Dark Souls 3 Beginner’s Guide to Lore

Part of the fun of Dark Souls is appearing in the middle of ongoing events with no idea what the hell is going on. Dark Souls has a complex and deliberately mysterious story behind it, a lot of the truth having vanished into legend in game so that you, the player, never really know it. There’s enough there for a lot of speculation, thrashed out by professional Dark Souls scholars like VaatiVidya on YouTube, but before you rush into Dark Souls 3 you might want to get a basic footing, shaky though it may be, on what has actually been going on. Here’s the basics of what we do know for sure about the history of the Dark Souls world. Probably. With a margin for error.

Note that this does not include details of the many side stories involving e.g. corrupted knights and fallen kingdoms from the series.

The Age of Ancients

So, a long time ago (like, uncountable thousands of years, we think, probably; it’s unconfirmed), the world of Dark Souls was ruled by immortal dragons with stone scales, and they lived in stone trees, and nothing changed because this, thematically, is the function of stone. This is known as the Age of Ancients.

The Age of Fire

At some, similarly unspecified, point in time, fire arrived in the world in the form of the First Flame (origins currently unknown), which contained some ‘Lord Souls’. These Souls were found and pilfered by four beings: Nito, the First of the Dead; Izalith the sorceress; Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight; and the Furtive Pygmy, who was behind the door when names were being handed out. With these souls the first three Lords were powerful enough to take on the dragons and win, ushering in the Age of Fire. This was a time of great prosperity and growth, during which humanity began to spread whilst the Lords ruled as gods (apart from the Furtive Pygmy, who hasn’t been seen or heard from since the Dark Souls opening cinematic). So far, so good.

The Curse of Undeath

The age of fire rattled along happily for a while, but just as the thematic function of stone is staying the same, one of the thematic functions of fire is change, and eventually the First Flame started to die out, as part of the run up to the Age of Dark. The three remaining Lords didn’t like the sound of that: Izalith tried to start a second flame but ended up burning herself and her followers, and creating a hideous demon-spawning flaming tree thing.

In response to this Gwyn travelled to the dying First Flame and rekindled it by linking it to his own soul, unnaturally extending the Age of Fire. After this the undead started popping up, people who are cursed to return after they die, gradually losing their humanity until they become ‘hollow’ and mindless. In Dark Souls you play the Chosen Undead, who will supposedly sort out the whole Gwyn situation one way or another, approximately a thousand years after Gwyn’s poorly thought out sacrifice.

The Lord of Cinder

When Gwyn linked his soul to the First Flame as fuel he became a burned, corrupted version of himself known as the Lord of Cinder (he’s the final boss in the first Dark Souls game). This is important for Dark Souls 3, since from interviews and trailer footage it’s apparent that at least one Lord of Cinder will feature as an antagonist in the game.

Whether or not this is Gwyn is unclear; Hidetaka Miyazaki, the creator of Dark Souls, has implied that there have been several Lords of Cinder that have sacrificed themselves to the First Flame, prolonging the Age of Fire and the curse of undeath. Since the end of Dark Souls is your character making the decision to either usher in the Age of Dark or to sacrifice their soul to the First Flame, and the end of Dark Souls 2 is your character discovering this repeating cycle of undead linking themselves to the First Flame, you could theoretically be fighting a player character in Dark Souls 3.

The Dark Soul

Right, so if, between the events of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3, people have just been rekindling the First Flame and becoming Lords of Cinder and so on and so forth, it means the Age of Dark is now well overdue. Throughout the series this is described as being the age of mankind.

Now, smash cut to that Furtive Pygmy lad we mentioned at the start, remember him? The soul he picked up was the Dark Soul, and it’s widely accepted that he fractured it into loads of pieces, and there’s a little bit of the Dark Soul in every human. Thus the Age of Dark is also the Age of Man, and as humanity grew in strength and numbers so did the Dark Soul.

What does this mean all for Dark Souls 3?

That’s a question with no clear answer. There have been a lot of references from the devs to Dark Souls 3 having a kind of end-of-the world setting (one of the special editions you can preorder is called the Apocalypse Edition), so there’s a lot of speculation that the Fire Age is finally coming to an end, and everyone is fighting over who will have control of the next age. A lot of what’s been seen from Dark Souls 3 footage is themed around fires dying – your character is ‘Unkindled’ rather than undead, for example.

The test footage also shows dragons (both living and dead), and bosses that have ice-based powers but wield flaming weapons, so it’s still continuing those themes of fire and darkness. However, the presence of the dragons and hollowed undead appearing to worship (and even possibly becoming) trees suggests that the stone themes from the Age of Ancients may be coming back into play as well.

Miyazaki has said that in this game you’ll be hunting down the Lord of Cinder, and that it’s “about the Kings that succeeded the power of the gods” from the first game, so it’s probably going to be pretty spectacular whatever happens.

Buy the official Dark Souls 3 Guide now.