So you get your Elden Lord ending of choice, but as the scene pans out to show the Erdtree burnt but no longer aflame, a new fire descends upon it - torrents of ghostflame reaching out to the horizon, forming four wings. The Erdtree’s branches crack and warp, shifting to resemble Helphen’s Steeple. The envoy of the real god of death is back, unbound for the first time since the beginning of the Golden Order.

With the return of the death god, the Forbidden Lands return to their proper form. The grace-like red light over that narrow isthmus reaching from Leyndell to the Mountaintops flares and then erupts, spilling out at last after an age of containment, and an entire region spills out to fill that chasm. It’s an area full of crashing rivers and turbulent pools descending down terraces, fed by the underground rivers and meltwater from the mountains. At the very bottom of it, you can now walk directly to the Land of Shadow without using Miquella’s cocoon. These waters are the way by which death once flowed to the Land of Shadow. There would need to be something stopping you from doing this before you gain normal access to SotE, but I’m not sure what.

The Twinbird isn’t actually too bothered about the upheaval of the Golden Order specifically. It’s more opposed to the spread of deathroot, a corruption of true death. Unfortunately for you, your new throne is directly over the source of the deathroot and if you picked Fia’s ending then you’re doubly in for it.

The story requires you to either find a weapon that can put an end to the Outer God’s anger by properly putting Godwyn down, or to drive the Twinbird off. For the former, we’re going to be visiting the Nox to make a new fingerslayer blade. The Nameless Eternal City gets a new section even lower down to facilitate this. We can maybe even have one of those giants in the chair-graves actually get up for a fight.

I don’t want to bring in the Gloam-Eyed Queen as the final boss. That feels too heavy-handed. I also don’t want to just resurrect Melina; her sacrifice is a good story moment and I don’t want to ruin it. As I said earlier, I also don’t want to bring Godwyn back. Him being half-dead is the whole issue here.

If you choose to put Godwyn down, your final boss is in the area in front of his corpse. You find Fia there, dead. Deathblight and worms alike gather around her corpse, swarming it, and gradually turning her into something akin to a smaller, but far deadlier, wormface.

If you chose Fia’s ending or otherwise choose not to finish killing Godwyn, you fight the Twinbird instead. To avoid the gameplay troubles usually highlighted in dragon fights, it should project itself down to be more like the size of the gravebirds in SotE and fight using a sword akin to Helphen’s steeple. It can fly to close gaps or return to its original size for big spectacle attacks, but should generally be more like a divine bird warrior.

I liked SotE a lot (and was okay with the final boss, even), but I do agree with criticisms of how disconnected it felt from the base game. I don’t want to involve Godwyn because his role as soul-dead is, in my opinion, too important to other major stories in the game. If we examine the base game, Miquella was indeed left with an unresolved and unexplored story, so I think following him to some degree or another was the right call for SotE. I think we need someone or something of similar power and influence to root a DLC-sized story in. Other major figures that are left in a similar position post-SotE are the Gloam-Eyed Queen and arguably Melina, We’ve also got some Outer Gods that remain fairly unexplored, particularly the Twinbird’s Outer God.

I think one of the other things I and many others would like most is more differentation between the different Elden Lord endings (that is, every ending except the Frenzied Flame’s and Ranni’s), so I think I’d like to do something that triggers after you get a base game Elden Lord ending. Also it’d be funny to see the internet get angry at missing out on a DLC if they marry their blue waifu.

I have a pet theory that each of Marika’s children barring Godwyn was created as a seal upon something that threatened her. Messmer is a cage for the Abyssal Serpent, for example. I’m going to roll with this and the Twinbird’s influence return upon the death of Melina. Her association with death is the connection here, her being the seal upon the Twinbird. In my opinion, she is in some way a form, piece, or child of the Gloam-Eyed Queen reshaped by Marika, hence her being a child of Marika but somehow unsure about how motherhood works. This origin made her a suitable seal upon the god of death.