The Ending of Elden Ring Nightreign Explained

Summary

• Nightreign’s ending ties into Elden Ring, hinting at how the Nightlords were involved with the original game.
• The gameplay loop involves building an Erdtree to repulse the night, with cycles playing a central role.
• The post-credits scene hints at the geographical and chronological relationship between Nightreign and Elden Ring.

Major spoilers ahead for Elden Ring Nightreign’s ending, final boss, and post-credits sequence.

When Elden Ring Nightreign was revealed, it was very hard to speculate how it would tie into the lore of Elden Ring. Seemingly set in a parallel version of the Lands Between, Limveld, it melded many previous Elden Ring motifs and FromSoftware influences into one. However, after various trailers, a network test, and now the full release, a picture is forming on just how Nightreign relates to Elden Ring, and Nightreign’s ending reveals how surprisingly interconnected they are.

To understand the ending of Elden Ring Nightreign, there are plenty of cutscenes, locations, bosses, item descriptions, and other smaller details that come together to illustrate a broader picture, as is FromSoftware fashion. Because of this, a definitive answer can be more interpretive than objective, and there can be more than one explanation yet to be unearthed. Still, with clues laid in place, players can come to comprehend Elden Ring Nightreign‘s world and the cryptic conclusion it offers.

Elden Ring Nightreign Ends Where It All Began

At the end of the Night Aspect expedition, players will come up against Heolstor the Nightlord, the one responsible for cloaking the lands in the veil of night, in an ashen land. Upon defeating him and acquiring the Primordial Nightlord’s Rune, the Nightfarers are separated, reemerging seemingly right where they last stood, but with a twist. Heolstor’s arena is outside the Roundtable House, an endless sea of ash replacing water, with the curved, fingerprint sky unfolded. This instance of the Roundtable Hold is far more dilapidated than ever, rendered in grayscale, and crumbling slowly, with no grace.

As players explore Elden Ring Nightreign’s Roundtable Hold, they will find a solitary corpse that can be offered Heolstor’s Rune. When the Primordial Nightlord’s Rune is passed on, the player will fade into strands of light, the only color within the Hold, flying through each room until ascending through the open roof, much like the shape of a grace.

What Connects Heolstor and the Roundtable Hold?

There is a strong emphasis on the role of time in Elden Ring Nightreign. Days pass quickly, and each run is a cycle that resets the clock, letting players challenge enemies that they have already defeated. As players make their way through Nightreign’s story, they will probably have noticed that the Roundtable Hold starts to crumble around them. After seeing the final ruin of the Roundtable Hold upon Heolstor’s defeat, it seems that the place has been falling apart since before the night began, only to reset upon the cycle completing.

The corpse in the Roundtable Hold is likely to be Heolstor, or whoever they were before becoming Heolstor the Nightlord, as it is by offering it the Nightlord’s Rune that causes time to reset. The biggest clue for this is in the item description for the Night of the Lord Relic:

“The country lay in ruin. The man who was once knight had challenged the hero, but he too was no match. He fell, just another body in a great pile.”

While no names are given, “man” in Nightreign’s item descriptions typically refers to Heolstor, hinting at his past before the cycle began. Interestingly, this description could also implicate the Tarnished from Elden Ring in its description, as few other characters could fit the bill of a nameless hero bringing an end to the world. As the description continues, it highlights how he could be connected to the Roundtable Hold:

“But eventually he awoke, crawling out from underneath the others. Though he had failed to protect anything or anyone, he yet lived. And so he cursed the world.

It was the dead of night, and from the sky poured down a great rain.”

By reuniting Heolstor’s corpse with the Primordial Nightlord’s Rune, the world can finally be reset, and the ruin of the old world that Heolstor cursed with the night can be washed away. The reason that these two could be separate entities could be down to fluctuating time, but also a separation of Heolstor the man and Heolstor the god. As the Primordial Nightlord, Heolstor holds the Rune within his chest, showing how his body is a vessel for the rune, like how Marika and Radagon’s body holds the Elden Ring. The hollow nature of Heolstor seems important here, as if the angry husk rose up to curse the world, while the meager body was sat in the dilapidated Hold.

Heolstor’s Rune is described as having the qualities of a Great Rune, but not necessarily being one.

The Night Is a Veil

Another key part of Nightreign’s symbolism is that night is a veil. By placing it and removing it, different things can be revealed. During his boss fight, Heolstor will cut the sky open, revealing the world behind it. It is highly likely that the crumbling Roundtable Hold found within Heolstor’s arena is the true form of the Hold, much like Elden Ring’s Roundtable Hold, which exists as both a projection and a physical space. The reason the Hold is crumbling in Nightreign could be due to the illusion that hides its true state falling apart as the night grows stronger.

