Talk:Dragon Slayer Ornstein/@comment-222.144.173.69-20161007152926/@comment-76.16.25.255-20170128093759

The only problem I see with your argument is that you can only get one soul between ornstein and smough, and if Smough's descriptions are correct, then you don't get ornstein's soul in DS1. You even say that ornstein fell first, which means that in the cannon of the game you only get smough's soul. It is assumed that ornstein dies in the fight too, because you get his health bar to zero, then smough smacks him with the hammer, and absorbs his power. But you don't get his soul from that, you can assume he is dead and his soul just became part of smough's soul, but it isn't proven anywhere in the games. In order to get ornstein's soul you have to kill smough first, meaning smough couldn't have been the last to stand guard. The only way to explain getting ornstein's souls at all is the wonky time line in souls games. How else could kill smough then ornstein, then link the flame and start all over, then kill ornstein then smough, and have the spoils from both fights on the same character. Based on the armor descriptions it is reasonable to believe that ornstein fell first in battle, leaving smough as the last man defending the castle, but that through some miracle he survived the battle and left anor londo. Now i agree that there is no concrete connection that the dragon slayer in DS2 is ornstein from DS1, but saying that it is impossible because you get his soul in DS1 isn't true. The descriptions say that ornstein left, and not that he left through death, because the game would have been more explicit than that. The fact that the dragon slayer is wearing essentially black ornstein armor in DS2 means that it very well could just be another recreation of the armor in gold in DS3, but it is just as likely that it is the actual armor of ornstein. The lore leaves it to interpretation, so chose what ever option you prefer.

I love ornstein, so of coarse i'm going to lean towards the side that says he survived and left anor londo. I also think it is a great story that, after learning smough had died defending an illusion of gwynevere, that he gave up on the old gods of the world and decided to seek out the first son of gwyn. A fellow knight who gave up on gwyn's world and left to find meaning of his own, with a dragon he once would have killed. But ornstein couldn't reach the nameless king because he was too far gone, or he just refused to accept a member of gwyn's court in spite of the fact that he abondoned it. So he left his golden armor right there as a final display of his abondoment. And who knows if the dragon slayer in DS2 is him before DS3, or after DS3, or not him at all.

Now that may just sound like a fan fic, but theroy crafting in dark souls isn't much more than that, because the lore isn't written in stone. All we have is the infrences that can be made from reading item descriptions and both ornstein's and smough's suggest that ornstein wasn't killed by the chosen undead.