Divinity fan decodes Elder Futhark runes on the villain's crown to reveal 'chaos is coming'

Seven months after Larian Studios revealed Divinity at The Game Awards 2025, a content creator has cracked a hidden message sitting in plain sight inside the cinematic trailer — and it points directly at the game's villain.

The discovery comes courtesy of WolfheartFPS, who was tipped off by a behind-the-scenes LinkedIn video posted four days ago by Unit Image, the 3D animation and visual effects studio that worked with Larian on the trailer. That video showed a high-detail model of the trailer's central figure — a battered old man in chains, barbed wire wrapped around his head, wearing a spiky crown covered in engraved symbols. WolfheartFPS identified those symbols as Elder Futhark, the oldest known runic alphabet, used during the Migration Period between roughly 300 and 600 AD and named after the phonetic sounds of its first six runes: F, U, Th, A, R, K. Deciphering Elder Futhark is tricky because of how phonetic the system is, but WolfheartFPS worked through it and concluded the crown reads "chaos is coming" — or more precisely, phonetically: "kay oss iz kum ing." Given that Larian has already subtitled the game Divinity: Lord of Chaos, the message lines up hard.

Larian is best known for Baldur's Gate 3, the RPG that swept the 2023 Game of the Year awards and redefined expectations for the genre. Divinity itself is the seventh entry in a long-running series — the two Divinity: Original Sin games built Larian's reputation before BG3 took it stratospheric. The studio has a history of using early access as a development tool, and Larian has already hinted in interviews that Divinity could follow the same path.

No release date has been confirmed yet. For now, the community is running with WolfheartFPS's decode — and if the runes are right, whoever is wearing that crown is the Lord of Chaos himself.