#jarburg

[littlezas]

doing a messmer playthrough & having a whole new experience with this questline

[arnaerr]

frolicking in Jarburg prints ✦ patreon

[haligdrakes]

Jarburg.

[technomancer-01]

I was created to be a warrior vessel.
Many great warriors reside within me, ever dreaming of becoming a great champion.
It's my destiny. And the reason for which I quest.
It is my ordeal, you could say. To test myself, to better myself, to fell ever greater foes.
And then, one day, we'll be a single great champion. The greatest of them all!
What do you think, eh? How do you rate my changes?
Heh heh...

Etsy

[evilmarshmallownox]

Here’s chapter 2! An alternate introduction to this short story.

Chapter II: “The Little Runaways”

They were not meant to be there.

Not in this place of ash and screams and skyless hours, where the sea ran dry and bells tolled in nightmares.

But the jars had run. Far and fast. Away from shattered lids and greedy hands. Away from Jarburg — their gentle hollow home, now scarred by poachers’ boots and broken shards.

Jar-Bairn had led them. The smallest, but the bravest. Heart full of courage, limbs full of fear.

“We can’t stay,” he whispered to the others.

“The cruel folk keep coming. We’ll be next.”

So they fled. Through hidden paths, forgotten grace, a dozen narrow places the cruel ones didn’t know. They passed beneath roots that whispered secrets, through graveyards no one tended, and into a dream that wasn’t theirs.

They thought they had found safety.

Instead, they found the Hunter’s Nightmare.

The sky with a sickly sun. Rivers filled with blood. The buildings bent inward, like ribs of something long dead.

But the jars stayed close. Huddled. Rolling in silence past moaning hunters and muttering beasts. Their clay bodies trembled — not from fear alone, but from remembering things that weren’t theirs to remember.

It was Jar-Bairn who spotted the light — soft and golden, flickering from a cracked door in a twisted hall filled with shambling patients with enlarged heads.

They pushed it open. Slowly. Quietly.

And inside… they found her.

Lady Maria.

The Lady of the Astral Clocktower.

At first, she had been still — half-slumped over parchment, her ink dry, her tea colder. A woman made of sorrow and resignation.

But then they crept closer.

Jar-Bairn placed a small bloom from Jarburg beside her hand — blue, delicate, a flower that should not have grown here. A reminder of home.

Maria opened her eyes.

She didn’t scream.

She didn’t strike.

She simply looked.

And when she spoke, it was with a voice that sounded older than the bells above:

“You’re far from where you belong.”

Jar-Bairn looked up.

He didn’t know the words.

But he felt the kindness in them.

And so, one by one, the jars gathered in her study — seeking warmth, safety, and the quiet flickering of candlelight.

Lady Maria hadn’t expected to become caretaker of wayward jars.

But now her room smelled faintly of wildflowers, and she found herself leaving a second cup of tea at her desk — just in case one of them got brave enough to try it.

The Nightmare was still outside.

But inside, for a while, there was peace.

And in the middle of it all sat Jar-Bairn, his little clay head nestled against her arm, breathing in the silence he had never known could feel so safe, away from the poachers.

———————————————————————

Days passed in ways Maria no longer counted.

There was no way of telling time in the Nightmare, only the slow shift of light through layers of fog and bloodstained clouds.

Jar-Bairn sat at the corner of her desk now, legs dangling over the side, spindly hands folded in his lap. The others scattered like quiet furniture — some perched atop shelves, others curled inside the empty hearth, as if remembering what warmth once felt like.

Maria had taken to reading aloud again.

She told herself it was to keep her voice steady. A way to stop it from rusting away into silence. But truly, it was for them. The jars.

Especially the small one with the flower tucked into his clay.

“This letter,” she said, tapping the page gently, “is a B. See how it’s shaped like a jar with two bellies?”

Jar-Bairn blinked. Slowly. Thoughtfully.

Then he drew a crude, wobbly ‘B’ into the dust on her desk.

“Very good,” Maria murmured. “Perhaps next you’ll help me with patient notes. Save me the trouble.”

Jar-Bairn tilted his head, as if unsure whether that was a joke. But his little clay body swelled with quiet pride anyway.

The jars listened more than they spoke — not because they couldn’t, but because the Nightmare had taught them to be quiet to survive.

But one day, while Maria was leafing through an old anatomical sketchbook, Jar-Bairn spoke first.

“We had a pond.”

