i’ve heard before that when you’re born somewhere, it’s a wager with the place you’re from that you can never really back out of. you’ve gotta come home at some point. I was born in a place in [Southern Limgrave] with a name we used to joke about as children – the weeping peninsula. it always rained. it had this kind of dense smell that you can’t forget. humid, rain soaked summers and pine trees that oozed sap that seemed like it colored the air. that was A Long Time Ago, how long i don’t know. i hear a scream.

A Scream brings me back to focus and my attention bends and snaps like the grass underfoot. another person – no, whatever we are, told me that sometimes it’s going to be like this. you’ll stumble over something small and forgotten and trip. a memory, or a memory of a place. everything here is fucking cursed and at night i hear screaming. in all honesty a part of me has forgotten what [The Weeping Peninsula] really looked like. it’s a blur of childhood and adolescent memories. i left, and that’s what’s important.

before you start picking these up and thinking i did something grand, like i died in some far off battle. i didn’t. i died at the bottom of a bottle and woke up here.

– first day

now it’s not like i had some kind of great urge that took me to force my way south. like we all showed up and got to play the part of confused outsider, i hear some of these others tell me they lose track of the light some of them permanently, and i see it incessantly. if you were to take a hot knife and carve up the inside of my mind, the light would be wherever the blade touched. i can’t get rid of it – it pointed me strongly north out of the mouth of that cave and so i went south.

lucky day for me, i pushed all the way to the southern tip of the world like i was trying to get off of it only to find it again, now urging me south. i’m more than certain if i head far enough east, west, north, there it will be again. i’m told to take my place as the [Elden Lord] like it were my god granted right. i don’t even know how young or old i was when i died, living some kind of life that was meant to really have no ending.

but still the light shines and tells me where to go. i say i crave freedom and i’ll make sure as hell to do it my way, but really the light tells me where to go. like a cruel joke, north or south doesn’t seem to matter, a castle standing in my way .

the merchant seems like a friend for better days, helping me along in exchange for echoes or runes or souls or whatever these things are, something setting me up for a type of greatness i never got to know in life. the charm of the weeping peninsula, Limgrave, it vanishes soon after i set foot in borders that belong to whoever. roaming packs of soldiers “piece back their lives” if i don’t take them from them first. i know somewhere deep in my chest that it will always be like this, soldiers wearing the banner of whoever fucked this all up in the first place like if they could bring them back and give them a second chance at it, it might turn out different.

i don’t get the first merchant’s name nor the second, but the voice feels welcoming all the same.

– third day

she’s got a voice like a siren, matching the light coming off of these little flickering flames they call grace. one more thing it seems like most of us have come back to Limgrave only to find in death. all of that talk of the sweet purchase or release or whatever, marching through the rain and revisiting the old haunts: she gave me something worth having. i don’t care who else has [Torrent] no, i don’t care if the times i can’t call him to my side are because he’s being championed by someone else. the steps and steppes of Limgrave fall underfoot to both of us, the swamps seem to not hold him back. the light can push me to being the elden lord as much as it wants. before long, i know i can know every inch of this place before long. fearful into the unknown, let’s ride into the horror and misery.

– fourth day

the sword is the weapon of a lord. the mace, the pike, with this knife i am a Jack, i will not go anywhere without it.

– seventh day

my body hurts but the hurt is a calm wave washing over me. there’s a gap in memory as wide as a canyon between when i was last cut down and when i woke up back here, home. the memories of the past stretch far back beyond that, but even they have a certain kind of dull edge to them. at times, i wonder openly if the Limgrave of my past is rooted only in my imagination.

a day or so ago I met a woman on a southern road. i find it’s best to avoid the roads, so choked with soldiers living out their final days over and over again. no doubt dressed in the colors and armor of some lord i do not remember: I remember being a kid on a farm and shipping off somewhere afterwards to be a rank-and-file swordsman. In any case, Torrent is all too happy to oblige my wanderings. This woman I met beckons me south to find her Father or someone of some important to her. I didn’t listen for the sake of her cause: what’s another noblewoman sat on the side of the country to me? in times passed, she would have happily ridden passed any beggar or urchin begging for assistance on the side of the road. something in me knows better than to trust the words of a voice so even-tempered and gentle. i looked at her with the caution i look at everyone now: it is starkly easy to see how these still-living soldiers have gotten caught up in the fantasy and paranoia of a Kingdom I do not believe in my heart still exists. so I cut a few down, here and there, as a way of paying them back on my further ride south.

