Will Miquella feature in Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree?

eurogamer.net:

Praise the Erdtree! An expansion for Elden Ring has finally been confirmed by FromSoftware.

It's not much of a surprise considering there's precedent for DLC in the Souls series — not to mention a cool 20m copies of Elden Ring sold — but fans of the game will finally get more of the Lands Between.

Or maybe it's not the Lands Between at all? Which characters will be the focus of this expansion? And what's happened to that tree?

The expansion will be called Shadow of the Erdtree. Its announcement came with new artwork, depicting a blonde figure riding what appears to be Torrent. The land is desolate and foggy, with ghostly graves littering the ground. A giant tree stands in the background, corrupted and shrivelled.

So what does this all mean?

Who is the blonde figure?

The artwork prominently shows a blonde figure riding Torrent — how many other horned, goat-horses are there? Ahead of this DLC announcement it was widely theorised that any extra content would focus on Miquella and, from this artwork, that appears to be true.

So who is Miquella? As Eurogamer's own Zoe explains in her lore video (above), Miquella is the twin brother of Malenia — that rot boss everyone loves to hate — both the demigod offspring of Queen Marika and Radagon. Both were born with a curse, however: Malenia is afflicted with Scarlet Rot, while Miquella is doomed to be eternally young and never grow to an adult. He is depicted as a young child with long blonde hair (see header image).

Miquella devoted his life to attempting to cure Malenia of the Scarlet Rot, which he believed required him to grow to be an adult. He devised Unalloyed Gold, perhaps a new form of magic, which we discover in-game as the Unalloyed Gold Needle, allowing players to ward