Killing the Lord of Cinder: Decline and Renewal in Dark Souls
Part One
In name they varied from place to place, but in substance they were all alike. A man, whom the fond imagination of his worshippers invested with the attributes of a god, gave his life for the life of the world; after infusing from his own body a fresh current of vital energy into the stagnant veins of nature, he was cut off from among the living before his failing strength should initiate a universal decay, and his place was taken by another who played, like all his predecessors, the ever-recurring drama of the divine resurrection and death.
What’s funny about the ingrained perception that Dark Souls throws you into the game without any narrative orientation is that its opening cutscene spells it all out: the world began with an age of twilight, before differentiation had occurred, before darkness and light had been separated (cf Genesis 1:4); with the appearance of fire up rose powerful champions possessing the souls of lords, who slaughtered the dragons and ushered in the Age of Fire. The greatest of these champions was Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight. Time has passed and now the Age of Fire is drawing to its end. More and more people are going undead, doomed to eventually go Hollow, a feral state after hope and memory have faded entirely.
The only thing the introduction doesn’t spell out explicitly is why the Age of Fire is ending or what is to be done about it. But by piecing together what the two Primordial Serpents—Kingseeker Frampt and Darkstalker Kaathe—tell us, we can get a pretty clear picture of this too. According to Kaathe, not the most trustworthy character, the Age of Fire should already have run its course and given way to an Age of Dark, a time in which the gods would diminish and recede—a time when humanity finally would have its day in the sun, or shadow, rather. But Gwyn resisted and poured his vitality out, linking himself to the fire in an act of sacrifice to the cosmological order. The last dregs of his essence keep the flame alive, but barely.
You, the player, the “Chosen Undead,” after great struggle and likely many deaths, ultimately reach Gwyn’s sacred domain, the Kiln of the First Flame. When you arrive there you find not the mighty Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight who knocked dragons out of the sky with his bolts of lightning but Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, his radiance having burned down to nothing. Once the Chosen Undead defeats him they face a momentous choice: reenact Gwyn’s ritual and link the fire anew, or let it fade and usher in Kaathe’s Age of Dark. I consider the canon ending to be linking the fire, setting up the world of Dark Souls 3. (Note: there is a Dark Souls 2 but as it was not directed by Miyazaki and was rushed through development, it will not be treated in this series.)
We’re dealing with loops here, cycles of regeneration, so let’s take it again from the top. An old, ailing priest-king crouches low over his fire. He has tended it day and night since he took up his mantle but his strength is failing, and the fire as well. Beside him lies his sword, which he keeps with him day and night, for an attack could come at any moment. Indeed it must come because trial by combat is the only way he may be deposed and another take his place. “Hurry,” he thinks out to his coming assailant. He doesn’t have much time left; someone must take his place and keep the flame alight.
This isn’t Gwyn but rather the King of the Wood, the steward of Diana’s sacred grove at Lake Nemi, who forms the starting point for Frazer’s grand inquiry in The Golden Bough. Frazer describes him thus:
In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
But the King of the Wood was more than just a caretaker. He was understood to be Diana’s divine male counterpart, a mashup of several figures associated with her including Hippolytus and Virbius and a living god in his own right. This is of supreme importance for Frazer, who sees in it proof that the King of the Wood is a relic of an tradition that reaches deep into the past and sheds light on archaic beliefs and practices that have otherwise gone extinct or been absorbed into later, more civilized traditions and sanitized of their most barbaric elements. In the fire-tending King of the Wood, the embodiment of a god, Frazer sees a descendant of primitive man-gods, whose mastery of nature elevated them to the level of the divine.
Following from Frazer’s conception of sympathetic magic—essentially the rule “like follows like,” in which humans sought to influence nature through imitation—people were to one degree or another capable of altering reality through acts of will and devotion. Thus, “In a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has scarcely emerged. [...] From beliefs like these it is an easy step to the conviction that certain men are permanently possessed by a deity, or in some other undefined way are endued with so high a degree of supernatural power as to be ranked as gods and to receive the homage of prayer and sacrifice.”
In Frazer’s telling, these god-kings were believed to hold such a sway over the cosmos that it in fact depended upon them. The maintenance of the universe was the beneficent result of their continued expenditure of effort and energy (certain Christian theologians would eventually make similar arguments). But whereas the Christian god maintains the universe from without, immortal, the divine king exists within it, subject to the vagaries of time and illness. Despite his supposed mastery of nature, the inescapability of death is undeniable even for such a figure.
No amount of care and precaution will prevent the man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying… The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god’s life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shews symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay.
