The Heartless Judge and His Four Cardinal Directions

The Heartless Judge and His Four Cardinal Directions is a boss in Elden Ring.

Location
Found in the Lost Undead Church.

Lore
Once, the one who would become the Heartless Judge was a religious scholar and a soothsayer. When war threatened his homeland, he became a rallying figure and a brave general. He became so noted for his divine wisdom that he was ushered in by the people as a theocrat and iudex (like King Solomon), and delivered sage judgements and edicts from his monastic temple.

However, the Judge became afflicted with a (curse, disease, what have you) that ate away his bodily integrity and mental capacity. Using his metaphysical talents over alchemy he split his soul into four armored vessels: the Four Cardinal Directions.

His Four were appointed as his special council: at first they proved capable; but, no longer reined in by one unified will, with time, each one grew decadent, each subsumed by one pair of virtue and vice of the Judge's personality.

As for the Judge himself, he was left no more than a hollow shell of himself, personality stripped away to pure logic. Again, he could be reined in by his Four at first, but as they gave in to bickering, the Heartless Judge banished them, and started to become... dangerously sane.

For, void of all emotion or human essence, he became truly impartial: even to the value of human life. Souls were damned, and atrocities were wrought unflinchingly, if that fulfilled a coldly logical "greater good". Inquisitions and assassins rounded up all those who were found to be "full of sin": under the strict and cold logic of the Judge's theocratic edicts, these were many.

Of course, the tyrannical Judge was overthrown and executed by his own persecuted citizens. His heart, still beating, was dug out of his chest in a symbolic execution. Following their custom, and honoring his memory as a once-just leader, the people buried him in ceremonial armor, and inhumed in his own temple.

Years passed. The same curse or illness that threatened the Judge now devestated his state, and eventually the world at large. Sometime in the intervening years, the Four Cardinal Directions returned from their distant exiles, as if drawn by a heartless vortex. Reunited with the pieces of his soul, the burial armor of the murdered Judge arose, a Heartless automaton, keeping watch over his ruined land, and the deepest, darkest secrets of Alchemy.

Drops

 * Skeleton Key
 * The Heartless Judge's Fragment