In Search of a Distant Light

Citation

Stein, Eric. “In Search of a Distant Light: Metaphysical Speculation and the Horror of Decision in Elden Ring and Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.” Canadian Game Studies Association Annual Conference, TAG Lab, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, and Online, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15653329.

Mirrors: Academia, KCWorks, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Zotero

Abstract

In Elden Ring, the Shabriri Grape¹ serves as a focal point for the metaphysical speculation that has become distinctive of the studio’s oeuvre under the tenure of game director and now company president Hidetaka Miyazaki. As the player-character blindly pulls on the threads of Queen Marika’s Golden Order, woven as they are throughout the Lands Between, they find themselves inducted into a metaphysical investigation. Elden Ring toys with questions of ontology and subjectivity that challenge the idealist branch of the Western philosophical canon, and in so doing introduces a ludic torsion that requires its players to come to terms with notions of the real and its organization that go back to the beginning of recorded critical inquiry. Elden Ring, redoubling the stylistics of its forebears, is distinctly hermetic in its narrative construction, and consequently it requires of its players a hermeneutic sensibility, a willingness to engage in the interpretation of the textual traces scattered throughout its gameworld, traces such as those which accompany the Shabriri Grape. To follow the guidance of this “yellowing, oozing eyeball,” to set off in pursuit of the “distant light” it reveals, the player-character must go to the limits of their knowledge, indeed to the very limit of knowledge as such, to the original scission or abyss from which the world of Elden Ring was born.

Keywords: Game Studies, Metaphysics, Ontology, François Laruelle, Gilbert Simondon, Presocratic Philosophy, FromSoftware, Elden Ring

The Frenzied Flame

Early in Elden Ring, in the southern region of the Lands Between, the Weeping Peninsula, the player-character meets a young woman, Irina of Castle Morne, wearing a bloodstained dress and a blindfold. She tells the player-character that she wears the blindfold because her “eyesight’s been weak since birth,” that her “good father secreted [her] out the castle” in the midst of a servants’ revolt, and that her companions were slain on the road.² Now, she finds herself helpless and alone and asks the player-character to take a letter to her father, Edgar, the commander of the castle, to beg him to come to her, to save his life and leave behind his duty and his honour. The quest ultimately ends in tragedy. Upon returning to Irina with Edgar, the player-character finds her slain. Edgar blames himself for choosing “duty over [his] daughter’s safety” and swears a vow of revenge.³ The next time he and the player-character meet he has “gone perfectly mad,” overcome with something called the “frenzied flame.” His love, his hate, his purpose—the frenzied flame “melts it all away.”⁴ Upon his death he drops his weapon, some runes, and some consumables, but most importantly, he drops a single Shabriri Grape. This woeful tale and its pustulent artifact are the first hints of a metaphysics that cannot be explained by Order.

For now, the player-character continues to follow the “guidance of grace,”⁵ which leads them eventually to Castle Stormveil and the game’s first shardbearer boss, Godrick the Grafted.⁶ Defeating Godrick will open the way to the Roundtable Hold, and within it, the great doors behind which are found the chamber of the Two Fingers. These monstrous, decaying digits serve as “envoys to the Greater Will,” communicating in a “language of light” to this god beyond the stars.⁷ Opinions about the Fingers are mixed. While many continue to serve them and the Greater Will, with the Elden Ring shattered, new gods vie for power in the realm, seeking to reshape or overthrow entirely the gilded order of the Greater Will.

After Castle Stormveil, the player-character enters Liurnia of the Lakes, wherein they come upon another young woman, suspiciously familiar to the one so recently slain. She has the same voice, the same hair, the same face; she wears the same blindfold and bloodstained dress; but this woman goes by the name Hyetta. She tells the player-character that she is “journeying in search of the distant light” and asks for any Shabriri Grapes that the player-character might have.⁸ Her “eyesight has been weak since birth,” she says, but when she eats a Shabriri Grape she can “feel a distant light in the back of [her] eyes,” a light that will lead her to her “true duty, as a Finger Maiden.”⁹ What neither she nor the player-character yet knows is that the Fingers to which she is being drawn are not the two of the Roundtable Hold.

The player-character must give her three Shabriri Grapes at three different locations throughout Liurnia. After eating the third of these, Hyetta wonders what they might be: “Delectably tender and sweet, yet searing… What sight they must behold.”¹⁰ The player-character tells her that in fact they are human eyes. Hyetta, horrified, gags at the thought, but after a moment gathers herself, and tells the player-character that she has “gleaned something very important”:

The reason why it was eyes I had to eat. The distant light is far and frail. So faint it can’t be seen by the naked eye. But with everyone’s eyes together, it appears. Finally, it all makes sense. I am certain now, I will become a finger maiden.¹¹

Only with the offering of vision can the blind woman see; only from beholding the suffering of the world can an eye begin to see beyond it. From here, Hyetta is strengthened in her purpose. Her next request is for Fingerprint Grapes, grapes “which only grow on those who’ve been clasped by the burnt Fingers.”¹² It is the vision that the Fingerprint Grape affords that leads her to her final destination.

