Talk:First Flame/@comment-66.67.69.49-20170712183115/@comment-166.137.14.128-20170716102556

For most, it's all they know. There's a mentioned Scholar in relation to Lothric that "doubts the linking of the flame", so clearly there's people that would doubt the cycle of linking the First Flame or can hazard a guess that all they're doing every time they instate a Lord of Cinder is just kicking the can down the road- a can that's eventually crushed regardless of whether you choose to link the flame or snuff it out at the end of DS3.

Plus the price of a Lord of Cinder is the sacrifice of a hero, something that's not really in any short supply in DS's world; the First Flame apparently even takes multiple people acting as one, given the Abyss Watchers count as a collective Lord of Cinder. One person of strength to ensure the world survives another few centuries, then decades, then years.

There's also the element that should the fire go out, nobody knows what will happen. History may have forgotten that there existed a time before fire, seeing as DS3 only really brings up "the age of gods", and while they know they're staving off the Dark, "Dark" is often left incredibly vague outside of being referred to as something to avoid at all costs. Most conflate it with the Abyss, though the Abyss seems an element more intrinsic to Humanity than it is to Dark explicitly, even taking into account that humanity is a butt-load of Dark Soul fragments. There's also the Deep, whatever that actually is beyond the eldritch horrors mentioned to inhabit it; it's "a darkness beyond human ken", suggesting there's Dark well and beyond even the all-consuming Abyss.