alright, this section contains the most “outside” information i am willing to drag into a plot analysis of a video game about werewolves that has its own internal scientific/magical logic. i am always hesitant to draw conclusions based on real world fiction and facts for this fantasy horror video game for a few reasons, but primarily its because the human brain has an incredible imaginative ability to see patterns where there are none. chasing this instinct with wanton abandon will quickly cause you to lose sight of whatever point you were making in the first place until you’re just writing paragraphs about how this thing is kinda like this other thing. so what? why would that outside information matter in this context?

that’s the line i’m trying to walk here: the real world qualities of chemical elements might have some subtle impact on the world of yharnam that is not explicitly spelled out for the player in item descriptions. this is because your character would not know this either.

i’m sure you can intuit by now that things were starting to get pretty fucked up as several calamities started hurtling toward each other. the healing church had no interest in the hunts as acts of bloodshed, sport, or as a catalyst for transformation like those other freaks. the gloves used by the healing church doctors explains that the church only “engages in the hunt in a medical capacity”‘; when the church got involved in the hunt it was for hygienic purposes, not for funsies. beasthood was a truly dreadful fate, and the clerics who were under ludwig’s’ command were, unbeknownst to them, at risk of the most gruesome transformations of all.

but until then, swag life

with the hunts becoming more and more regular in occurrence, superstitions and rumors were running rampant about the beast scourge.

Old Hunter gauntlets made of brass to protect their weapon-bearing hands.

At the time, some hunters believed that certain metals would guard off beast blood.

On a night of the hunt, it is no wonder that some resort to superstition.

old hunter trousers:

A widespread belief of the period was that “beast blood crept up the right leg”, and this led to the double-wrapped belt.

(that’s the leg you inject your blood vials into)

old hunter arm bands:

Old hunter arm bands wound tightly to prevent infection with the scourge.

Of course, the idea that the scourge was infectious was pure hearsay.

oops. i guess they don’t know what germs are yet. but they’re on the right track in a weird way; some metals ARE antimicrobial, including copper and it’s alloy cousin brass. copper and its alloys are typically conflated with with yharnamites and hunters (see above). other antimicrobials, such as silver and gold, (like the ardeo, the thread in the surgical long gloves, or the cainhurst armor) were employed by the healing church and cainhurst to “repel” beast blood. silver was also used in the church’s righteous damage weapons1 like ludwig’s holy blade (a mundane mass market replica of the holy moonlight sword for church hunters) and the kirkhammer.

another antimicrobial is mercury, or as its known colloquially, quicksilver. if you’re of a certain age, you were instructed by one or more adults at some point not to break open a thermometer and play with the badass silver liquid inside because it makes you die horribly. unlike the aforementioned elements, iron (found in armors associated with the school of mensis) doesn’t melt when in contact with mercury(external link). look, its all very simple. like pokemon. mercury defeats silver and silver defeats dog and dog defeats guy wearing a big stupid iron hat and mr. hell-in-a-cell defeats mercury.

don’t take this too seriously. the information that actually matters is that they accidentally stumbled upon ways to protect themselves from a contagious disease and formed weapons and armors that worked for reasons they didn’t understand. in time, they would come to use another very reliable means of sterilization as a proactive means of disease control: fire.

a popular theory in bloodborne lore discussions argues that grey kin blood is composed of mercury. i was quick to dismiss this at first, but it seems like it has a lot of legs. there are select enemies that drop quicksilver bullets, which are made from only two ingredients: your blood and mercury. its not surprising that enemies with firearms such as the huntsmen would drop them, but things start to get weird when the drops start to come from the ghastly pale church servants (seen below in the doctor uniforms). maybe some of them just have a few in their pockets for safekeeping? some of them use guns after all. in fact, many of the enemies on the list have quicksilver bullets due to how the game code handles projectiles.

but the drop rates on kin enemies is noticeably higher, and no kin wield guns. the slime scholars, the garden of eyes, brainsuckers, and celestial emissaries drop quicksilver bullets. isz gravestone is absolutely drowning in the damn things. the kos worshiping snail people, the nightmare apostles (those are the giant spiders; the ones with human heads drop twice as many bullets), winter lanterns, and the merciless watchers of the pthumerian labyrinths, while not kin, clearly share more visual overlap with kin than their other pthumerian brethren. like, the merciless watchers are inexplicably robin’s egg blue instead of white. i would agree with the general consensus that there seems to be a direct connection between one’s degree of kinship and the amount of quicksilver in their blood.

there are a few other oddball enemies. first, the labyrinth madmen (the super scary guys who scream at you) drop a shit ton of bullets, they are also…beasts. they take beast type damage unlike other pthumerians. this might seems strange until you look closely; the labyrinth madman have clawed toes, fangs, and clawed hands but few other easily visible markers of beasthood. there are VERY few beasts in the pthumeru labyrinth and of the few that remain, they feel almost cultivated for a purpose.

so here’s the theory: given the healing church’s history of using live subjects for experiments and celebrating the gruesome demise with sainthood, these “saints” from the sage’s hair and wrist item descriptions read like failed attempts to prevent the outbreak by using quicksilver injections. evidently, the beast plague was unable to take full hold in pthumeru due to the presence of mercury in the blood of the pthumerians. but those who WERE infected were only barely transformed. the church sought to work off of this information but were apparently willing to ignore a critical symptom of mercury poisoning: you get twitchy and weird. like a (labyrinth) “madman”. “mad as a hatter” as they say. man, there should be more evil hat guys in this game. huge missed opportunity.

the other weirdos are the two variants of the clockwork patients: the ones with the infected arms (due to being injected over and over with something…hm!) and the crawling ones, who have the dubious honor of having successfully grown eyes on the inside, as demonstrated in the art book. other patients don’t! just a smidgen of kin in these guys.

in conclusion: i don’t know. i forgot if this had a point. but you read it anyway, sucker!

oh wait, hold on. i remember now lol. the hunter has a mechanic where they’ll draw their own blood in order to generate 5 “blood bullets” if you’re in a bullet emergency. the only difference between a quicksilver bullet and a blood bullet is the name and where you get it. what the fuck did that old man put in us at the beginning?? is mercury the “tinge” of “bloodtinge”?

the appearance of ashen blood wasn’t really helping things either. old yharnam (which is right next to where the school of mensis conducts its research in yahar’gul, where they would have been experimenting in and around loran, home of exotic diseases) was getting it the worst. in response, healing church doctors were split into two categories and sent into the communities with specific instructions. black healing church doctors were used as…preventative measures, and were the most prolific. ignore the pthumerian look of these guys for now, we’ll get there.

Attire of Healing Church hunters. The Holy Shawl2, symbol of the Healing Church, flutters proudly on their backs.

Most Healing Church hunters are elementary doctors who understand the importance of early prevention of the scourge. Achieved by disposing of victims, and even potential victims, before signs of sickness manifest themselves.

Their black attire is synonymous with fear, and that peculiar Yharnam madness.

we gotta read between the lines on these and do some lateral thinking. in the same little back alley where we find the black church clothing set, we find a bunch of poison knives which are “often used for self-defense by special doctors in the Healing Church”. this class of doctor know that the best cure for a sickness is to prevent it from happening in the first place. one way to achieve that is by killing people both suffering from the scourge and those uh, made too much noise about the outbreak.

given how you find quite a few black church doctor garbed corpses all over yharnam (and i do mean, “all over”), i think its safe to assume that these guys were not popular among the masses and were met with resistance from the well armed and riled up townsfolk.

the next tier were the white church doctors, described as “specialists in experimentally-backed blood ministration and the scourge of the beast”. remember: these are the same people who came from byrgenwerth, a school that was putting slugs in its head to obtain “more eyes” to become smarter (??). in fact, the white church set can be found between the grand cathedral and byrgenwerth in the now forbidden woods. the woods became host to a small, incredibly shitty village where the eccentric locals would conduct “forbidden research” (in the forbidden woods…double forbidden), a phrase that would get you placed on a watch list in the real world. the vibes of this place are fucked, we’ll talk about it more when we get to it during the course of the hunter’s journey. just keep in mind that these doctors were doing beast-based experiments with an unusual mindset:

They believe that medicine is not a means of treatment but rather a method for research, and that some knowledge can only be obtained by exposing oneself to sickness.

that sounds kind of bad actually. i don’t think you’re supposed to do that.

there was also a secret agent class of the church stalking the streets of yharnam, disguised as beggars. the first stages of the disease would cause the pupil to collapse, revealing one’s state of “blood-drunkenness” to the world. not only did they make them targets to the church, but blood-drunk hunters had a tendency to…disappear mysteriously. to obfuscate this from nosy church doctors and as part of their continued superstitious practices, yharnamite hunters began to wear bandages covering their eyes to the point where it became a societal norm. check out the statues around central yharnam and the cathedral ward: most of the statues are depictions of people with their eyes covered by hoods or bandages. and so, in turn, these secret church hunters would don these coverings and go do evil assassin shit.

