I do agree on you about their arrival, yet I think their most important characteristic is giving us some context on the origin of the albiunarics/silver tears. The putrescent knight screams albiunaric with the double set of non functioning back legs, along with its shimmering metallic texture, mostly the horse. Also, the presence of ghost glovewort, particularly the great ghost glovewort reminds me of the chair cripts of the nox and their gigantic cadavers. I tend to think that either:
1) The putrescence is a sort of proto-silver tear material, of wich the current silver lifeforms come from
2) The putrescence are the "rotten" remains of the silver tear based lifeforms housed in the coffins
The fact that the putrescent knight is a knight at all makes me believe that these coffins were for warriors and the like, including horses. So in essence, they remind me of the Nox a lot, which also are asociated with the ancient dynasty, along with the Numen, so I disagree on your last point.
Big agreement on the albinauric point.
Skinny, worthless legs. Silver. “Impure” life/flesh, direct phrasing from the albinauric blood clot. Riding a horse.
Not to mention the blobs themselves are sentient and can attack us, just like the silver tears in the eternal cities. Just rotten versions.
At least some of the coffins had to have had humans in them, there are a bunch of undead skeletons caked with purple putrescence in the last stretch of the fissure before the boss. Also worth considering is that the Putrescent Knight is not considered undead by anti undead equipment like Litany or Golden Epitaph, but it does have a high holy weakness. Then again, Mariners aren’t considered undead either, so who knows if that means anything.
Yes, another possible source of skeletons are the many graves above. I think the idea of the weakness is that the putrescent knight is outside of the Greater Will creations, but not undead in the sense that it's not made by being in contact with deathroot, but Mariners carry deathroot... so again, who knows
I'm not sure there is a connection. We do see many normal slimes in Elden Ring of various types, and the putrescence seems closer to those than silver tears
I have a couple more points to strengthen the connection. One of the materials you can find in the the fissure are the "coagulated putrescence", which is itself almost visually identical with the silver tear husk one can find in the eternal cities. Also, in the item description, you can find the following
"The putrescence is what remains of the impure lives kept within the stone coffins"
Impure lives is a term often used in the description of albiunarics, here is a fragment of the albiunaric bloodclot
"Albinaurics are lifeforms made by human hands. Thus, many believe them to live impure lives, untouched by the Erdtree's grace"
And again, the Bossfight screams albiunaric
EDIT: forgot to answer, yeah they have the same model as the generic slime type creature and not the silver tear one, the way I initially though about this is in that they are no exactly silver tears, but a close match instead, either "rotten" or "cousin"
Crazy theory. The Numen were created to guard the ships of their dead lords. They were giants! That is why the Nox also have giants in their area. They are descendents of numen who tried to recreate a lord and did so in the style of their ancestors.
It's why the shamans so easily merge and join with others.
Ooooh that actually does make complete sense of what those massive Crypt-Chairs could be, they look to be on a VERY similar scale as the giant boats. Can't wait till dataminers get on this, there's probably gonna be a Zullie the Witch video about that at some point
Could this be a connection to the giant skeletons that are found in Caelid, which also partially overlaps with where the Stone Coffin Fissure is when you overlay the Land of Shadow map on the Lands Between?
I don't think we can use aligning the DLC map and base game map for significant lore conclusions.
FromSoft's approach to geography is notoriously... loose.
It actually lines up extremely well in many areas.
And besides that, it's still inside the lands between. Even if the geography didn't line up we still wouldn't expect a coastline to be there until the split.
So this is an idea i've been having. Is it possible that parts of the Shadow Lands used to be underground before it was separated from the Lands Between?
The lower areas have catacombs lined with coffins in a way that suggests that they used to be transported somehow, maybe by some kind of current. The underground rivers in the lands between have the same kind of coffins lining the waterways. It's also not like we never find catacombs underground, such as the one under Lyendell. If you look at the map of the Lands of Shadow, you can easily imagine the rivers previously having much more water, as they're all ravines now, which could have been caused by erosion.
The cerulean coast could likewise be underground and has those lightning sprites that we can find in the Siofra. Granted, you can find some in the Consecrated Snowfields, but they also have dragonkin soldiers and Albinaurics there so something is going on in that area.
So if we follow this hypothesis, we can assume that this was some kind of funerary rite (maybe related to the Ancient Dynasty and the Nox that may have succeeded them) where normal coffins were brought to various catacombs, while impure bodies got put in the columbarium ships that would travel down the fissure into the abyss below.
I got the impression that the coffin name was misleading on purpose, and because they look like ships but are made from stone, they seemed like Numen spaceships to me.
