#celestial centipende

[jarognieva]

Okay so today I want to talk about this pretty girl:

It is called Celestial Centipende or Fluorescent Flower and we can find it in Byrgenwerth and Chalice Dungeons. In my opinion this name suggest it's just mix of big space bug and a plant. But considering Bloodborne is highly inspired by Lovecraftian stories, I think Celestial Centipendes might be an ancient intelligent beings.

I realised they are similar to the Old Ones (Don't confuse with Great Ones!) from At the Mountains of Madness. The Old Ones are ancient beings who came from the cosmos and created life on our planet. Their civillization was very advanced when they started to colonize the Earth but it started to degradate through time and finally completely disappeared. In the story main characters find well-preserved remains of a few Old Ones on Antartica. Old Ones are not EXACTLY like Celestial Centipendes, but there are a few distinguishing marks that are very similar to them. Here is an extract from a description of one of these beings (fragments that remind Celestial Centipendes are bold):

Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot, five-ridged barrel torso three and five-tenths feet central diameter, one foot end diameters. Dark gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membranous wings of same color, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks three inches diameter branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which branches after eight inches into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles

Surely Centipendes do not have wings, and their "legs" are more like arthropod legs than tentacles but look at concept art:

These things around the "mouth" remind more tentacles than legs, aren't they?

At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like suggestions, holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colors. Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact center of top probably breathing aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an eye.

Exept for yellow color and an eye, it seems quite similar, I think.

Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in saclike swellings of same color which, upon pressure, open to bell-shaped orifices two inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white tooth like projections—probably mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness. At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist. Bulbous light-gray pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement.

Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches diameter at base to about two and five-tenths at point. To each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membranous triangle eight inches long and six wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old.

I know that some parts of description don't correspond with Celestial Centipendes' appearance, but I think it might be possible that they're inspired by the Old Ones because it wouldn't be the first Lovecraftian reference in Bloodborne. What if summoning a meteor is not just weird superpower holding by a cosmic beast but an equivalent of the Call Beyond? What if they're not just a weird creatures from the dungeons, but the last from their kind? The kind which civilization vanished millions of years before Ptumerians, Loran and Isz. History likes to repeat, especially in Bloodborne, so I believe they were using Old Blood and trying to communicate with the Great Ones too.