These hunters are keen to early signs of the scourge, serving as a first line of defense against its outbreak. Or perhaps, when the time is ripe, they find signs of the scourge where there are none

as long as you have even just a few eyes on the inside you can still see just fine with your eyes covered, or at least your hunter doesn’t struggle with it. cloth bandages are nothing; master willem and the choir students have no problem seeing with their eyes covered with solid gold.

so here’s the rundown:

HUNTER DREAM: exists

HEALING CHURCH: in trouble

YHARNAM: weird

OLD YHARNAM: sickly

WOODS: forbidden

BYRGENWERTH: unknown, presumed fucked

CAINHURST: ransacked

HEMWICK LANE: not important right now

LORAN: ailing

ISZ: dead

PTHUMERU: nearly explored

THE CHOIR: sluggish

MENSIS: mental

EBRIETAS: lonely

things became so shitty so fast. and it’s not like they weren’t trying to fix things. they were just incredibly unethically sound while doing so. whats a little human experimentation between friends. the good news is that when you hit rock bottom there’s nowhere for you to go but up.

1. see: the section on logarius

2. the shawl’s importance is that it will appear in all attire related to the church. weirdly, there’s one outfit we can’t get that i don’t even think was programmed or made at all: ludwig’s hunter outfit. its a cross between the executioner garb and tomb prospector garb. he and the giant squid hunters in the hunter’s nightmare wear them. it’s grey.

the rinky-dink town of yharnam expanded upward until it was the brick and cobblestone CITY of yharnam, home of blood ministration. the hamlet where the comparatively humble church of the good chalice had been established became “old yharnam”. you couldn’t go two feet without bumping into a hunter, and when you did there was an even chance that they were some out-of-towner looking to have a little fun with the light, occasional hunts. the royalty was allegedly dead, the healing church stepped in to fill the void and simply tortured or experimented on dissidents. people were too drunk on blood to give too much of a fuck. a strange time for yharnam to be sure. i don’t think things were going well at this point, but the wheels hadn’t totally come off.

the former members of the school who formed the healing church split into two factions: the choir and the school of mensis. this initial split appeared to have been for practicality rather than an ideological split: if the school of mensis was the research department at byrgenwerth, then the choir was development. school of mensis students you encounter carry choir weapons, so its likely that mensis was an offshoot of the choir (which itself was a direct descendant of the research hall, which was based on byrgenwerth discoveries). the choir could be found high above the grand cathedral and was home to a collective of scientists focused on the study of flora, phantasms, and the pursuit of eyes on the inside. it’s unclear when mensis began its own off-the-books research, but it was after the choir had made a few fascinating discoveries.

in order to keep these next parts straight i have prepared a handy chart for you to consult when you are confused:

Members of the Choir are both the highest-ranking clerics of the Healing Church, and scholars who continue the work that began at Byrgenwerth.

slugs and snails (phantasms) had turned out to be a fruitful avenue of research for the crew still researching eyes before the choir’s official establishment. one slug in particular (remember? from part 2?) retrieved from the early byrgenwerth explorations fueled a hunt for more specimens (or their remains) with similar capabilities to channel this new mysterious arcane power. church hunters were adding kos parasites to their eyes1 to draw forth meteors from what looked like a vast, dark sky. the slug tentacles and the meteors had to be coming from somewhere…but where? we;;, they all originated from the labyrinth, so that is where they continued to look.

the scholars that would go on to found “the choir” discovered, through means unknown2, the great isz chalice. to be clear, it’s the chalice that’s great3, not isz. isz is a dump. it’s full name is “isz gravestone” and every room looks like slimer sneezed on it. the alien, organic, decomposing appearance of the isz chalice4 is like no other chalice in the game and i personally would be hesitant to drink out of the rotting green cup of unknown origin. but the choir was probably thrilled to be exploring anything other than the hintertomb or pthumeru. i mean, it’s still basically pthumeru with a new coat of paint, but what a paint it is!

It was also the first Great Chalice brought back to the surface since the time of Byrgenwerth

the unsealing of isz was cause for celebration; what a discovery! we don’t know who or what isz is, but we do know according to the eggheads at the healing church that this dungeon is “in contact” with forces beyond their ken. so as a result there’s some weird shit in here. but, as the name implies, it seems most of it is dead and decaying. the place is riddled with tomb mold and every once in a while a little puff of uh…space dust goes by. many of the lifeforms had been touched by the eldritch wisdom of what was being dubbed “the cosmos” and had, as a result of this “contact” become “kin”.

isz wasn’t completely beast free, but the handful of beasts was nothing compared to the plethora of rubbery freaks awaiting them. because the bestiary of isz is so novel, i will give you a truncated rundown of these nasty things. some information now, more later.

there are still pthumerians watching over the old tombs, but in this location it’s hard not to notice that they take bonus arcane damage. the choir was responsible for inventing rosmarinus5, a pest control solution that sings. its costly, but it works. can’t complain.

brainsuckers (name self-explanatory) are kos parasites6 living inside the stitched up skulls of…people? pthumerians? i would argue pthumerians due to the fact that these enemies replace the generic pthumerian enemies here in isz. they’re piloting their host around semi-aimlessly looking for brains to suck. some design details to note: they have an oversized left arm7, they are wearing what i’m pretty sure are just generic pthumerian torn-up shitty robes. they bleed grey kin blood. they can do two obnoxious (blue, cosmos) arcane spells that can stunlock you into a never-ending hell of being paralyzed from across the room and having your insight eaten in the longest and most frustrating animation of your life. no one likes these guys.

Image

 

this stupid thing is the first boss of isz. being as its a regular, early, base game enemy by the time YOU find it, it should be no problem. to the tomb prospectors it was probably a horrifying experience to realize that their precious knowledge and favor from the gods could be taken away from them permanently.

scourge beasts, a common beast variant in yharnam rarely seen in isz. they are the only beasts present in this section of the labyrinth and are only remarkable because they have an unused skin for this area called “moon”8 in the game files. it glows an otherworldly, familiar sea green.

i’m trying not to think too hard about the celestial emissaries right now because they also have a major appearance in the base game, so i’m really just going to give you the barest highlights. they also bleed grey. their anatomy is bizarre. six fingers on the right hand, seven on the left. bulbous, glowing heads that wobble and slosh with…something. some have wriggling tentacles coming out of their heads; those with head tentacles can fire blue arcane projectiles similar to those observed in the more successful iterations of the healing church research hall experiments (some clocktower patients and the living failures have these moves in their arsenal). they tend to move in packs of three or more. very rarely, there is a big one, approximately the same size as the “living failures”.

i’m fairly certain the choir was not yet established when the research hall was in full swing, so finding working versions of their uh, prototypes probably made people flip their lid. THESE were what adeline was speaking of when she envisioned the milkweed rune. celestial attendants were intended to act as seedbeds and gardeners of the phantasms, which could be used as powerful weapons and to channel the cosmos or whatever. isz was shaking up the foundational knowledge regarding great ones; did they not come from the sea?

