r/EldenRingLoreTalk

Of every bit of lore in the game nothing comes close to the God Devouring Serpent. who has a staggering 8 items, not counting the shared ones with Rykards stuff, dedicated to it and 6 soft lore dedicated to it. It's so important that it defines everything that came after it. With it you can very clearly create a timeline of the world leading all the way up to current day.

Let's start with the cultures that had to deal with this thing. This is where the snake's soft lore comes into play there is snake imagery in every culture in the world but two, the Nox and the Dragons.

Rauh

Fire Giants

The Uhl

The Carians

The Hornsent

The Giant snake found on the side of the Fire Giants, The Serpent God's Curve Sword found in the Ruin Strewn Precipice, an Rauh ruin, on the top of the Uhl Coffin ships, and even on the Preceptor's hat of the Carians. And then of course, the gladiator set of the Golden Order. The before, and after the snake.

Then there is it's location, and natural magical affinity. Look at Mount Gelmir, think about the path you take to get to the top, Mt Gelmir is a natural spiral, it is a natural Crucible and it brings that power to itself by making it gain the traits of what it eats, on top of that it has a natural affinity for the volcano that's so strong that you can tell how strong it is just by looking at the volcano.

Volcano Manor

All of that structure was clearly built on solid ground at one point and it wasn't until the Serpent came into power that the Volcano became active again.

God Devouring Serpent.

Then there's this imagery when we come into it's arena. It's a fist. 5 fingers, a sign of intelligence but also 2 and 3 fingers. Chaos and order, feed yourself to the snake and there will be order again.

Moving away from facts we've got to put this knowledge into some kind of order and this is where I'm going to go a little wild. It's name and the fact that it isn't in Dragon culture at all opens up a crazy story option. We have Placi's missing god, and a serpent that eats gods. I believe that the God Devouring Serpent ate the Elden Ring and was the vessel for it from Placi's time to Marika. The next culture in line after the dragons is The Fire Giants and the Rauh. This is punctuated by Borealis's Mist stating that the ice dragons were kicked off the mountain by the giants for the Forge of the Giants. What is the God Devouring Serpent called by the Rauh? Serpent God, a completely different name then what it is now.

Because of the coffin ships we also know that the Uhl were also in the Giant's age. The Coffin ships help us put an end to the Age of the Giants as we see it from a joint Rauh and Fire Giant culture. The Rauh ruins engulfed in stone matches with the coffin ships which are also in a similar fashion. There are two great calamity items in the Eternal Darkness spell and Gelmir's Fury but it's Gelmir's Fury we're going to focus on, "This sorcery is held to represent the fury of the volcano, but the arrogance of attempting to harness it is solely that of men and serpents." The Uhl knew that a calamity was coming, they build specific boats to try and survive it, They had the Volcano blow putting a soft end to the Age of the Giants. Many of the Uhl survived, enough to restart civilization.

The Snake can never die though, reborn it no longer has the sacrifices brought to it. Forced to hunt again after an age it goes out into the world till it smells a familiar scent. Chopped up bodies, the snake has found Bonny Village where a young Shaman girl chances upon it.

There is a bunch of odd loose threads here. not facts, just hints but they tell a story none the less. First off there's Hewg and Marika. Hewg has met Marika and owes her from something. There is a story there, why does Marika put Hewg on the task of killing a god? What makes him qualified to attempt to make such a weapon in Marika's eyes?

The Gelmir Hero's grave gives us a dead former knight of Rykard before he fed himself to the serpent. After we take out our first invasion in Volcano Manor we're greeted by a spirit that tells us to Kill Rykard and that he left the spear in the arena. We know this spirit couldn't have been eaten by the snake because of Rykard's Rancor, Anything eaten by the snake stays in the snake. If the spirit is the same as the one found dead in the Gelmir's Hero grave then that's where the Serpent Hunter was originally there. It's boss is a red wolf of Radagon named Red Wolf of the Champion. Champion being Radagon's title in the Liurnian wars.

Finally there's Messmer, Marika's children pay the price for when she messes with the world. Kill's the Giants and messes with the Fell god, Melina is the Kindling Maiden, Genocides the Hornsent, Omen cursed twins ( this event sequence can also be flipped where the Crucible can just make people like that and that causes Marika to genocide the Hornsent), Remove the rune of the Unborn from the Elden Ring get the twins afflicted with Abundance and Rot. Messmer's abyssal snake could be because she took the Elden Ring out of the Serpent God.

Finally I leave with this head canon as Rykard is getting eaten he sees a vision of the future, this is then made into the Devourer's Scepter, "Scepter in the shape of a serpent devouring the world. This weapon will one day become the very symbol of the Lord of Blasphemy. One of the legendary armaments. A vision of the future briefly seen by Rykard in his final moments before being devoured by the great serpent." This is potentially the true end of the Lands Between, of the world, of the universe. All will eventually become the serpent, all will become one in the serpent until the serpent is the only thing left in the universe, The One Great and like Ouroboros the snake that eats its own tail the great cycle of the universe will start again.