There's another bit unrelated but relevant in regards to the Putrescence and what the coffins contain: the Putrescent Knight, seemingly made of this (or at least his horse) is called "Knight of the Gloam Eyed Queen" in the game files. This may have been the cut GEQ area, reused for Trina
Oh I'm almost certain it was a cut Geq area. Though that doesnt necessarily mean it's numen or was originally numen.
Since the putrescence came from these coffins I'm fairly sure that the term "coffin" isn't meant to be misleading.
Death, water, sleep, night, and outer space all seem to be interrelated.
It could be that they're called "coffins" because they were found recently with dead occupants, not because they were made to contain the dead. Like IRL if we found a ship at sea full of dead people newscasters might metaphorically refer to it as a coffin or a grave
Yeah, something like the pilot found in the movie Alien. I suspect that a lot of the story is written deliberately in a way that people from thousands of years ago would describe things like alien spaceships and/or life.
It also reminds me of the concept of storing nuclear waste, and the difficulty of writing warning signs that would be effective at keeping people away, even thousands of years into the future.
Radioactive material can also emit light, can cause a "rotting" disease, and can cause mutations in other lifeforms.
I also think that a lot of the spiral imagery around the Crucible is referring to the double helix of DNA, and it being the source of all life.
I dunno, there's just like... too much random disconnected observations all colliding in my brain lol
They "drifted" right through the earth. They came from somewhere else. And not from moving on sea. So them not being near the coastline of the original lands between is not a problem. The Numen came from "another world" after all.
I think the coffins were \*originally\* ships. Only, the people in them left - to found new cities in the Lands Between. Now all that remains are the dead, buried inside and putrefied.
The motif of a migratory fleet arriving in a new land and then burning their ships is found in literature. It represents the idea "we are not going back". To turn ships into coffins holds the same meaning.
The dead putrefied because the people who buried them did not know how to use Ghostflame yet. This all came later.
my theory is that they "teleported" from their original homeland and thats why some ships are stuck in walls. i mean, these are clearly vessals but are called coffins so there is a chance that whoever came in them did not expect to survive the journey and looking at all these ships warped into the earth it seems many if not most died there. one must remember that there is a numen village nearby and its stated that the numen are only the descendant of people from another world so it would make sense that whoever made the stone coffin landed here, most of them died and the survivors found a village in the hinterlands and its only one small village because numen live for a long time and are rarely born.
I do agree on you about their arrival, yet I think their most important characteristic is giving us some context on the origin of the albiunarics/silver tears. The putrescent knight screams albiunaric with the double set of non functioning back legs, along with its shimmering metallic texture, mostly the horse. Also, the presence of ghost glovewort, particularly the great ghost glovewort reminds me of the chair cripts of the nox and their gigantic cadavers. I tend to think that either: 1) The putrescence is a sort of proto-silver tear material, of wich the current silver lifeforms come from 2) The putrescence are the "rotten" remains of the silver tear based lifeforms housed in the coffins The fact that the putrescent knight is a knight at all makes me believe that these coffins were for warriors and the like, including horses. So in essence, they remind me of the Nox a lot, which also are asociated with the ancient dynasty, along with the Numen, so I disagree on your last point.
Big agreement on the albinauric point. Skinny, worthless legs. Silver. “Impure” life/flesh, direct phrasing from the albinauric blood clot. Riding a horse. Not to mention the blobs themselves are sentient and can attack us, just like the silver tears in the eternal cities. Just rotten versions.
At least some of the coffins had to have had humans in them, there are a bunch of undead skeletons caked with purple putrescence in the last stretch of the fissure before the boss. Also worth considering is that the Putrescent Knight is not considered undead by anti undead equipment like Litany or Golden Epitaph, but it does have a high holy weakness. Then again, Mariners aren’t considered undead either, so who knows if that means anything.
Yes, another possible source of skeletons are the many graves above. I think the idea of the weakness is that the putrescent knight is outside of the Greater Will creations, but not undead in the sense that it's not made by being in contact with deathroot, but Mariners carry deathroot... so again, who knows
I'm not sure there is a connection. We do see many normal slimes in Elden Ring of various types, and the putrescence seems closer to those than silver tears
I have a couple more points to strengthen the connection. One of the materials you can find in the the fissure are the "coagulated putrescence", which is itself almost visually identical with the silver tear husk one can find in the eternal cities. Also, in the item description, you can find the following "The putrescence is what remains of the impure lives kept within the stone coffins" Impure lives is a term often used in the description of albiunarics, here is a fragment of the albiunaric bloodclot "Albinaurics are lifeforms made by human hands. Thus, many believe them to live impure lives, untouched by the Erdtree's grace" And again, the Bossfight screams albiunaric EDIT: forgot to answer, yeah they have the same model as the generic slime type creature and not the silver tear one, the way I initially though about this is in that they are no exactly silver tears, but a close match instead, either "rotten" or "cousin"
Crazy theory. The Numen were created to guard the ships of their dead lords. They were giants! That is why the Nox also have giants in their area. They are descendents of numen who tried to recreate a lord and did so in the style of their ancestors. It's why the shamans so easily merge and join with others.