– eight day

fuck fuck fuck. fuck you. fuck. i ride south into the castle passed the giant with the bow and arrow. i take the elevator up and run straight through with both knives tucked in by belt. by the time i get one loose i don’t feel the cleaver bite into my right shoulder. i vomit, like i always do. i fall to the ground and reach and wake up dry heaving back in the armory, glitter and starlight surrounding my body. it hurts and it’s bitter and dull all at the same time. an arrow catches me on the forestep and i vividly remember spinning and looking down to see the arrowhead poking out of my shoulder. it’s not soft meat. i feel the next one break my ribs and force inside my chest. i puke, and tumble down a castle rampart like an asshole.

at least one time i bring to bear to shout my providence. i am jack knife. the gargoyles, the goblins, whatever they are. ridged brows and hair matted down with rainwater and crusted in blood – they do not seemingly give a shit about who i am. two knives carry me forward and i die again. puke and blood. slamming into the ground outside the sign of grace that still points me south like at this point I don’t know where the fuck i’m going. every time it’s like i drop right out of the air and hit the ground from ten feet, dry heaving and feeling my chest or my hips or wherever i’ve been wounded for that cold, that sticky wet feeling that comes after the warm recedes. every time i’m dry.

i rode back north today. just a little bit. the woman and i sat in silence across from each other. my breathing was heavy, and hers was as light as the rain come down. we exchanged not a word, my unbroken vow that I will deliver this letter. i wonder plainly if she even knows i’m here.

– tenth day

i ride and ride and ride and rode until my legs hurt, that dull pain. this undead body. the smells of the weeping peninsula gave way to this cursed marsh and i found what i was looking for. i never knew it. like some of the tarnished that i have heard of, the world echoed with a dimmed sound of a bell ringing and my senses blurring. he got the drop on me so quick and I bled like I have never bleed before: all through my whole body. i could see them glittering under the ashen embers. that was all from my body, and then I saw it, I saw it, I saw it. the runes in my blood, calling out for me to find even more grace. i can see them now.

his dead fingers curled tightly around the [Reduvia]. that curled handle imparts a warmth in my palm sometimes i feel greater than that maiden. we settle into a first name basis: i leave my other jack knife in some forgotten canyon or the trunk of some tree. if i had seen a child in the time i have been here i would no doubt say that they would be the ones to find it earlier: setting them on a road not unlike mine. playing in the woods in fantasy imparts…desires.

it is so very warm. it must have been pried from some sort of creature. the first day around the swamp i swear i spend my time carving up everything i can, pushing my hands into them and pulling out everything i can to find some sort of match, some sister or brother bone somewhere in the natural world. i do not understand the Reduvia but it speaks a language i can get behind. i shout from the top of the cliff: i am the jack knife.

– eleventh day.

you have to see the runes in the blood. doubling over in the grass from my most recent death. you have to be able to see when you don’t have them.

---

 

I THINK

people aren’t gonna forget about Elden Ring for a long time, in an era where most triple aaa, big top Videogames (the ones with the big V in front) are are bent and broken and just purely made to be Huge, in an almost undeserved way where the experience of something happening to the player, to me, with a controller or a mouse and keyboard in hand, is almost taken to mean the paranoid checking off of items on a list. Collectibles, points of interest: god, it’s fucking true, we’ve done it, we’ve successfully gamified videogames. Here I am, after the first fifty hours wandering around the hallowed halls of Limgrave proper and I haven’t once thought about where I need to go. I am confident, as if by some dumb stroke of luck, I will end up there.

