The cinematic trailer for "The Elden Ring: Shadow of the Eldestree" was released exactly one month before the expansion's release: "This is great, but I have no idea what's going on. However, after playing the DLC for 80 hours or so, I kind of know what's going on.

Spoilers for "Shadow of the Elder Tree" ahead.

I quickly learned that the gate of bloody corpses Marika hangs out at the beginning of the trailer is the Divine Gate, which appears in the boss battle of the Promised Bastion Rahdan at the top of Enil Elim.

The item description and other tidbits from the DLC revealed that Marika was from a place called Shaman's Village, and that the Hornsent society systematically rounded up shamans, butchered them and placed them in large jars.

My interpretation is that the urn was a prototype of the Divine Gate, or collected building materials, from which Marika either snuck past or tricked Hornsent to steal divine power. A complication is that in the game, many of the petrified corpses around the arena in Radan have Hornsend's horns growing out of them.

The sequence of Messmer burning Belurat is always fairly straightforward, but as NewArtificialHuman points out on the Elden Ring subreddit, there is a moment that takes on shocking new importance only after playing the DLC: 1 minute 16 seconds in. The woman clutching the spear, by the way, is the late expansion boss Romina, Saint of Bad, and Scarlett Lott before her Scorpio centurion transformation: its item description includes the passage, "Once, in a crumbling burning church, Romina held a bud in speechless silence"

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The passage reads.

It seems possible that Mesmer and his soldiers were responsible for the burning of her church and may have even been unintentional collateral damage. We had always assumed that it was Hornsend who burned her church, but it seems that Marika's own power created, released, or at least greatly empowered the "scarlet corruption" that would later plague Marenia and the "land between the chasms". After that, we know that the woman falling through the purple haze is St. Trina, though no longer in the realm of lore revelations. Other than that, just a clean shot of the DLC area and the NPC fellowship. I hope nothing bad happens to those people!

I don't know what else I was expecting: a pre-rendered intro/trailer from From Software that only makes sense in hindsight. Sekiro's intro? You won't understand the scene where "Kensei Isshin" kills the general of the Ministry of the Interior until about 40 hours later. story trailer for the 2021 Game of the Year award for "The Elden Ring" Yes, that one really fits in only after release.

Thanks to the DLC item descriptions, we have one last fact from the 2021 trailer: the moment Marenia lands on Radahn and stabs him before unleashing a flower of scarlet corruption, she says something to the general that is inaudible in the trailer. According to the description of the young lion set, it was "O promised queen, Michaela awaits you."