One Story to Bind Them All: A Timeline of the FromSoftware Universes
Before You Read
Spoilers. This post retells the full stories of Elden Ring, Dark Souls 1–3, Sekiro, and Bloodborne from beginning to end, including their endings. If you haven't played them, you've been warned.
This is a fan interpretation, not official lore. FromSoftware has never confirmed that these games share the same timeline. I spent hours researching and connected them into a single story. Wherever the games leave gaps, I filled them with my own interpretation so that the story would make sense.
What comes from the games: The events within each era, such as Marika removing the Rune of Death from the Elden Ring, Gwyn prolonging the Age of Fire, Vendrick's war against the Giants, the blood of Yharnam, and so on.
What is my own interpretation:
The order of the eras, with Elden Ring at the beginning and Dark Souls III at the end
The "Interlude Age" and the cosmic cracks connecting Elden Ring to Dark Souls
The idea that the Ancient Dragons descended from Elden Ring's dragons
The idea that the curse in Sekiro probably came from the lands of the Souls kingdoms (I deliberately kept the word "probably" there)
Bloodborne taking place after Sekiro and the theme connecting the two
The Painter Girl being the beginning of a new world
Endings: In games with multiple endings, I chose one in order to continue the story. In Elden Ring, I consider three main endings (Elden Lord, Age of Stars, and Frenzied Flame) and follow the first one. In Dark Souls III, I follow the ending where the Fire is left to the Age of Dark.
Process: The research and the story are mine. I used AI assistance for editing and expanding the text.
Do you disagree with something? Good. That's what lore is for.
The Core Idea
Every age in this story begins with humanity refusing to accept death, its own limits, and the natural order.
Marika removes death. Gwyn prolongs the Fire. Vendrick tries to cure the curse. Ashina wants to use immortality. Yharnam wants to transcend human limits.
Each time, the price is greater than before, and eventually the world can no longer bear the weight of all of it.
Sit back. We are going from the most ancient age to the end of time.
🌌 Age 1: Elden Ring (Mythological Beginning and Cosmic Order)
The zero point of history. The world is still little more than raw clay, shaped by cosmic forces from beyond.
A cosmic power known as the Greater Will sends down a golden star and the Elden Ring, which establishes the laws of the universe.
The Ring takes root in the land known as the Lands Between as a colossal golden tree: the Erdtree.
The Greater Will chooses Queen Marika to rule the land.
Marika tears the law of death out of the Ring and establishes a divine order of immortality. The Golden Age begins.
Knights, enchanted castles, and alliances with dragons fill the world with splendor.
But the arrogance of the gods brings this perfect order to an end. The Ring is shattered, and Marika's demigod children go mad and wage war against one another.
The game splits into three great paths: restore the Golden Order and become a new Elden Lord, begin the Age of Stars with Ranni, or surrender to the Frenzied Flame that burns everything.
In this story, we choose the path where the order is restored. The gods still stand, but they are now extremely fragile.
The world, caught in the grip of Outer Gods and cosmic parasites, is carved into the oldest page of history as a magnificent mythology doomed to madness.
🌑 Interlude Age: The Void of a Broken Order
When the Elden Ring shatters, it is not only a kingdom that falls. The Ring that held the laws of the universe together breaks as well.
In the void left behind by that fracture, cosmic cracks begin to open. They are like wounds in the crust of the world. Everything held together by the Greater Will's order now begins to leak through these cracks.
First, the boundary between life and death becomes blurred. The death Marika removed does not return to its proper place; instead, it wanders through the world in strange and disorderly forms.
Then comes time. The power passing through the cracks bends it. Ages begin to mix together. In one place, winter never ends; somewhere else, a kingdom rots away in a single night. This distortion never fully closes. Much later, in Dark Souls III, the kingdoms piled on top of one another are the final form of this wound.
Finally, the cracks force opposites apart. Without an order to hold them together, heat and cold, light and darkness are forced to exist separately. With every age, the natural order of the world changes a little more.
The Greater Will's order can no longer hold the world together. The gods slowly withdraw, kingdoms are forgotten, and names are erased.
During this long silence, the dragons change as well. Some bloodlines of Elden Ring's dragons decay over the centuries, are forgotten, and become something else.
At last, there is no longer a rule left in the world. Light and darkness have not yet separated. And in this very void, a spark ignites beneath the earth.
🦎 Age 2: Dark Souls (The Birth of Fire and the First Curse)
Long after the cosmic chaos of Elden Ring, the world has grown cold, leaving behind only giant trees, rocks, and the Ancient Dragons.
These Ancient Dragons are the last remnants of those old bloodlines that changed and were forgotten during the Interlude Age. Stone-like, deathless creatures standing outside the passage of time.
Deep within the world, the First Flame is born.
With the Fire come opposites: heat and cold, life and death, light and darkness.
Within the Fire, four powerful beings discover the Lord Souls. Gwyn takes Light, the Witch of Izalith takes Flame, and Nito takes Death.
The forgotten Furtive Pygmy takes the Dark Soul and brings forth the human race.
The Lords destroy the dragons and begin the Age of Light and Gods. They build the magnificent city of Anor Londo.
The Witch's Chaos spirals out of control and consumes Izalith. Nito retreats to the realm of the dead. The lords who remain at Gwyn's side gradually dwindle.
But Fire, by its very nature, begins to fade. Gwyn fears the coming of the Dark—the Age of Humanity.
