Image: Before the First Strike

Published: February 20, 2026 at 5:43:53 PM UTC

Landscape anime-style Elden Ring fan art showing the Tarnished in Black Knife armor cautiously confronting Metyr, Mother of Fingers, in the eerie Finger Ruins of Miyr moments before battle.

Anime-style fan art of a hooded Tarnished in Black Knife armor facing Metyr, Mother of Fingers, in the flooded Finger Ruins of Miyr just before combat.

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Regular size (1,536 x 1,024): JPEG - WebP
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Image description

This landscape-oriented anime-style fan art depicts a tense, silent moment just before battle within the Finger Ruins of Miyr, a drowned and crumbling sanctuary steeped in eerie blue light. In the foreground on the left stands the Tarnished, clad in sleek Black Knife Assassin armor. The armor is dark, matte, and segmented, reflecting faint highlights from the cold ambient glow filtering down through the waterlogged ruins. A hood obscures the Tarnished’s face entirely, enhancing the sense of anonymity and resolve, while their posture—low, angled forward, knees bent—signals cautious readiness rather than immediate aggression. In their right hand, the Tarnished grips a dagger imbued with a faint golden-orange glow, its warm color sharply contrasting the otherwise cool-toned environment and subtly drawing the viewer’s eye to the imminent threat of violence.

Opposite the Tarnished, dominating the right side of the composition, looms Metyr, Mother of Fingers. The boss’s grotesque, otherworldly form is rendered with unsettling detail: a massive, pale, fleshy body supported by multiple finger-like limbs that spread outward and downward, pressing into the stone floor like grasping roots. From its upper mass rises a thick, elongated appendage resembling a colossal finger or coiled spine, curling upward into the water-darkened air. At the center of its torso, tangled cords of sinew and flesh twist and knot together, suggesting both a malformed heart and a blasphemous altar of living tissue. The texture of Metyr’s body appears slick and organic, with subtle veins and folds catching the dim light, giving the impression that it is breathing or slowly shifting even in stillness.

The environment reinforces the feeling of dread and anticipation. Broken stone pillars and fragmented architecture rise from shallow, rippling water, their tops disappearing into darkness above. Shafts of light descend from unseen openings, scattering through suspended particles and illuminating the ruins in a muted, spectral blue. The water on the ground reflects both figures faintly, blurring their forms and reinforcing the sense of an unstable, liminal space between calm and chaos. No attack has yet begun; instead, the image captures the fragile pause where both Tarnished and godlike abomination study one another, fully aware that the next movement will shatter the silence and decide survival or death.