Elden Ring truly is the game that keeps on giving. It feels like every other day you lot are figuring out more of FromSoftware's hidden lore and secret stories. Today, we're here to share with you the revelation that the white stuff you're knocking off of the giant Walking Mausoleum's legs isn't some sort of magical barnacle, but the skulls of the Spectral Soldiers tasked with guarding them. Gnarly stuff.
The evidence is, well, just look at the things close up. It's clearly a mass of skulls. And where would these Walking Mausoleums get so many skulls? That's right, the legions of headless soldiers that guard them.
Once you get the walking fortress to stop roaming and finally settle down, any remaining spectral soldiers also vanish, so maybe once you've removed all their cursed skulls they're finally free of The Lands Between and can rest easy.
One player wrote, "Kinda cool to think that the walking mosoliums [sic] are powered by a legion of spirit soldiers and would also make sense as to why some of them patrol around them." Do they draw power from their souls? Is that why they fall once we demolish all the skull clusters?
Multiple players have corroborated that, "Yup, bringing a mausoleum down also kills the soldiers," so this theory seems pretty likely. As with anything FromSoftware, we'll probably never get a concrete explanation, so this "almost, definitely, probably, sort of," is as good as we'll ever get.
Others think "they're more like skull shaped barnacles. Fits with the nautical theming that death has on this game." If that's left you thinking, "there's a nautical theme to death?", you're not alone. The mariners are in boats, Godwyn's corpse has a fish tail, there's always talk of murky depths, it does fit, but that's a theory for another article.
In other Elden Ring news, one fan has reimagined a load of the demigods and bosses as Hades characters, check them out.