The Sword Master is aNPCinDark Souls III. You first meet him at theFirelink Shrinenear the Firekeeper tower (to the left of the main entrance to the Shrine) when he attacks you with no particular reason. He has long grey hair, wears extremely ragged clothes and wields Uchigatana. If defeated there he can be summoned as a white phantom to assist you in couple of boss fights. Not much is known about him really, there are only few things which, with some speculation, may be interpreted as hints of his story in Dark Souls III world.
However, what I’d like to write about here, is about the story of the very character “Sword Master”. And it seems he has some story.
While looking through the Dark Souls I artbook recently, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon one peculiar design. It is less detailed than others, and looks more like a draft.
This design depicts some sort of warrior monk, or maybe a samurai/ronin character. He has long white (or grey) hair, he wears ragged clothes and wields a katana. There are no other, more detailed, designs of this character, the only thing we get to know about him is written on a little sidenote to the image, which, according to the English version of the artbook, translates as “Rings this bell to mourn the death of infants killed due to wars and other battles”.
But, as you probably already know, this character didn’t make it intoDark Souls Irelease and we find out about him only from the unused early design sections.
However, it seems that he finally appears in Dark Souls III as Sword Master NPC. His attire is even more ragged, he doesn’t have his bell and hat, but still it can be seen that, quite likely, the old unused Dark Souls I design depicts the same character.
As for his story within the game: the design in the artbook gave a feeling of formidable warrior, probably with some philosophy, not exactly a bad guy, but the player, however, would’ve been forced to cross paths as an enemy, for a reason.
But the Sword Master of the Dark Souls III is a different matter, he seems to be a tsujigiri character who attacks random passers-by to test his katana and/or fighting style. The impression is amplified with the fact that he uses the (ill-)famous cursed katanaChaos Blade(a katana that takes control of its wielder, making him commit murders, a rather common theme in Japanese media and games). It’s a matter of speculation of course, but it seems that he assists you only because he acknowledges you worthy after being beaten. The presence of the Chaos Blade has also been interpreted as a hint that the Sword Master is in fact Shiva of the East from Dark Souls 1.
Unused assets always have a way of working themselves into future projects and I thought it would be interesting to share the story of a character who didn’t make it into the game back in the day, but makes appearance as a Sword Master in Dark Souls III. Although there isn’t a ton of lore to build off with this character, consider this yet another easter egg in a series full of them!
