The seven guardians no longer borrow skeleton bodies. Each now has a 3D model of its own that matches its story and moves with the game's animations: walking, striking, casting and falling when beaten. Their echoes in the Ember Depths wear the new forms too.
New forms
- Morgrave the Unburied: the hunched gravedigger with his long beard, rusty spade and a lantern holding a spark of the Heart
- The Hollow King: the hollow crowned armour, both hands on the great sword before it, red mantle trimmed with fur
- Sister Calyx of Cinders: the priestess in a cracked porcelain mask with her censer staff and charred hands
- Queen Ysolde the Mourning: the ghost queen in her mourning veil, a locket held to her heart, her hem dissolving into shadow
- Abbot Halvar the Drowned: the drowned abbot, pale and crusted with barnacles and frost, holding his crozier with its blue lantern
- The Choir Warden: the horned giant of bones, skulls lining its shoulders, bronze bells at its waist
- Vorath, the Ashen King: the king in obsidian armour split by lava, the Ember Heart beating in his chest, a blade of fire in hand
The guardians' stories
Every guardian had a life before it came to bar the way down: the gravedigger no one buried, the queen locked away and forgotten, the king who burned his kingdom to escape death. Read their stories under Guardian on each zone's page. All guardians →
A guardian's model loads in the background when you enter its zone. On a very slow connection the first meeting may still show the old form; the new one appears from then on.
Models made from concept art with AI (Microsoft TRELLIS.2 and Stability AI Stable Fast 3D), rigged with KayKit's skeleton and animations (CC0).