Maria stopped turning the page.

“With lilies,” Jar-Bairn added, softer now. “The big ones. Bigger than me.”

A moment passed.

“Did it smell of rot?” Maria asked, thinking of the Fishing Hamlet. The blood of Kos beneath the sea, of the villagers butchered by her hands….

“No,” Jar-Bairn said. “It smelled like sweet flowers and mud. Like warm days.”

Warm days.

She had almost forgotten what those felt like.

Jar-Bairn continued — in small bursts, like rain on stone: tales of frogs they befriended, mushrooms they wore like hats, and his uncle Alexander the Iron Fist, who told them bedtime stories of heroic tales of his adventures.

Maria listened. Not with pity, but with reverence.

These were memories untouched by the Church, by blood, by the unbearable weight of knowledge.

“You must miss it,” she said finally.

“I do.”

A pause. Then:

“But I don’t miss being afraid.”

Maria didn’t respond at first. She stared at the ink blot on the corner of her page — one that looked almost like a sun. Or a pond. Or a dream someone had once had, long ago.

“Then stay,” she said.

And Jar-Bairn did.

That night, she left the study door open.

- End -

[kouvisart]

Messmer, Warrior Jar Alexander, and Jarburg

Disclaimer: These are just random thought bubbles and headcanons at 2am in the morning that have taken my brain hostage. I don’t have a solid idea of the timeline of events.

————————————

Assuming this is before Messmer was sent to damnation during the Realm of Shadow crusade, I wonder if he ever visited Jarburg. They are the closest reminder to his mother’s people, where she was able to take back control of the atrocities that happened to Shaman Village and turned it into something good.

Based on the item descriptions and lore, Messmer was quite well liked by pretty much everyone. To the point Radahn and even the Carrian Princess Rellana held him in high esteem. And he clearly held a lot of empathy for those who were misfortunate. As shown with his jar infirmary and his acceptance of an albinauric (Commander Gaius) as his right hand.

I’d like to imagine him being reluctant at first because he feels he might be too imposing, so he stands off to the side like a vampire in the shadows. Watching them from afar.

Jarburg is very peaceful and kind towards many. I don’t know if Marika ever visited herself, but I can imagine that Messmer is nearly brought to tears at how they are thriving. That this is what him and his Marika are fighting for. He probably would just observe from a distance until a jar folk spotted him. Not just any jar folk, but a young one with the boisterous personality to rival Radahn.

Alexander is his name, and he’s going to become a great warrior jar some day. Messmer’s big brother instincts immediately kick him and there he goes regaling child versions of his battles and even teaching the kid fighting tactics on how to use his jar body. The kid admires him so much that he said he’s going to be big and strong and noble like him. The kid is none the wiser to the mental breakdown Messmer is holding back the entire time. Messmer’s heart clenches because he is not noble. He is only doing what he musts, to keep himself and his affliction as far away from others as he can.

[bri-the-nautilus]

The Potentate Complex

Lately, the wonderful @catcas22 and I have been discussing the Hornsent, the Omens, and the Living Jars. Cat has two excellent posts on the subject up, one on the nature of the Lamenters and another on a potential link between the Omen's nightmares and the crimes of their progenitors. I highly recommend you read those posts first and then come back to this one, as they'll make it much easier to understand some of the concepts I'll be bringing up.

Anyhow, there's something that fell by the wayside in all this: the word "potentate." It's curiously exclusive to the context of jars in Elden Ring.

In the base game, Jar-Bairn and the other residents of Jarburg are searching for a Potentate to serve as a leader/protector of their village. The criteria for which are... odd. Jar-Bairn first attempts to enlist the player as Potentate, only to reject us on the grounds that our callused warrior hands are unsuited to the position. He finds what he believes to be a better candidate in Diallos Hoslow, but can later be found remarking that while he rather likes Diallos's soft, supple hands, he finds the younger Hoslow uninspiring as far as protectors go, going so far as to wish that they could have a Potentate who's "big and strong, like you."

In SOTE, we learn that "Potentate" was also the title given to the Hornsent clerics who butchered human/Numen villages to fill the Living Jars.

Interesting.

Assuming Cat's theory about the throughline between the Hornsent Potentates, the Living Jars, and the Omensmirk nightmares is correct, I think I have an idea of what's happening here.

