The single event that frames the entire game is the Shattering. When you begin as a Tarnished, the golden order is already in ruins, the demigods already scattered, and the Erdtree already closed to you. To understand why, you have to look back to the moment Queen Marika the Eternal raised her hand against the very thing she was sworn to protect. Where our bosses guide covers how each demigod plays as a fight, this piece is about their motives and relationships — the human (and inhuman) reasons the war happened.
The Golden Order Before the Fall
For an age, the Lands Between were ruled by the Erdtree and the Golden Order, an arrangement of laws and beliefs centred on the Elden Ring — a constellation of runes that defined the very rules of the world. Marika was the Eternal, the vessel and god-queen through whom the Greater Will, a distant outer god, exerted its rule. Death itself had been rewritten: the rune of Destined Death was sealed away inside the Black Blade carried by Maliketh, so that the people of the Lands Between could not truly, permanently die.
Marika Breaks the Ring
The Shattering began with an act of profound rebellion: Marika shattered the Elden Ring with her own hands. The reasons are deliberately left for the player to assemble, but the fragments point to a god turning against her masters — grief over the murder of her son Godwyn, whose soul was slain by an unsealed shard of Destined Death, and a refusal to keep serving an order that demanded such losses. For this defiance, the Greater Will imprisoned Marika within the Erdtree, bound inside the very symbol of the order she had broken.
With the Ring broken, its power scattered into Great Runes. Each of the demigods claimed a shard, and with it the strength to make a bid for dominion.
The War of the Demigods
The Shattering War was a conflict between siblings, each holding a piece of a broken god. None could win outright, and the fighting hollowed out the Lands Between. What follows is each demigod's motive — the why behind the war:
- General Radahn fought to hold back the stars themselves, gripping fate in place through sheer strength — until the Scarlet Rot he contracted dueling Malenia reduced him to a feral shadow of the hero he had been.
- Malenia and Miquella, the twin Empyreans, pursued designs apart from the war — Miquella seeking a gentler order, Malenia bearing the rot that would slowly consume her.
- Rykard turned to blasphemy, letting a great serpent devour him in his hunger for a way to overthrow the gods entirely.
- Morgott, shunned for the omen horns he was born with, stayed loyal to the capital and the Erdtree long after his siblings abandoned it.
- Mohg coveted his brother Miquella and built a bloody dynasty in the depths, guided by an outer god of blood.
- Godrick, weakest of the line, fled to Stormveil and grafted the bodies of the dead onto himself to feign the power his bloodline had lost.
Where the Tarnished Comes In
You arrive long after the war has stalled. The Tarnished are exiles, once stripped of the Erdtree's grace and now called back by a flickering guidance as the demigods exhaust themselves. Your task is to gather the Great Runes, mend the Elden Ring, and decide what order — if any — should replace the one Marika broke. The game's multiple endings are, in essence, your answer to the question the Shattering asked: now that the old world lies in pieces, what should be built from them? That question, more than any boss, is the real heart of Elden Ring.
