Archive of Our Own

1. “May the Ring of Friendship Turn Forever” (Dark Souls 3)
1. “...a foul creature ravaged Astora…” Reference to the Ring of the Evil Eye
2. “Did you know only a single Divine Blessing was ever given benediction? A curious loophole… done correctly a single drop of that blessed water in a bottle of brandy or bitter tonic transmutes them into a new bottle of the holy stuff! And a drop of that into a new draught, and so on…”  My take on the Catholic Church’s wacky relic system.
3. “...the ghosts of Catarina.”  Siegmeyer, Sieglinde, various PCs, and Patches.
4. “...a tale of cancer… and the knife.”  This is a turn of phrase used significantly in an unpublished Fate of the Undead comic about Ingward and Artorias.
   
   
2. “For the Sangha” (Sekiro)
1. “So… I have heard it said, oh monks, that… hmm, I dunno that’s the best way to begin.”  This is a very traditional phrase in Buddhism, used to begin many texts and discourses.
2. “Usui? One slip of the pen and he would have been a cloud-and-water man.”  A cloud-and-water man, or Unsui, is an itinerant cleric who is no longer affiliated with their home temple, and wanders the earth until they find a new teacher. I am actually an unsui, as I was once a Buddhist priest but my temple was disbanded and I have not found a new teacher yet.
3. “Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā?” The ending verse of the foundational Heart Sutra.
4. “...the sixth Patriarch’s famous verse.”  Specifically this is a reference to a poem that the illiterate Huineng composed in response to a more traditional verse of wisdom. The verse was what convinced the abbot of the monastery where Huineng was the janitor to take the future Zen Patriarch into officially studying the Dharma.
5. “Scripture scrolls dug from piles of garbage!” Some iconoclasty from Zen master Hakuin. I think what he’s getting at in his verse is that approaching holiness with the wrong intentions is kind of like going through a pile of newspapers and expecting to find an autographed copy of the Bible.
6. Huineng, Hakuin, Ikkyu, Tanka, Dogen, and Rinzai were all Zen masters of surpassing insight and their teachings critical, but as hinted at here were… eccentric, to say the least.
7. “Without any hesitation he flung the idol onto the fire.” A famous Zen story and thought experiment on the interaction between “Buddha nature” and the world.
8. “Let us decide which sage would win in a battle, then!” There are a list of acinteyya or “imponderables.” These are topics that are advised against thinking about and discussing as they are too distracting from the work of meditation. One of these imponderables is about Dragonball Z power levels.
   
   
3. “True Companion” (Dark Souls 2)
1. The companion is wielding the Roaring Halberd and is wearing the Warlock Mask, Witch’s Robe, and Lion Mage Skirt.
2. “The funeral pyres of saints and sages often held tiny crystalline souls amid the ashes…” In Buddhism there is a concept of something called “sarira” which are crystals sometimes found in the ashes of great teachers and wise elders. Not sure if this was ever confirmed to be the origin of the Lifegems, but I’d like to think so.
3. “...like the afterimage of staring into the sun, as some devotees of the sun cults did.” I hope Solaire is wearing shades beneath his helmet.
4. “...everyone knew what the fables said about overconfidence.”  I can hear Wayne June opining about a slow and insidious killer.
5. “...like one of the sun cult’s toroctonies…” A practice involving being showered in the blood of a sacrificial bull. Associated with the cult of Mithras, and in my mind would be something the Sunbros might do.
6. “Like a great golden idol submerged at the bottom of an algae-choked tarn.” This was a reference to Lovecraft’s story “The Doom That Came To Sarnath” but I mistakenly remembered the idol of Bokrug as gold when it was in fact jade or olivine.
7. “...that wizard…” Darkdiver Grandahl, and this part of the story takes place in the Dark Chasm of Old.
8. “Our loremasters discovered the key to a door that opened on other worlds, and to visit them, and receive visitors…” My headcanon is that Mirrah’s continued existence despite constant warfare is that they have discovered how multiplayer summoning works.
   
