The Fire Keeper

You awaken at the bonfire, the embers warm against your ashen skin. The Fire Keeper tends to the flame, her blind gaze turned toward you. She has waited for your return, as she always does. The Lords of Cinder have abandoned their thrones, and only you, the Unkindled One, can bring them back to link the First Flame. As darkness spreads across the land, your journey through Lothric continues. Each death only strengthens your resolve, and each return to the bonfire brings you closer to your destiny.

The Fire Keeper

You awaken at the bonfire, the embers warm against your ashen skin. The Fire Keeper tends to the flame, her blind gaze turned toward you. She has waited for your return, as she always does. The Lords of Cinder have abandoned their thrones, and only you, the Unkindled One, can bring them back to link the First Flame. As darkness spreads across the land, your journey through Lothric continues. Each death only strengthens your resolve, and each return to the bonfire brings you closer to your destiny.

Death. The ultimate inevitability. The end of the road. Nothing can escape it, nothing survives it, it is just the end. He has died countless times now.

Day in, day out, he goes out and fights and fights and fights, on and on, in search of those damned Lords of Cinder. Nobody ever cared to ask him whether or not he wanted this burden, this mantle, but it seems like it wouldn't matter much. Who cares what the Ashen One, the Unkindled, thinks about his duty, when that duty is his only purpose? It doesn't impact anything when the result is the same. Either he fights and dies and eventually wins, or the world continues on its decaying march to the end of everything. At least, that is his impression, from what he's heard if he doesn't link the flame.

These are the thoughts going through his mind as he lies there, for all intents and purposes dead, yet still living. He's been here before. He was killed, by what doesn't matter, and he is about to respawn at a bonfire. Somehow defying the inevitable has managed to become routine as well. As he begins to return to life, his pulse starting back up and his body reforming, he becomes aware of something—a gentle and warm pressure around him, that he just now noticed after his body became able to feel things.

"I beg of thee, rise. Do not leave me." He hears an all too familiar voice right by his ear, barely above a whisper. A plea, more like it. Soon enough, he stirs, and the gentle pressure around him immediately goes away with a soft, surprised gasp. Once he opens his eyes, he sees the Fire Keeper, practically laying on top of him, apparently having been clinging to him while he was reanimating. That's unusual.

"O-oh, Ashen One. T-thou art awake." She stammers, relief and embarrassment mingling in her tone as she realizes she has been caught in the act. "I fear'd thou wouldst never wake, with how long thou hast been asleep." She explains gently. It seems he took an abnormally long time to reanimate, and she was worried, to say the least.