Below Leyndell, the capital of the Lands Between, are found the Subterranean Shunning-Grounds, and further below, the Cathedral of the Forsaken, and yet further below, the Frenzied Flame Proscription. Here, the player-character is confronted with a wall of flesh marked with fire, and Hyetta, awaiting them. “I’ll be a Maiden,” she says, and “you… surely, a Lord. Go to the door ahead, divesting yourself of your possessions. It will surely open, and the Three Fingers will welcome you. May the flame of chaos find purchase within you.”¹³ Not two Fingers, but three. Entering the chamber, the player-character is confronted with a shocking revelation, so obvious in hindsight, but stunning nevertheless—the Order of the Two Fingers was never all there was, could never have been complete, severed as they were from a larger whole. The Three Fingers await, inviting the player-character into their fiery grasp, to be marked with their fingerprints as the Lord of Frenzied Flame. Hyetta asks the player-character, her new Lord, to “rest [their] hand upon [her],” to sear her flesh and melt her eyes and in so doing make her the player-character’s Maiden.¹⁴ Upon doing so, she has the following to say:

Thank... thank you... I have touched them. The words of the Three Fingers. As your maiden, allow me to divine them. “All that there is came from the One Great. Then came fractures, and births, and souls. But the Greater Will made a mistake. Torment, despair, affliction... every sin, every curse. Every one, born of the mistake. And so, what was borrowed must be returned. Melt it all away, with the yellow chaos flame. Until all is One again.” Those who gave me grapes howled without words. Saying they wished they were never born. Become their lord. Take their torment, despair. Their affliction. Every sin, every curse. And melt it all away. As the Lord of Chaos. No more fractures... no more birth...¹⁵

Unless the power of another divine being is secured, this is precisely what the player-character does. Proceeding to the end game, the new Lord of Chaos finishes the work that the shattering of the Elden Ring started, overthrowing the old Golden Order and the last vestiges of its power, and finally splitting apart the symbol of the Order, the Erdtree, from within. The whole of the Lands Between are bathed in fire, the sky made molten, and above the splintered trunk of the Erdtree hangs an enormous, seething eye, the vision of the new Lord. All will be One once again.¹⁶

While many characters encountered throughout Elden Ring are motivated by personal stories of revenge, or ambition, or love, the story of the Frenzied Flame situates these strivings against a profoundly metaphysical backdrop. Hyetta’s final monologue recontextualizes the suffering of the world as a consequence of original individuation, of the splitting from which every “one” was born.¹⁷ For the Three Fingers, no Order can hope to set things right—only a restoration of the Oneness that was fractured could do so. Individuation was a mistake, the root of affliction, and so it is individuation that must be melted away. It is a bleak vision. And yet, far from being some nihilistic storytelling trick, this vision is doing important philosophical work, work that FromSoftware has been undertaking since at least Demon’s Souls in 2009.

A Philosophical Project

In Demon’s Souls, the terms of this philosophical project are explicitly articulated in the game’s opening cutscene, laying the groundwork for the critical exploration that Elden Ring continues over a decade later:

On the first day man was granted a soul, and with it, clarity. On the second day upon Earth was planted an irrevocable poison. A soul-devouring demon.¹⁸

While the diction and accompanying imagery invoke all the usual trappings of high fantasy, these short phrases do much more, inaugurating a metaphysical framework that will provide all the games that follow with their motivating contexts. With the soul comes reason, but with reason comes the necessary possibility of its extinction. In Demon’s Souls, this extinction is made manifest in a “colorless Deep Fog” that envelops the kingdom of Boletaria, and within which lurks the “Old One”¹⁹; in Dark Souls and its sequels, it is the “dark”²⁰; in Bloodborne, it is the “frenzy” caused by “insight” into the “Eldritch Truth” of the cosmos²¹; in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice it is the “terror” of apparitions²²; and in Elden Ring, of course, it is the madness of the Frenzied Flame.²³ Whether one succumbs to such dissolution or one willingly embraces it, in each of these games the player-character is forced to reckon with the tension between the rational “power of souls” and the irrational power of “chaos,” a reckoning made manifest in the choices that each games’ narrative offers.²⁴ None of these games makes clear which choice is the good or right one, and subsequent games tend to complicate things, remixing and reorienting terms to open new territories of inquiry. But what remains consistent across all of them is a figuration of some primordial reality that has been lost, perhaps forever, or perhaps yet to be recovered. In Elden Ring, this is the “One Great” of which Hyetta speaks, and which the Shabriri Grape illumines.