The Choir stumbled upon an epiphany, very suddenly and quite by accident. Here we stand, feet planted in the earth, but might the cosmos be very near us, only just above our heads?

this might seem like a too obvious observation to us worldly non-yharnamites, especially for the time period this take place in; people have known what space is since we could look up at the sky. however, have you noticed? where are the stars in yharnam’s night sky?

last, but certainly not least: the celestial child!

now, i know what you’re thinking: “what the fuck am i looking at?” well, i’m here to tell you this: don’t worry about it. even without context you can tell they’re weird little baby creatures. they inch toward you until you’re within range of their little nibble attack that makes your frenzy meter skyrocket. the four sucker bits are their eyes, apparently (its what glows when they pick up your blood echoes). and they have a mouth that opens like a tent flap filled with tiny, sharp teeth. i think they are kind of cute. like weird puppies.

hey, whose baby is this. who is responsible for these infants. i-oh.

probably. there’s more evidence we can cover later. this is the second named boss in the game that’s also in the dungeons for no reason. again, let’s take her re-appearance as a means to explain her origins to the player: she (or knowledge of how to make her) came from the chalice dungeons.

this is ebrietas, daughter of the cosmos, a name likely bestowed upon her by the choir. she is the source of the flailing tentacles that the augur of ebrietas summons. she has nothing aesthetically in common with the real world butterfly that shares her name, but it instead is a beautiful combination of several established concepts within the world of bloodborne: metamorphosis, imbibing (blood), latin existing for some reason, milkweed, and the theory of rom-as-a-cocoon. she bears a strange combination of traits we’ve seen and some that are still to come. her body, hands and fragile wings evoke the celestial child’s sluggish design. ebrietas is pale white and her profile (more prominently in the art book9) is arguably skull shaped, hinting at her more humble origins. her body bleeds grey. her head spits  red blood that induces frenzy status. she too can summon a version of the arcane blasts common to kin, but hers is…something else!

ebrietas is described by the choir as “the left behind great one” or “abandoned” due to her solitary existence in the dungeons, but from my point of view this is inaccurate. she wasn’t abandoned, everyone died. hence “isz gravestone”. plus, she’s not a great one. she takes kin damage and, as we find out later on, authentic great ones bleed don’t bleed grey. she is an impressive impersonation of a great one but if “every great one loses its child”, then how could ebrietas exist as a “daughter”?

i have two theories for you to choose from:

one: ebrietas’ fellow great ones perished, but due to her (potential) pthumerian origins and old blood usage prior to her metamorphosis, she gained immortality like her fellow labyrinth watchers. her eagerness to work with humanity (and her later observed behavior) hints at a loneliness that otherwise might be difficult for a noodle monster to express.

two: the other great ones literally went back to their home planet like poochy but ebrietas, being a pseudo-great one, couldn’t join them. she was literally left behind to the same fate as above because she still fell short of ability to reach the “outer reaches of the cosmos”.

either way, the choir joyfully took ebrietas back to the healing church and kept her in a secret basement in an elevator only accessible via the orphanage in the upper cathedral ward (which would come to be the hub of the choir). the parasites harvested from ebrietas would turn out to be a spectacularly powerful signature weapon of the choir. a call beyond, which is a nudibranch-esque creature you punch over your head to activate, causes an explosion of blue arcane star power that will fucking atomize you if you’re in its path. this did not take them to the cosmos or help them communicate with it, as they were hoping. but it did kill everything in a 10 mile radius if personal experience is anything to go by.

struggling with “a call beyond” in ng+? there’s a subtle hint in ~*the lore*~ that could help you…or it could have, if they had translated “ceremony” to “rite” instead for the internal consistency. -_-

a call beyond description:

One of the secret rites of the Choir. […] The rite failed to achieve its intended purpose

the loch shield description:

Originally used to safeguard the leader presiding over a sacred Healing Church ceremony, and later supplied to tomb prospectors, in particular those exploring the Labyrinth of Isz.

there’s something in great isz that gets overlooked that i think would go on to be quite significant to future events. there’s a single, strange trap in the base game chalice dungeon that appears nowhere else in the entire game. nowhere. it’s a circle of lit candles that spawns messengers to grab you and teleport you if you step in it.

 

cool trick. but it seems like no one used it for anything. seems. keep it in your hat for now.

until now, the tomb prospecting experience had been based entirely around the eradication of a specific type of monster: basically werewolves. now, the healing church and byrgenwerth faced a new foe: basically 1950s rubber suit aliens. this presented new challenges…and new opportunities…and new disappointments.

Together with the left behind Great One, they look to the skies, in search of astral signs, that may lead them to the rediscovery of true greatness.

ebrietas doesn’t know what the fuck is going on either. not a good sign.

before we move on, i have some final notes about isz that didn’t really fit anywhere else that are worth mentioning.

  • compared to other chalice dungeons, there are hardly any blood vials here.
  • instead, it seems that there is a surplus of quicksilver bullets.
  • you can find two of the rare-ish item great one’s wisdom here. it depicts a skull erupting with ghostly slugs.
  • blue elixir can be found here
  • an unnamed tomb prospector wielding rosmarinus is wandering around. a choir boy!

1. when a hunter uses it in combat, their eye pops out comedically like they just saw a hot babe

2. the art book and location of ebrietas strongly suggests that isz is beneath the grand cathedral of the healing church.

3. there’s another great chalice in the game that takes you to the final layer of pthumeru, the capital city. don’t worry about it right now.

4. after much scraping and scrounging and desperately trying to find ANY context at all for the completely unique appearance of the isz chalice, an enterprising redditor watching a show about holy grail conspiracy theories found the inspiration: the so-called “magdalene chalice”. its a hoax chalice ofc. anyway i’m satisfied with the answer of “it resembles a real life catholic adjacent thing”

5. people get a little too into interpreting the name on this one when im pretty sure the connection is that rosmarinus, or rosemary, is a plant. the choir is plant themed.

6.reddit post pointing out this connection

7. “one big arm” is a common fromsoft enemy design, but its not clear if the implementation of it in bloodborne has any consistency or not. sometimes its the left, sometimes its the right. it doesn’t seem to matter beast or kin. some armors have extra metal protection on one arm or the other. some have lore reasons to have big arm, some don’t. the brainsucker’s big arm is a mystery to me. the only difference is a tattoo that only appears in the artbook on the right arm (that looks like ebrietas) that didn’t make it into the final design.

8. this page has a link to the datamined beast

9. picture here

unlike the lofty choir boys, the school of mensis took its base of operations below the grand cathedral; first in byrgenwerth, then in a peculiar, out-of-the way village called “yahar’gul”. if the school of mensis was an “upper echelon of the healing church“, then the relationship between the church and byrgenwerth must not have disintegrated immediately after laurence’s departure. after all, the mensis students you summon and their professor wear the byrgenwerth student set.

you may also be wondering about their stupid hats. the mensis cage is a dumb device for idiots.

The cage is a device that restrains the will of the self, allowing one to see the profane world for what it is.

It also serves as an antenna that facilitates contact with the Great Ones of the dream.

what’s annoying is that it probably works. more on that later.

i don’t know how, but the school of mensis found another entrance to a labyrinth that lead them to the decrepit and ancient city of loranthe hunter accesses loran via a chalice; its possible mensis used the same method after finding the chalice…somewhere. idk you get it from a boss drop. they could have just dug a big hole for all i know. though overlapping in aesthetics with pthumeru (i have no reason to believe that anything other than pthumerians made civilizations down there), the differences between the two locations was startling. pthumeru is relatively intact and well-maintained, albeit a bit spiderwebby. loran is being smothered in desert sands and harsh winds. the air is so dry that static electricity crackles nonstop.

 

they found magnificent phantasms and life-giving blood in pthumeru and isz. in loran they found…more beasts. no sign of any great ones; only “trace remains of medical procedures” but, much to everyone’s collective unease, it wasn’t clear if what they were looking at were “attempts to control the scourge of the beast, or the cause of the outbreak”. it didn’t take a genius to put it all together: what’s happening to yharnam has already transpired and desiccated this lost city. the beast plague was not a novel problem and others had already tried, and failed, to eradicate it. the aforementioned “trace remains” refers to the unbelievable amount of blood vials just laying around loran for the taking. h-hey guys why is there so much of our healing blood in the underground wolf city we just dug up. is that good.

i think it makes sense to view loran and isz as the divergent paths that yharnam could devolve into. isz was addled by the cosmos, but the truth of the great ones is that they too are mere mortals like us. loran, conversely, embraced beasthood and everlasting life via the old blood. but in a pthumerian society, choosing beasthood meant rejecting their roles as servants and surrogates for the gods…but life in loran seemed hostile for great ones and their kin*. the blue sparks in the air are identical to those summoned when using bolt damage items, and the appeal of bolt damage is that it does bonus damage to kin enemies. so if the air is hostile to the great ones and their little seedbeds, they’re bound to be super pissed off.

Curses are caused by inciting the anger of the Great Ones,
and used to hex others. Special materials are required to
complete the ritual.

