Board Thread:Dark Souls II/@comment-2.223.169.191-20140325204725/@comment-98.250.190.229-20140701102450

Cement Plant wrote: The official strategy guide for Dark Souls 2 was written in close cooperation with both Namco and From Software, and in fact several of well known community members worked on it(Such as EpicNameBro or A German Spy).

So is a majority of all the other game guides out there, minus the community member part, which doesn't mean squat in this case. They're unreliable in regards to lore or fluff information; get them for the numbers and that's it, and even then they're not always accurate.

The Lost Sinner is just an unrelated entity who was possessed by the bug-creature that once was Witch of Izalith, that simple. Whether or not the possession first occurred when we see it, or had already happened before our arrival, is up in there air. This isn't complicated.