Larian Studios showed up at The Game Awards this year with a brand new Divinity trailer. It was a hell of a spectacular, treating us to a brutal Source-powered Burning Man festival slash-orgy, where a terrified old man – who has a seven-pointed star carved into his flesh – is lit in a mighty wooden figure that eventually evolves into an even more awesome depiction of all the statues we've discussed.
But this has sparked another discussion entirely among fans: who is that guy? And why do they sacrifice him?
It's been a while since I had to dismantle the old divinity doctrine in my lap, so bear with me. We don't have much to work with aside from the trailer, but Larian teased that “The Gods are silent. Rivellon is bleeding. New powers are stirring,” and fans like u/robad0114 are suggesting that these happy festival-goers make an offering to the gods to “break their silence” and bring Lucian back to the world, if not through him to invoke a new Divine.
Spoilers for the Divinity series; if you are new here, go play the games!
While it is unclear when exactly Divinity takes place, it is presumably between Original Sin 2 and Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, which would mean that Lucian is currently imprisoned in the Hyperotomachia plane beyond time; the people of Rivellon wouldn't know this until years later, so any senseless debauchery and revelry could be their way of trying to reach the missing divine and connect with their silent gods. That would certainly explain the symbol etched into the man's chest, and his split crown, all of which evoke the seven.
But the ritual would always be moot if that was their intention, since Lucian won't be saved for decades, until the Flames of Vengeance expansion for Ego Draconis, and the Silent Gods can't possibly be awakened, since they're all dead. Not that you'd want their help anyway, as it turns out they'd been feasting on the lost souls of the Hall of Echoes for a living.
That doesn't mean the ritual was ineffective at summoning gods, but it just got it wrong.
The Lord Of Chaos Returns?
An often unspoken part of the divinity mythos is the Lord of Chaos, banished from Rivellon by the Seven; with them dead, could he have clawed his way back and thus explain the “new forces” that have caused the country to bleed?
“His imagery is fleshy red goo and flayed corpses. The flowers blooming from spilled blood? The cloud of flesh spewing from the victim in a gruesome ritual? Totally matches his vibe,” u/gorgrath177 argued. “”The Eclipse”? Seems like a hole in reality formed when a god breaks free from millennia of imprisonment. Divinity will take place in a world where the only active god is Satan of the Environment.”
As u/Richard_kickam_again noted, the statue at the end of the trailer bears an uncanny resemblance to the demon spawners we find in Ego Draconis as we explore Nemesis' realm, and it's a recurring theme throughout the series' wider story that the Lord of Chaos is vying to return. One such attempt saw the Black Ring, a collective of Dark Mages, work with the Lord of Chaos so that he could possess an infant, the same infant that Lucian would adopt and come to call Damian.
Many speculate that the ritual in the trailer may actually be the work of the Black Ring; the seven-pointed crown and symbol could venerate the gods, as we discussed earlier in this article, but it could just as well be seen as a mockery of them, a symbolic burning of Lucian and all that the divine stood for. But u/Financial_Formal_103 argued against this theory, noting that the “religious gesture the mother performs is five fingers in front of her face and then two more,” indicating that they is worse of the seven.
TLDR; the sacrifice may be a ritual to attempt to awaken the gods and Lucian, only to inadvertently summon the Lord of Chaos into the world instead.
It's a compelling theory ripe for discussion, all of which stemmed from a brief CG trailer. It speaks volumes about the rich world of divinity and what a fire has already been lit under society, and it will be fascinating to see how this story unfolds in the years to come as we get more clues to come through.