To try one’s hand at curses, first seek the Bastard of Loran.

bastards of loran (yucky dead kid usable item warning) are mummified remains of infant loran silverbeastsformed in the womb of women infected with the beast scourge. silverbeasts are pthumerians transformed into beasts, probably. this is based on the color and their admittedly unimpressive fire magic, but it is fire magic nonetheless. a curious note is that bastards of loran can only be farmed from silverbeasts in the chalice dungeons. other locations won’t drop them. another thing to note is that bastards usually have fathers. so who was it?

this is the “great one beast” restored by the incredible foxy hooligan.2 “restored” is putting it lightly. there was a low res model found with some animations and now somehow it works in game as a thing you can fight with a hacked ps4. insane shit. amazing. very sad they cut this. he looks like a total bastard to fight. i would have loved it. there’s a mechanic where you can burn off his fur and make him nakey lol.

anyway, its name in the files is “silverbeast”. loran (loran only) silverbeasts are named “disciple_of_silverbeast”. there WAS a connection here! a great one that is also a beast feels like a difficult plot contradiction to reconcile but i assume its a “great one” exactly like how ebrietas is a “great one”; in name only. alas…we can only speculate.

the little bastards were used by later church tomb prospectors to open a cursed and defiled wing of pthumeru looted from the lower pthumeru dungeon. that’s for another time. another horrible, horrible time.

ailing loran (so it is known) is an odd little place for both hunter and scholar. inventive hunters were drawn to the taboo novelty of the dungeon, eager to get their hands and eyes on the unique and long-lived beasts within. despite the inherent horror of staring at your terrible fate right in its face, these fellas saw the silver lining in this dreadful affair: cool loot!!!! mensis attracted a wide range of absolute maniacs who were eager to experiment with whatever they could get their hands on, including two men who are only mentioned in item descriptions: irreverent izzy and archibald. archie doesn’t get a bad-ass nickname. sucks to be him.

both were captivated by different aspects of the undead darkbeasts they stumbled upon and invented some pretty cool shit. izzy created weapons from their bones3 to take advantage of their (and man’s…) unending hunger for blood. archibald, on the other hand, invented a plethora of weapons and items inspired by the ethereal blue sparks emitted by the creatures. the tontritus in particular is one of the most useful weapons in the game; it kills the absolute shit out of kin type enemies. killing the things that the church was trying to create/emulate/befriend is probably why hunters of archibald’s time didn’t really appreciate his contributions and he had to make his spark hunter badge in secret.

right outside the walls of yahar’gul, archibald kept a specimen, or a pet. darkbeast paarl was one of many darkbeasts in loran, but the only one to be given a name and his own yard to run around in. in return for this kindness, he ate archibald and burps up his pendant after you beat him to death. some people weirdly think that paarl is archibald transformed into a beast despite the fact that their names are spelled/pronounced differently and the dark beast is freakishly old. he ate him! fact facts, kid!

izzy, on the other hand, disappeared after his inventions and love of beasts were declared heretical, leaving behind a hefty handful of admirers and fellow church heretics comprised of both those who embraced their beasthood and those who realized the innate humanity of the beasts. his thumbprint on the upcoming implosion of the church can not be overstated: izzy’s willingness to cross what was seen as a firm boundary between Them and Us was one of the first major blows against the dogma (lol) of the church.

tomb prospectors cut their way through the labyrinth until they reached its bottom. following in the footsteps of the logic that the pthumeru tomb prospectors took the same path that the hunter does, they would have encountered another beast possessed soul, a poison spewing beast that ripped it own skin off in a desperate frenzy to feed on its own blood, two beasts with broken hitboxes that have some suspiciously human looking faces4, some powerful cleric beasts i’m sure won’t be a precursor of things to come, and the ancient, ungrateful darkbeasts. the fauna here is considerably less interesting than isz, which makes it much easier to write about lol. whew!

what the school of mensis didn’t know, (and to be fair how could they?) was that the beast plague of loran had been accelerated by the introduction of a poisonous malady called “ashen blood”. by opening the chalice seal on loran, they had introduced ashen blood to yharnam.

okay, it could have been the hintertomb too, since it’s overflowing with slow poison, but it’s more dramatic this way….trust me.

at some point, willem lost faith in laurence and presumed he had forgotten the adage of byrgenwerth: “fear the old blood”. while the healing church asserts that they were the ones who made the so-called forbidden woods forbidden, the door to the forest from the cathedral was guarded by one of willem’s two loyal, but insane, servants and only the students knew the password. alfred has the weirdest take on this situation, stating that byrgenwerth was “abandoned and decrepit” and that hes not sure how many students are still alive there. he does not elaborate on why they would not be alive, except that i presume no one has seen them since the gate closed. or maybe he’s stupid. either or.

these schools represent a central thesis in bloodborne’s many themes: should man aspire to raise himself up to be worthy to be a recipient of god’s grace? or should he succumb to his own basest instincts and be his own master? better to reign in hell or serve in heaven?

also flora versus fauna, for some reason. there’s a lot of weird dichotomies in this game. vampire versus werewolf. hunter versus the hunted. ocean vs sky. freaks versus geeks. moon versus mud. classic stuff.


* oops i forgot this one lol. there is, quite literally, ONLY kin coldblood to be found. they are all dead.

1. note the open rib cage, twisted neck, and deformed nose on the little bastard. if that isn’t enough for you, he has some wispy silver hairs.

2. the location is obviously not loran, but it is a cut chalice dungeon location being showcased in the same trailer.

3. left on layer 2

4. although…i don’t think they were here yet. i think the abhorrent beasts are tomb prospectors that embraced beasthood and took residence in loran. its the faces…and…a later character…

here is a recap of the state of affairs when it comes to the chalice dungeons: byrgenwerth scholars discovered the pthumerian underground labyrinth, wherein they discovered the holy medium ritual blood and the pthumerian labyrinth chalice (currently being worshiped in old yharnam). by combining these items at an altar surrounded by candles, a process called “communion”, (a play on both the catholic act of eating the body and blood of christ and the healing church’s attempts to communicate with great ones) they were able to enter deeper parts of the labyrinth via the same sort of teleportation used by hunters to get to and fro, by passing through the nightmare. that black garbage below is nightmare mist. there’s a few more times it shows up later where it continues to establish itself as the substance the nightmare is made out of.

by receiving communion ( from the labyrinth (not “taking”, specifically the language used across translations makes it clear that the act of communion is bestowed) hunters and prospectors for the church could explore more dungeons and could stock up on the rare materials for more communion which meant growing closer and closer to the great ones. the healing church doles out blood so that hunters can continue to explore the dungeons and open deeper seals in the labyrinth: “blood ministration is, of course, the pursuit of communion”. of course [leans over to you] what the fuck is he talking about

after being temporarily sidelined by beasts in central pthumeru, the church rallied and carved through the remaining layers. more chalices and labyrinths were discovered including the hintertomb, a peripheral dungeon of lesser, more informal graves. the hintertomb and the “entrance” (like the collapsed cave in cainhurst) in the forbidden woods near byrgenwerth was flooded with a toxic sludge by-product of decomposing great ones.1 that’s the most exciting thing about the hintertomb. awful place.

hunters with interest in the arcane passed through the lower pthumerian labyrinth and left one of their tools behind. 2 upon reaching the third (and usually final) layer of the dungeon, the tomb prospectors ran into one of the most inconvenient lore discoveries of all time: rom the vacuous spider. if we’re following my chalice dungeon progression theory, rom would be the first kin they encountered with a corpse that didn’t teleport back to space after it dies. don’t worry about what a kin is for now. the loosest explanation is that it’s a mid-step between human and great one. we will get deep in the (milk) weeds of this later.

we should talk about what little we know about rom here because i think it might be relevant to the current point in the timeline. i’m not going to pretend like i understand rom though. she3 is one of the least comprehensible aspects of the story by a wide margin.

 

 

we’ll start with a view of what you see when you run into this weird lump in the chalice dungeons rather than the base game. she’s the big weird lump covered in shit. the little white faces around her are her nasty little romlings (“children of rom” officially”) whose special power is doing 10000000000 damage per hit. the hunter shrugs off the huge meteors rom summons out of the sky to crush you but when a bug touches them they die instantly. same, i guess.

no one likes that rom exists in the chalice dungeons, me included. not only because she’s an absolute slog to fight (made worse by the fact that the fight takes place in a broom closet with pillars that block your swings) but like, why is she even here. she’s in the game later as a (equally annoying) non-optional boss battle that drops the game into its third act and ends up probably one of the most consequential encounters in the entire game. her narrative purpose makes it weird to think there might be more than one vacuous spider named rom.

my suggestions on how to rectify this perceived inconsistency is pure cope but if it works, it works:

technique one – rom and ebrietas are no different from the beasts and are merely different species of kin. a rom. an ebrietas. however…this is kind of a big perspective shift in general as to how great ones are perceived. the wording on various items that reference these specific great ones would be rendered too awkward and the item description wording is usually deliberately precise to the point of being almost comedically literal. but rom and ebrietas ARE kin and not REALLY great ones, so its not nuts to suggest there might be more than one that was “made”.

technique two – there’s nothing that indicates that the chalice dungeons are a nightmare/dream/time travel or that the great ones have a separate “consciousness” that exists only in the tombs (wtf lol). but perhaps the purpose of the repeat fights is a more direct and unsubtle part of the process of retracing the historical journey taken by the first tomb prospectors. as a result of time constraints/choices, they shifted focus away from boss fight challenges4 and more original bosses to instead try to establish where base game monsters originate. rom came from pthumeru. this is the information the game is trying to deliver and here is how its going to do it. inelegant, but we’ve had worse reasons for fights in fromsoft games.

i greatly dislike the explanations people come up with for the chalice dungeons involving “consciousness” or “different planes of reality” or whatever. its more intellectually honest just to say that that they were subject to the treatment given to all games during the fromsoft dev cycle than it is to just invent a new plot mechanic out of thin air. in the end, what we should be extrapolating from this stupid encounter is that rom, or knowledge of how to “make” rom if there’s more than one, came from the pthumerian labyrinth.

okay, let’s ACTUALLY talk about rom. we can get into the details and the nitty gritty here so we have way less to cover by the time we actually reach her in yharnam.