It’s given me time to do that great thing we do with all videogames since childhood. My reckless avatar, my smashed and bludgeoned and drained simulacra of not yet visible enough but at the same time all too there viscera and sinew has taken on a life of their own, apart from me. I don’t know if it was on a particular hilltop, or after saving grace with one fraught encounter where I needed time to just stroll through the woods and breathe, a relaxed hand guiding my digital self through a moment of respite so I could get back to IT.

and that’s just the first few hours: Jack Knife took on their own life, personality and aspirations. The Role Playing Game finally came home, just in a world free from the systems and spreadsheets and objectives that might steer them in one direction. I hope, through the next year, we might learn something about videogames through our protagonist, Jack the Knife, or whatever they end up calling themselves after I finish binging Go Nagai anime (in truth, it’s a much deeper calling) and maybe, just maybe, learn a little about ourselves.

---

TWELVE DAYS

Twelve days and I somewhere lost track. Torrent takes me to the north – stormveil castle rises on the horizon. I know the way, when I was still young enough to really hold onto a sword my feet carried me up that path and back again with a kind of eagerness to serve that was bled somewhere from my body.
I use the longer rides to organize the way I feel. When the sky tips over dark, the burning embers light the way. I miss clear skies, but it’s as good a marker as any that the day-to-day matters. I ride again passed soldiers carrying out long-dead duties for long-dead lords, or those screaming and locked in a chamber somewhere.

I’m the Jack but on these long rides I pass through country I remember. Torrent sets me at the foot of [Stormveil Castle]. Margit is the first of many in my way, I wager. If I put him and all of this castle to rest, can that be it? I think I’ve found the root of the reason these soldiers stick around: so does their lord, [Godrick] the Grafted. Godrick has a reputation serving him unto a type of involuntary celibacy and whatever kind of oblique suffering old men fall upon. I will die first.

day thirteen

Last I remember, it was waking up here. That’s the last sleep I had: since then if I want to rest I spend my time staring into the ember of grace that lights my way. I have been transfixed by this sorcery but something about the hall outside of Stormveil castle made me desire real rest.
Under a snow of ash and soot that rains from great trees and paints the sky, I closed my eyes and looked for rest. The sky twists, above me I see those great branches reach down as if fingers that try to pry up parts of the ground itself. A great splitting noise, a paranoid sleep.

I see swords and bodies and blood, flashes of life that can’t be mine. Maybe, I wonder: I could be seeing through the eyes of other tarnished touched by grace, but they point towards me. Looking and craving. The sleep that comes to me is so much less than what I get staring into those small, sleeping dreams of the past. I hate it. I wake out of a completely different kind of trance. My body feels like it’s covered in an inch of grime – the blood pooling on the cobblestone stays warm and slick like the world itself refuses to accept the soldiers I killed for dead. I will look into the grace, and a fresh battalion will greet me first thing in the morning.

I’m always hungry and there’s always a feast. Hello, world.

day fourteen 

I keep this log to keep track of days. I keep this log to keep track of all of the various ways I feel a flash of pain and come back to the world. Margit tells me everything I need to know through a chorus of bullshit I don’t care about. Tarnished tarnished tarnished, lords lords lords. His own grace pushes him towards me, and he still feels like he needs an excuse.

I don’t. No matter how many times it takes. I’ll get back up. He might need an excuse, but I have to kill him. I can do nothing else until I do. If I don’t do it alone, how will he feel about three of us?

day fifteen

These great figures offer me no satisfaction. When they die, they never bleed, they never sit and breathe their last breath and let me drive my knife deeper into their heart or belly. I never feel the bones snap and crunch. Vanish into the ether, Margit, you coward, and know that if by some circumstance we ever cross paths again not even your status as tarnished will keep me from killing you. If you were to leave a message for others, tell them there is only a future full of blood. My allies left me in the wind – take heart, I know you are out there Willow and IncelSmasher. It was no trick of luck we made it through this. Whatever strange world you come from, if it’s a mirror reflection of mine I hope we can cross swords on opposite sides in the future. Now, there is only time for me to stare into that ever-loving grace and feel for once, warmth.

