Travels to Siofra River

Don Everhart, Contributing Editor, Wretch

I had been trudging around Limgrave, Elden Ring’s starting area, for a few hours when I found an elaborate stone gazebo in the woods. Well, “trudging” might not quite be the word, since I’ve spent more hours partying with friends in the game than steadfastly pursuing its objectives. On this occasion, though, I was hiking solo, having not yet found the game’s summonable, spectral steed. Limgrave is a grounded area. For all that it is full of crumbling ruins, a massive dragon, a timeless prison, and a perpetually stormy path to a castle, it’s mostly a place of dusty trails, meadows, groves, and humans. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture muck on your character's boots.

Or, in my case, muck and dust on the bare feet of a character that started with nothing but a loincloth and a club. I was a desperate bandit. My character crouched in bushes and waited for soldiers to pace along their route, clubbing them in the back and then over the head until I was wearing their tabard, helmet, and, yes, boots. I was working my way up to using a flail. One of the first things that I did with friends in the game was to rob a stagecoach. It was a fantastically large coach pulled by two giants, so it wasn’t an ordinary heist, but it was a classic piece of banditry, nonetheless. Hooting and hollering on mic from disconnected homes and apartments, my friends and I dropped from a cliff, stopped the giants in their path, slaughtered their human entourage, and opened the chest hanging off the back of the carriage. My reward was a large axe that my character was too weak to use.

So, later, on my own again, I walked into some nearby woods. They grow densely on the eastern side of Limgrave. I met a wandering merchant, but I was too broke to buy anything. I ran past a large bear, and then a much larger, hulking monstrosity of a bear, and heard a wolf’s howl. And then, just off the path, in the shade, I saw a round, stone structure. Walking into it, I saw the hallmark of an elevator in From Software’s design language - a small, raised circle, a pressure-activated plate. I stepped on it.

Down it went, into the earth, dropping me into a cavern with shallow water and sandstone ruins. Humanoids with strange harpoons populated stone steps. I went through them slowly and methodically, doing my best to engage one at a time. Another elevator. And then the area opened up, under a majestic sky of hovering ruins and violet stars. A title informed me that the name of the location was Siofra River. It was nothing like Limgrave, at all.

Videogame artists are under a lot of pressure to create vistas. While many games contain pretty views, they’re often revealed to be empty backdrops. Gamers are sometimes dismissive of skyboxes as tantalizing, illusory renders that hold unreachable promises of more interesting areas to explore.

Siofra River certainly has a lovely skybox, but it’s not all vista. Its ground is an upwardly-sloping set of hillocks and shallow streams tucked amidst grand columns and aqueducts. Ghostly minotaurs materialize and fire enormous, Tarnished-seeking arrows. Shrines are scattered about with braziers to light, though it’s not obvious why one would do so except out of curiosity. To one side, there’s an open air temple, hanging off a foggy abyss, with the decaying remains of a godly elk. At the top of the slope, there’s another giant elevator to be activated that brings players to the middle of cursed Caelid, a land of rusted red sands, putrid swamps, decrepit dragons, and howling, mindless demigods. Early on, it clearly wasn’t a friendly place to explore. 

During my first trip to Siofra River, I realized that I wasn’t much of a match for its ectoplasmic warriors, either. Even if I could dodge out of the way of their attacks, my club just didn’t do much damage in response. I would be at it all day if I attempted to clear them all out of the zone, and they would just respawn, anyway. So I dashed around in a random walk. It worked out – I found my first bow, an immensely useful tool for pulling enemies into range of my club.

Over a dozen hours later, I was back. Past the castle that overlooks Limgrave, past the distant lake in the north and its academy of crystal magic, past a frosty mansion full of 10-fingered pairs of hands that scuttle like spiders, I met a witch. I guess I met her a second time, since she appears early on to put you in touch with a magical horse and to show you how to summon other allies made from spirit and ash. She has a follower named Blaidd, a towering wolfman. It turns out that it was his howl that I initially heard in the Limgrave woods. Rainni the Witch, Blaidd, and a couple of her other retainers were looking to gain entry to Nokron, the Eternal City. Blaidd had gone searching for that entry at Siofra River. 

On horseback, armed with multiple flails, I charged down minotaurs and lit every shrine. That let me challenge the ancient elk spirit of the temple, ghostly and colossal. That fight feels a bit more like a nod from game director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s to film director and animator Hayao Miyazaki’s work than usual. In it, a regal animal spirit leaps multiple times in the air while a subdued score plays in the background. Whether or not there is anything victorious about defeating that spirit is left an open question. In the scope of the game, it’s an optional battle. It’s not a gatekeeper for a further area – once it is defeated, no staircase emerges to Nokron.

If players look for Blaidd, they can find him near the temple. He stands pensively, looking up at that magical sky, much like a player might when seeing the sights. Nokron, he explains, is up there. You can see bits of it, floating in the glowing sky. It seems to sit in between the crust of Limgrave and the depths of Siofra River. But there’s no way up from where you stand, and no elevator, tunnel, or well from the surface. Existing in between, it’s out of reach.

Part of the beauty of Siofra River is that it’s not an essential part of the game. My journeys there are illustrative of that. I stumbled on its entrance, then later came back as part of a character’s story. Not the story, not the main plot of Elden Ring, just a story. Blaidd travels there because he doesn’t know where else to look, and once he’s at the River, all he can do is look up and away. Even meeting Blaidd there is tangential to unlocking an entrance to that city. He can help clear out a castle in Caelid and can help you beat up the demigod next door, which in turn progresses the game’s state in a way that opens a way into Nokron. But that entrance ultimately arrives through Limgrave. You can enter Nokron without ever setting foot in Siofra River.

That is one of my favorite qualities of Elden Ring. There is this beautiful, mysterious area, hidden away from the overworld, with only tenuous connections to the main story. Players can stumble upon it, and stumble through it, at almost any time. From it, you can see a crucial place. Part of Nokron’s myth is established by its place in the skybox. It’s aspirational in design and also an aspiration for some of the game’s most celebrated characters. And then, eventually, it turns out to be more than a skybox after all. You can travel there, just not from Siofra River. That’s left as a place to wonder and dream.