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.”