Rauh architecture all around TLB has always felt intentional to me, with arches and pillars acting as structural supports for the land itself, like a cultivated miniature landscape.

It reminds me a lot of penjing, the Chinese predecessor to bonsai. Western audiences usually think of bonsai as just tiny, uniquely shaped trees. The older penjing tradition was often about shaping an entire landscape in miniature: mountains, cliffs, trees, and negative space all carefully arranged into a living world.

When this tradition passed from Chinese monks to Japanese monks, it evolved into bonsai, where the focus became the tree itself.

That makes the Erdtree/Scadutree era feel like a philosophical shift.

Rauh architecture frames the landscape itself as sacred and curated, almost like the world is a giant penjing composition. But the Golden Order narrows that focus onto a single perfect tree. The world stops being the garden and becomes the container for the Erdtree.

Almost like the Lands Between went from penjing to bonsai, both acting as microcosms for much greater cosmic forces.

EDIT: This was an image post showing a bonsai tree compared with the sealing tree and the golden trees in Enir-Ilim but they're just gone now, cool. You can use your imagination. Bonsai is not a type of tree, to be clear. It is a practice of growing and shaping a mini tree, which could be any sort of tree.

Conversations about Dragon Communion describe it as a tool created by Placidusax to be wielded against his nemesis. I'm proposing instead that Dragon Communion is older and did not begin with human practitioners against Bayle. It began with dragons themselves.

Rock Heart: Heart consumed in the ancient, original form of Dragon Communion.

Sharp Gravel Stone: The scale of an ancient dragon that has supped on the blood of lesser dragons.

These suggest that Dragon Communion predates its current use and was a practice inherent to Dragons themselves. The Rock Heart being literally stone reinforces this and also puts Humans on the map much earlier than we may have suspected.

BAYLE THE DREAD

Bayle the Dread is the Chaos to Placidusax's Order. He is an upheaval to Order.

"O Bayle, tyrant drake, do your wounds yet ache?

Is your fury still yet to crest its zenith?

Hurry, hurry, and lay it all to waste!

Lay waste to the proud, the conceited, each, every last one of that arrogant lot."

I posit he is this way because he was the original, extreme practitioner of Ancient Dragon Communion that has undergone some form of Magma Wyrm transformation applied to something greater.

His followers fight each other to gain power, echoing the same Crucible-like philosophy of growth through conflict. His talisman is magma related. Drakes breath reflect what they eat/their environment and Bayle breathes fire and lightning, two elements the Ancient Dragons wield.

ANCIENT DRAGON ORIGINS

To understand what Bayle disrupts, it helps to define what Ancient Dragons are.

Dead Ancient Dragons like Gransax and the one in FA with a Crucible Knight near it are entirely stone, petrified. The latter is falling apart and you can see the inside is also entirely rock.

Live Ancient Dragons are imbued with gold through their wings and can bleed. The difference between life and death, flesh and stone, is the presence or absence of said gold.

Alabaster and Onyx Lords are direct examples of life created through a meteor impact: 

A race of ancients with skin of stone who were said to have risen to life when a meteor struck long ago. They also bleed, but it's not red.

Ancient Dragons then are not purely biological creatures. They are something closer to living stone given form, vitality, and Order through gold. How does this form of life lead to flesh and blood descendants?

DRAKE ORIGINS

Drakes are clearly not Ancient Dragons. They lack immortality through stone scales. Ancient Dragons are mostly rock with a little flesh and blood, while Drakes are mostly flesh and blood with a little rock in their hearts. Drakes are adaptable, reflecting their impermanent nature.

When the dragons were born from their ancient kin, they lost their stone scales, which can now be used to cause them mortal harm.

So what really is Bayle and how did the Drakes come into being? A frequent theory is that Bayle was an Ancient Dragon that touched the Crucible. While this makes a lot of intuitive sense, I'd explore more specificity by wondering if they reflect a similar experiment we see all across TLB history with cultures creating new life.

Returning to the Talisman of the Dread and Bayle's connection to Magma; this is a clear connection to Magma Wyrms, but magma also suggests the earth in constant, unstable change. A body originally made of the earth, of rock, in constant, unstable change.

Lastly, the Dragons flying around the outskirts of Farum Azula resemble Drakes. They were part of that society in some way, likely as an underclass like Albinaurics are treated within the Golden Order.

A PATTERN ACROSS THE LANDS BETWEEN

This idea of “becoming real” rather than simply being created appears elsewhere.

The Nightfolk are said to have once bled silver, aligning them with artificial, mimetic life. We watch the Albinaurics go on to self-perpetuate. In both cases, something that began as an artificial construct becomes biologically 'real' and indistinguishable over time, though never perfectly and often treated as lesser because of it.

The Drakes fit this same pattern and the difference is method. Silver reshapes through imitation while the Dragons are associated more with the Crucible and Fire.

In turn, the Drakes (and Humans) partake in the ancient, original form of Dragon Communion, while the Ancient Dragons kill and consume their blood in kind. The Chaos of life versus the Order of stone. The Ancient Dragons created the Drakes that exacerbated their own downfall.

