The Grand Caravan

Ah, friend. Thou dost seek knowledge of the Grand Caravan? Come closer, and let my words, though they sting thy ears, reveal a glimpse of the truth that burns beneath the earth.

Thou must understand that the history of this land is not merely a tale of the Erdtree's ascent, but of the things it crushed to rise.

The Great Shunning

The Caravan was not a wandering band of merchants; it was the entire people—the ancient, gentle folk—who were the first to be utterly rejected by the Golden Order. Their crime was simple, yet unforgivable in the eyes of Queen Marika: they worshipped an entity that promised the unmaking of distinction.

The Greater Will demands Order and separation, but the true God of the merchants, the Frenzied Flame, yearns to burn away all duality, making all things one again in a crucible of chaos.

When the Golden Order was established, they did not tolerate rival faiths. The merchants were rounded up, not for warfare, but for their belief. They were condemned, shackled, and buried alive in the darkest depths beneath the Capital, in the very walls of the Subterranean Shunning-Grounds. The Order sought to extinguish their belief by immuring them—trapping them in the filth and the dark, to be silenced forever.

The Summoning of the Flame

Yet, the fire could not be put out.

Down there, in that chasm of utter despair, where the Golden Order had hoped they would simply rot, the merchants realized their fate. They were lost. They were abandoned. They had been declared unwanted by the very framework of the world.

In their endless suffering, in the agonizing union of their piled bodies, the merchants performed one final, desperate act of worship. They did not find the Frenzied Flame; they summoned it.

Their collective madness, their unified agony at the world’s injustice, became the perfect conduit. Their tormented spirits called upon their God to deliver them, and to bring the same judgment upon the cruel world that condemned them.

And the Flame answered.

The bodies of those first merchants did not merely die; they were fused, melted together by the heat of their summoned God, and became the living, tortured source of the madness: the very Three Fingers themselves. Their final, agonized union fuels the desire to burn the world and return all things to one indiscriminate chaos.

Dost thou see, friend? The Grand Caravan was not merely exiled; it was transformed into the very weapon that will destroy the world that cast it out. The greatest sins always return to exact the highest price.