#fire flame

I am late to the party, but I have been thinking about the relationship of the Dark Soul to the First Flame for a long time.

Why does the Dark Soul grow stronger as the Flame and other Lord Souls grow weaker? Why does feeding the Dark Soul to the Flame breathe new life into it, but less so each time?

Because the Dark Soul is the only Lord Soul that grows. Maybe it could only ever have worked that way, or maybe it was an accident, but when the Pygmy broke the Dark Soul and spread it among its kin and children to make the Darkness larger, the Dark Soul began to draw more than its “fair share” from the First Flame.

Gwyn saw this right away. Even at the absolute height of his power and the absolute bottom of the Dark’s power, he knew what would eventually happen: The Dark would utterly consume the First Flame and extinguish his own Lord Soul of Light. His vision of an Age of Fire was doomed from the start.

That’s why the gods hated humanity. That’s why humanity, though they wished to fight alongside the gods against the dragons, had to accept the Dark Sign and serve as slave knights to the gods.

The Dark Sign is a ring of Fire constraining the growth of the Dark Soul; a model of the system that Gwyn would build to stem the rise of Darkness. He later expanded upon that system by establishing the bonfires and the Linking of the Flame by the Undead; all methods to sustain the First Flame by feeding as much of the Dark Soul as possible back into it, to return its stolen power.

The Witch of Izalith and Nito the Grave Lord might have cooperated with Gwyn, using their Lord Souls of Life and Death to create the Curse of Undeath. The Curse would turn certain humans into Undead whose humanity would constantly be consumed by the First Flame, driving the Undead to kill other humans to take their portions of the Dark Soul into themselves, lest the Undead become Hollow.

But by the time the Ashen One has the option to Link the Flame, humanity has grown too vast. He cannot hunt down and consume enough of the Darkness before the Flame fades away entirely. The spread of humanity reached critical mass.

The Ashen One can alternatively consume the last dregs of the First Flame into himself (or allow it to be drained away by the rest of humanity), completing the Dark Soul’s inevitable ascension and ushering in the final, unending Age of Darkness.

Gwyn was a good king and father who did everything he could to save his people, including burning himself alive for centuries to sustain their power. To the extent that he was a bastard, he was a bastard in retaliation against the Furtive Pygmy dooming his people’s future.

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