Quella's Family

Damn Frosty, back at it again with the Quella HC post after so long since dropping your incredibly long post?

Yeah. I am. This shouldn’t be as long (famous last words), but I think this one should be a bit more tasty to read. What strange headcanon am I dropping on you all today? Simple.

Quella and Nahr Alma are the children, or at the very least were very dear to, Caitha. I don’t quite know if this is a bold claim, but I do factor it as evidence that Quella and Nahr Alma are not imaginary or simply perversions of former figures in Dark Souls’s history. How did I come to this conclusion?

Two item descriptions and their covenants are all I need. Allow me to start by establishing the principle figures here: Quella, Nahr Alma, and Caitha.

I’ll start with Quella, as I have spoken about him at length. He was a small, easily frightened child that was granted protection from a Spirit Tree that transformed itself into a shield. (I am choosing to read that Quella is the boy for various reasons I don’t think are necessary to get into here.) He is associated with the color blue through his primary artifacts — the Spirit Tree Crest shield and the Grand Spirit Tree Shield — and through his covenant, the Blue Sentinels. Enough action as a Blue Sentinel will turn your character's spirit form when engaging in online play blue, furthering this connection.

Nahr Alma, then, is similarly simple to discuss for purposes of this. The god of questionable validity that heads the Brotherhood of Blood. I suppose it’s not a stretch to simply say that and move on; man’s title is God of Blood and leads a cult that does a lot of invading, where your character's phantom is red. The only other thing about him is I’d like to draw attention to the fact that Titchy Gren uses a chime of Caitha. Whether this is intentional or not, it is a dietetic part of gameplay and I can read it as I please because it’s my post.

Which transitions us nicely to Caitha herself, our Goddess of Tears and seemingly dominant faith in Carim by Dark Souls 3. I think most players, even those who are uncaring for the lore, will be well familiar with her artifacts: the blue and red tearstone rings. While in Dark Souls I she goes unnamed, they are still both attached to Carim, which I read as some minor evidence that perhaps Caitha existed in the world before the backstory of Dark Souls II. 

Regardless, it’s the rings’ incarnations in Dark Souls II I would like to focus on. The Blue Tearstone Ring is found in two different ways, but the second, perhaps lesser known one, is relevant here: upon reaching rank 3 in the Way of Blue covenant, Saulden will give one to you. Its description reads as follows:

A ring set with a blue tearstone. Reacts when the wearer is in danger, temporarily increasing its wearer's physical defense power. Caitha, goddess of tears, mourns those who have lost loved ones by shedding pure tears of blue. It is said that the stone set in this ring is one such tear.

Now: why would an adherent to the Way of Blue (the covenant the Blue Sentinels are explicitly meant to protect) give us a ring so connected to Caitha? I think it’s likely that the clue lies in the verbage: ‘shedding pure tears of blue’. Moreover, this is stated to be the color of Caitha’s tears for those who have lost loved ones. Keep that in mind as I give the Red Tearstone Ring's description, again from DS2:

A ring set with a red tearstone. Reacts when the wearer is in danger, temporarily increasing its wearer's physical attack power. Caitha, goddess of tears, mourns the undeserving dead, shedding tears as red as blood. It is said that the stone set in this ring is one such tear.

I do not believe it is necessary for me to point it out explicitly: the ring that increases damage when near death is ‘red as blood’. While it can simply be a cute detail, I’d point out it’s curious that it stands opposite the purity of her blue tears, which raise defense. What is a trait we can ascribe to Quella? Between his shield being able to reflect even spells and his covenant being about protection, it is the ability to defend others.

I would argue the opposite is true for Nahr Alma. His entire covenant is based around bloodshed and offense, even if we get less info on the god himself. Taken a step further with this interpretation (that the colors were chosen specifically to hint towards a connection between the three), you can even say the tears Caitha weeps are for them; which my fanfic brain has made them her children.

Quella is a loved one lost; perhaps taken entirely by the dreamworld of his beloved spirit trees. Nahr Alma, then, could have been unjustly killed — he became an undeserving death and why his ring says that he may not truly exist — he died long ago and no longer benefits his worshipers.

Does this mean anything? I unno. It’s more a fun little web that I noticed. Two characters associated with these gods — Saulden to Quella through his covenant and Caitha through the ring he gives you, Titchy Gren to Nahr Alma through being his covenant’s only known member and Caitha through using her chime — add more pieces to this puzzle.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to connect them to Caitha in this case. As always, I don’t claim this is definitely what was intended or even necessarily true. I’m simply connecting very disparate dots once I noticed there’s a few harder to notice dots between them. 

I enjoy doing this sort of thing. It makes me feel almost like a historian or ancient literature scholar; trying to find the connective tissue between seemingly disparate events.

Worldbuilder brain sees this as a fun opportunity for environmental storytelling in a hypothetical center of Caitha worship. Such an ancient structure is bound to have been changed greatly over time; maybe once there were statues of Quella and Nahr Alma at her side, but now are either completely broken or moved to some manner of storage.

Caitha's red tears flow from her right eye, as Nahr Alma's dominant hand was his right, while her blue tears flow from her left eye, which is the same arm Quella held his shield on —

Sorry I started getting lost in the sauce. Thank you for taking the time out to read this silly little post! Did I manage to show the connections well? Should I have gone harder on the potential connections? Let me know!

Hope you have a great day, reader ✨

…One off story about Caitha as a character mourning her beloved children sounds like it’d go hard, though...

If Caitha is Indeed Gwyn's First Wife, is she the Mother of The Firstborn Son/Nameless King Too????

Full headcanon:

Sorry this took so long, Anon!! 😣 I had to mull over how to answer this and rack every corner of my brain since I'm kind of a dumbass when it comes to piecing lore together and coming up with plausible theories, specially when there's very little to go by.

Anyway, here are some of my thoughts regarding these goddesses. It's not much but I guess it's something (also art underneath :D):

These outfits come from the Dolce&Gabbana Fashion Show at the Temple of Concordia at the Valley of The Temples in Agrigento, Sicily.

And this is also the perfect example of how I imagine fashion would look like at Anor Londo.

So we now have some insight that 'Caitha' could be in fact a long forgotten 'God'. But let's now look at some of the other items associated with her. I will start the with the 'Blue Tearstone Ring' and we shall start with the description from Dark Souls 2.

''A ring set with a rare tearstone. Reacts when the wearer is in danger.'Caitha, goddess of tears, mourns those who have lost loved ones by shedding pure tears of blue. It is said that the stone set in this ring is one such tear". From this description we can get the insight that 'Caitha' is in fact a pure 'God' that cares deeply  for lost loved ones and in fact mourns the death of others despite the huge power it contains. This is shown by the pure tears of blue and the rings effect of how it reacts to those in danger. 

This gives us so much more information but further information can be taken from looking at the 'Dark Souls'. The description of the same ring. ''The rare gem called tearstone has the uncanny ability to sense imminent death.This blue tearstone from Catarina''. I have cut off the information regarding the rings benefit as we are looking from a lore side. So from this we get a bit of back story on where she may have come from 'Catarina'. It's hard to not go into much detail about this but this is very interesting as from this game we actually meet two characters from 'Catarina' which we shall talk about another time! 

So from all of this we are given the impression that 'Caitha' is a caring 'Godess' who mourns the loss of those who die. She may have come from the land of 'Catarina' which is not certain but we definitely know she was around the area or living there at some point in her life. Her tears have taken on crystallised forms and forged onto rings within the area of 'Catarina'. Truly this is a 'Godess' who is full of good intention and worry about the world of lesser beings. On the next part we will look at the conflict between this view though.