Godwyn, the Golden
Listen well, for the name of Godwyn the Golden is the first true tragedy of the Lands Between. He is not a warmonger, nor a schemer, but the flawless child whose demise fractured the very concept of immortality.
The Golden Scion
Godwyn was the firstborn son of Queen Marika the Eternal and Godfrey, the First Elden Lord. He was the embodiment of the Golden Order’s glory: noble, powerful, and beloved by all. Where his siblings were afflicted with curses or dark fates, Godwyn was pure gold, a shining paragon.
His valor was proven during the Ancient Dragon War. When the colossal dragon Gransax assaulted Leyndell, piercing the city walls with a single, massive lightning spear, it was Godwyn who led the counterattack and slew the beast. Yet, in a testament to his unique virtue, he did not merely conquer the dragons; he made peace with them. He befriended Lichdragon Fortissax, and this act of profound reconciliation gave rise to the Ancient Dragon Cult in the capital, an order that saw no contradiction between the Golden Order and the power of the ancient lightning.
He was destined for greatness, likely groomed to be the next Elden Lord, the consort to the coming Empyrean. He was the anchor of the Golden Lineage, the hope of the world. And it was this shining perfection that marked him for ruin.
The Night of Black Knives
The turning point of the world, the true prelude to the Shattering, was the Night of the Black Knives.
On a night of wintry fog, a band of assassins—the Black Knives, rumored to be Numen women related to Marika herself—swept into the capital. Their daggers were no ordinary steel; they were imbued with a fragment of Destined Death, stolen from Marika’s shadow-bound beast, Maliketh the Black Blade.
The entire conspiracy was orchestrated by Lunar Princess Ranni. Her goal was to sever her own fate from the Greater Will and the Two Fingers, but to do so, she required an imperfect death: the death of the flesh without the death of the spirit. To make this possible, her ritual demanded a mirroring act: the death of a soul without the death of the flesh.
Godwyn the Golden was her chosen victim.
The assassins struck, and at that moment, Godwyn's soul alone was slain. His perfect golden body remained intact, but the animating force, the very essence of the demigod, was extinguished. Simultaneously, Ranni used the stolen Death to kill her own body, leaving her spirit unbound in a doll.
The Cursemark of Death, which should have been a complete circle of fate, was broken into two half-wheels: one carved onto Godwyn's soulless flesh, and the other upon Ranni’s discarded body.
The Prince of Death
Godwyn was the First of the Demigods to die, a violation of the Golden Order's core principle—that life under the Erdtree knew no true death.
His un-dead body was interred deep in the roots of the Erdtree beneath Leyndell. But without a soul to guide it, and with the half-curse of Death upon its flesh, the corpse began to spread a grotesque corruption.
His remains merged with the root network, growing and expanding like a monstrous fungal bloom. You can see his horrifying visage, with its gaping mouth and branching roots, deep in the earth.
This corruption is the Deathroot, which travels through the roots of the Greattree and infects the Lands Between.
Those afflicted by the Deathroot are raised as Those Who Live in Death—the shambling skeletons, the Death-Rite Birds, the foul Mariner boats. They are not merely resurrected; they are a mockery of the Golden Order's immortality, trapped between life and death.
Godwyn, the golden boy, became the hideous figurehead of this blight: The Prince of Death. His faithful, even some of the Mausoleum Knights and his dragon friend, Fortissax, sought to cure him or grant him a true death, a final repose. They failed, and many became corrupted themselves.
His death was not an end, but a foul beginning. It shattered Marika's faith, led her to shatter the Elden Ring in grief and madness, and thus plunged the world into the endless war you now traverse.
Do you see the grand irony, Tarnished? The most beloved, the most flawless of the demigods, is now the eternal engine of the world's decay.