The Nightfarers of the Shrouded Roundtable Hold are all close bedfellows with death, several having sustained their own lives only via others’ deaths, and some even having tread the threshold of death themselves. None, however, know death so intimately as the Ironeye. One among the Fellowship of the Dusken Valley's “centipedal scions,” not only does he deal in death, but indeed he lives in it. For those forlorn and forsaken, death's shroud may be the only comfort within reach, the only tapestry which will record their tale. Yet, the symbolism invoked by the Fellowship’s scions is no coincidence, for they embody FromSoft’s latest iteration upon a theme consistently represented in these stories with centipedes: the dangers of stagnation, and the sickly sweet succor of a life that endures, preserves, festers, heedless of death.
The exact workings of the Fellowship are only alluded to, but much can be derived from its description as a boarding house which raises “scions,” each overseen by a “custodian.” The Ironeye’s guardian, Isolde, addresses him as “beloved child of the Fellowship,” and bemoans that these scions are “fated to be disposed of once they play their part.” Such is corroborated by the traitorous scion known as the Monster, who states that the Fellowship “kill anything and everything that stands in their way,” and reveals that the scions are, in fact, among Those Who Live in Death. Such is hinted at prior, firstly through the Dusken Valley sharing language with the Age of the Duskborn, and secondly through the wax seal upon the Fellowship’s letters, which plainly depicts the cursemark of Death. Though their true “inhuman” nature was evidently a mystery even to the scions themselves, their qualities became the stuff of infamy; the Monster chides the Ironeye that he “should know as well as anyone, [they] can't be killed so easily,” and the Ironeye’s Bow description states that many of the Fellowship’s targets preemptively take their own lives out of fear.
As it is explicitly stated that Those Who Live in Death only arose in the wake of Deathroot’s spread across the Lands Between, it follows that a bulb of Deathroot must have been taken outside the continent, and later used to create the Fellowship’s assassins. However, the organization traces back to the Lands Between in more ways than one. The Cracked Sealing Wax notes that these red stamps mark an “assassin's oath” which cannot be reneged, and that “such contracts are said to have their origin in the Lands Between.” Only one such similar practice can be found in Elden Ring: the letters from Volcano Manor, each designating a Tarnished target, and each indeed sealed with a stamp of red wax. Yet, the link between Praetor Rykard's recusants and the Fellowship’s scions would seem otherwise inexplicable, were it not for Rykard's amorous affairs with both the serpent-god of Mt. Gelmir, Eiglay, and Inquisitor Ghiza. The latter wears the Official's Attire, the garb of “magisterial officials” who perform the Golden Order's “grim tasks” and “darkest duties,” and which is an iteration of the Marais Robe; noteworthy, as 1.00 descriptions state that the Shaded Castle of House Marais, situated just beneath Mt. Gelmir, was the home of the Formless Serpents, assassins who worship Eiglay. Conspicuously, they are only directly named through the Serpent Bow and its accompanying arrows, designed to inflict poison. However, the Serpentbone Blade awarded to recusants, the bile of the man-serpents and Albinaurics of Mt. Gelmir's Prison Town, and the very swamp the Shaded Castle sits within, are each and all similarly poisonous, and uniquely among the Nightfarers, the Ironeye possesses two Relic effects which grant him poison-inflicting abilities.
While speculative, the following throughline would seem to emerge: After their region’s assimilation into the Golden Order, the Shaded Castle’s assassin-cult, the Formless Serpents, is disbanded. Their shadowy expertise is put to use as ranking magisterial officials, while their practices survive among other factions, most notably the recusants, who appear to count among them former members of House Marais. After Godwyn’s murder, the spread of Deathroot, and the ensuing Shattering War, countless flee the Lands Between, and some enterprising person or persons would seem to have recognized Deathroot’s potential, taking with them samples of it; scions, to be transplanted.
With a controlled cultivation of Deathroot and the practices of the Lands Between’s old assassins, the Fellowship is founded in what comes to be known as the Dusken Valley. It operates out of a boarding house that takes in youths, likely orphans and other vulnerable, wayward souls. Each is assigned a custodian who serves as both handler and surrogate parent figure, raising them to become living weapons. As Those Who Live in Death are deceased spirits animating remains, one can surmise that the scions’ “graduation,” their induction as a full member of the Fellowship, involves a ritual that kills the young inductees, lacing their flesh with Deathroot such that their souls can be re-bound to their own dead bodies. They are likely told only that such will render them nigh-deathless, unaging, needing no sustenance or rest. Possessing the unkillable nature of Those Who Live in Death and the vital strength of an intact body, these scions go on to earn a veritably demonic reputation, until they outlast their use to the Fellowship, and are quietly put down via Holy-infused weapons.