WARNING: WE WILL NOW DISCUSS A SPIDER-bug thing!!! THIS INCLUDES IMAGES!! there will be no irl images of spiders but still: READER BEWARE!!!!

ok now let’s get a close up.

hmmm. yuck.

most of rom doesn’t make a lot of sense to me and what little i can discern doesn’t really elucidate things any more. her tail (left) has a superficial resemblance to the fiddlehead fernsfound around yharnam. i do not know what the plants are growing out of her body and do not think it appears anywhere else in the game. the plant-y bits glow with an eerie white light. the rest of her is dead, cracked, grey, and shriveled. there are deep holes in her body on her flanks and her legs are tiny, ant-like. at a certain point her body becomes segmented, and those segments are peppered with dark eyes that continue to dapple her calcified, pale, helmet-esque head.

her eyes are dark (but pupils can be discerned!) and her mouth is perpetually gaping and open. her nose, while askew, can be discerned with careful observation.

she drops “kin coldblood” upon defeat, . her little romlings drop “madman’s knowledge“. they are truly less vacuous, i suppose.

here’s the canon on rom: she is NOT!!!!! a byrgenwerth scholar! this is an early theory that everyone ran with for years until very recently when it was pointed out that literally nothing says or implies this. if anything, given her location in the pthumerian dungeons and her facial features, more evidence points to her being of pthumerian origin.

rom is kin. officially. i’m putting my trust in the brave soldiers of the bloodborne-wiki who are willing to crunch the numbers7 that i really do not want to. however, rom has an unusual quality for a kin: most kin bleed a smokey grey color (pale? not pale enough…). rom bleeds grey from her head…but her body bleeds red! this is, curiously, a quality not unique to rom. but it’s very rare for a kin.

she is “vacuous” meaning stupid, not empty. this might seem like a weird distinction but in other languages she is something like “rom the idiot spider”. this matters i guess. why are they so mean to her…..consider this: rom’s eyes are on the outside. she probably does not have eyes on the inside. vacuous indeed…

you will find a corpse/statue later in the game that resembles rom. that corpse is NOT rom!!! it has a full set of much larger legs!! we can compare her to one of her romlings and see that she’s missing her legs and her sickle arms. i assume they took them to keep her from wandering too far.

the holes on her body are NOT where her legs used to be!!! the romlings have them as well and their big legs are attached to their underside!6 the holes were probably eyes harvested for byrgenwerth research. that would make rom and her kids have an appearance similar to brains lined with eyes…no?

maybe. there’s a common theory that rom and the romlings are cocoons (they could be both eye gardens AND cocoons!) to facilitate the transformation of others. there’s no proof to support it…but there’s NO proof to NOT support it. there’s plenty of references to the concept of metamorphosis, including two runes named after the concept. keep it in mind for the next page i guess.

rom has an (latent?) ability that is not expanded upon well at all during the game and the execution of which was so baffling it left people confused as to what even happened. she hides rituals(?) by obfuscating evidence of them occurring. two different notes in yharnam describe the byrgenwerth spider of “hiding all manner of rituals”. information so nice, you repeat it twice…how she does this is a complete fucking mystery. illusions are not well understood and are utilized in the stupidest ways possible. in the base game, there’s a ritual actively being hidden, explaining her presence. but underground there’s nothing going on. she’s just the final boss of lower pthumeru.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hold on, why is there another layer in this dungeon. don’t they stop at 3??

wh-

 

 

 

 

 

WAUGH

AAAH

the bloodletting beast is a grotesque abomination cut nearly in half from the efforts of the previous prospectors. your hunter will eventually succeed where others have apparently failed; his grotesque wound does not seem to bother him outside of forcing him into a hunched posture. bare patches of flesh hint at the origin of the beast (pretty pale arm on the right…! the fur is silver as well, but dark from being matted with blood). his eyes are not just closed, but he’s blind. you can hide from him in plain sight by standing still far enough away.
 
his name in the JPN release is “host of the beast blood”. behold! the origin of the beast blood! the bloodletting beast!
 
you would never be able to hear it unless you hacked the game…but the beast’s body periodically gurgles as though something within is writhing with purpose…alert and alive.
 
 
well, anyway. what’s going on ABOVE ground?


 

1. the slow-poison causing goo in the forbidden woods is odd and has a milky appearance, but i can’t tell if that’s just fromsoft water texture quality lol. the poison pool colors in other places are inconsistent: isz and the nightmare frontier are opaque navy blue, inside the hintertomb its just kind of mud colored, pthumeru has oil? who knows. thanks for reading this note about goo. oh, also the forbidden woods goo that’s the likely the entrance to the hintertomb contains arcane, “nourishing” and rapid poison inducing blood gems

2. it’s an awl for some reason. your guess is as good as mine as to how this one works. cow tools.

3. confirmed by miyazaki in an interview.

4. this incredible lance macdonald vid shows off the cut content for the chalice dungeon bosses, including a cut boss rush mode….don’t even get me started on how mad i am this didn’t make it in. they really want me to do ALL the chalice dungeons AGAIN to fight yharnam?! there’s some wild shit in here but focus on the amount of cut shit instead of the contents for now.

5. the ferns were at one point going to be of some importance. they can be seen in some environments, such as yahar’gul. means jack shit to me though. some enemies in the chalice dungeons have a hysterical animation where they eat grass and heal though. its VERY rare and VERY stupid looking. hold on i need to eat this honeysuckle to restore my whimsy

6. trying to get a clear picture was impossible so you’re going to have to “trust me bro” with this fucking blurry ass screencap

7. kinhunter blood gems have become the definitive standard on what is or isn’t kin. if it takes bonus damage, its kin.

these are things i’m not going to argue about, im not going to fold into my theories, or are just concepts that have been mistakenly passed around as fact. READERS BEWARE!!!!: i am a hater. if i trash something you believe its its only because you are an evil person who is bad. just kidding…..looks away mysteriously.

this section is much more informal than the history parts, which are heavily cited. sources: trust me bro


“it was all a dream. the nightmare, the waking world, none of it is real.”

this theory sucks so bad and you know it. not only is there nothing to back this up, its used as a cheap cop out to explain away perceived plot inconsistencies or any information that doesn’t make immediate sense. its trite, its boring, and super mario bros. 2 already did it best.

“the chalice dungeons are dreams/nightmares/overlap with one or the other and that’s why you fight repeat bosses in there”

i’m pretty sure this is a multilayered misunderstanding. its a case of bloodborne being a video game with realistic limitations and some lore misreads. the isz chalice says it overlaps with the cosmos. the implications of what crossing with the cosmos means is not clear other than what we see on screen and experience with our own god given eyes and hands; as far as i can tell it just makes things blue and moldy. combine this with the ambiguous notion of “slumbering Great Ones”.

ill say it again in the actual essays but heres how i view “slumber”: the reason the game calls the absence of  the great ones “slumber” is because of the whole dream theming of the game. but the reason why they “slumber” is individual to each instance. kos died from unknown causes, the great ones of isz just fucked off somewhere and left ebrietas home alone while they went to paris (but presumably died), the great ones of loran are dead or pushed out. so on and so forth. but they aren’t REALLY dead. they’ll re-awaken, some day. that’s what it means to slumber.

they’re fake dead. like you, the hunter. they’ll be back.

