FromSoftware has been pulling the same visual trick for more than a decade, and it’s the kind of thing you either never notice, or you can’t unsee.
Way off in the fog of its biggest games sit these colossal pillar-trunks, like petrified trees or bone-white columns, rising into nowhere. They don’t get a cutscene. Nobody in-game gives you the “as you know…” lecture. They’re just… there. InDark Soulsat Ash Lake. InBloodbornebeyond the Hunter’s Dream. InElden Ringin an arena tied to a major, big-deal creature.
And because FromSoftware is FromSoftware, the studio refuses to tell you what they mean, turning a background prop into catnip for lore nerds, YouTubers, and forum archaeologists.
The same eerie silhouette keeps showing up, and fans won’t let it go
This argument didn’t start yesterday. Players have been connecting the dots since the “Archtrees” inDark Souls, those gigantic, trunk-like structures half-swallowed by mist, then spotting similar shapes later inBloodborneandElden Ring.
The recurring fight is always the same: is this just an internal wink from the art team, a visual shorthand for “you’re somewhere weird,” or a breadcrumb pointing to some shared FromSoftware cosmology across separate franchises?
FromSoftware, led by director Hidetaka Miyazaki, does what it always does: shrugs in silence. No official answer. No canon diagram. No “here’s the lore, folks.”
That silence isn’t an accident. It’s the whole business model.
In Dark Souls, the Archtrees feel like the world’s load-bearing beams
Dark Soulsgives fans the most ammunition because Ash Lake is a mood piece: vast, quiet, ashy, and dominated by these absurdly huge “trees” that look like they could be holding the sky up.
You don’t get a tidy explanation, but the game’s opening narration talks about a formless world ruled by fog, crags, and trees, before the Age of Fire. So players look at Ash Lake and go: okay, this is the basement of reality. A scar from the primordial era. The place where the universe still shows its seams.
The staging helps sell it. Ash Lake is hidden behind a secret route, which makes it feel less like a normal location and more like a forbidden layer the game didn’t want you to find. There’s not much “game” happening there, few enemies, lots of emptiness, which only cranks up the sense that you’ve stepped outside the timeline.
And the Archtrees themselves are weirdly ambiguous. They read as wood, but their texture can look like stone… or bone. Mineral and organic at the same time. That’s exactly the kind of unsettling half-answer FromSoftware loves: enough shape to imply meaning, not enough clarity to pin it down.
Fans also point out how well they fitDark Souls’ obsession with cycles, worlds burning down, restarting, stacking on top of each other. If everything else collapses, what stays? Maybe the foundations. Maybe these things.
In Bloodborne, the pillars look like a “you’re not in Kansas” warning sign
Bloodbornebrings the motif back, but now it’s parked in a place that’s explicitly not normal reality: the Hunter’s Dream.
This isn’t just a hub area with a nice view. The game tells you it’s a dream-space tied to higher forces, separate from Yharnam. AndBloodborneis already obsessed with layered existence, dreams, nightmares, waking life, cosmic entities squatting just outside human perception.
So when you see those distant pillar-trunks on the horizon, they don’t feel like ancient “roots of the world” so much as structural supports for an artificial pocket reality. A set. A construct. A place being maintained.
One popular read: they’re a mythic “world tree” idea, think Yggdrasil vibes, recast in FromSoftware’s preferred aesthetic: rot, ruin, vertigo.Bloodborneeven has a mechanic (Insight) that literally changes what you can perceive. The pillars become a visual metaphor for a truth that’s always been there, but most characters can’t even describe.
Still, most serious lore folks pump the brakes on the “shared universe” leap. FromSoftware reuses imagery the way some directors reuse camera shots: as a signature, not necessarily a continuity promise.
Elden Ring adds gasoline: open-world scale, stacked realms, and that familiar horizon
Elden Ringmakes the whole thing messier, in a good way, because it’s a massive, layered world full of metaphysical bureaucracy: Order, Grace, outer wills, fractures in reality, underground continents, and places that don’t behave like normal geography.
So when players spot those same distant mega-pillars in an arena tied to a major encounter, the comparison machine fires up instantly. The silhouette is too familiar. The scale is too ridiculous. The way they fade into the horizon is too deliberate.
InElden Ring, the “other planes” idea isn’t as overtly dreamlike asBloodborne, but it’s everywhere. The game constantly hints that what you’re walking through is only one layer of something bigger. In that context, the pillars read like a visual marker: you’re in a space governed by different rules, maybe closer to a concept than a location.
The cautious theory is also the most convincing: FromSoftware uses these pillars to make you feel small. You’re a speck crawling through the wreckage of gods and empires. Infinite pillars in the distance are environmental storytelling that doesn’t need a single line of dialogue.
The spicier theory tries to tie them to the studio’s multiplayer logic, each player in their own “instance,” realities brushing against each other via summons and invasions. It’s a fun idea, and it’s been floating around the community for years. ButElden Ringdoesn’t hand you a clean text quote that seals the deal.
Miyazaki’s favorite tool is the missing page, and fans bring their own books
Miyazaki has said in multiple interviews over the years that he prefers fragmented storytelling, the kind where you reconstruct the truth from item descriptions, architecture, and half-buried hints. He’s talked about loving stories where you don’t get the full picture, like reading something with pages torn out.
So a recurring, unexplained motif like these pillars isn’t a mistake. It’s the point.
Fans, being fans, start building their own reference library. One comparison that gets tossed around linksDark Souls’ Archtrees to C.S. Lewis’The Magician’s Nephew, which features worlds connected through an in-between space. That’s not evidence, more like a metaphor fans use to explain the vibe.
And culturally, the “world tree” is ancient symbolism. FromSoftware didn’t invent it. But it does twist it: instead of a lush, living tree, you get a fossilized trunk-column, less “nature,” more “scaffolding.” Sacred turned structural.
There’s also a practical upside to keeping it vague: if you explain it too clearly, you shrink it. Mystery is part of the atmosphere. Plus, ambiguity lets the studio reuse the same shape across different games without getting trapped in contradictions. In one game it can be primordial foundation; in another, a dream-space tell.
Sure, some players roll their eyes and call it lazy recycling. But FromSoftware’s whole identity is built on these repeating visual rhymes. They create continuity of feeling even when the lore isn’t shared.
So the pillars remain what they’ve always been: a shape in the distance, a silent dare, and a community that refuses to treat background art like background art.
