If you have roamed the Shadowlands Elden Ring‘with a recently released expansion, there’s a good chance you’ve met the biggest hater that ever lived. No, Kendrick Lamar is not sudden in The Shadow of Erdtreehe is too busy in Compton doing Drake’s life is hell. Instead, you’d meet Egon, who is both one of the most emphatically voiced characters in a From Software game and the tiniest dude alive. We have no choice but to insert this Ahab insert into this storyline ripped straight from the pages of Moby Dick.
Spoilers for Aegon’s questline in The Shadow of Erdtree I follow.
Aegon can be first encountered west of the place of grace at the Path of the Pillars waypoint, but you won’t know him by his looks so much as by his voice. Here is the content creator DansGaming encountering “an NPC making some very strange noises” who turns out to be none other than Aegon, a dragon warrior on his latest mission.
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When you happen upon Aegon, he has been defeated and scarred. He really can’t use his arms and his legs seem to have failed him as well. For all intents and purposes, Aegon is trudging through the Shadowlands to slay Bayle the Dread, a treacherous dragon who wounded Placidusax—a name you might remember as the crazy dragon boss you fought at Farum Azula in Elden Ring— and struck Aegon with a crippling fear that prevented him from partaking of the Dragon Communion that gave value to his life.
Talking to him in this state provides a lot of anguished cries and repeated invocations of the “vile Bail” and begins a line of quests after Aegon’s journey. When he’s not snarling every next line he utters, he’s deeply hurt and frightened by Bale, who has terrorized Egan, who literally still haunts him, and the way voice actor Richard Lintern moves between these extremes isn’t nothing short of impressive. He seems like two different characters rather than dimensions of the same person, and people are already welcoming Lintern’s full performance as Igon.
Continuing to talk to Egan provides ample opportunity to continue hearing his ramblings and ravings, but it’s not long before he realizes his body is failing him and physically won’t make it to Bale. At this point he does the craziest thing ever and gives wiggle his finger to summon his spirit to screw Bale when you eventually get to the boss fight. And then the boss fight happens and Aegon reaches levels of hatred previously thought unattainable.
The moment you call him, Aegon immediately screams “Cursed you, Bale” and rushes into mother of all tirades. He even gasses you, saying “Behold, a true dragon warrior! Me too, Egon!’ You are a true drake warrior, he speaks! My favorite line, though, is when he yells at Bale that he’s going to “punch holes in your rotten skin” and immediately follows it up by giddily delivering the line “With a hail of harpoons!” Dude wants Bale dead so bad, it doesn’t look like he’ll ever shut up, but eventually he does. And so Aegon takes his bow made of dragon bone and the harpoons he specially made to sink into Bail’s “rotten skin” and does exactly what he was put on this Earth to do and slay this dragon .
Aegon’s plot is so silly, and Lintern’s reading of every line so ill-advised, that the character instantly became a standout from extension, as well as FromSoft’s growing gallery of weird little guys. Many players did memes about the dude and his apparently obsessive anger. Others are just paying his respects to a performance that absolutely blew them away. One person has sworn allegiance to man for the mad rally he pulls at the end despite everything that plagues him, eventually calling Egon a “gigachad.”
Interestingly, a few sensible people have managed to piece together that both Bale and Egon are related to another literary work Moby Dick. That being said A Song of Fire and IceAuthor George R. R. Martin works on the lore of Elden Ring, it should probably come as no surprise that both names draw inspiration from his seminal work. Bayle is a reference to a literally fearsome dragon named Balerion in ASOIAF, who is ridden by the phonetically similar Aegon Targaryen. And so everything comes full circle.