In the context of Buddhist philosophy, and specifically the thought of Nāgārjuna, the “One Great” can quite easily be read as the “emptiness” of being, the fact that all beings are in themselves nothing and can only be understood as individuals through their “dependent origination.”²⁵ Indeed, Shadow of the Erdtree provides extensive materials for making such an argument. The High Priest Hat of Count Ymir is distinguished by a large hole above the forehead that “represents the Greater Will and its lightless abyss.”²⁶ Ymir’s throne conceals the ladder down to the Finger Ruins of Miyr, wherein the player-character finds the “broken and abandoned” divinity Metyr, the Mother of Fingers, who was “the first shooting star to fall upon the Lands Between,” but who now confronted is revealed to be a tragic monstrosity, a writhing agglomeration of fingers.²⁷ The player-character learns that Metyr was the first child of the Greater Will, and in turn was the “mother of all Two Fingers.”²⁸ When slain, her remembrance can be used either to claim the Staff of the Great Beyond, a twisted staff topped with the lightless abyss of the Greater Will in “microcosm,”²⁹ or the Gazing Finger, a giant club marked with a “tiny wart-like eye [that] gazes vacantly into the beyond.”³⁰ This strange, primordial deity is thus remembered by either a visible void or a sightless eye, mirrored sigils of emptiness. However, while the generative void of the One Great can certainly be positioned in a long tradition of eastern philosophy, the horror of its depiction in Elden Ring is not so easily situated. Instead, this horror is better located in the inversions of western high fantasy tropes that FromSoftware’s games perform, and which, through their philosophical investigations, enact a similar inversion in what we might refer to as the tradition of western high idealism, forcing us to reconsider the primacy of the rational subject in western philosophical thought.³¹ To follow FromSoftware in this line of reasoning, we must make visible an alternative set of thinkers that connects some of the earliest western philosophers, the Presocratics, with the most recent, the radical French philosophers of the twentieth century. From Anaximander and the Pythagoreans to Gilbert Simondon and François Laruelle, we can chart a continuity of philosophy reconceived, a tradition that upends the metaphysical idealism of Plato and his Enlightenment inheritors.

Presocratics

In Anaximander, the One Great is the “boundless.”³² The boundless is the “first principle and element of existing things”; it is not “any of the other so-called elements, but something different from them … which is the source of all the heavens and the worlds in them.”³³ All “existing things” come from the boundless, and these things “die back into” the boundless “according to necessity.”³⁴ The boundless is the “infinite source from which anything which is generated is subtracted.”³⁵ It is “taken not to have an origin, but to be the origin of everything else—to contain everything and steer everything.”³⁶

In a step beyond Anaximander, for the Pythagoreans, the One Great is “number.”³⁷ Numbers “are the elements of all things,” and in turn, “the elements of number are the even and the odd.”³⁸ The “even” is the “unlimited”—cognate of Anaximander’s boundless—and the “odd” is the “limited.”³⁹ Since one, the first number for the Pythagoreans, “is both even and odd,” this means that one is “formed from both even and odd,” and so number as such “is formed from one.”⁴⁰ Since numbers are the elements of all things, this amounts to saying that all things are made of one, made of the one. One is both the number of a single thing and the principle of singularity itself, that which separates and distinguishes the unlimited.

Simondon

If we make a leap across the millennia, we find similar arguments in the writings of some twentieth century French philosophers. Where Anaximander discusses the generation of individuals from the boundless, and the Pythagoreans discuss the enumeration of individuals from the unlimited, Gilbert Simondon argues that “individuation” is a “resolution” that “appears through the division of being into phases,” where being, Simondon’s One Great, is specifically understood as the “pre-individual,” that is, “being in which there is no phase.”⁴¹ The becoming of individuals is a “mode of resolution of an initial incompatibility that is rich in potentials.”⁴² Simondon’s analogue to the boundless or unlimited is the preindividual, conceived as a “supersaturated solution,” a condition of being in “metastable equilibrium” that is

more than unity and more than identity, capable of expressing itself as a wave or as a particle, as matter or energy, because every operation, and every relation within an operation, are an individuation that divides, or dephases, the preindividual being.⁴³

