A while back, we looked ahead of time as the Fishing Hamlet, seemingly Ground Zero for a lot of what's happening in Yharnam, a place where citizens are slowly transforming into sea creatures as they farm, consume and even burn mysterious "slugs" as basically their main resource. So what happened, exactly?

It all began with the beaching of a cosmic globster; a mysterious, dying creature that washed ashore and brough the "gift" of its parasites. This is the Great One Kos, or Kosm, and it's also rumored that she already watched over the hamlet before her death, sending her many invertebrate familiars to keep the community thriving.

The entity bizarrely resembles a cross between fish, squid, and human being, like a boneless and elongated woman draped elegantly in thin membranes of Cephalopod flesh. "Dying" for a Great One is evidently a lengthy, possibly even indefinite process, since her body remained seemingly pristine for generations; all the more proof of divinity to her cult.

You will never battle against Kos, of course, but her resting place IS the site of the game's single most powerful boss.

The Orphan of Kos, also referred to as her Poor Wizened Child, can be found staring out over its mother's body, attacking only if you actually approach.

The Orphan does not look like Kos, nor does it look like a child. It appears as a tall, lanky, impossibly decrepit old man with a wide mouth, a fleshy membrane down his back that he can use as a pair of wings, and a tumorous red mass actually representing the "child's" placenta, which oddly enough can be used as a gigantic axe.

On defeating the poor little dude, it will mope around its mother in a shadow-like form, putting up no further fight until struck just once more and properly defeated. This is closer to the Orphan's "true" form, trapped in a limbo-state, whereas the physical form you battle against is more of a projection it manifests into the Hunter's Nightmare.

Slaying the sad baby boy is considered the ultimate, truest closure to Bloodborne's storyline and best possible ending, because Kos weaves together everything that has happened to Yharnam. When rumors of a "dead god" reached Byrgenwerth's scholars, they became hell-bent on retrieving the corpse, which of course the hamlet citizens weren't going to take lightly. This lead to a massacre of the townsfolk by a hired band of hunters lead by none other than Lady Maria, Gherman's apprentice and basis for the plain doll. The mass slaughter lead to the discovery of eyeballs in the brain's of Kod's followers, and the god's corpse was desecrated in some manner that's never really specified, but we can assume it involved the examination or removal of her child from her womb, which should have been left to rest and decay with her. While she doesn't clarify what was done either way, we know that the act never stopped haunting Maria, and it's also implied that the Curse of the Blood is actually the wrath of Kos herself, because, of course, she's not really gone at all.

True Great Ones don't actually die, see. They aren't the physical bodies we encounter. A Great One is a formless consciousness that traverses the cosmic realm, which crosses over into the world of humans through the ocean, which is probably why when they take on a physical form it often looks like they started with something like a sea slug or a crustacean. During the battle against the Orphan, you'll even be attacked by bolts of energy that channel from the sky down through Kos's body, suggesting she's still watching over her little one, and all either her or her child really want us for him to be freed. Killing the shadow triggers a narration that he's "returned to the ocean," and from there, it's believed that Kos actually lifts the curse of the Old Blood once and for all.

Why is this only our Day 29, then? With this being an optional ultra-final DLC boss, it's still not the catalyst of what we do in the main game, and it's part of the "best" ending, sure, like, "morally" the best. That doesn't mean it's the coolest ending for us, per se.