   
4. “An Agile Swordsman” (Dark Souls 2)
1. “Alveus Colatorius Maximus” This is a quick and dirty dog Latin meaning “big colander hat Logan.” The hat in question is a roningasa, which looks like it could be a wicker colander or a ceiling boob.
2. “We are born to the dark, made men by the dark, undone by the dark.” Well, it was blood according Master Willem, but anyway…
3. “...some barghest chasing a warlock up a rope.” I don’t know why, but this is an inside joke from a D&D campaign from when I was a kid. It crops up in my writing now and then and I’d like to think it contributes to the overall verisimilitude.
4. “...an incursion by plant monsters from some distant sphere, the latter of which reeked of licorice.” Some of my published stories and novels take place in a connected setting and one of the big overarching threats is a race called “The Fennel” who are in the business of invasion and war despite being fennel plants. Nothing anthropomorphized, just fennel.
5. “...the stories of clever rogues and malformed pachyderms…” Reference to “How the Elephant got his Trunk” by Kipling.
6. “...training his body to become as strong as the chainmail that protected it.”  Tiěbùshān is an advanced form of Qigong that is said to make the body hard as steel. It is also hilariously spoofed in the movie Kung Pow.
7. “Eventually, even just a rumor of his presence in an area could cause a local enemy force to scatter to the wind.” There is an old tall tale about some Gurkhas fighting alongside the British and Indian armies in Vietnam. The story goes that the first thing the Gurkhas did when they got there was to completely annihilate a couple of villages to spread terror among the enemy. That terror was so great that even hearing a rumor that the Gurkhas were coming was enough for them to flee.
8. “...had once been the protector of some sainted oracle…” Shout out to Vinland/Astraea and Eygon/Irina.
9. “Drummond’s Folly.” Again we see my headcanon that the nation of Mirrah has figured out online multiplayer. The summons listed here are all from Mortal Kombat: Sektor, Cyrax, Scorpion, Sheeva, Mileena, and Sub Zero.
10. “...it has been said that one needs but a truly good friend and a determined enemy.” These quotes are a bit butchered but taken from Diogenes.
11. “..moving away from a standard plate-and-chain to something more unusual…” Raime’s set just seems way too over the top and intimidating for a knight and it seems symbolic of who he was becoming.
    
    
5. “The Smell of Pyromancy in the Morning” (Dark Souls 1)
1. “...he had kicked it apart in a shower of sparks, putting the fire out like he was breaking camp.” In case this doesn’t become apparent, this is happening immediately in the aftermath of the Dark Lord ending.
2. “Chuppies and Roarers”  Capra and Taurus demons.
3. “Pygmies. Furtive, Easily forgotten. A miserable pile of-” Secrets, that’s what.
4. “Dark sorceries this world isn’t ready for.” He looked at me. “Your descendants are going to love it.”  Hexer Marty Mcfly?
5. “That knight got chopped. Up. Into Catarina-steak.” Where else would the hamburger be invented, if not Catarina?
6. “...some grizzled old tinkerer from a city I’d never heard of…” Gehrman, the First Hunter. He seems to have brought his cunning/trick weapons to Lordran and has some good advice for the troops. Vittorio shows that she has taken that advice to heart in the fight with the silver knight.
7. “...greatswords with mercury channels inside to increase their heft…” Reference to Terminus Est, the executioner’s sword wielded by the protagonist of Shadow of the Torturer.
8. “These clutching, tickling night-gaunts…” Again, these demons seem lifted straight from Lovecraft but I don’t know if that was confirmed by From.
   
   
6. “Crimson Echoes of a Blue Note” (Bloodborne)
1. “...the bowl of his olivewood pipe…” I’m a pipe smoker so it certainly shows up in my work, and it’s historically appropriate to Bloodborne. All of the stuff about pipes in this story is real- even the upside down thing.
2. Erlito/turtles/Jinsha. I’m not sure why I decided that Henryk’s ancestry went back to Bronze age China, but I did. I’m really not sure why I decided that the Yellow Emperor wore the Xanthous Crown, but I did.
3. “...before a certain silvery metal had been added to it.”  My headcanon on Quicksilver Bullets is that they are not actual bullets that you load into a gun, but they represent how many “bullets” worth of mercury are in your system. Quite a while ago I had a crazed idea about Blue Elixir and Chinese alchemy but it never really made enough sense to people who aren’t me.
4. “The old magic’s still there!” Quote from the movie Bad Taste, where one of the heroes kicks a zombie’s head out of a window.

