Lords

The Lords are the four original gods of Dark Souls, who found the lord souls in the First Flame. They are Nito, the Witch of Izalith, Gwyn, and the Furtive Pygmy.

Prior Existence
Little is known of the lives of the Lords before the discovery of Fire, but it is mentioned that they came from the Dark. Gwyn had an uncle in Allfather Lloyd, and a company of knights by the time of claiming his soul, so he clearly has existed long before the Flame. The Witch was accompanied by her adult daughters when she claimed her soul, so she must also have been a mother long before. Nito-- is shown to suddenly appear to reach for his soul, but it is not known if he used some sort of travel to the Flame, or if he spontaneously sprung to life.

Discovering Souls
After approaching the First Flame, the four Lords claimed the strength of lord souls, metaphysical representations of the newly introduced concept of disparity. Nito claimed a manifestation of death and disease, the Witch claimed the concepts of life and heat, and Gwyn was imbued with the powers of light and energy.

War and Dragon Hunts
Now with the strength of Lords, the three waged a war on the Everlasting Dragons that ruled the grey. They were joined by Seath, a scaleless albino dragon that pillaged the Primordial Crystal from them as well, possibly to make certain that they would be made mortal.

As the beasts flew forward, Gwyn released grand bolts of light so powerful that they stripped the dragons of their stone scales, the source of their everlasting nature. With her daughters, the Witch wove firestorms that incinerated the land, and burned the weakened beasts. Once this was done, Nito arrived for the killing blow by releasing the miasma of death upon the scaleless foes, killing them in one fell strike. Soon the dragons were no more, and the Age of Fire could begin.

Age of Fire
During this place in time, a number of things happened, but the actual chronology is uncertain.

The kingdom of Lordran was established, and the Lords took to their different homes and agendas. Gwyn had his city of the gods, Anor Londo, built in the center of Lordran, which would eventually be inhabited by his children, his faithful silver knights, and other beings awarded with fragments of his soul. These include other deities, such as the king's four knights. He also bequeathed fragments to four individuals, and naming them rulers of New Londo, for their foresight.

At some point the firstborn of Gwyn betrayed the gods and allied with the descendants of the dragons, and his name and Light Soul shard (the difference between gods and hollows) was stripped from him, and was removed from all recorded history such as annals and statues.

From the union of an unnamed dragon and an unnamed god or goddess, the crossbreed Priscilla was born, and Gwyn had an individual named Ariamis create a cold alternate world within a painting. As she grew up within the painted world, she grew stronger and developed the power of lifehunt, so powerful that the gods feared her and had her painting guarded to make certain nothing went in or out.

The Witch returned to her home of Izalith, but what she did there is not known.

After establishing the Catacombs, Nito slept in the Tomb of the Giants, quietly overseeing the death of all things living in Lordran.

Seath was awarded dukedom and became the one dragon respected by the royal family, even receiving a fragment of Gwyn's soul, and was rewarded with an archive of all known knowledge. He retreated into his new home to study immortality, through the Primordial Crystal, and created the art of manipulating the energy of the common soul as a result of this.

The Fast-Fading Flame, The Birth of Chaos, and the Pygmy's Plan
Even with the power and knowledge gained through the lord souls, they were soon surprised to find the First Flame fading, and with it the light and power of the gods.

But there was one who knew that this would come. For it was the Furtive Pygmy, who they had forgotten, who stayed in the dark while his larger kin fought the dragons. He had discovered something in the fire that while small, possessed a power and potential surpassing the other lord souls. Claiming the dark soul, he became the first Dark Lord, and god of darkness. Understanding the ability of darkness to expand and increase in strength, he had spent the Age of Fire breaking off innumerable shards of darkness, and with them he created his children and became god of humanity. Soon the flames would fade completely, so that he and his descendants may rule the world that the soon to be powerless gods, through their war with the dragons, made safe for them.

Meanwhile, the other Lords feared the dark and the growing strength of humankind, and sought to prolong the inevitable end of their rule. Desperately, the Witch attempted to use her own soul, the soul of life, to recreate a new flame. But trifling with the very fundamental concepts can corrupt them, and the flame she created devoured her, killing her and many daughters as well. Using her soul as the fuel and her body as a seedbed, this fire grew and consumed Izalith, mutating most of her surviving daughters into abominable creatures and turning her only son into a volcanic monstrosity. Then this corrupted flame began to use the Life Soul to create corrupted life imbued by fire, and the beings were called Demons, and the fire was named the Chaos Flame. In response, Gwyn and many of his knights fought the demons to mitigate their danger, charring the knights black.

Fearful of the darkness and of humans ruling the gods, Gwyn had one last idea to stop it. Taking some of his black knights with him, he bid his clan farewell and left to the Kiln of the First Flame, burning himself to prolong his clan's rule and incinerating the knights that guarded the entrance. His lord soul allowed the age to continue for approximately another thousand years, but left Gwyn hollow and burned after losing his soul.

When this occurred, the other gods used unknown means to erase the memory of humans' true power from later generations, while potentially removing those coming before. To stay in power, the gods shepherded the humans into worshiping them, teaching them to fear the dark. By the time any human encountered the power of dark, they had no clue as to how it work or had any memory of how they used to manipulate it, and were transformed into corrupted beings.

Aftermath
Some while after, the curse of undeath was formed, possibly due to the damaging of fundamental workings when Gwyn artificially prolonged the fading. Humans, who were meant to rule in the Age of Dark, received the Darksign. Those that bore it would be revived after death, though their humanity would be lost, and without restoring it would devolve into mindless corpses like Gwyn. But the undead were also able to serve as a vessel for the souls of those who die around them, and use the souls to strengthen themselves.

Despite the memory of The Pygmy being lost to humans, Darkstalker Kaathe worked to make certain that the Age of Dark would occur, and it's Dark Lord be crowned. He traveled to Oolacile, where human sorcerers worked to create golden sorceries, and informed them of a powerful primeval human buried there. In an effort to gain power, they unearthed and revived the man, subjecting him to extremely torturous imprisonment. This dark sorcerer was driven mad and, with his humanity driven wild as well he generated the very first Abyss, consuming the land and corrupting citizens.

Then Kaathe went to New Londo, seducing the kings with the art of lifedrain, which corrupted them and their knights. When Darkwraiths posed a grand danger, one of Gwyn's four knights Artorias traveled to the Abyss, where he made a covenant with the denizens there to traverse the dark without being swallowed so that he could hunt the Darkwraiths. Soon the city was flooded, and the dark servants were imprisoned in the Abyss at the cost of the the lives of the citizens. Artorias traveled with his wolf Sif to Oolacile to combat Manus, and he was forced to sacrifice himself to save Sif, becoming corrupted by the dark.

The Way of White  was formed by Gzyn's uncle  Lloyd  to hunt down the hollows, but due to the progression of undead to hollow, it became the simple act of hunting and corralling all undead. Those that they did not kill were imprisoned in an  asylum  to wait for the end of the world, for it is said that one day an undead will escape the prison and succeed Gwyn as the fire's fuel. At the same time, Kaathe preaches that this chosen has the opportunity to become the new Dark Lord and usher in the Age of Dark. The choice is their's.