Recs time :

At the time of writing I'm the sole English author for Maliketh. For Always is Maliketh x Reader 9but not player character!) and Little Brother is a one shot looking at Blaidd meeting Maliketh as a very young shadow fresh from his training.

For more Blaidd content, I recommend Have You Tried Dying Less? by Shirokoi. Sounds super promising and is from the POV of Blaidd. Really enjoy his voice.

Beyond the puppers, but still in the realm of monster fucking, The Golden Hour by Tanatanas is very well written. Morgott x Tarnished.

And I had a MAD blast reading Five More Minutes Please by The Third Iteration, which is under 300 words and is reader x Godrick the Grafted.

Redmane by Pearl Slug forcuses on a Tarnished reader x Radahn, where the reader remembers the past relationship as they fight. Kinda bitter sweet and tragic, very cool.

I'm sure there's a ton of great pupper fics out there... Well, clearly not for Maliketh, but MAYBE one day someone else will join me in that corner lmao. Blaidd is popular though, so you can find stuff for him, I'm sure. He's in about 30 fics in English.

Yeah. tiny fandom galore.

#elden ring #elden ring lore #blaidd the half wolf #maliketh the black blade #Queen marika #red wolf of radagon #PUPPERS #please don't skewer me for subpar lore retelling #this is a very vague overview #shadowbound beasts #Youtube

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