Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-5613590-20141003122643/@comment-16047389-20141003192719

It seems to me, that the entire world is trapped by the cycle. To retain their sanity and hold off the curse, humans must sacrifice a powerful soul to the First Flame to keep it burning strong. Allowing the First Flame to die out would mean the end of the Age of Fire and the beginning of the Age of Dark. I see this less as a world full of Hollows, and more like a world engulfed in the Abyss, while humans would become like the spirits that roam the Dark Chasms. While one could argue that they like living, one could also say that unnaturally extending the life of the Age of Fire and allowing the cycle of suffering to perpetuate is worse.

So ultimately, humanity seems to have two options: struggle against the Dark and survive (though often during times of great strife), or give into the Dark and allow the First Flame to die out (meaning the end of life as the world knows, but also ending the constant suffering and struggle).

However, there may in fact be a third option. Before Fire and Dark, there were the Dragons. These beings exist outside the normal rules of life and death. Througout both Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, countless people set out to harness the power of the Dragons, whether by serving them loyally, or attempting to claim their power for their own. The Path of the Dragon sought to become Dragons themselves in order to transcend life. The Drakeblood Knights set out to claim the blood of Sinh for themselves. Aldia was apparently experimenting with the corpses of Giants and the remains of a Dragon egg. And the Iron King was rumored to have been trying to make an Iron Dragon.

I believe that Aldia was attempting to find a way to create half-dragon half-human creatures capable of transcending the natural lives of humans, and ultimately make the curse inconsequential. However, the experiment failed and Shanalotte didn't come out the way Aldia had hoped. If this is the case, it's possible that Vendrick ordered Aldia to find a way to use Dragons in order to end the curse of the undead. It is likely that the Enhanced Undead are the results of these experiments (probably failures).