around this time, some jag-off named logarius and a band of “executioners” (a faction you can join in game) traveled to cainhurst castle and slaughtered the inhabitants, the dreaded royal vilebloods of cainhurst. the inciting incident (or so says alfred, a heavily biased source as hes the only executioner in the game, uh, with lines anyway) was an unknown scholar who “betrayed his fellows at Byrgenwerth and brought forbidden blood back with him to Cainhurst Castle“. the blood “threaten[s] the purity of the Church’s blood healing” although it’s not explained how or what the fuck they’re talking about. according to alfred, logarius stayed behind to prevent the undying and unkillable queen from regaining power and corrupting all the blood with her stank.
to determine when this happened, i had to remember the stupid secret type of damage they don’t tell you about in the game for some reason: righteous damage. righteous damage only affects enemies found in castle cainhurst (and also the one labyrinth ghost enemy, but i assume that’s to underscore the cainhurst/chalice dungeon connection) and can only be found in weapons carried by church members. therefore: its reasonable to assume that the raid occurred after the foundation of the healing church trick weapon workshop where the majority of those tools came from.
i need an image to break this up so check out the most fucked up, non-snake related map in the game:
for a company known for its cohesive maps, this is a fucking insane series of choices. i understand annalise needs to be trapped but what the fuck is this room. why is it up here. why is it magic. why is it like a hoarders nest full of the same 4 statues found literally everywhere on this map. this truly is the most mysterious game.
everyone and their mother has a completely baseless and improbable theory about who the culprit was or if there even WAS a rat at byrgenwerth- so of course so do i also. let me work my way over there.
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the executioners have a rune too, “radiance”, which is unusual for its description specifying that caryll had already discovered the rune before the executioners adopted it as their own. there is no mention of this process on the “corruption” page, nor on the remaining covenant runes discovered by caryll. “radiance” is also present on the astral clocktower, “corruption” is not.
tensions between the royals of cainhurst (who no doubt felt entitled to the magic blood and already had systems to deal with it) and the healing church (which was distributing it to the masses as a cure-all) must have been untenable once they both realized what the other had. with the vilebloods gone, the church would have (and did have) unilateral control of the ministration process. i wonder if a certain byrgenwerth educated runesmith was invited to castle cainhurst or traveled on their own, only to discover during the runemaking process that the “old blood” from the labyrinth and the blood in the veins of the royals were one and the same.
all but one royal was slaughtered: annalise, queen of the vilebloods. they locked her in a silver helmet and, as the story goes, logarius martyred himself to ensure that annalise could not escape. he sits on the roof, wearing the crown of illusions and keeping vigil against those who might be tempted by her corrupted veins.
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HIGHLY SPECULATIVE POSTING FOLLOWING:
this shit doesn’t make any sense.
most people agree (or can at least see the argument) that it might not have gone down the way alfred believes. alfred wasn’t there himself so what the hell does he know. i think he only knows the version the church told the public, which is contradictory and confusing once you set eyes on the martyr himself. this shit right here, specifically, with logarius’ purpose and relationship to the church is where you can really feel the last minute story edits lol.
first of all, there’s a lot of cainhurst cut content we need to address: there were knights and horses, a really gross reward for the vileblood covenant (a yucky bloodclot from annalise that would have had the same healing power as arianna’s blood, just in case their connection was somehow too subtle), a “king in blue”, and weird additional kings (multiple) labeled “king ghost low class”.