“_____ is based on/a reference to h.p. lovecraft/other real world fiction!”

probably not unless you’re talking about berserk, jojo, d&d, and magic the gathering. or paris, france. fromsoft wears its references on its sleeves. its not subtle. look at these cards from innistrahd lol bruhhh no way lol

you should also take a look at a “brotherhood of the wolf” (2001) and “bram stoker’s dracula” (1992). sometimes they just steal ideas entirely. i forgive them forever.

if anything it’s a wonderful positive that bloodborne steers away from the lovecraftian standards of cosmic horror. look, we all went through our horror dork phase where we got really into weird (as in the genre) fiction and thought cthulu was the coolest shit ever and then eventually found out about lovecraft’s cat’s name and discovered how metaphors work and who he was REALLY writing about. the man did indeed lay the foundation for far more interesting people to build off of. but the man himself doesn’t just suck because he’s a level 99 racist, he’s also unbelievably boring and rote. “omg could this be nyarlathotep?!” no!!!! lovecraft describes his monsters in either the vaguest terms possible or racistly!!! no exceptions!!! his descriptions apply to nearly any monster!!! and even if it was, so what!!! what would that even mean in the world of bloodborne?? why would that matter! what would that tell us about the setting, characters, or motivations!!!! all you did was use your pattern seeking monkey brain to compare two things superficially!!! AAAUGH!!!

bloodborne was obviously influenced by cosmic horror conventions that sprung up from lovecraft’s writing. but there is nothing in the game that is meaningfully comparative on a 1 to 1 basis.

“oedon is _____!”

his name is formless oedon and he exists only in voice, lacking a form. if you ever say this dumb shit to me again i will flip you around like a switch blade.

“bloodborne takes place in the demon souls/dark souls universe!”

i’m going to slap you. i don’t care about the umbasa! forget about the umbasa! let it go!

“rom is a byrgenwerth student!”

ok this one is fair because i didn’t even know this until i started writing this whole thing. but there’s absolutely nothing that suggests that rom was a human, let alone a student. hm!

“the blood you get from the women is menstrual blood!”

hey pervert, you pull it from adeline’s arm in the dlc. unless you have a serious misunderstanding of the MOST basic female anatomy the answer is “no its not what is wrong with you”. do you think arianna just pops a squat and what. pisses it out? into a vial specifically made for intravenous blood collection irl?? do you think all the girls in yharnam have their periods synced? someone should kick you. you know what, i’ll do it

“________ happened because (total conjecture)”

sometimes scary things happen because it would be scary if they happened and there was no rational explanation. its kind of important to keep this concept in mind lol

“viola’s body disappears after you kill mergo’s wet nurse!”

no it doesn’t.

“ebrietas is the source of the healing church’s blood!”

timeline doesn’t add up on this one. the old blood existed long before the choir found the isz chalice. im going to read this sentence to a normal person and demand they tell me what they think it means.

“the healing church poisoned old yharnam in order to trick people into using the old blood!”

why. like i understand why you would sicken a population for financial gain, but what was step 2 of the plan. why would they poison them with something the old blood couldn’t treat if the point was to show off the healing power of the old blood. this stupid theory makes no sense lol. its based entirely on someone coming to the conclusion that the water of old yharnam was poisoned purposefully based on literally nothing. why not just give out free samples like dealers do. some suburban dorks came up with this theory, they don’t know how a good scam works

“with 0 insight, micolash won’t be able to jump through the mirror!”

sadly, not true.

“the laurence in the hunter’s nightmare is a projection/his soul!”

why is laurence the only character who gets single out for the catholic hell treatment that shows up nowhere else in the canon. why would the mechanisms for him being pulled into the nightmare be different than everyone else. like i know he’s important in the canon but who did that to him lol. kos? how?

 

 

anyway, let’s get on with it

explaining the fromsoft game design ethos and the perils of taking shit too seriously

if you’re reading this hopefully you know the basics: in nearly every soulsborne fromsoft game you play a no-name nobody of no consequence who gets dropped into the world after watching a single cut-scene that only kind of make sense. by the time you arrive the world is dying, but you don’t know that (yet). the game mechanic of starting over from the last checkpoint is baked into the fiction with an in-universe explanation. you glean information about the world from the item descriptions, which will describe the purpose of the item within the fiction as well as its purpose to you, the player. the descriptions will drop references to people and concepts that mean nothing to you but must be commonplace knowledge in-universe. then you run around and do a bunch of things that don’t seem to have much if any connection to each other and watch some even more confusing cut-scenes. then it ends and you don’t know what happened until you think about it in hindsight and decide to start a new game plus (NG+). there is a guy with a big arm. these are the core elements of the fromsoft playbook.

the joy comes from slowly untangling information from more than just descriptions. there are environmental clues, audio references, hidden details in nearly every facet of the world they carve out. you can draw out a pretty good understanding of what exactly made everything so fucked up if you care (a.k.a. if you are insane). i swear to you there IS information to be gleaned!! its real and its out there!!

HOWEVER!!! YOU MUST ALSO BEWARE THE BASTARDLY TRICKS OF FROMSOFT!!!!

my first fromsoft experience was dark souls 1, not demon souls, so here’s the trick i was exposed to: during character creation you choose one “starting gift”. the descriptions are so vague as to be near useless, so if its your first time playing and you don’t want to look it up, you would have to intuit the importance of these items on your own. i think we all agree that most games would offer something of equal use or value for all gifts. dark souls does not do this.

the goddess’ blessing, black firebomb, and twin humanities (description: Tiny sprite called humanity. Sometimes found on carcasses. this means nothing to you) turn out to be very common consumables. the binoculars offered on the gift screen are the same as an in game pick-up near the hub area about 15 mins into the game. these are worthless, or at least options with a really limited lifespan. the tiny being ring at least gives you an actual semi-permanent health boost even if its is truly pathetically tiny. its also useless because it mostly just takes up one of your ring slots.

which leaves the old witch’s ring, the pendant, and the master key. the master key rips but its only really useful on new game plus or for experienced players who already know what doors it opens and what to do with those open doors. the ring (with a description that reads simply, “Gift from a witch. Ancient ring with no obvious effect“) allows you to talk to a character about 40 hours into the game and literally nothing else. you get nothing for it but dialog, and its not even especially revelatory.

which leaves the pendant, which fromsoft game director and foot quality inspector hidetaka miyazaki stated he would choose at the start of the game. it has the description:

A simple pendant with no effect.

Even so, pleasant memories are crucial to survival on arduous journeys.

it does nothing. sometimes it can be an item drop under certain circumstances but they aren’t remarkable and aren’t any less revelatory.

people have datamined the game to hell and back looking for what secrets the pendant might be influencing within the game code. people would tell the most outrageous, 1999-video-game-era lies about it unlocking a new ending or that you had to play until “the final BG+”, which is not a thing but it is a hilarious time waster. when miyazaki had to come out and say he was pranking everyone and we all got owned, then the community turned to trying to come up with tortured lore explanation of why the pendant was actually SECRETLY SIGNIFICANT. for a period of time it seemed unthinkable and impossible that the item’s purpose to simply to impart that fact things were once good in lordran and now they are bad. no!!! every single thing is the most important thing or else they wouldn’t have included it!!!! the pendant was velka’s and she used it to make solaire forget he was gwyn’s first born and priscilla’s father!!! the pendant is the dark soul!!! the pendant will solve the game and all the problems in my life!!! aaah!!


how do we know what information to value? how do we determine the line that differentiates realities of the medium (re-use of assets or use of stock images) from an intended message (re-using assets to establish a relationship between two spaces)? obviously without interrogating the entire dev team over every single byte of information in the game, we are never going to get an “official”, objective explanation. and we don’t need, want, or deserve one. the ambiguity is the charm point. the fun is in trying to peel the layers back and doing the archeology yourself. when investigating, its your own responsibility to not get so caught up in the weeds that you lose sight of what the point of your exploration is: what information is trying to be conveyed to me, and what does it mean?

we are all overthinking this, of course. there is no way that the dev team purposefully accounted for every plot extrapolation now treated as common knowledge in the community. whats been cobbled together is a tightly bundled collection of intent, happy accidents, and a willing suspension of disbelief on behalf of the player base to overlook contradictions or obvious last minute edits to the entire plot and game structure. bloodborne is not a complete story and any attempts at objectivity is an exercise in frustration. what i’m writing here is my best guess at an explanation using primary resources (item descriptions and information within the universe to draw conclusions), datamines, and community guides where more patient people than i have recorded the raw gameplay numbers. i will also try to concede places where what happens is obviously just a product of being a video game lol.

my overthinking is based on 2 things: the content of the game primarily and cut content second. cut content is examined in the context of how it may have influenced the game and what that means for the story that remains. as i edit this thing i will try to correct myself away from using cut content entirely as the basis of a theory, VERY special circumstances excluded. i am trying to keep my speculation limited to the most objective information. otherwise, i’m just writing fanfiction, right?

thank you very much for a-read my post,

mario bea

 
 
 
 

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:

Image

 

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

 

its not cum. grow up!
 

