elden ring anniversary rambling

[adventumpueri]

too impatient to wait for june 20^th… here’s some reflection.

while we live in Midgar-Edge, the “Realm of Shadow” is much closer to what’s called a hearthome.

it is not a place where we permanently reside, it is a sort of home-beyond-our-home, usually unreachable without direct contact with the game itself.

I acquired the DLC a little earlier than everyone else, due to a combination of pre-ordering and being in a lucky timezone. in the #spoilers channel in a certain hyper-specific Elden Ring discord, I joked with those who still had another 4-6 hours to wait, as I walked through the nameless tunnel. from the moment our avatar, Thera, stepped foot into the plains, I knew it was home. the colors, the sounds. the game-manufactured music, even, spoke in a manner that was unmistakably To Me.

I don’t typically have premonitions. but I knew Belurat, and even more so Enir-Ilim. I saw the great Tower without its cloak in a dream, and imagined the spiraling platforms that would bring me to it; this being one of three times I have ever traveled to Elden Ring’s realm. I felt sand beneath my feet and atop my head, the little bowl in my hand as I meditated and a rush of scents wafted from alloyed censors and candlesticks – practices, sensations, and environments introduced to me by my neighbors in “the real world”, five years before Elden Ring was even announced. I knew that there was a multitude of Great Trees from the beginning – the idea of a one world-Tree espoused by the Golden Order and loretubers alike always seemed reductive. all the twins and the braids! twists in the locks of the silver-haired, horn-bedecked people. all of these things found in the Lands Between, but turned up to eleven.

I want so desperately to know what it was called. our homeland. I know names of the barely-intact major cities, general geographies, but not anything that any hornsent would have called the continent itself.“The Realm of Shadow” brings to mind – as mentioned by a friend – the idea of Darkest Africa: a world of inverse, uncivilized people, only existing to offset the Light, the West, the First World or Global North. the name of the “Gravesite plains”, too, seem to be a product of colonialism. the scorched remains of hornsent towns overflow, full of howling spirits with nowhere to return; ghostly graves appear where there once were homes, farms, temples. it feels wrong to call these places such terrible names. I don’t blame the game itself – the story being told here is important, the erasure a deliberate attempt to say something about what happened to my people, as opposed to ignorance or careless authorship. if anything, I appreciate the discomfort, as it’s made us wrestle with why it feels so uncomfortable.

yet it hurts so, so horribly. I still want to know. I want to ask the grandam – the keeper of ceremony and knowledge – but even in Thera’s current save-state, she, too, has passed away. I don’t even really know her name. I don’t know the name of the revenger with whom Thera shared a meal, or the sentinel that watches over her peoples’ graves, or the dancers beneath the lion costume. I understand why this is. I appreciate Elden Ring’s unapologetic opacity, its tragedy. it still hurts. if fire knights and blackguards are allowed names, why not divine beast warriors? Ornis’ name is likely only preserved in his ashes because no one could reach his grave to pilfer it.

I want to know what we used to call the grasses in the plains. the trees so carefully twisted into spirals. I want to see the copper sky again, with my own eyes, instead of from behind the shoulder of the nonspeaking woman we’ve come to adore. every time I visit the realms in Elden Ring, it’s been by chance. I don’t know how to begin going there on my own. even still, during this heavy week, leading up to the eclipse, on the days following the anniversary of my favorite video game, we’re being drawn there. but we don’t know how to make the trip.