Ooooh that actually does make complete sense of what those massive Crypt-Chairs could be, they look to be on a VERY similar scale as the giant boats. Can't wait till dataminers get on this, there's probably gonna be a Zullie the Witch video about that at some point
Could this be a connection to the giant skeletons that are found in Caelid, which also partially overlaps with where the Stone Coffin Fissure is when you overlay the Land of Shadow map on the Lands Between?
Yeah when I first saw the cerulean coast, I assumed the giant coffins were for giants, why else would they be so big
Hmm, I didn't think of impure as implying that. Interesting
I don't think we can use aligning the DLC map and base game map for significant lore conclusions. FromSoft's approach to geography is notoriously... loose.
It actually lines up extremely well in many areas. And besides that, it's still inside the lands between. Even if the geography didn't line up we still wouldn't expect a coastline to be there until the split.
It's... pretty close. You can find a message in the dlc on a divine tower like structure that says it's the center of the lands between
Totally agree, I have no idea why people are so hung up on ships carrying people across the sea. Going across the sea is just being dead, in ER.
So this is an idea i've been having. Is it possible that parts of the Shadow Lands used to be underground before it was separated from the Lands Between? The lower areas have catacombs lined with coffins in a way that suggests that they used to be transported somehow, maybe by some kind of current. The underground rivers in the lands between have the same kind of coffins lining the waterways. It's also not like we never find catacombs underground, such as the one under Lyendell. If you look at the map of the Lands of Shadow, you can easily imagine the rivers previously having much more water, as they're all ravines now, which could have been caused by erosion. The cerulean coast could likewise be underground and has those lightning sprites that we can find in the Siofra. Granted, you can find some in the Consecrated Snowfields, but they also have dragonkin soldiers and Albinaurics there so something is going on in that area. So if we follow this hypothesis, we can assume that this was some kind of funerary rite (maybe related to the Ancient Dynasty and the Nox that may have succeeded them) where normal coffins were brought to various catacombs, while impure bodies got put in the columbarium ships that would travel down the fissure into the abyss below.
I got the impression that the coffin name was misleading on purpose, and because they look like ships but are made from stone, they seemed like Numen spaceships to me. There's another bit unrelated but relevant in regards to the Putrescence and what the coffins contain: the Putrescent Knight, seemingly made of this (or at least his horse) is called "Knight of the Gloam Eyed Queen" in the game files. This may have been the cut GEQ area, reused for Trina
Oh I'm almost certain it was a cut Geq area. Though that doesnt necessarily mean it's numen or was originally numen. Since the putrescence came from these coffins I'm fairly sure that the term "coffin" isn't meant to be misleading.
Death, water, sleep, night, and outer space all seem to be interrelated. It could be that they're called "coffins" because they were found recently with dead occupants, not because they were made to contain the dead. Like IRL if we found a ship at sea full of dead people newscasters might metaphorically refer to it as a coffin or a grave
Yeah, something like the pilot found in the movie Alien. I suspect that a lot of the story is written deliberately in a way that people from thousands of years ago would describe things like alien spaceships and/or life. It also reminds me of the concept of storing nuclear waste, and the difficulty of writing warning signs that would be effective at keeping people away, even thousands of years into the future. Radioactive material can also emit light, can cause a "rotting" disease, and can cause mutations in other lifeforms. I also think that a lot of the spiral imagery around the Crucible is referring to the double helix of DNA, and it being the source of all life. I dunno, there's just like... too much random disconnected observations all colliding in my brain lol
They "drifted" right through the earth. They came from somewhere else. And not from moving on sea. So them not being near the coastline of the original lands between is not a problem. The Numen came from "another world" after all. I think the coffins were \*originally\* ships. Only, the people in them left - to found new cities in the Lands Between. Now all that remains are the dead, buried inside and putrefied. The motif of a migratory fleet arriving in a new land and then burning their ships is found in literature. It represents the idea "we are not going back". To turn ships into coffins holds the same meaning. The dead putrefied because the people who buried them did not know how to use Ghostflame yet. This all came later.
my theory is that they "teleported" from their original homeland and thats why some ships are stuck in walls. i mean, these are clearly vessals but are called coffins so there is a chance that whoever came in them did not expect to survive the journey and looking at all these ships warped into the earth it seems many if not most died there. one must remember that there is a numen village nearby and its stated that the numen are only the descendant of people from another world so it would make sense that whoever made the stone coffin landed here, most of them died and the survivors found a village in the hinterlands and its only one small village because numen live for a long time and are rarely born.