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…

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

laurence, one of the byrgenwerth students, is the aforementioned brother who aspired to be a doctor, which makes his blindly optimistic interest in a magical blood from a hole in the ground that cures all your ailments much more understandable. this passion drove him to leave byrgenwerth with some of his associates in order to form their own research hall/church/punitive colony. he did not, however, totally abandon the eyeball-based research of byrgenwerth.

but first, he needed support. after establishing the church of the good chalice in old yharnam to show off his cool new chalice and blood, the church became wildly successful. the wealth of the church was such that it built an entire new yharnam to replace that old shitty one. the grand cathedral would act as the headquarters of the church and all of its eventual subsidiaries. above and behind the grand cathedral, a research hall of extremely dubious morality was built.

it seems yharnam has a lackadaisical approach to human rights and torture: the subjects of the research hall are criminals or heretics who cry out that they’re “guilty, they know” and they “won’t do/say it again”. i dont think there’s any reversing what they do to them, based on what you harvest out of them:

Greyish amoeba-shaped brain fluid. Wobbles and bounces. Extracted from a patient whose head expanded until that was all that they were.

In the early days of the Healing Church, the Great Ones were linked to the ocean, and so the cerebral patients would imbibe water, and listen for the howl of the sea. Brain fluid writhed inside the head, the initial makings of internal eyes.

“imbibe water” is an incredible innuendo for “pour dirty, parasite-filled ocean water inside of their skulls” (likely using the techniques seen in the skulls of the fishing village from the previous post. just get a funnel and see what happens). makes me a bit queasy, honestly lol. also it was a huge bust, except in a handful of cases. the most significant discovery came from the aforementioned doctor’s sister.

Image

 

on the left is a research hall patient stock enemy. they have the emaciated, pallid bodies associated with those who experience The Eldritch Truth™ (they are, in fact, reskinned labyrinth pthumerians). some have grown into giants, some are only heads, some are friendly but insane, most are hostile.

on the right is laurence’s sister, blood saint adeline. a blood saint is a woman (apparently, as all of our samples come exclusively from women) whose blood has been specially treated and cultivated to be superior in healing. adeline and another blood saint found in the main game named adella both serve up blood with bonus healing (adeline’s effect is superior by far). arianna’s dirty vileblood increases stamina regen instead. here’s all the bloods side by side with the brightness blasted up so we can see. i included iosefka in here for good measure but she is not a blood saint. it doesnt seem like the blood from the vial is hers.

Image

 

blood saints are “vessels for blood“, which i take to be literal. i think they are the results of a full blood transfusion of old blood. i mean, you run into some of these guys with the transfusion bags still attached to them so its a fair assumption. whatever the process, there are enemy patients with rotten track-marked arms that spew slow poison at you (as opposed to rapid poison, a different mechanic) whose transformation was unsuccessful. poisons are found in story significant places and enemies; most relevant at this moment the weapon obtained at the end of the DLC, the kos parasite, that spews slow poison. lore note: black and white healing church doctor armor sets protect against poisons. poison might have been a big problem in day to day life in that shithole of a town yharnam.

anyway, look again at the two lumps up there. adeline’s head is paler than the enemy versions. the more frenzied an enemy is, the redder their head (…). check out the difference between the patients that attack you with their fists and the ones that run on all fours and growl.

Image

 

remember this simple rhyme:

if its eldritch and true:
its pale and blue
if the blood is red,
its a beast ahead.
 
-shakespeare

this will come up a lot more later.

all this shit lead to at least SOME kind of information. the experiments lead to results such as the notable failures of the experiment who survived a grotesque transformation of their body but their eyeless heads collapsed. there’s also the patients in the lumenflower garden who have arcane magic and cast spells of “slow down your ps4’s frame rate”. there’s some heads just oozing around without bodies. all in all, just created some weird freaks who were on the precipice of scraping something otherworldly, but fell just short.

 

except adeline.

after partaking in multiple helpings of “brain fluid” (…), adeline hears/see something and transcribes it; a rune that reveals a sliver of the eldritch truth and what it means to be a “celestial attendant”.

milkweed. something to be cultivated and consumed to facilitate transformation.

when milkweed is equipped with the kos parasite, the hunter takes on a bizarre transformation.

Image

 

okay, it’s a reference to matango, but it also turns your ass into space broccoli for parasites to eat. the hunter moves jerkily like the parasite is piloting them ratatouille style. we can assume the brainsuckers operate on similar principles; parasites have some agency in this world.

following the events of the fishing hamlet, lady maria abandoned the hunters and took up residence in the astral clock tower above the research hall. while beloved by the patients for her compassion, she was unable to ease their torture induced suffering and was driven to despair. when the hunter finds her trapped in the hunter’s nightmare, she is forever in her final horrible moments. her wrists are slit.

Image

 

lady maria’s suicide drove gerhman over the edge. his “curious mania” for her was such that he buried her in his workshop (the grave is where you find the old hunter bone, which allows you to do maria’s quickstep. its also. where the doll sometimes prays and where you enter the hunter’s nightmare). that’s kind of normal i guess, but he also made a porcelain doll of her, and dressed it in weird frilly doll clothes completely unlike her real duds. and like. combed its hair and groomed it and shit. hey i have an idea. let’s kill him.

in his manic, feverish, obsessive grief, gerhman’s sorrow was heard. perhaps, it was the numerous echoes in his blood that drew it to him. or, maybe, it was placing the umbilical cord on the memory altar that called out to it. or a combination of both.

something stirred. and it also understood the agony of loss

 

Every Great One loses its child, and then yearns for a surrogate.

The Third Umbilical Cord precipitated the encounter with the pale moon, which beckoned the hunters and conceived the Hunter’s Dream.

you, the hunter, find this umbilical cord (kos’ umbilical cord) in an abandoned workshop beneath the official healing church workshop. this is the site where a deal was made between a nameless unknown spirit and the healing church. the hunter’s dream is a perfect replica of this workshop in its heyday, except in the hunter’s dream something resembling maria lives in quiet submission to your desires. the exchange was surprisingly equitable: maintain my dream, love my doll, never die, and i will teach you to take the echoes from the blood of these beasts that plague you and turn them into power. all i ask, in return, is merely what every great one years for.

its a weird detail, but the english translation is the only one that says that laurence and co. “beckoned” the moon. the others actually say the opposite, calling it a “chance encounter”. this inconsistency is repeated in a note you find later. i’m pretty sure it was not a deliberate act. the note just calls it “laurence and his associate’s moon monster”. like they’re responsible for it, but they didn’t necessarily want it. it just happened and they rolled with it.

we’ll catch up on most of these guys again when the hunter (you) bumbles in.

 

 

the discovery of blood entailed the discovery of beasts, and the discovery of beasts necessitated hunters.

the original group of hunters, colloquially known as “the old hunters” to differentiate them from the common riff-raff, were shaped largely by the efforts the first hunter, a man named gehrman. it is unclear what gehrman’s role was prior to his work as a hunter, but he was likely a student, as he uses the title of “master” to address willem. we know he was a close associate of a student named laurence, that he had an apprentice named maria who was once a knight of the castle cainhurst, and was a practitioner of an art called “quickening“. his focus on agility and maximizing the amount of blood spilled laid the foundation for all hunters to come.

gehrman is the inventor of the “trick weapon”, the first of which was a simple magnetic lock and hinge that changes the burial blade from a one handed knife to a scythe. the magnetic force was inherent to the iron used in the creation of the blade; the burial blade and its sister weapon the blade of mercy were forged from siderite and take advantage of the magnetic force to “transform”. these, the oldest weapons of “the workshop” (gehrman’s workshop), served an additional purpose: these astral materials contain traces of the arcane. it seems that these two weapons are the only weapons that would be capable of severing a hunter’s connection to the great ones and, by extension, the boons that come with their attention.

not that those boons have been sought or discovered yet. the arcane world was only just becoming known to the students of byrgenwerth. as of now, the explicit purpose of the burial blade was to end the seemingly endless lives of the pthumerians and beasts for good. the blade of mercy appeared to have been created as a contingency plan in the event that gehrman fell to the undead curse of blood and was entrusted with a foreigner who could take a comrade’s life graciously…or at least thoroughly.

the old hunters are a bunch of freaks. only a handful are still alive in modern yharnam. otherwise, the player will only experience them by calling them as summons for boss battles. the in game lore for the mechanics of the summon system clarifies that these hunters that can be summoned have “long since passed from the dream” but will answer to the siren call of the hunt.

some old hunters the player will encounter as major characters or boss encounters. others appear to be nondescript nobodies…at first, anyway.


