As Annie faced off from afar against the "Dung Eater" on the hill, the trembling, masked man behind her—Uncle Ironhead—quietly began telling her everything he knew about the Dung Eater's legends and the rumors surrounding him.
As it turned out...
The masked man had once been captured and locked up, and the Dung Eater in the distance had been one of his fellow prisoners!
He'd had another cellmate, too, but the Dung Eater had killed and defiled him.
Whenever he thought about that horrifying scene, the masked man was too shaken to eat or sleep. Seeing the Dung Eater appear right before his eyes only made his legs tremble so badly he could barely speak.
But being afraid wouldn't help. The man had come after them again, like a persistent ghost, and the masked man didn't even know how he had escaped from prison and tracked them down.
Actually, "Dung Eater" didn't mean that the man literally ate dung. It referred to defilement and curses, and to consuming the filthy, cursed things that were like excrement.
The story of the Dung Eater went back to a distant age, long before the Erdtree and the Golden Order had appeared...
It was said that the Lands Between had once had a sun. Not only that, but there had also been a moon, and the stars had shone brightly at night. The Erdtree hadn't looked as it did now, blotting out the sky day and night. Back then, it had simply operated as a crucible of life.
In those days, the many-hued life born from the crucible had walked freely across the land, different in form but all belonging together. The horns of the Omen had been a sign of the crucible's blessing, not something people kept quiet about and shunned like the