Discussion Characters / EldenRingSecondaryCharacters

I'll cop that that edit that it was slander towards the Golden Order was a guess RE: the other things pertaining to "blasphemy" or "heresy" and not "slander" specifically. That the crime would just be talking trash about people felt rather bizarre compared to what other things I'd seen, so I made a judgment call. Feel free to snip.

As for what he is, there's no way to know for sure, but it sure LOOKS like the intended twist ending to his story was that he was one of the Merchants all along. The Frenzied Flame didn't exist in the Lands Between before the Merchants invoked it (and the narration is careful to mention that it didn't exist in his eyes originally, so we can assume it had no power in the lands between, thus that he wouldn't have had any either), so he would have had to be buried alive down there with the rest of the merchants to possibly lead them in invoking it in the first place. Granted, his status as a body-hopper makes this dubious, but doesn't actually seem in-line with his particular flavor of so-called "deception". Without making any assumptions, he looks like one of the Great Caravan. The only thing I can say seems especially unlikely is the (in my opinion) bizarre theory that he's the one who originally accused the Great Caravan - discrimination against them in the first place is already seen to be particularly widespread, and the Inquisition wouldn't even *need* a motive to purge them, just a pretext. Essentially, the unreliability of the narrator isn't outright lies, but rather lies by omission: It says that certain parties hold Shabriri to be guilty of things he couldn't have done before the Golden Order faithful had already committed their crime.

Bearing in mind that it looks, given all evidence, that the Inquisition is the party who prosecuted the Great Caravan, it doesn't logically follow that they would then turn about and punish Shabriri for making false accusations against the Caravan if they just demonstrated that they "believed" said accusations by condemning an entire people to a horrific doom (conspicuously without involving Destined Death, another MO shared by Rykard, but that's just conjecture).

I think in this case, without making any assumptions, it's more likely that Shabriri's slander was exactly what you see him doing when you first meet him, and what it's implied he did towards Vyke previous: Brazenly speaking about the Golden Order's worthlessness and the necessity of the Frenzied Flame if you want to call yourself a worthy Lord.

My sense of storytelling would absolutely love it if it turned out to be some sort of Telltale Heart thing where Shabriri was actually one of the murdered men, showing up impossibly again, loudly accusing the Golden Order of the murder they did commit, but for the words to backfire on him as they would be impossible for him to know, after all, being buried alive and locked away, but I admit that's just my personal fancy.

To summarize: The unreliability of the narrator is that the narration on the Howl of Shabriri tells you only that "it is said" that the Frenzied Flame began with Shabriri, and that he's the most reviled man in history. This may well be true, but it's misleading. Later on, the Merchant's Finery explicitly spells out the reality that it was the Great Caravan, together, after being rounded up and purged, unable to even die, that summoned the Frenzied Flame, recontextualizing the Frenzied Flame from an act of motiveless malignance to a cry of despair.

I agree, especially after some of the revelations that appear in Ranni's questline and how they may be linked to the shattering

Wrong place sorry

Another outer god worth mentioning is the one whose emissaries are the Twinned Bird (Twinned Bird shield description) and the Death Rite Birds.

The Twinbird and its outer god of death has already been listed before you pointed it out. But as for the Full Moon... that's a very interesting detail. I will have to research if there are other texts which mentioned that before editing it in.

The Blood Star being an outer god is POSSIBLE, but unlike the ones already listed in this page it was never referred as a “god”. As such, we fundamentally cannot list it as one of the outer gods, all of whom have been evidently worshipped at least once.

As for the primeval currents, they are consistently identified with the stars and the cosmos, and there is no other outer god we know of who is associated with Cosmic Motifs other than the Dark Moon and the Greater Will. And the chance of it being the latter is laughably low given it never guides sorcerers into inventing new magics.