I see Stormveil’s outer wall on the horizon. Always building walls within walls, but I persist or die. Nothing can keep me out.

day eighteen

FUck these birds!! fuck!! FUCK

day nineteen 

Every proclamation I make a greatness sends me a reminder to be humble. So Stormveil castle will have to wait, and I can forgo grace’s light to make my own path for now. I know something sleeps in that castle hold and sooner or later I can have some kind of revenge on it, but now I’ll travel far more north than I ever remember. Unfamiliar stone under my feet. How much of this world have you seen before, Torrent? Every person I meet has the same aura of pity that I see over myself in the reflections of pools of water. I crave warmth and comfort, and nothing gives it. Maybe I will finally head for this [Roundtable Hold]

FIRST BOSS

---

I don’t really remember where I was at when I first beat Godrick in Elden Ring. I know it took me quite a few attempts to make it through Stormveil Castle itself. It’s sort of impossible to talk about the S***’s series without invoking the specter of Difficulty, that fantastic phantom that inspires everything from thinkpieces to near incessant memes asking you, me, and everyone on planet earth to “*** ***” a phrase I’ve done my good will to have completely erased from the surface level of my cerebral tissue.

Elden Ring’s encounter design is one like all of these games of near societal pressure: we’ve constructed an identity of passing through challenging videogames in our head that is still beholden to almost lowest-common-denominator voices, no matter how the developers reach through the TV and Monitor to set their fingers through the holes in your face and tell you exactly how to play them.
That’s videogames, right? The good ones we expect some measure of teaching us something, if not how to play them.

It took me near a dozen tries to beat Margit, the boss who shows up when you google “elden ring first boss” most often, despite the fact that I fought an imprisoned blade dancer, a spirit of fire, a giant tree, a bear and a boar and even a dragon before I ever crossed the golden spirit gate onto that fucking bridge! I thought I knew what was up conquering near half of them on the way: here I am a lowly dickhead with two knives in head who’s telling a story in their head and not at all prepared for the game telling me actually I haven’t learned a single god damned thing so far.

See I’ll say, here, proudly, as if I know what I’m talking about: Margit has a bunch of tricks up his sleeve to see if you’ve really been paying attention. Jumps that create space, surprise ripostes and secondary attacks. A second boss phase intense and direct but in a way these games usually save till the last half or the back quarter. Margit is there to tell you loudly (and brutally) that Miyazaki and his friends of developer teammates are onto the panic rolls, status adjustments and co op partners that people usually use to get through these big tough first encounters. Like the baleful eye of the developer opening up just to say “I see you.” carried across the wind.

But that’s it, right? If you can’t beat Margit you don’t deserve the crown, the title, the experience. When someone says “*** ***” that’s what we’re really saying: these doors are closed to you but not to me. I beat Margit the first time with a co-op partner, and still felt the surge of victory. I beat Margit the second time with a rain and river of blood from my blade or is it my body? Reduvia carried me to the finish on every subsequent co-op partnering against him. What is a sword against Magic? Conan the Barbarian can scowl in my direction all he wants: I’m smart enough to use sorcery to get what I want.

Is that valid? the game might never tell you it is, and there’s the challenge. Usually I approach these games in the middleground, a shield, a sword, just enough points in acrobatics or dex to make sure I get the good roll I need to stay out of the way. Margit is the “first boss” but also the gate where the game says: maybe it’s not time to plan around the bosses, but plan through them. I see sorcerors on high and I wish I could tell all of the people turned off from these games that there might not be an easy mode, but you’re meant to see it through the end too if you’re willing to play the same game they made. There is no fault or lie in simply crushing an opponent under magic, trickery or steel.

I don’t hope for easy modes in videogames, I hope everyone gets to be as conniving and murderous as they want in these worlds post good and evil as they deserve.

(elden will be published this year on deep-hell.com, and deleted january 1st 2023, entries happen weekly)