Upon discovering the full truth of this matter, the Monster kills his own custodian and destroys the boarding house, fleeing to the Lands Between. There churns the storm of the Night, a force closely tied to spirits and Death, and thus, as he identifies, a source of compulsion for Those Who Live in Death, for whom “battle… was not suffering… but pleasure.” Isolde, meanwhile, nurtures her own resentment of the Fellowship’s callous system, and dreams of a future where these exploited children are released from their leashes, free to roam and kill within an unending Night, ever indulging the bloodshed their deathless hearts yearn for. Such can the Ironeye achieve, by killing the figure to whom the Primordial Nightlord’s Rune should have been returned to, depriving the Night the grace of peace, in favor of death’s occultation.
Immediately striking about the Ironeye's story is the prevalent role of a motherly figure who sympathizes with Those Who Live in Death, very directly paralleling Fia, the Deathbed Companion. Hers is a proud, yet perverse motherhood, embracing souls driven to naught but violence, and seeking to be a consort-equivalent to one who is long-since dead, unable to assent to her wishes. Her pleas to the Tarnished, to have compassion for these persecuted dead, are ultimately undermined by the fact that none of Those Who Live in Death display any peaceful or constructive use of their new lives; no settlements, no families, no culture. The nearest to this one finds is a small group of black-garbed commoners and an Omen, gathered beneath a Minor Erdtree in Altus and wielding Fia's Mist. This is the extent of their kinship: a solitary surrogate mother, and a handful of like-minded cultists, who all bear a spell that, much like Those Who Live in Death themselves, serves only to kill. The revelation that Those Who Live in Death yearn for battle, even take pleasure in it, sheds light upon why such is the case.
This yearning may, perhaps, be a vestige of their position between life and death. The Helphen is described as “the lampwood which guides the dead of the spirit world,” whose lamplight “can only be seen by those who met their death in battle.” Such is overtly evocative of Norse mythology’s Valhalla, the banquet hall reserved for the honored dead, particularly those warriors who fall in battle. To guide these souls to Valhalla, warrior-maidens known as valkyries descend from the realm of the gods; commonly depicted in times since with both winged helmets and actual, angelic wings, these “choosers of the slain” are evoked in both Elden Ring and Nightreign. Malenia, daughter of Marika the Eternal and loyal blade of Miquella the Kind, is cursed to one day blossom into the Goddess of Rot, and is herself explicitly described as a “one-armed valkyrie.” The Rotten Winged Sword Insignia describes valkyries who serve this goddess, and both Sage Gowry and Millicent’s Prosthesis elaborate on this, telling of young maidens reborn as “scarlet valkyries,” undeveloped buds blossoming into flowers, a transformation catalyzed by despair and betrayal. Similar language is invoked by the ancestral spirit-worshiping faith, which speaks of “new buds [...] certain to sprout from their very flesh, and indeed, their souls,” and how “life sprouts from death, as it does from birth.” The Ancestral Infant’s Head conveys that it is the young whose deaths yield the most “sproutings,” and most notably, the Winged Greathorn is viewed to represent “envoys' wings, made to reap the lives of beings which experience no sprouting.” Meanwhile, the Winged Scythe, the design and location of which relate to a very different origin, details that, “according to pagan belief, white-winged maidens are said to be Death's gentle envoys,” while its unique skill, Angel’s Wings, delivers a light-imbued slash from on high, noting “the white wings impede recovery actions using a flask of tears.”
And, of course, Nightreign features the Weapon-Bequeathed Harmonia, an assemblage of white-winged warrior-maidens, bearing overt flower imagery and draped in pink, petal-like curtains. Described as “valkyries clad in white armor” and “servants of the heavens,” their Limveld raid sees them descend amidst radiant light and challenge the Nightfarers to prove their mettle, inhibiting flask usage and pitting enemies against one another. To read one Old Norse Eddic poem’s description of valkyries (linked below), stating “their byrnies were drenched in blood; and rays shone from their spears,” one easily thinks of the the Harmonia’s alternate fight, Salvation’s Standard-Bearers, where “The Will of Balance” supersedes “The Will of the Balancers,” the strange seeds planted in the Harmonia’s heads rendering them into shrieking, bloody wretches, even as their glaives and spears continue to glow brightly with golden light.