every chalice dungeon (save the last one) connected to the story has a secret, fully functional, but cut fourth layer that only became accessible once hex-editing was possible. several corpses on the fourth layer of the hintertomb, home to “cesspools of noxious snakes and insects”, can be looted for evidence of unusual creatures harboring arcane power. the mysteries presented by these invertebrates captured the attention of a separate faction within byrgenwerth, sparking the study and collection of “phantasms” present (or were once present) in the labyrinth. the discovery of the augur of ebrietas, a slug (snail? the empty phantasm shells could be reasonably assumed to have belonged to the augur) that summons flailing tentacles of unknown origin, and the arcane properties of pearl slugs drove the school’s continued plunges into the depths in spite of the danger posed. part of this research involved discovering the potential beneficial parasitic qualities of these creatures, which could inhabit soft tissue, like eyes and be used to harness bizarre powers.

while continuing to investigate the ruins, byrgenwerth became aware of a possibly pthumerian fishing village where a washed up carcass of an oyster/globster monster was teeming with otherworldly parasites and carried a stillborn fetus1. the so-called “kos parasites” resemble barnacles without their shell, and judging by the appearance of the villagers these barnacles have made themselves at home on what must have once been pthumerian hosts. its unclear if the fishing hamlet’s residents were transformed against their will or deliberately cultivated the look, but the result is a gaggle of fish-like monster people with physical appearances similar to the monster on the shore. whether of their own accord or because its the will of the creatures that have taken them over, the villagers actively cultivate millions of odd slugs for mostly unknown purposes; we do know that they are used as lamp oil on a day to day basis2.

upon arrival to the village, the school and its hunters helped themselves to a little bit of genocide just for fun. villager’s heads were cut off and “treppaned” open in the search for “eyes on the inside” by forcibly removing the barnacles from their skulls. the monstrous corpse was desecrated by the byrgenwerth researchers who took her child (as the villagers of the fishing hamlet chant) and the orphan’s “umbilical cord”, a string of flesh not unlike a human umbilical cord but lined with eyes. it is NOT a literal umbilical cord, the orphan still has that attached to his body, but a translation hiccup muddied the waters on the initial understanding of the nature of the “umbilical cords”.

the NA translation is “one third of umbilical cord” leading people to erroneously believe that its one umbilical cord split into three parts (made even more confusing by the existence of four umbilical cords in the game). the EUR release got it right: it should be “third umbilical cord”. the NA release calls it a “precursor to the umbilical cord” which makes no sense in or out of context. the re-translation project provided a much more comprehensible alternative: “Only infants have [third umbilical cords], even in Great Ones. Calling it an “umbilical cord” comes from that”. as in, they are not literal umbilical cords, but they are LIKE umbilical cords in that they are only found in infants. now you have an inkling of understanding why great ones keep losing their children; the children are host to something valuable.

Provost Willem sought the Cord in order to elevate his being
and thoughts to those of a Great One, by lining his brain
with eyes. The only choice, he knew, if man were to ever
match Their greatness.

careful inspection of the umbilical cord’s art reveals that it sits in a puddle of silver liquid. the villagers chant: “a call to the bloodless, wherever they be”.


but this wasn’t just any ol’ pile of fish goo they were fucking with, it was the corpse of the great one, kos (or as some say, kosm). kos’ wrath and retribution would come in due time, as this event birthed a powerful curse: the creation of a surreal plane of torment known as the hunter’s nightmare. the hunters responsible for the massacre and those who became “blood drunk” from overdosing on blood would be snatched away into a bloody, never-ending hunt in a warped and twisted facsimile of yharnam and the fishing hamlet. blood drunk hunters, who sustained themselves entirely on imbibing blood, could be identified by their rotting eyes.

“Lay the curse of blood upon them, and their children, and their children’s children, for evermore.
Each wretched birth will plunge each child into a lifetime of misery.”

but that all comes much later.


lady maria could not tolerate her role in the fishing hamlet massacre. as she was already sickened by the use of blood blades (in spite of her familial relationship to queen annalise of cainhurst), she threw her beloved weapon into the fishing village well when she could no longer tolerate its presence. she, with others, joined laurence, the medical student, when he split from byrgenwerth to found the healing church. its not explicit that the fishing village massacre was the reason for the split, as there were ideological differences brewing that also came to a head, but a one sided genocide SEEMS like a matter that would cause a splinter between one faction that is notoriously ruthless in its methods and another that tries to be in the business of healing.


i’m going to add an editor’s note that from this point on the timeline is muddled, confusing, vague and occasionally contradictory. people have moved heaven and earth trying to make sense of the inconsistencies, but the truth of the matter is that bloodborne suffered the fromsoft late game curse and was chopped up beyond recognition at the 11th hour for whatever internal development reason. whats interesting to me is the stuff they chose to keep that’s complete and utter chaff. there are extremely rare items that do literally nothing but sit in your inventory, or quests that are completely pointless. enemies appear where they “shouldn’t” and it difficult to tell if they are trying to impart some kind of information or if we’re just getting dragon-assed in lost izalith again (if you know….you know). its very odd and i think thats what draws people back again and again.

i can give you overviews of these events in the approximate order that they happened but there is no guarantee that they happened exactly in this order or in this fashion.


the schism at byrgenwerth came down to this: willem refused to use the blood until they understood it better and has become fascinated by the existence of great ones. laurence, on the other hand, recognized the blood’s potential as miracle medicine. the instantaneous healing powers were too enticing for laurence to ignore, but willem was steadfast in his belief that humanity was not yet ready to reckon with whatever it was that was happening here; one must “fear the old blood”. willem’s distaste for use of the blood is mentioned off-hand in the rune workshop tool description.

caryll runes side note for newbies: caryll runes are a gameplay mechanic that give you buffs you can switch in and out by using an iron brand on your consciousness. the runes themselves are transcriptions of “the inhuman utterings of the Great Ones”. all but a handful of the runes were discovered/transcribed by runesmith caryll and some were explicitly secret ones, hidden from public knowledge.

almost nothing explicit is known about caryll except they were a student of byrgenwerth. the workshop tool named for them is found on a dead hunter tied to a chair as the reward for surviving the witch of hemwick boss fight. people will try to tell you that the schmuck in the chair is caryll but that’s fucking stupid. caryll was not a hunter and there’s no reason why caryll would have the means or motive to pilfer their own tool from the hunter’s dream. i dont know why this guy has it. maybe hes just an asshole and stole it from the dream to be a dick. who knows. hes just griefing us lol. classic trolling

did he fall through the ceiling into the chair. what the fuck is this lmfao. its like the witches found a way to make an interrogation room lamp without electricity. do you think they went in the room above and jumped up and down until the floor broke.

all three translations agree that caryll runes “do not rely” on using blood, so its significant when blood DOES start to appear in the runes. one could read this as indication of caryll’s transition from byrgenwerth to the healing church after deciding to follow laurence, like most of his peers. some covenant runes are filled with unknown goos and liquids, all of the runes relating to a mysterious great one named oedon (whose existence is only made known through the descriptions of “his” items) are bleeding or “contain a nuance of Blood.”


i suppose we should do a quick oedon sidebar before he becomes VERY plot relevant. formless oedon is a great one who “lacks a form, existing only in voice”. we know very little about him except he has a chapel in his name in yharnam that we use as a central hub/safe zone and he likes blood and broads. hell, who doesn’t. hes a man (?) of taste.

according to the linked caryll rune, blood is the essence of oedon and oedon is always looking for good blood. the thing about oedon is that you might be a part of that process and not even know it; an “inadvertent worshiper surreptitiously seeking precious blood” (as they say).


willem sought “eyes on the inside”, which drove him and the others to defile the great ones. but what the fuck was he on about?

in one sense, to gain “eyes on the inside” is a cutesy way of describing “insight”, or the ability to see beyond the mundane. but the scholars were also being quite literal; in order to think on higher planes they were putting slugs in their fucking head. if we do some reading between the lines on the description for the “spark hunter badge“, the description of “a style of inquiry that […] closely followed the methodology of Byrgenwerth” is almost certainly “expose yourself to it” or “use living specimens” based on, well, everything they and their protegees do.

what happens to byrgenwerth after this is hazy. we’ll hop back in occasionally, but it too suffered from the fromsoft editing hack and slash. so trying to make concrete sense of it is a fool’s errand. let’s focus on the foundation of the healing church for a while.

 


1. this video provides a great look at the model of strange black mist emitting from kos’ corpse after the final boss fight of the DLC. this is probably what they took from the fishing village, not a huge old man baby who shoots lighting and jumps around like a frog on a skillet

2.source which leads to this image