1. “Krakaskinna” (Dark Souls 1)
1. “Krakaskinna” Roughly old Norse for “crow document.”
2. “Canny Kwachie and his shield.”  Kwachie is Patches. I don’t remember who I had intended the others to be. Hram is Old Saxon for “raven” but I still have no idea.
3. “Your sin carries on forever…”  This section is just a fancied up version of the family saying you hear from Oscar at the beginning of DS1.
   
   
2. “ET IN IARNAM EGO” (Bloodborne)
1. “Grognards, they were called..”  The original Grognards were veteran soldiers under Napoleon’s command who were not shy about bitching and moaning, even to the Emperor himself. Modern “grognards” are those people from early in the lifespan of a hobby who like to complain about the way things are being done nowadays, and say a lot of “back in my day” to protest the natural evolution of things. 
2. “...a craggy old man with a beard and a snow white queue…”  Bellfounder Magnus and the infiltrator are characters from a comic script I was working on involving the history of expeditions into the chalice dungeons. They work better here.
3. “...party invitations strewn in the street down Hemwick…” I like the idea of the Cainhurst Summons just being lost in the mail.
4. “I used to run with the Old Man. His crew, that is, not his “menial” day job at the College.”  Gehrman, and another idea from the unpublished comic scripts, where Gehrman runs a small crime syndicate.
5. “Caravanserai, it was called.”  Reference to the Fallout: New Vegas game Caravan.
6. “...a distant kingdom, where some scions of a fallen lineage had begun excavations of their ruined ancestral manse.” This section in Laurence’s first letter sends him to the Darkest Dungeon. The “be-turbaned alchymist” is the Occultist class.
7. “The custom of the carpenter is booming…”  All the coffins stacked everywhere in the game made me think of the morticians in Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, etc. Someone somewhere is making a mint off the plague.
8. Several Lovecraft references- the anti-invisibility powder is the “Powder of Ibn Ghazi” which is used for that purpose in The Dunwich Horror. “Al-hazard” is Abdul Alhazred, who was killed by an invisible monster in antiquity. The “darkest of the hillside caves” a reference to the hillside thickets in another story.
9. “...the Schwarze-Kugel”  This is the Blacksky Eye. The implications of this item creeped me out way more than you would think. So I ran with that and treated it as the Bloodborne equivalent of the atomic bomb. 
10. “...reprobates with alliterative names- Deacon, Dagmar, Dwight…”  These are the D class from the SCP lore. I’d imagine that scientists in Bloodborne land would burn through a ton of unfortunate test subjects.
11. “Golden sand, white limestone ziggurats, domesticated tigers…” Thus begins a weird mashup of Disney’s Aladdin and the legend of the Scholomance. The latter was alleged to be an underground school of sorcery where the worst student ends up being seized by a demonic power. From the former: Domesticated tigers=Jasmine’s tiger, Sorcerer=Jafar, haunted cave/grinning tiger=Cave of Wonders, etc. A vajra is a type of artifact from the Vedic traditions. Its literal translation is “thunderbolt” but most commonly means “diamond.” A diamond in the rough, you might say.
12. “He was an artist, a pioneer.” A line from a Donald Fagen song, referring to jazz legend Dave Brubeck.
13. “a plague-ridden island nearly destroyed by its tyrannical lich-king.” The totally infested island that is the setting of Dead Souls.

"INSIGHT"  (Bloodborne)

1. "It is not the age of the wagon, thought the hunter, but the distance of its travels." Good old Indiana Jones with some terse wisdom.
2. "Gregoire du Fonsac"  Du Fronsac is the protagonist of the film Brotherhood of the Wolf, a great film and a huge influence on the visuals of Bloodborne. I didn't have any particular reason to put him in such a bad light, but I needed someone to play the role of fallen hunter.
3. "I’d sooner have a leg lopped off." This is foreshadowing, pretty much all you get other than this hunter working for the Church.
4. "kaldi tea" This is coffee, and Kaldi the legendary discoverer of said beverage.
5. "Flammenturm/Heidean mercenaries" German for "Tower of Flame," and yes, it's supposed to be that Tower of Flame. This hunter grew up in Dark Souls 2, who'd have thunk it? The mercenaries are a reference to the famed Hessians.
6. "A volume of a collected dramaturgy about some lusty maid of distant Aragon. The works of the infamous Barone du Salo. More fascinating, the old man was not just a collector- he had even authored a series of pamphlets on the arts of seduction."  The Lusty Argonian Maid, the Marquis de Sade, and the infamous book from the library in the Hunter's Dream, respectively.