Nightreign’s Post-Credits Cutscene Has Huge Implications for Elden Ring’s Lore

Elden Ring Nightreign has quite the surprise in store for players who watch the end credits. From the middle of an empty sea, the camera pans up to reveal the Lands Between and the Erdtree standing tall and resilient, as though nothing had ever happened. If that wasn’t enough, a giant figure made of knotted wood rises from the sea, taking one look at the distant Erdtree, before turning back and walking toward the sunset.

Naturally, this has massive implications for the nature of Elden Ring’s world and dispels the idea that Nightreign exists separately from the main game. One of the Elden Ring Nightreign achievements, “Dawn,” is awarded when beating the story, and it depicts an Erdtree, mirroring this post-credit sequence. As some players noticed during the network test, Limveld is surrounded by the same islands that surround the Lands Between, further indicating that Nightreign takes place in the same geographical space, separated by night’s veil.

Revelations about the veil of night could help explain how the Shadowlands were veiled by Marika.

The Wooden Giant Is Actually One of Many

The giant that rises from the sea is actually visible way before the end of Nightreign. During an expedition, foggy figures will appear off the coast of Limveld, and as the night draws in, their forms materialize until they are revealed to be made of wood. Each one is walking in the same direction, seemingly around or away from the island.

Interestingly, they share some similar motifs to some dead Giants in Elden Ring, wearing crowns of thorns, indicating guilt, and bearing fingerprint markings between their vines. The one waking up at the end appears to look out at the Erdtree before rejecting its radiance, leaving the Lands Between behind. Whatever they are, the cycle of night and day is what reveals their presence, and they seem to be migrating away.

Elden Ring Nightreign’s Gameplay Loop Is About Building an Erdtree

One of the most prominent questions many players asked regarded where the Erdtree is in Elden Ring Nightreign, as it couldn’t be seen anywhere. Upon playing the game, there are portraits of the tree to be found, and Executor can be seen painting one. Many players will have recognized that the safe zone in Nightreign is underneath some glowing tree roots, and if they watch the tree throughout the course of a game, it grows larger, until its twisting, hand-like boughs form around the spectral form of a divine tower.

The rains of the oncoming night seem to be repulsed by the tree each time, as if its presence is holding the veil of night back. Eventually, Elden Ring Nightreign‘s Nightfarers will ascend the tower to fight the Nightlord, finding that the tree and tower are now a ruin.

Nightreign‘s roguelike structure perfectly mirrors the game’s cyclical story, a staple of FromSoftware design melding mechanics and narrative.

As time is central to more than just Elden Ring Nightreign‘s three-day loop, the quick life cycle of the tree seems to indicate that the day-night cycle does not flow as expected. Although the Nightfarers experience it relatively quickly, it could be that building the tree to repulse the night takes far, far longer in reality, or that time is compressed, and what should take millennia happens, literally, overnight. Either way, it leads to a rapid decay that is also seen in the Roundtable Hold, hinting at the rapidly deteriorating state of the world.

How Nightreign’s Cycle Could Tie Back to Elden Ring

Given what has been said about the relationship between Limveld and the Lands Between, the tree being constructed in Nightreign could be the Erdtree seen in the post-credits scene. As the two lands occupy the same world space, it is possible that the end of the cycle, the construction of the tree, leads to the Dawn, the beginning of the new world, where the Erdtree stands resplendent again. The Primordial Nightlord’s Rune item description has something very interesting to say relating to this:

“The cutting-gifted tribe anticipated the coming night, and spent many a moon planning its prevention, concluding that their only chance at success was to cheat a god.

They had glimpsed what they should not, the very sin of the Erdtree. For their trespass, so were they punished.”

This description appears to implicate the distant Giants further, as their crowns of thorns would match up with punishment. While only a theory, it is possible that the Erdtree being constructed during a run of Nightreign is being built by these Giants, their forms becoming illuminated by its growing light, as, although they were punished by Erdtree society, they were the tribe gifted a cutting of the Erdtree to plant and finally stop the night.

They constructed the tower needed to reach the Nightlords, silently assisting the Nightfarers as they ascend to challenge the Nightlords who would threaten the world. This would explain what causes them to reject the Erdtree afterward, as even though their actions saved it, they would not be accepted for their original sin.