What Happens In Elden Ring? The Game's Story, Part 7: Castle Sol And The Consecrated Snowfield

gamespot.com:

The peak of the Mountaintops of the Giants holds the Flame of Ruin, but that's not all that's hidden within the Lands Between's snowy mountain range in Elden Ring. Malenia, one of the fiercest demigods and a Shardbearer, hides here somewhere, as well. If you can defeat her, you can claim her Great Rune--but you'll have to find her first, and doing so is no easy task.

You're not the first to go looking for Malenia or her brother, Miquella, in fact. Sir Gideon Ofnir the All-Knowing, the Tarnished knight you find in the Roundtable Hold, has been trying to locate the whereabouts of these two demigods for some time. He knows they can probably be found at Miquella's Haligtree, a special, holy site--but he doesn't know where it is or how to get to it. He wants the information so badly that he was willing to wipe out an entire village to get it.

Of course, you can find your way to the Haligtree, where you'll learn a whole lot about a schism in the Golden Order and a demigod who has mostly been operating in the background, despite being extremely important to the Lands Between. But finding the secret path forward is difficult, and if you do uncover it, you'll have to ask yourself: are you doing the right thing? If you invade the Haligtree to face Malenia, are you making the world of the Lands Between a better place, or a worse one?

We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. As always, this article contains spoilers for the story of Elden Ring.

More Elden Ring story explainers

The Grand Lift of Rold will take you to another location, but only if you have a special medallion in your possession when you use it. We found the first half of that medallion back in Liurnia of the Lakes, when we ventured to the village of the Albinaurics