By Jonathan Wojcik and Rev Storm

ENTRY 10: FINGERCREEPER

Entry 10 seems like a special day, so let's talk about a special horror! This is another of those monsters spotted early on in preview trailers, and it looks like they're still considered among the "scariest" regular enemies in the game! They're not all that tough, but they're certainly spooky ones: giant, warty, misshapen, undead severed hands that can scurry up walls like humongous spiders!

These grisly ghoulies come in multiple sizes, they wear a number of giant golden rings and they have a minimum of six or seven fingers, the largest varieties possessing ten! Usually clinging tightly to stone walls or rocky terrain, they lie in wait to ambush passersby and will attempt to crush victims to death in their fist, exhibiting no means of "feeding" or any other behaviors other than this drive to kill. They're obviously some sort of undead guardians, but who created them, and why?

There are only two clues as the backstory of these scuttling weirdoes. The ringed finger weapon outright says it was "cut from an ancestor of the Fingercreeper" and that it is the "legacy of an ancient act of blasphemy." The use of the word "ancestor" almost implies that the hands can actually multiply on their own, but as hilarious as that would have to look, there's no further evidence that these giant zombie hands engage in any form of fornication, so I'm afraid that line of discussion is already a dead end.

The part about the "ancient act of blasphemy" offers us a little more of a lead, but just a little. The setting of Elden Ring, the Lands Between, was once ravaged by a war against an army of giants who served a "fell god" in exchange for greater power. By the events of the game, however, the land is littered with the mummified or even petrified remains of this all but extinct race, and many of the corpses are conspicuously missing their arms.

Furthermore, Fingercreepers aren't the only necromantic mitts haunting the Lands Between: atop several divine towers are the entities known both collectively and individually as "Two Fingers," literally just enormous, two-fingered mummified hands. Most of these entities are dead, but a living one offers guidance as translated by a sacred "Finger Reader." Two Fingers are said to be the vassals of the Greater Will, an outer being representing order.

So...there are rare, sacred rotten hands that act as oracles to the (allegedly) "good" deity, and then there are hordes of hostile rotten hands connected to an "act of blasphemy" by giants in service to the (allegedly) "evil" deity. The parallels are clear, but many of the finer details still tantalizingly unknown. What's even the obsession these gods have with fingers?

The Two Fingers are implied to have been created by alien outer gods, and if their power benefited the war against giantkind, perhaps the giants sought to create their own equivalent? I also find myself wondering if they were always working for the "human" side, or if they could have been something taken away from the giants, as could also be the case for the realm itself?

Their implied lore is fascinatingly dark, but even at face value, I'm glad that giant corpse hands are part of such a major game, and are taken seriously as disturbing adversaries. They always would have been, but for so long, crawling hands felt doomed to only "cheesy" or "kiddie horror" roles.

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