Miquella is free in first trailer for Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

In 2022, FromSoftware released Elden Ring, a video game set in a brutal fantasy world that changed the player with overcoming a battery of vengeful bosses to become king of this ruined land. The game was very beautiful and very difficult, with a story about warring demigods contributed in part by A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin.

Now, two years later, we have a trailer for the game's highly anticipated DLC: Shadow of the Erdtree. It will return players to the Lands Between where they'll face down one of the few demigods they didn't massacre in the first game: Miquella. Watch the trailer above!

The lord of Elden Ring is deep, dark and somewhat vague on purpose. FromSoftware has pulled this trick with a lot of its games going back to Dark Souls; the idea is that if you don't fill in every gap, the players will be even more fascinated and create theories more rich and elaborate than anything the developers could have come up with. The strategy has worked, as anyone who's taken a peek at the myriad lore videos on YouTube about games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring can attest.

Still, we do know some things about Miquella from the first game. He is the son of Queen Marika, the last firmly accepted ruler of the Lands Between before the player takes over at the end of the first game, and Radagon, a warrior who is actually part of Marika. So she sort of married herself — gods do weird things, don't judge — and then gave birth to Miquella and his twin sister Malenia, who was the absolute hardest boss from the first game. The idea of her returning in any form, even in memory, fills me with dread.

We never actually meet Miquella in the first game; before it begins, he's been kidnapped by another demigod named Mogh, which is easy to do since Miquella is in a catatonic state, part of his attempt to cure himself of the curse of forever looking like a child. (God stuff, man.) Mogh, who is Miquella's half-brother, hopes to use Miquella to establish himself as the head of a new dynasty now that Marika is no longer in charge of the Lands Between. But he never gets to do that, because the player beats the tar out of Mogh near the end of the game. Miquella is present in the room where we fight Mogh, but all we see is his withered arm hanging out of a giant egg. He never wakes up...until now.

Miquella sounded like one of the more benevolent demigods. He built a massive home for the disaffected creatures known as the Haligtree, and the trailer for Shadow of the Erdtree has this to say about him: "Pure and radiant, he wields love to shrive clean the hearts of men." That sounds kind of nice, right?

Well, no, because everything in Elden Ring wants to kill you three times. The trailer follows up that line with, "There is nothing more terrifying." I have no doubt Miquella will want the player dead just as badly as everything else in this world does, especially after we kind of, um, killed his twin sister. Our bad.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree will be available on June 21.

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