'Trousers of the nomadic merchants. These merchants once thrived as the Great Caravan, but after being accused of heretical beliefs, their entire clan was rounded up and buried alive far underground. Then, they chanted a curse of despair, and summoned the flame of frenzy.' The nomadic merchants the Tarnished meets at every crossroad, at Eastern Limgrave, at Caelid, at Mt. Gelmir, ringing their bells over a small selection of crafting goods, are the surviving remnant of a much older trading clan. Once they were the Great Caravan, a roving people whose Chapeaux and Finery were 'decorated with tiny gems in a wide spectrum of colors.' Then the Erdtree's order found them heretical.

'Then, they chanted a curse of despair, and summoned the flame of frenzy.' Their burial is the canon's first naming of the flame of frenzy as a created thing, summoned by the wronged. The Subterranean Shunning-Grounds, where the Tarnished descends to find Mohg's chapel and the Three Fingers themselves, was the very pit into which the Great Caravan was thrown. The Nomad Ashes flavour text confirms it : 'A member of a tribe that was entombed in the earth so as to bury the maddening disease that followed them. Able to emit the terrible flame of frenzy from his eyes.' Every yellow-eyed maddened pilgrim from Shabriri onward is a child of that buried curse. The bell-ringing merchants on the road are the cousins who escaped the pit ; they sell crafting notes and forget what their family did.