CONCLUSION

The mad hunger and fierceness of spirit that only flows from those young and short of sight. He rather reminds me of Bayle, in fact. Such thoughts are unfathomable to ones as old as we.

The unspoken, but logical implication here is that Bayle is NOT as old as an Ancient Dragon, which would rule out him having been one that transformed into his current self.

The Ancient Dragons did not create the Drakes by accident through some inadvertent Crucible touching. Bayle was the first purposefully made (the oldest and vilest) and grew into a breaking point through Dragon Communion. He embodies chaotic excess and, in doing so, he undergoes a transformation akin to a Magma Wyrm, but on a far greater scale.

The Drakes follow as a consequence. Stripped of stone permanence, they become adaptive, mutable, and fully alive. In that sense, they are closer to the Crucible because they reflect its core principle: life in flux and conflict.

Dragon Communion is older than a weapon against Bayle.

Godfrey’s conquests across the Lands Between fill in an often unexplored period of the timeline prior to his exile. Nokron is an example where the game presents a clear narrative for a lost civilization: rebellion. There are many unknown specifics, but the core idea is plainly communicated through defiance and punishment.

Meanwhile, there are persistent traces of another civilization scattered across the Lands Between that are too fragmented enough to form a single, cohesive story. Storms, beasts, hawks, Banished Knights, exiled soldiers ... this culture is everywhere, yet it has no preserved narrative like Nokron.

GODFREY TIMELINE

Godfrey's campaign is described in broad strokes with limited text, notably defeating the Storm Lord who is never contextualized beyond us understanding that Stormveil and Castle Sol were part of this dominion. There was also a Stormhawk King and Lord of Beasts, the latter being important enough that he was made Beast Regent and taken upon Godfrey's back.

When we think about the timeline and what was considered the heyday of the Golden Order (as Miyazaki called it in an interview) and the Age of Plenty under Godfrey, it would seem the vast majority of this was during these conquests.

FARUM AZULA AS THE SOURCE

If Farum Azula exists outside of time, then it may represent a displaced center. Something that once anchored a system that broke into separate groups which then evolved differently in parallel. The Hornsent versus the Stormveil/Castle Sol society share many similarities, but are also clearly not quite the same.

Reverence for Beasts

Hornsent: Ritualistic/Spiritual - Lion-like beasts that are divinely invoked but not actually existing, only channeled but not physically present. Gravebird constructs facilitate death rituals and are present in Enir-Ilim.

Stormveil: Integrated/Functional - Wolves riding the storm, Lion Guardians, and Stormhawks that are later subjugated and retrofitted with weaponry by the Golden Order because they were physically present in Stormveil society.

Storm Power

Hornsent: Ritualistic/Spiritual - They allow the storm to wield them. Divine invocation of wind, lightning, and ice is considered communion with the divine.

Stormveil: Integrated/Functional - They wield the storm. Weapons and even wolves themselves wield the power of the storm, Commander Niall of Castle Sol uses lightning and ice also.

The Stormveil society seems much closer to Farum Azula with the Stormhawk and Banished Knight overlaps, while the Hornsent are a more distant offshoot that likely branched out from their exposure to Rauh and subsequent sprouting of horns.

THE ELDEN RING

The Dragonlord whose seat lies at the heart of the storm beyond time is said to have been Elden Lord in the age before the Erdtree. 

The Elden Ring being associated with Farum Azula reinforces the significance. What the Hornsent and others seek as “divine” may not be abstract at all. It may be something that once existed within reach, but has since been removed/lost.

The storm they attempt to channel may be the same storm surrounding Placidusax: not just weather, but a higher plane of existence, rendered “heavenly” because the Elden Ring resides/resided there. Marika successfully retrieves the Elden Ring from somewhere through the Gate after all.

GEOGRAPHY

The Mountaintops, Limgrave, Caelid, and Weeping Peninsula are the main spots we see this storm-aligned culture, but nothing in Liurnia. This raises the possibility that these regions were once more directly connected via a land bridge between the Mountaintops and Caelid.

Castle Sol’s proximity to the Fire Giants may also hint at a relationship that remains unexplored. The destruction of Caelid’s ecosystem obscures additional evidence that could have clarified these connections.

DIFFERENT BEASTS

The Hornsent divine beasts are lions, Serosh is lion-like, the Guardian Lions are... lions. These lion-like Beasts do not appear upright (except when channeled by Hornsent humans). Lions are also symbols of the Redmane and Radahn.

Farum Azula beasts are wolf-like. The statue with Beast Clergyman has three wolves. The FA beastmen can stand upright and have burial rituals and other human-like characteristics and behavior. Maliketh and Blaidd are wolf-like. Wolves are also the beast of the Carian royal covenant.

The significance of this divide is unclear, but it is consistent. It may point to separate evolutionary paths or different interpretations of the same original role beasts once held.

CONCLUSION

While its presence is arguably more widespread than the Eternal Cities and the Hornsent, we have no communally agreed-upon name or identity for this culture.

It is a mystery of an overwritten historical layer that was dismantled, repurposed, and reintegrated into the Golden Order.

Revisiting and better defining this layer reframes Godfrey’s conquests, clarifies the Hornsent’s aspirations, and suggests that what was lost was an entire way of interacting with the world itself.