logarius himself is labeled “king reaper” in the game files; an appropriate moniker for a man wielding a scythe who looks like a piece of jerky. he’s decked out in chains and jewels and is wearing an impossible to miss bejeweled crown. this look is in near complete diametric opposition to the statue of him where you meet alfred at the beginning of the game. this is clearly not REALLY him. he doesn’t look like this! the only thing they got right was his height. (brightness and contrast adjusted)
he might be in bad shape from being freezer burned, but it’s not a leap to assume that logarius is a pthumerian based on his appearance. besides the slack jaw and tall, thin frame, his clothes have a lot of similarities (besides color) to the pthumerian elder and pthumerian descendant. so why the fuck would he be throwing down his life for the healing church? like, what’s his motivation? what’s with the shitty crown that only opens up one wall? even if he couldn’t kill annalise, why didn’t he smash her into bits like alfred, destroy the crown and brick up the wall?? is he STUPID??? (GAME THEORY)
i dunno. i’ve been pecking away at this and i feel like i’ve carved out a semi-agreeable interpretation that kinda holds water. this is REALLY reading into tiny details. and it’s predicated on the idea that EVERYTHING the church said about cainhurst was a lie, which might be too much of a stretch, even for an organization within the fiction that is known for stretching the truth. one point in my favor is the weird quote the executioner’s garb attributes to him; if he’s a pthumerian, he didn’t fucking say that. what he probably said was “HURRAGH” or “HAUGHH”.
anyway, consider this: every time the game refers to the executioner covenant/church group, it capitalizes it. Executioners. i don’t because i’m lazy. this is consistent across every item description and in game dialogue1. so there’s truly only one item that sticks out because it does not capitalize the word “executioner”. multiple times.
the gloves have the same unique red skull magic that is exclusive to logarius himself and the breaking wheel (a real life execution method) named after him. could these not be his gloves? was he the royal executioner? for who? his clothes and weapons would suggest he came from the pthumeru chalice dungeons. and he’s not the only Executioner in the chalice dungeons: meet “queen killer”, a boss summon and friendly npc. yes hes a reference to the classic fromsoft “naked guy with a big weapon” thats in every game. but hes also a pthumerian (or as close to one that can be made in the character creator) under the ardeo2.
were all of the executioners pthumerians? no idea. like alfred, i wasn’t there either. if so, it’s odd that ludwig admired them so much that he based the holy blade uniform on theirs. and its double weird that one of them tries to help you kill queen yharnam in the chalice dungeon.
but for now let’s operate under the assumption that logarius, at least, IS pthumerian and from the chalice dungeons. after all, everything from his neck up bears an uncanny resemblance to the chalice dungeon material sage’s hair. right down to the crown. sage’s hair is dropped by the scariest motherfuckers on the planet who are found only in the chalice dungeons. the item description states that the skulls they drop are “a body part of a saint, sacrificed by the Healing Church in their search for Truth”. dunno what that means; maybe they were hacking up the bodies for similar reasons as everyone in the game who is disassembling people. maybe its to access the chalice dungeons. maybe its to do magic like the ritekeepers. those guys have the sage’s wrist in one hand and a (less specific, child-like) skull in the other.
but between the cut ghost kings from several paragraphs ago (who has multiple weapon variants) and these skulls-wearing-crowns drops, we at least have an explanation for why alfred has his own crown at the end of his questline (i dont know WHY he has the crown but that’s why a second one could exist; otherwise i don’t know where he got a second magic crown); more than one royal looking crown exists. logarius’, however, is specified to be “THE old king’s crown”. it bears strong resemblance to the sage/saint crowns to underscore their relationship, but the crown of illusions is specified to be the crown of THE royalty.
so: why would logarius, a pthumerian royal Executioner/executioner from the pthumeru labyrinth lead a band of masked allies to castle cainhurst, kill everyone except for annalise, and then choose to wear the crown while on rooftop guard duty to make sure she never escapes? my best educated guess is that it was a coup. as his filename states, he is a “king reaper”. he “donned the crown of his own volition” after wiping out the old king3 not to keep annalise at bay4, but to keep others from discovering her potential to have a “child of blood”. logarius worked “for” (with) the church to take advantage of their agenda. this is also why he gets up to beat the shit out of you no matter what you’re wearing5. he doesn’t care who you are, he saw her first.
IF the church was involved (and i suspect they must have been for many things to make sense), i would think that logarius taking the throne instead of killing the final ultimate enemy of the church probably threw them off big time. imagine the church retreating, destroying the bridge connecting cainhurst to hemwick and telling everyone it was almost a huge success except they had to leave poor logarius behind because the queen is ummm immortal as it turns out. but don’t worry because he wanted to stay in order to save us 🙂 he wanted to. we won!
alfred’s dialogue dances around it, but “master” logarius might not actually be a recognized martyr in the church’s eyes the way that he is in alfred’s. in fact, alfred’s entire mission is to kill annalise so that logarius CAN be martyred. when he thinks he’s killed the queen he exclaims:
Well? Isn’t it wonderful? Now master can be canonized as a true martyr!