The important distinction here, especially between Anaximander and Simondon, is that wherein Anaximander things “die back into” the boundless, individuals in Simondon do not return to the preindividual. Individuation is the “only ontogenesis,” a “partial and relative resolution” of the “complete being.”⁴⁴ There is an entropic irreversibility at play in Simondon, because becoming is a “resolution of the initial tensions” in preindividual being and “a conservation of these tensions in the form of structure.”⁴⁵ An individual might have its structure destroyed, but this destruction does not return the individual to a preindividual state; rather, the individual is broken up into its individual parts, which are individual in turn. Hyetta’s words should be echoing loudly here: “fractures, and births, and souls.” The question that arises, then, is if this process of individuation was indeed a “mistake,” and if so, if that mistake can be undone? Following a Presocratic metaphysics, we might think such a return possible, the cosmos ever being born from the chaos to which it will inevitably return. But following in a more contemporary metaphysics, we might think instead that preindividual chaos is lost to us, and that to wish for such a reality is to wish not for unity but incomprehensible oblivion.

Laruelle

This is the argument that François Laruelle makes in his Philosophies of Difference, a properly metaphysical argument that presents the Frenzied Flame with a robust theoretical opposition.⁴⁶ Similarly to Simondon, Laruelle’s One Great cannot be recovered:

The One is such that it distinguishes absolutely from itself—in the form of a unilateral duality without reciprocity or reversibility—a domain of reality that we call effectivity containing all the entities.⁴⁷

Like the Pythagoreans, for Laruelle all entities, as individual, come from the One, but this process of individual distinguishment is absolute and irreversible. The terrible work of philosophy is to construct a “syntax” that mirrors the One that has been lost, recreating a preindividual “identity” that can in fact never be recovered.⁴⁸ Such “unitary” thought can never effect the return it desires, can never communicate with the beyond, resulting only in the horrific assemblages of thought that vainly attempt to capture an impossible completeness.⁴⁹

Such is the horror of “decision,” an alternative name that Laruelle gives to philosophy.⁵⁰ But if one stares into this abyss for long enough, one discovers that it is an “abyss of an absolute contingency that can never be partially filled in or closed up.”⁵¹ The irreversible dephasing of the One in individuals “may always receive multiple possible interpretations” and these “interpretations [may] supply the most diverse philosophies,” but these philosophies may never capture again the One by way of decision, because the One can never “choose itself: it is the Undecidable as immediate given,” resolved in the “diversity” or “radical that-ness” of individuated being.⁵² This is the philosophical significance of the multiplicity of Elden Ring’s endings, the multiple possibilities of its closure. To follow Laruelle, we might say:

There is no possible decision as regards this diversity; it is too indifferent to offer any reason for choosing, too absurd and contingent in its existence even to offer a reason for its existence.⁵³

Individuation, as product of the becoming of preindividual chaos, is in itself profoundly unreasonable, the fundamental condition for the “very diversity of decisions” that results in the “radical absurdity” of philosophy as a totalizing project, the radical absurdity of decision and choice as such.⁵⁴ The diversity of individuated being is in fact the very “possibilization that frees choice as possible,” the “essence of choice, of absolutely any choice possible whatsoever without any limitation.”⁵⁵

Conclusion

Herein lies the irony of the Frenzied Flame ending of Elden Ring, and the outcome of the present philosophical investigation: to choose the flame of chaos, to choose to melt it all away, is to wield the very possibility of choice to annihilate choice itself, and so to annihilate choice for any and all other choosing beings who might choose otherwise. Certainly, none of these beings chose their own existence—truly every birth, in a way, is a mistake. But the absurdity and contingency of birth is precisely that which frees birth to the possibility of all the choices that follow, a life without guarantee, to be sure, but nevertheless a life. In technical terms, Laruelle refers to this life as “extra-empirical multiplicity,” the “real content” of being in the “uni-laterality” and “irreversibility” of its “unary de-jection” from the One, the immediate and radical multiplication of the “singulare tantum,” the single-as-such, in the diversity of individuals.⁵⁶ The Frenzied Flame denies the “abyss” of this myriad of “unary multiplicities,” denies life itself, demanding one final decision that would annihilate everything.⁵⁷ But it is precisely this abyss of individuation that FromSoftware has asked us to acknowledge, to step into, and therein make a final “indifferent” choice, which is to say, an un-idealizable choice, a choice that refuses to claim any “transcendental necessity.”⁵⁸ In this gesture, FromSoftware reveals the same truth Laruelle articulates, that metaphysics “acquires its true reality from none other than this very absurdity” that it denies.⁵⁹ The Frenzied Flame is the most reactionary of responses to the absurdity of existence, a refusal of the choice for existence, which is the refusal of choice itself. While FromSoftware never explicitly says whether a given ending is good or bad, perhaps this is the point. The point is to choose, because it is the choice, in the end, that matters. The choice is all we have.

References

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Notes