In the age when Queen Marika the Eternal served as the vessel of the Elden Ring, the Lands Between existed in a state of perfect stasis, as though sealed inside a sphere of amber where decay and ending were impossible. The Rune of Death had been plucked from the Elden Ring and entrusted to Marika’s shadow, Maliketh, and with it, all true mortality was erased. Beings could still fall, but their spirits would be pulled back to the Erdtree, only to be reborn. To the faithful, this was a golden age of undying order. To others, it was a quiet prison: a world where meaning dissolved because nothing could ever truly conclude, and the Greater Will’s design stretched over every soul like a taut, unyielding membrane.
The perfect stillness was shattered on a single, moonless night known ever after as the Night of the Black Knives. A cadre of assassins, their faces obscured by cloaks and their blades glimmering with a fragment of stolen death, descended upon the royal capital. Their target was Godwyn the Golden, firstborn son of Queen Marika and Godfrey, a demigod renowned for his radiance and his conquest of the ancient dragons. The knives they carried had been forged from a shard of the Rune of Death itself, the one element that could pierce the immortality woven into the fabric of the world. When their steel found Godwyn’s flesh, it did not merely wound: it dealt a death that was catastrophically incomplete.
Because the daggers carried only a fragment of the Rune, Godwyn’s death was cleft in two. His soul was killed, carved from his form as cleanly as a fruit’s pit is removed, yet his body remained alive, a vast and empty shell. This was the first true death in an era of immortality, a breach that sent tremors through the Golden Order like a crack racing through a frozen lake. When Queen Marika learned that her beloved son had become the first to die, something within her broke. Whether out of grief, fury, or a desperate attempt to reclaim agency, she took up the Elden Ring and shattered it with her hammer. The ring, once a perfect symbol of cosmic law, fractured into shards of pure power, and the catastrophe known as the Shattering began. In that instant, death, strife, and ambition flooded back into the world.
Godwyn’s Living Corpse and the Rise of Those Who Live in Death
Godwyn’s body was laid to rest deep beneath Leyndell, in the roots of the Erdtree itself, perhaps in the hope that the holy tree could cleanse or reclaim him. Instead, his half-death became a spreading corruption. His soulless flesh, still thrumming with a grotesque parody of life, began to warp and grow downward into the root system like a malignant vine grafting itself onto a sacred bough. This undead tumor became the seedbed for a new form of existence: Those Who Live in Death.
From the corrupted roots rose skeletal warriors, death-spewing jellies, and mutilated spirits, all bound to a second life that defied the Erdtree’s cycle. Godwyn the Golden, once a hero of the dragons, became the Prince of Death, worshipped by these outcasts as their progenitor. The Golden Order, which had been built upon the erasure of true death, declared this entire order of being an abomination. Its fundamentalists, led by hunters such as D, pursued Those Who Live in Death with relentless zeal, seeking to scrape away a truth that could no longer be buried. Godwyn’s transformation was not just a personal tragedy; it was an infection at the heart of the world, a wound that refused to heal.
Ranni’s Gambit: A Moonlit Defiance
For many years, the identity of the true architect behind the Night of the Black Knives remained hidden. It was only through the journey of a determined Tarnished that the truth emerged from the lips of Ranni the Witch, the mysterious Lunar Princess. In her hidden rise behind Caria Manor, she revealed that she had orchestrated the entire affair. Ranni had stolen the fragment of the Rune of Death from Maliketh, then imbued it into the blades of the Black Knife Assassins.
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Her motives were woven from rebellion and renunciation. As an Empyrean, Ranni was destined to succeed Queen Marika and become the new vessel of the Elden Ring, serving the Greater Will as a pawn in an unending golden game. She rejected this fate. On the Night of the Black Knives, as Godwyn’s soul was slain, Ranni simultaneously destroyed her own Empyrean body, leaving her spirit to inhabit a doll-like form crafted by a trusted servant. This simultaneous death freed her from the influence of the Two Fingers, the localized envoys of the Greater Will, and allowed her to set her sights on the dark moon, a path that promised a world unshackled from outer gods.
Her plan was a gamble of cosmic proportions, a chess move in which she sacrificed a golden prince to vacate her own throne in heaven. By reintroducing death into the world, she broke the ironclad order of the Greater Will and opened the door for a different kind of destiny. The Shattering that followed was not merely the result of Marika’s grief, but a seismic shift that Ranni had engineered with the precision of a watchmaker and the cold resolve of a heretic. Where the Greater Will demanded a sterile immortality, Ranni offered the Lands Between the terrifying, liberating, and profoundly human promise of an end.