Image: From Behind the Tarnished — Facing the Black Blade Kindred

This illustration presents a tense and cinematic confrontation in an anime–influenced visual style, now framed from a pulled-back angle that allows the viewer to see the Tarnished partially from behind. The composition enhances scale and vulnerability, emphasizing the enormous presence of the Black Blade Kindred standing ahead in the open moor while the Tarnished, small but resolute, advances through the rain–streaked wasteland.

The Tarnished occupies the lower left foreground, turned three-quarters away from the viewer. The back of the dark hood, cloak, and segmented Black Knife–style armor is visible, creating a strong sense of perspective and motion. The character's shoulders lean forward and slightly to the right, weight placed into the left leg in mid-stride as they approach their enemy. The cloak hangs in layered folds, dampened by rain and wind, while the armor shows muted metal edging along the pauldrons and vambraces. The Tarnished holds a dagger near the left side of the body, blade angled downward, while the right arm extends outward with a longer sword—a stance that implies caution coupled with readiness to strike.

Across the field stands the Black Blade Kindred—vast in scale, skeletal, and menacing. Its bones are rendered black and glossy, like polished obsidian or cooled volcanic stone, providing a stark contrast to the pale, washed-out sky. Decaying armor plates encase the torso, cracked and worn with centuries of corrosion, while the arms and legs remain exposed, their skeletal structure long and angular like the supports of a ruined cathedral. Each limb ends in clawed fingers or taloned feet that dig into the mud-wet ground. The torso armor is jagged and uneven, like an exhumed reliquary still barely holding shape. Beneath the cracked plates, the silhouette of a rib structure is faintly suggested, as if swallowed by darkness rather than fully lit.

The Kindred’s wings dominate the compositional upper half—massive, tattered, and cavernously dark. Their span curves outward in a threatening arc, framing the monster's horned skull. The skull is elongated and worn, twin horns rising upward with sharp backward curves. Two dim, red lights burn in the empty eye sockets, piercing through the rain and grey atmosphere. This glow becomes the visual anchor of the creature, a point the viewer cannot help but return to.

The greatsword in the Kindred’s right hand angles diagonally toward the Tarnished, massive and blackened as if made of the same dark bone. In its left hand rests a crescent halberd with a golden blade edge, dull yet reflective in the low light. The weapons, positioned like jaws, emphasize the threat between which the Tarnished advances.

The setting itself reinforces bleakness and ruin. The ground is strewn with rock, mud, and broken stone, with distant ruin fragments barely visible through the haze. Thin, skeletal tree silhouettes break the horizon, stripped of life. The sky is overcast and textured with rain or ash, drawn in fine diagonal strokes. The palette leans toward desaturated slate tones—blue-grey, moss black, ochre-stained metal—punctuated only by the faint bronze of the weapon edge and the hellish glow in the skull.

The overall result is a tableau of courage in the face of impossible odds. The viewer stands behind the Tarnished like a silent witness, seeing what they see: the enormity of the enemy, the finality of the landscape, and the fragile defiance of a lone figure who moves forward rather than back.

The image is related to: Elden Ring: Black Blade Kindred (Forbidden Lands) Boss Fight