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in the deepest depths of the labyrinth6, old hunter turned tomb prospector ludwig discovers three things that change his, and all of yharnam’s, fate forever.
the first is a sword with an initially unremarkable appearance. when called upon by ludwig, the sword would shine with eldritch moonlight, rallying his own spirits and those of his cadre of hunters who were drawn to his heroics (the sword would remain an iconic symbol of the church hunters). the second was found in conjunction with the sword; a rune meaning “guidance” that glows with the same strange pale moonlight as the sword.
and third, in the seemingly eternal darkness of his closed eyes, suddenly ludwig could see tiny flecks of light dancing in his mind’s eye. or perhaps, in his real eye, as the dlc he appears in establishes is quite possible (albeit with different result when a kos parasite is used). it is worth considering that ludwig’s mysterious and otherworldly “threads of light” that shook him to his core were something literal and physical, not figments of his imagination. something true, and real, and parasitic . a gift from the same pale moon that blesses his hunt
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with gerhman hosting the hunter’s dream, guidance toward their ultimate goal from adeline, and ludwig going hog wild with his sword, the church became a force to be reckoned with. they were now healing themselves with blood that operates the same way that angel dust does, reviving themselves by way of the hunter’s dream, and began to ruthlessly enact a stranglehold on the city. it also began to confusingly split up into a million different subgroups which all began working in opposition to each other. we will, unfortunately, eventually need to discuss these groups and try to figure out what the fuck they were doing. mission: impossible.
as for gehrman, his story stagnates here until you, the hunter, arrive and drop kick him into the next millennium for being a shitty old bitch. trapped inside the dream, he did nothing but wait, and wait, and wait, and wait for help from his compatriots that would never come.
sucks to suck, loser. his only companion was his weird maria doll, which was given the gift of life in the contract he made with the unnamed moon presence. however, it lacked maria’s personality and spirit; instead the doll is obedient, subservient, and above all, an object to be used.
curiously, the doll is the only being in the game that bleeds white blood.
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AND SO “the hunt” began as a yharnam tradition. it should be known that yharnamites are considered to be completely batshit insane people by the outside world so all of the deranged and anti-social behaviors of the church will be more believable if you understand that everyone around them is like “what the hell is wrong with those people”. if you try to whip the little sickly fella gilbert through his window he calls you a “yharno” as a slur lol.
without gehrman, his workshop was simply abandoned by hunters in favor of the remaining healing church workshop. this one produced a plethora of trick weapons with some unusual properties picked up by the executioners. silver, as it turns out, repels bad blood. this discovery may have been spurred by the unfortunate events that came to pass. but first…
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1. fuck wait i forgot: there’s a generic enemy called “executioners” but its a case of really bad translation lol. they are supposed to be “dismantling men”. this is why you find them in places where there’s bodies to be hacked apart (hemwick, forbidden woods, yahar’gul) and why they’re dressed in the same cape as the butcher set. do not be distracted by this guy! he’s irrelevant and fits in fine with the story with that explanation!
2. despite the fact that you basically never see anyone’s face clearly in the game, NPCs all have unique face data. you can scrub through this video and see a wild variety, including a few that are supposed to impart that the character is in the process of transforming into a beast. not too far of a stretch to assume this is supposed to be read as a pthumerian.
3. presumably the “king in blue” whose color would match/complement annalise’s blue dress
4. she effortlessly makes us a member of the vilebloods because all you have to do is drink her blood; the mask has nothing to do with it
5. you can sometimes elicit different responses from NPCs if you are wearing church clothing
6. my guess is near isz, given this cut scourge beast intended for that chalice dungeon that shares a color scheme with the following items- and literally nothing else in the game
old kharkanas says:
Enjoying this series quite a lot, looking forward to how the knot of the rat at byrgenwyrth will be unraveled.