Elden Ring’s story is a bit complicated. When one starts playing this massive game, they will find themselves wandering the Lands Between without any understanding of the way most things are happening. There’s nothing surprising here; most FromSoftware games do this. Besides being hard to follow, the story of the Elden Ring is also pretty convoluted.
From the very first teaser of this game, everyone has been talking about that broken Elden Ring. It had been “shattered by someone or something.” It was Queen Marika who broke the ring, but some say that the Greater Will tried its best to stop her outburst and even gave her the whole other side.
Would Shadow of the Erdtree prove the theory about Radagon and Marika?
For those familiar with the gist of what goes around in Elden Ring, it would be clear who Marika and Radagon are. For those unaware, Marika was the one who ruled the world of Elden Ring, which is called the Lands Between. She was given that throne by none other than greater will. The Greater Will is basically a great celestial entity that rules one and all. It created the world; it created gods like Marika; and it created the Elden Ring.
The Elden Ring then made Marika a Numen Empyrean, the ruler of the Lands Between. In this chain of command, the Greater Will remained the most powerful entity of them all. Merika eventually established her rule by creating the Golden Order. It is a religious group that basically prayed Marika, Elden Ring, and the Erdtree. She eventually married a demigod called Radagon; he was already married to Queen Rennala. Before her marriage to Radagon, she had three sons, including Godwyn; after marriage, she had two, Malenia and Miquella, both of whom were empyreans.
An empyrean is someone who is capable of becoming a god and becoming the vessel for the Elden Ring. As all this happened, the night of black knives came, and black knife assassins killed Godwyn. And Marika loved Godwyn so much that she went haywire and destroyed the Elden Ring.
This is where the theory comes in; a fan called skyscorcher suggests that Radagon was actually created by the greater will to control Marika. He hardly succeeded, though; she broke the Elden Ring anyway. What does “created” mean, though, one might ask? Well, after he married the queen, a sculptor was commissioned to create a statue of Radagon. He found a very interesting secret; it turned out that Queen Marika and Radagon were both the same people. This means that Greater will just create an alter ego.
That’s why, after the shattering, he took the same hammer used to break the ring and started using it to repair the shattered ring. This just goes to show that the greater will might have a lot of power, but it does not have control over everything it sees. Fans are hoping that the upcoming DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, actually builds upon this theory.
What about their other children, though?
Besides Godwyn, they had a bunch of other children too. Radahn, Ranni, Rykard, Miquella, and Malenia. The moment Elden Ring was shattered, they went out and started an all-out war. Some of them wanted to rule the lands between while others were just looking for order. The rightful ruler, Miquella, has vanished, and things have taken a turn for the worse.
Besides proving the pre-established theories, fans are also hoping that Shadow of the Erdtree will also give some conclusion to the stories of these characters. It would be a shame if all these conflicts remained unresolved in such a huge DLC.
