This is all products of my deranged mind and should not be mistaken for anything else.

Before the Elden Ring, before the Crucible, before the Elden Beast crashed into the Lands Between and fucked everything up forever, there was the One Great.

And the One Great was a massive tree that in essence WAS all of the Lands Between.

And it rained down a continual gentle storm of likely blue Immortal Essence, without souls, without thought, without division.

But this bounty of fundamental energy draws predators, and deep in the vast unknown the Greater Will sensed this delicious feast and dispatched one of its larvae, the Elden Beast, to begin the process of plundering the Lands Between of every drop of Immortal essence.

So the Elden Beast crash landed in the middle of the One Great, the Great Tree, shattering it and in its smouldering crater, the Immortal Essence of the One Great Tree was polluted with the golden essence of the Greater Will.

And that Immortal Essence began to take form, and shape, and have will and desire, and love and conflict, life and death.

The beings that this tainted Immortal Essence created fell into conflict, struggling for power and prestige. And their willingness to fight, the bright burning of their lives, their desire to strive and dominate, these all became glorious golden energy to feed back to the Greater Will via a corrupted conduit spawned from the Crucible and the Elden Beast.

As long as those sharded essences of the One Great continue to fight and strive and struggle, the Greater WIll shall never be hungry, and what being in the Lands Between exists without struggle?

Marika or the God that fled, it matters not, Crucible or Erd Tree, it matters not, as long as the Greater Will is constantly fed the struggle of willful beings.

Which is why the Frienzied Flame is the only egalitarian ending.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, MAY CHAOS TAKE THE WORLD!