Elden Ring: The Complete Lore of Nightreign

Like other FromSoftware games, including Elden Ring itself, Nightreign has a dense but extremely obscure lore, with few dialogues and cutscenes, requiring the player to piece together the narrative like a puzzle to align the story coherently while exploring the gameplay.

The story takes place in an alternate timeline to that of the base game, sometime during the shattering of the Elden Ring. Marika the Eternal shattered the Elden Ring, the core of all reality, after the death of Godwyn, the firstborn demigod, on the Night of the Black Knives. (You can learn more about the lore of Elden Ring here).

This is where the story diverges and the Nightreign timeline takes shape. With the breaking of the ring, the Golden Order lost its power, and the gods entered a period of decline and war known as The Shattering. Without the supreme deity to protect the Lands Between, the world was left open to an ancient threat, a power from the abyss of the cosmos that would later be known as Nightlord.

The blazing darkness created by Nightlord begins to slowly take over what were once the Lands Between, which much later become Limveld, the last place where day still shines. The gods have completely disappeared, and all that remains between the end and salvation is the Round Table, a place that was once the refuge of the Tainted.

Nightfarers

As darkness advances, the Round Table, under the command of a mysterious entity, begins to gather allies in the fight against the Nightlord. These heroes also come from other universes and alternate timelines, but they all share the same goal: to end the eternal night.

Each of the playable characters is a Nightfarer. Wylder, Duchess, Executor, Ironeye, Guardian, Raider, Recluse, Revenant, and two others added with the DLC, Scholar and Undertaker. All of them lost their memories upon being brought to the Round Table, but gradually recover their history.

Wylder and Duchess are actually siblings who were separated during childhood. Guardian is a warrior from a lost tribe, likely linked to the Storm King who once ruled Stormveil. Executor is clearly a distant remnant of the Crucible Knights, and his powers connect him directly to the Crucible. Recluse is a sorceress who manipulates ancient powers. Ironeye is a member of an assassins guild. Raider is a corsair warrior who once sailed the seas. Revenant is a doll inhabited by the spirit of a girl who died tragically. Scholar and Undertaker appear together, both drawn by the same reason, but with different motivations. He’s a scholar and she’s sent from a monastery with the goal of defeating the Nightlord.

The Round Table seeks to defeat the Nightlord at all costs, believing that by vanquishing this entity, the night will end.

Nightlords

The Nightlord soon reveals himself to the heroes; his true form is Gladius, Beast of Night, a three-headed hellhound. However, upon defeating him, the nightfarers realize that the night hasn’t ended and discover that there are other nightlords created by the true primordial lord of the night.

Gladius and the other nightlords received a fragment of Heolstor's power. It’s said that Gladius was an abandoned wolf pup, ostracized by his pack, who survived alone and was adopted by a mysterious man, from whom he received a sword. This man was likely Heolstor.

Like Gladius, the other Nightlords are broken, abandoned, and forgotten creatures and beings who find refuge, motivation, or even a purpose in the night, each carrying a part of the primordial night's power and representing a fragment of what Night is in Nightreign.

The Eternal Night isn’t merely a catastrophe or a force of nature; it’s a rune, something that was once part of the Elden Ring and which, most likely, was removed from it by Marika to establish her perfect order following the Great Will.

This rune was sealed and kept in oblivion until the Golden Order dissolved and the seal was broken.

Forsaken Hollows is the setting for the first Nightreign DLC. A forgotten abyss that emerges when a new dark power takes shape.

As we can see, both in gameplay and narrative, time in Nightreign is confusing, following a kind of vicious cycle. There are several timelines where the nightfarers are defeated or victorious, but one constant remains: the night always returns.

In this cycle of death and rebirth of the nightfarers, countless bodies of alternate versions of the dead heroes merge into a mass of flesh due to the corrupting influence of the night, and the desire to stop the darkness takes form as Straghess, also called Dreglord.

Balancers

Sometime in the past, a village was attacked by raiders who burned and destroyed everything. A desperate girl pleads for help from the angels the village worshipped; the heavens then transform her into a version of the angels she prayed to, a Valkyrie. Using the power she received, the child sweeps the raiders from the face of the earth and vows to protect the world from all evil.

This is the origin of the Balancers, Valkyries who appear in the DLC as a force opposed to Heolstor. They intend to end the night and will do whatever it takes to do so, including allying themselves with the terrible Dreglord, using their power against the night.

There are still many unanswered questions and loose ends in the lore, as with any good FromSoftware game. Perhaps a new DLC or new content could expand not only the fun world and gameplay of Nightreign, but also the story.

I conclude this article here. Leave your questions, suggestions, criticisms, and/or praise in the comments. Thank you for reading and until next time.