There’s no shortage of incredible stories in Elden Ring. Its world is so huge and its lore is so deep that interesting tales are snuggly hidden in every corner of this game. All it takes for players is to keep their eyes and ears open, and they will definitely find something unique. It can be anything—a side quest or just a person looking for a friend.
And sometimes unusual things happen to these people in Elden Ring. They may perish, or they might just vanish without explanation. This is where those hardcore fans come in; they would collect all the clues and come up with theories of what might have happened to them. One such fan has an interesting theory about the death of NPC Thops.
What killed Thops in the Elden Ring?
The first massive hurdle fans would come across in Elden Ring is none other than Godrick the Grafted. He is a very hard boss and somewhat tricky to defeat. But once players do so, their prize is something mind-blowing. Once he is defeated, the map of Elden Ring just blows up, and a new area opens up that players are free to explore at will.
At the start of this new area, players would notice a church. In that church sits sorcerer Thops. He is a young go-getter who was once a student at the Academy of Raya Lucaria. But due to his natural talents for sorcery, he was considered a “bluntstone.” Even though people never thought any better of him, he still looked up to Sorceress Sellen.
When the Elden Ring was shattered, he was out of the academy. And during that event, the Academy decided that it did not want to deal with the ongoing conflicts that had started due to the shattering. That’s why they sealed their doors with a magic seal. As a result of this, Thops was unable to go back to the academy.
And that’s why he sits in the Church of Irith in Liurnia of the Lakes. He is the one who asks players to look for the Academy Glintstone Key that can open those seals for the academy, allowing players to enter it. Eventually, players find a second key that can be given to Thops, and he would then return to his precious academy too.
But once there, he passes away on a desk, probably while he is hard at work on a new sorcery. Players find his body and are left to wonder what killed him. It appears a Redditor by the name of NMRreads has an interesting answer.
Players find the second key in the academy itself, in the body of an unusual person. A person who appears to be sneaking around the academy and supposedly just dropped dead out of nowhere. NMRreads suggests this happened because he was carrying a key for the academy that was not paired with him.
And the same fate befell Thops, as he was also using a key that belonged to someone else. Once again, players decided to help someone and ended up killing that poor soul instead. Let’s hope Thops is a bit more cheerful where he went because he was a bit mopey in life.
He leaves a very interesting surprise behind, though
When players find him dead, they find an unusual, never-before-seen sorcery on him. Something of his own invention. It’s called Thops’ Barrier, a sorcery that deflects other sorceries. This is special because he made it himself and would probably start a new branch of sorceries going forward.
One common thought among fans is that maybe he was killed because he found this sorcery. This kind of sorcery only existed in secrecy, and maybe the academy never wanted it to be a tool for the commoners. As with every FromSoftware game out there, stories about these mysteries are plentiful; the more one digs, the more they uncover.