We've established that when a human consigned to a jar reincarnates as an Omen, they retain some subconscious mnemonic impression from their previous life, potentially establishing the terror and torture endured at the Hornsent's hands as the source for the shared nightmares about horned beings that plague all Omen. We also know that "rancorous spirits" cling to the flesh inside the jars.

I don't think it's unreasonable to suppose that if the Omen retain memories of their previous deaths, the jars created by the Hornsent do the same. However, I'd also suppose that the mindscape of a Living Jar is all kinds of confusing. Every jar we talk to seems to have one unified voice/personality, despite their innards being composed of an every-growing multitude of beings who each have discrete spirits. Add that the same souls clinging to scraps of jar meat are also the ones being reincarnated as Omen, and a picture starts to emerge.

I think that the process of being eviscerated and stuffed into a jar, along with whatever ritual allows for their reincarnation, seems to "split" the soul of the victim, and this may be by design. One fragment is allowed to return the Erdtree to be reincarnated, but the other is trapped, sealed in the jar to prevent it from escaping. The free half comes back as an Omen, while the sealed half remains locked away from the Erdtree and its other half, ensuring that pure reincarnation is impossible.

This also has a confounding effect on the memory impressions of the soul. The Omen have vague nightmares about horned beings torturing them. Meanwhile, the Jars also have the memories of their component people, perhaps clearer as a result of not having passed through the Erdtree but confused in other ways as a result of being part of this single-voiced mass of flesh and spirits.

Jar-Bairn and the others simultaneously associate the word "Potentate" with warrior strength and the gentle, ritualistic touch of a cleric. They vacillate between thinking a Potentate should be a strong protector (the Hornsent's sacking and butchering of villages) and a soft-handed, studious artificer (the same Hornsent going on to craft and fill the Living Jars in clandestine underground laboratories). The word is divorced from the terror its origin inflicted in the minds of the jars, who know only that their existence is inextricably linked to strong yet careful beings called Potentates.

There are two interesting addendums to our tale, one being the Potentate's Cookbook.

A record of crafting techniques of the greater potentate who roamed lands near and far. Haunted by the grotesque practice of his village of birth, he stuffed great pots with all manner of things.

Apparently, at least one Potentate was disgusted by the actions of his peers and left to travel the world, but continued to experiment with ritual pots in other ways that involved considerably less occult sacrifice.

The other afterthought I'd like to mention is the weapon of the Potentates, the Bonny Butchering Knife (which is actually a greataxe that looks like a curved greatsword, but that's besides the point):

Weapon of the greater potentates of Bonny Village. An outsize butcher's cleaver used to dismember human bodies in the making of the great jars stored in the gaols.

Restores a very small amount of HP when it squarely strikes an enemy.

I'll now direct your attention to the Butchering Knife found in the base game, used by the Tarnished-Eater Anastasia:

Huge carving knife made to cleanly butcher the human body. Signature weapon of the Ogress Anastasia, known to have eaten countless Tarnished while disguised as a Finger Maiden.

Restores a very small amount of HP when it squarely strikes an enemy.

Again, still not a knife, or a greataxe, but I digress.

These weapons are IDENTICAL in many respects. They use the same model, have the same heal-on-hit passive, and even their attack/guard ratings, weights, stat requirements, and FP costs are the same. The only difference is their names, descriptions, and default Ashes of War, and even the former two are only negligibly distinct. I feel quite comfortable in stating these to be the same weapon.

So here we have a massive cleaver expressly designed to butcher the human body, wielded historically by the Hornsent Potentates who terrorized the settlements of other races to build "saints" out of their corpses, and one instance having fallen into the hands of a psychotic serial killer in a far-off land.

Tying this back to the cookbook, I propose that after wandering for some time, the rueful Potentate left the Land of Shadow altogether, journeying to the Lands Between, where he beheld the fruits of his peers' labor in the form of the Omen and Living Jars dwelling there. At this point, he cast off the tool of his trade and settled somewhere to live out his days in morose solitude.

Some amount of time later, his former weapon fell into the hands of God's bloodthirstiest soldier, who immediately noticed that it was perfect for her preferred pastime of killing and eating people. So perfect, in fact, that it could only have been designed with such a purpose in mind.

And another thing: isn't it funny that the Omenkillers, whose attire draws inspiration from the Omen's nightmares, also use cleavers? Cleavers made from Omen horns, but cleavers nonetheless.

[evs-eme]

INKTOBER 21 - Jar Bairn, Elden Ring

The little jar as endearing as his uncle Alexander. Eme