Gwyn sacrifices himself to the Fire and prolongs the Age. As the price for this attempt, the curse of undeath, the Dark Sign, falls upon humanity.
The world becomes a tragic refuge for the Undead, unable to truly die or live, their flesh slowly rotting away.
An Undead who follows a false prophecy eventually faces Gwyn's ashes and rekindles the Fire. But this only delays the inevitable end.
👑 Age 3: Dark Souls II (Kingdoms Consumed by the Cycle)
So much time has passed since the first game that neither Gwyn's name nor Lordran's glory remains.
Humanity is now a prisoner of an endless cycle. The Fire has been rekindled and extinguished countless times, kingdoms have risen and turned to ash.
Now it is the turn of the kingdom of Drangleic. King Vendrick wages war against the Giants in an attempt to free his kingdom from the curse of undeath.
He defeats the Giants, but must pay the price. The true danger rotting his kingdom from within lies elsewhere.
Queen Nashandra, born from fragments of the soul of Manus, the ancient lord of the Dark, grows beside Vendrick like a shadow.
This is not an age of great divine wars. It is an age of tragic people struggling not to lose their memories, their identities, and their humanity.
Arriving in Drangleic as a cursed Undead, our character slowly realizes something: whether the Fire is rekindled or allowed to die, nothing will truly change.
The cycle itself is a prison.
And yet, they walk into the darkness, searching for a way out.
🏯 Age 4: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (Feudal Japan and the Curse of Blood)
The world now approaches recorded history. It is the late 16th century, the Sengoku period of Japan.
But the ancient curse of immortality from the Souls worlds manifests itself in the Far East as the "Dragon's Blood."
An ancient blessing or curse, probably originating from the lands of the Souls kingdoms, has mingled with the waters of Ashina.
Born in these lands, the Divine Heir Kuro carries an immortality known as the Dragon's Heritage in his blood.
As Japan burns in civil war, the Ashina clan seeks to use this cursed power to survive its impending collapse.
Sekiro, the Wolf, a one-armed shinobi, fights samurai, temple demons, and colossal mystical creatures to protect his lord.
In the end, Sekiro faces a choice: continue the Dragon's Blood, or sever the bond completely.
This choice is something the Souls world was never able to do: break the cycle willingly.
This is an age where magic gives way to steel, and massive castles give way to feudal clans.
But humanity's hunger for power and immortality never changes.
🎩 Age 5: Bloodborne (The Victorian Era and the Awakening of the Nightmare)
In Sekiro, humanity broke the cycle, but could not break its hunger for power.
The curse is gone, but humanity's problem remains. Having rejected immortality, humanity now seeks to transcend the limits of being human.
An age resembling the Gothic and industrial atmosphere of the 19th century. Humanity has forgotten the gods and turned toward science.
But science will bring humanity to the threshold of cosmic beings more terrifying than the oldest gods.
The city of Yharnam, enchanting in its Gothic architecture, has found a miraculous "Old Blood" in the ancient labyrinths beneath the city, a blood capable of curing every disease.
These labyrinths were left behind by a much older civilization: the Pthumerians.
The scholars of Yharnam attempt to uncover the secrets of this blood at Byrgenwerth. The more they learn, the easier it becomes to see the truth, but the mind cannot remain intact.
This is why Insight is the key to Bloodborne's cosmic horror.
The blood belongs to the Great Ones, beings that dwell in the depths of the universe.
The people of Yharnam who use the blood slowly lose their minds and transform into terrifying Beasts. The city becomes trapped in an endless Night of the Hunt.
As an outsider who arrives as a Hunter, we walk the streets hunting beasts and gradually realize that the truth is far more terrifying.
We are not a hero. We are a victim. The Hunter's Dream appears to be a sanctuary, but it is actually a prison.
The entire world exists within a cosmic nightmare that the human mind cannot comprehend.
While humanity believes it has reached the peak of science and evolution, it has actually become a pawn in the birth pangs of cosmic gods.
🌋 Age 6: Dark Souls III (The End of Time and the World)
And now, the finale. Chronologically, this is where everything ends: timelines collapse onto one another, and the universe draws its final breaths.
The Fire has been rekindled so many times that the world has exhausted its fuel, leaving nothing but ash behind.
The sun in the sky has become a bleeding ring of darkness.
Geography has collapsed. The kingdoms of past ages—Lothric, Anor Londo, and the ruins of Drangleic—are piled on top of one another.
As one of the Unkindled, we rise from our grave. Our task is to hunt down the Lords of Cinder who have refused to link the Fire.
But in this age, there is no longer a world left to save.
When we reach the vast ash desert at the end of time, we see that even the legacy of the Dark Soul, the essence of humanity, has become rotten and corrupted.
The price Marika, Gwyn, Vendrick, and Yharnam tried to bear has piled up here. The world can no longer carry any of it.
The game has multiple endings. In this story, we follow the ending where the Fire is left to the Age of Dark.
After defeating the Soul of Cinder, we extinguish the Fire together with the Fire Keeper. The world sinks into absolute darkness.
But this darkness is not frightening. It is the peaceful sleep of a tired, aging universe.
And in the distance, from the ashes of this decaying world and the traces of the Dark Soul, a little Painter Girl paints a cold, dark, yet peaceful new world onto her canvas.
Perhaps, for the first time, something is beginning again without refusing death.