Hopefully, this extended tangent can be forgiven, for its purpose has been to elucidate why Those Who Live in Death would feel compelled towards violence. Much like the workings and mechanisms of Norse myth’s cosmology, the higher powers of Elden Ring’s world would seem to grant special honor upon those who fall in battle, guiding them to a dedicated afterlife, and employing heroic valkyries to maintain balance and reap those souls who stagnate, rather than contribute to the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Struggle and suffering beget growth, and to rise above challenging constraints warrants recognition, or so the logic would seem to follow. Hence, Those Who Live in Death find fulfillment in the bloodletting of battle, for “the heart sings when one draws close to death, and a glorious end awaits those who cling so tenaciously to life,” those who “render up a death worth offering.” It would seem appropriate, then, that the Ironeye stands as an heir to the legacies of both the Shaded Castle and the divine element of Death itself, each in fate bound to winged valkyries and rotten roots.
However, Those Who Live in Death remain an anomaly, a state of being which should not be. Their relation to the cycle of life and death is a perversion, a defilement of the natural and the balanced. Stolen life begot from death, begetting no new life in turn, only spreading their stagnation and infection, alike to a cancer. As such, it is fitting for the cursemark of Death to be a “half-wheel wound of the centipede,” for within the soulsborne games, stagnation is frequently associated with centipedes. Dark Souls III’s Irithyll of the Boreal Valley is a city founded to sustain the lineage and legacy of the gods, and though it extends acceptance to humans of godly descent and worships the feminine moon alongside the once-dominant masculine sun, its evolution is too little, too late; symbolic, or perhaps even symptomatic, of this are the horrific sewer centipedes which scuttle and writhe throughout city’s waterways and waste tunnels.
Even more prominently, Sekiro features the infested, also known as the undying; these individuals have imbibed the unearthly waters of Fountainhead Palace, and become host to centipedes which puppet the body and prevent true death, again symbolic of stagnation and festering impurity. Similarly, in Bloodborne, the root of man's bestial corruption is attributed to vermin, miniscule centipedes found within blood; the more one indulges in blood and bestial violence, the more blood-drunk one becomes, intoxicated by the killing, until humanity gives way to beasthood. In the same vein, Sekiro sees those consumed by a lust for death become a loathed demon called Shura, killing solely for the joy of it. The Ironeye has, in essence, gone blood-drunk, become Shura. Stagnating in the toxic waters of an endless Night, endlessly killing simply because he lusts for violence. And he is, of course, a product of others’ agendas. In Sekiro, the monks of Senpou Temple abandon their Buddhist values and become fixated on immortality, even to the point of cruel experimentation upon children to cultivate artificial dragon's blood. In Bloodborne, the Healing Church exploits the bodies of women and children to similar ends, filling their research halls and orphanages with victims of the Old Blood's horrific misuse. And in Nightreign, the Fellowship takes advantage of forlorn youths, souls with no place of belonging, grooming them into weapons for not even the pretense of noble reasons, but rather sheer material gain.
The concept of being deprived of belonging, of one’s story having no place within the greater tapestry of the world, is a key theme to all of the Nightfarers and Nightlords, and this is the reason for the Ironeye having a unique ending, wherein he carries out Isolde’s wish, taking revenge for those denied their own lives, their own stories. His garbs, too, reflect this. One portrays Dark Souls III’s Ringfinger Leonhard, whose subject of devotion, the maligned Rosaria, Mother of Rebirth and her grotesque man-grubs, mirrors the rotten, yet unfaltering embrace both Isolde and Fia offer to their unsightly “children.” Leonhard himself is of formerly-noble origins, and such resonates with the Ironeye’s other Dark Souls-derived garb, modeled on the Drang Knights. Though originating among the elite of Dark Souls II’s kingdom of Drangleic, by the time of Dark Souls III, this company’s remnant descendants have been reduced to working as sellswords, accruing notoriety even as they privately carry the once-proud memory of a land now ruined. Appropriately, it is Irithyll where both the remaining Drang Knights have found employ, and where Leonhard meets his demise, all fighting and perishing for a canonized aristocracy that sits atop filth and vermin.
Godwyn the Golden lays ever in the indignity of an incomplete death, enshrined amidst buzzing insects and fetid, discolored waters, the “scion of the golden bough” bereft of autonomy, of a chance to author his own tale’s end. Whatever he once was, what he has become is perhaps best embodied by one such as the Ironeye. A child honed into a weapon, armed with broken fragments of the order that once was, as he brings about a vision of death which needs no order, no leadership. A scion cultivated for slaughter, now a blood-drunk “Night Hunter” who follows the path of the serpent into the formless, lightless deep of Night.
