Miquella and Malenia are missing opposite arms, and in the case of Miquella, this is especially confusing: why is his ascended deified form, missing an arm?

Miquella and Malenia are missing opposite arms

Elden Ring's metaphysics were heavily inspired by Kabbalah's Tree of Life.

The Tree runs on two opposing "pillars": a right pillar of mercy and expansion, a left pillar of severity and restraint, held in balance by a middle. Miquella and Malenia each represent one side of these pillars, split into two bodies -- twins who are each one half of a whole.

Chesed / Miquella

Miquella embodies Chesed, usually understood as boundless kindness, the unconditional love of the divine. It is expansive giving, overflowing benevolence. Esoteric writers also associate Chesed with abundance--the great rune associated with Miquella.

Crucially: Chesed is associated with the right arm.

Gevurah / Malenia

Gevurah is often translated as severity, might, strength, or judgment, the necessary "no," the power to set and hold a boundary, associated with the left arm. Malenia is that in every sense.

The sword is Gevurah's classical emblem, so "Blade of Miquella" reads almost as a translation of "the Gevurah of Miquella." She is his cutting edge, his sword-arm, the faculty of severity walking beside the god of mercy.

Her defining strength is presented as an interior discipline: what lets her hold the rot at bay is, in the game's own words, "the dignity, the sense of self, that allowed her to resist the call of the scarlet rot." Not power over the rot — self-possession against it. Boundary held from the inside. That is the Gevurah virtue stated positively, exactly as the outline of her character keeps stating it.

Where Miquella Fails

In a balanced Tree (one with both Chesed and Geburah) Chesed is a virtue: love and abundance checked and shaped by Gevurah, the severity on the opposite pillar.

When it runs unchecked , mercy and growth with no severity to bound them, giving that refuses every limit. When Miquella ascends he declares: "Beginning here, love encompasses all," and "No living thing will be denied, no deed censured." Not just love, but love that denies nothing and censures nothing, mercy with every boundary deliberately removed.

Kabbalistic teaching warns against this exact configuration. Love that embraces all has to compel the unwilling, because a universal embrace cannot survive a single free refusal.

So unbounded mercy has to erase the possibility of "no." And that's precisely what Miquella does: his followers are bound to him by charm, and when anyone refused him, he overrode the refusal.

The teaching on Chesed is that unrestrained giving destroys the recipient's selfhood: someone who lives entirely as the beneficiary of another's boundless largesse "loses his own identity--he becomes a vessel of the benefactor."

Gevurah is the remedy. Severity is the "left hand" that pushes back and says "stand on your own two feet," the force that lets the recipient keep a self of their own instead of dissolving into the giver.

We are shown this -- quite literally -- because Miquella is missing the left arm, missing the Gevurah that would temper his love and kindness.

Where Malenia Fails

Kabbalah teaching is blunt about this as well: severity/restraint without love or mercy is indiscriminate cruelty.

That is the scarlet rot exactly. It no longer tells friend from foe, consuming her enemies, her allies, and Malenia herself.

She is "Malenia the Severed", the one who cut off her right arm, the very Chesed arm, that could temper the unmitigated indiscriminate severity of the scarlet rot.

These failures mirror each other

• Miquella's mercy stops distinguishing the willing from the unwilling, and embraces everyone whether they consent or not.
• Malenia's severity stops distinguishing friend from foe, and consumes everyone whether they deserve it or not.

Judgment without mercy and mercy without judgment fail in the same way, by losing the ability to discriminate.

Each twin possesses what the other one lacks. Miquella has infinite acceptance and no capacity to say "no"; Malenia is nothing but the capacity to say "no," with no softness to aim it. They are two halves of one integrated person — mercy that can still set a boundary, severity that can still show mercy, split into two bodies and never reconciled.

We are shown this quite literally. Each is missing the arm -- the symbolic portion of the body -- that represents the quality each lacks.

With this understanding, this line about Radahn now also has new context:

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Miquella is saying Radahn posses BOTH strength and kindness -- united together. The very aspects split between Miquella and Malenia, which is what makes them stand 'in stark contrast'.

So Miquella is drawn to Radahn because he sees an integrated self, someone possessing both his kindness, and his sister's strength (the quality he lacks).