Talk:Unkindled/@comment-69.143.134.163-20170417155337

It makes sense that, at some point in the endless cycles of light and dark people would have realized what's going on and tried to "head off" the fading of the flame by feeding people to it. These people were probably relatively weak (having not gone through a huge adventure gaining tons of souls) and simply burned out - like tossing a handful of twigs into a fire. I feel like the unkindled are the remains of these underpowered people. Considering that knowledge of the cycle exists in DS2, I can see some kingdoms trying something like this to hack the system. Throw a whole city of undead into the flame to try to keep it going. I highly doubt that it ever worked, though.

The irony of the whole fading of the fire is that the *only* situation that can reliably create a being with the strength to link the fire is it's near-extinguishing. Only when there are thousands of powerful hollows that can be farmed (for lack of a better word) in a post-apocalyptic world is there enough raw soul-mass that someone can gather to perform the linking successfully.

It's made clear in DS2 that this cycle has occurred many (perhaps hundreds or thousands) of times since Gywn linked the fire. I'd imagine that most of the time the linking goes as it did in DS2, where a powerful undead just sort of rises, battles his/her way through the remnants of the previous kingdoms absorbing all of their souls along the way and eventually linking the flame.

Could it be that the Lords of Cinder are the exceptions?  They don't seem to be standard undead - and their linkings probably represent early restarts of the cycle rather than the kind of 'last ditch' effort that seems to be prevalent in the games.