The comparison is almost 1:1 exactly. Gwyn, a mortal elevated to godhood by his mastery of lightning miracles (his faith stat is off the charts), linked his life-force to the cosmological order, making the state of the world dependent on his vitality. With his growing enfeeblement, catastrophes are mounting, as the usual cycle of life and death grows perverted by the rising tide of undead. Gwyn has gone Hollow and so goes the world. By slaying him we absorb his soul—literally, as currency—melding his being into a successor and taking his place, providing a fresh infusion of supernatural power and renewing the Age of Fire.
When we return to this world in Dark Souls 3, an unfathomable amount of time has passed. An unknown number of cycles of decline and renewal have taken place. Lordran has become Lothric; everything is grimmer, the monsters more twisted and deformed, the abyss threatening to bubble up and swallow the world whole. The task of holding the power that opens the way to the Kiln of the First Flame is now split five ways between the Lords of Cinder, no one champion capable of the task. It’s as if the world of Dark Souls 1 has been chopped and screwed, with familiar elements all out of joint, the high city of Anor Londo now somehow lying in the shadow of Lothric castle, nestled in the Boreal Valley. It’s as if the loop of renewal has twisted into a Moebius strip. Everything is inverted—the high has fallen low and the low risen high. Even living creatures seem turned inside out, with many enemies rocking exposed ribcages and the like. There’s a palpable exhaustion pervading the game. The people who persist in this world are pale and short of breath, playing their parts in a pageant of regeneration that ran its course long ago.
The journey of Dark Souls 3 culminates in another trip to The Kiln of the First Flame, where the opponent is not Gwyn but the anonymous Soul of Cinder. This boss is the amalgamation of the essence of every champion who has linked the fire, from Gwyn and the Chosen Undead to the innumerable others that followed and prolonged the Age of Fire to this point of extreme attenuation. The Soul of Cinder swaps between the weapons of every possible build players could have challenged Gwyn with, rolling in with a curved sword before pulling back to let off the massive spell Comet Azur. Eventually the flaming sword and the familiar attack patterns come out—an echo of Gwyn from deep within.
Once again the player has the choice to link the flame but the game pushes the player to understand that it’s time to break the cycle. In a comprehensive playthrough, the player will go under Lothric Castle and pass through somehow into a version of Firelink Shrine where all is dark. I take this to be a vision of the future, after the flame has been extinguished and the Age of Dark has come. There the player finds the eyes of the Firekeeper, the woman at Firelink Shrine who keeps the flame and channels your souls into level-ups. The eyes give the blind woman a terrible vision of a world of darkness, but not one without hope. She tells the player, “The eyes show a world without fire, a vast stretch of darkness. But 'tis different to what is seen when stripped of vision. In the far distance, I sense the presence of tiny flames. Like precious embers, left to us by past Lords, linkers of the fire.”
The problem of entropy haunts video games. To play a game is to use it up. Once a boss has been beaten it is dead and gone; you can’t do that again. Every challenge completed, every dungeon cleared, reduces the remaining experience, moving it from a position of unsettled dynamism toward its lowest-energy state in which nothing more remains to be done. Developers have come up with solutions and work-arounds—looping rogue-likes, competitive shooters—but all these efforts accomplish is shift the site of entropy’s work from the game-world to the player’s mind, where this settling manifests as boredom and burnout. Only Dark Souls takes entropy and makes it its grand theme, a raging against, and eventual acceptance of, the dying of the light.
It’s notable that Frazer believed that our own world was doomed to slide into darkness and decay, a victim of the implacable forces of entropy. At the very end of The Golden Bough, he reflects on the grand sweep of his investigation to argue for the value and dignity of the beliefs of primitive man, characterizing them as attempts at understanding no different from the work of science. Frazer believed in science and progress and man’s mounting mastery of the physical world. But he saw a hard limit to its power:
The dreams of magic may one day be the waking realities of science. But a dark shadow lies athwart the far end of this fair prospect. For however vast the increase of knowledge and of power which the future may have in store for man, he can scarcely hope to stay the sweep of those great forces which seem to be making silently but relentlessly for the destruction of all this starry universe in which our earth swims as a speck or mote. In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun.
In an incredible footnote to this passage, Frazer quoted a letter of Charles Darwin: “To think of the progress of millions of years, with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been again converted into red-hot gas. Sic transit gloria mundi with a vengeance.”
Call it Gwyn vindicated. In the final analysis, Frazer also dreamed of the possibility of linking the fire and rekindling our own First Flame in its heavenly orbit.