Shadow of the Erdtree’s trailer gives us more Elden Ring lore to get wrong

There are lots of ways to enjoy Elden Ring, beyond the core attack/dodge/survive gameplay. You can obsess over builds, appreciate the mastery of speedrunners and grand masters like Let Me Solo Her, or mix and match the huge variety of armor in pursuit of Fashion Souls. And then there is lore. There is so much of it, and most of it has the consistency of campfire smoke. Elden Ring tells its backstory (written in part by George R.R. Martin) primarily through item descriptions and environmental hints. The scraps of narrative that do exist stand unsteadily against unreliable narrators, contradictions, cut content, and lovably enthusiastic fans who take small hints to their illogical extremes. Developer FromSoftware and primary creator Hidetaka Miyazaki do almost nothing to disprove misunderstandings or reward accurate conclusions, although they appreciate the energy. Miyazaki will just casually tell IGN that there's a "small element" that hasn't been discovered, offer nothing more on that, and leave fans like me craven with an unmet need for conclusion.

I love this and cherish the way FromSoftware will never in my lifetime confirm my hopes or expectations. So with the surprise arrival of an honest-to-goodness story-based trailer for the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, due out June 21, I was given yet another feast of vague notions and evocative images. Let's dig into it, moment by moment, if not frame by frame. If you're new to Elden Ring lore, you've got a lot of road in front of you. Play the game, probably, as a first step? But then I recommend YouTuber and Souls archaeologist VaatiVidya's 30-minute lore explainer, and then his Miquella-specific deep dive.

The beginning

"Miquella the Kind spoke of the beginning, the seduction, and the betrayal," says the narrator. And then, as with many primordial myths, there is some body horror. A bloodied hand, with a wrap-around golden bracelet, reaches into some kind of gray, parted part of a biological something, confirmed by the sound effects, pulling out golden threads. This is almost certainly Marika, the matriarch figure that puts most of the main Elden Ring plot into action, given the bracelet (visible in images from before her golden crucifixion). "An affair from which Gold arose," (all capitalization from the video's captions), "and so too was Shadow born." As in the Land of Shadow, where the expansion takes place. Likely-Marika walks out of a bloody, squishy hall to an opening, holds the threads aloft triumphantly, and a pan back and outward reveals that she has parted (I think) a bloody tree. There are more than a couple biblical references running through Elden Ring's lore, and some of them are as subtle as a colossal sword. Then: "What followed was a war unseen, one that could never be put to song."

Fire, fire everywhere

Next is depicted "a purge without Grace or honour," which is indeed what I would call it when everything in sight is set on fire. The big basket-o-fire golems seen in the last gameplay trailer are on the move, and Mesmer, the seeming big bad of this DLC, is triumphant. "The tyranny of Mesmer's flame," the narrator intones, and then we see him squaring off against a lion-like creature, one with notably blond/golden hair around its face. It moves like a sentient, single-bodied Chinese dragon dance. Mesmer's reaction is, unsurprisingly, to bring up some deep red flame in his hand. Marika's theft of golden radiance, and seeming infestation of the alternate-universe (prior-universe?) Erdtree, started a war, and Mesmer and the forces of Burn It All won. There are now creatures impaled on pikes amid flames, and a large castle-like city is ruined. But, above it all, golden threads are seeming to hang over and settle into the big tree.

“Will you walk with us?”

This war, purge, and tyranny caused "Kindly Miquella" to "abandon everything," including his "golden flesh, his blinding strength, even his fate." This all fits with our loose understanding of Miquella as an essentially missing demi-god from the first game. But over the line about "his fate," we see St. Trina, ensconced in purple light. There are entire AWS servers full of debate about whether Miquella is St. Trina, either as a masquerade or split persona or alternate universe or some other solution in suspension. This confirms what most lore divers knew, that there was a connection there but not much else, which is par for this course. The final scenes take you back to where you, the player, come in. Threads of light emerge from the ground inside a few spots in this shadowed land, with a runic design at the top that could be Miquella's own rune from the Elden Ring itself. This could be the save and rest points that you use, akin to the bonfires of Dark Souls titles or the "Sites of Grace" in Elden Ring. That would make sense, given the mythos and in-universe explanation for why you can stop and be safe from "Grace" in the base game's unsafe world, which wouldn't play in this prequel or alternate-universe side-quel. "We are not deterred… We choose to follow… Will you walk with us," asks the last few lines, as an armored hand scrapes the ground to find gold threads beneath. They are just one of a bunch of armored dudes staring at a thread of light, with the shadow-draped tree and its golden braid deep in the background. What did we learn? What can we guess? The opening scenes provide the biggest new thing to chew on, given how they suggest that Marika might have become the earthly head of the Golden Order (the dystopian system that falls apart before you play Elden Ring) not by being chosen, but by "the seduction, and the betrayal." Was there one unified, perfect world before Marika did this evil thing and tore it asunder (another very subtle Bible reference)? Beyond that, there is the framework of answering why Miquella, who is very present in the lore but barely present in Elden Ring gameplay, needed to step out of his body and fate for a moment. There was a literal fire to put out—or, perhaps, revenge, and you're going to help with that. If you read all this and believe that Shadow of the Erdtree, like Elden Ring, will be impossibly arcane, requiring wikis and long YouTube essays and Reddit threads to form into something resembling a story with an arc, I agree with you. But I also can't help but be eager for more of this. It's more of a vibe than a tome. But combined with the suffer-than-triumph gameplay, and the fan community's eagerness to indulge sickos like their own, it's hard to resist.