Dragon Communion is how you make dragon power your own in Elden Ring. You take a Dragon Heart from a slain drake, eat it at a Dragon Communion Altar, and in exchange you learn breath attacks and claw strikes as incantations.
How Dragon Communion works
The idea is simple. Drakes are descendants of the Ancient Dragons, and their hearts carry a piece of that draconic power. Kill one, take its Dragon Heart, then spend it at an altar. What you get back are the Dragon Communion incantations: fire, ice, rot and magma breath, plus a few close-range attacks.
The altars don’t all offer the same things. Some powers can only be bought at one specific altar, so visit every altar once you have hearts to spend. The Dragon Communion Seal also belongs to this practice.
Where the altars are
There are three Dragon Communion Altars in the Lands Between:
- Church of Dragon Communion
- Cathedral of Dragon Communion. Watch out: Decaying Ekzykes guards the entrance, and he is there precisely to keep would-be communers away from the altar.
- Grand Altar of Dragon Communion
Dragon Communion incantations
These are the incantations tied to Dragon Communion. Each spell page has the full details.
Other gear connected to the practice: the Dragon Communion Harpoon, Dragon Communion Grease, Dragonwound Grease, Dragonscale Flesh, the Dragon-Hunter’s Great Katana, Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword, Igon’s Greatbow and the Flowerstone Gavel.
The story behind it
The practice started with a feud between dragons. Placidusax, lord of the Ancient Dragons, was attacked by the great drake Bayle the Dread. The fight ended with both of them badly hurt and Bayle running away. For revenge, Placidusax sent some of his followers to live among humans as Dragon Communion priestesses. They recruited warriors to hunt Bayle and his drake offspring, and they paid them with the power hidden in a drake’s heart.
Over time the hunters forgot why they were hunting and kept eating hearts for their own gain. The more they ate, the hungrier they got, and bit by bit their bodies and minds turned draconic. That road ends with the Magma Wyrm, a crawling dragon-thing with tiny wings that can’t fly. The cruel twist is that a Magma Wyrm’s own heart becomes something worth hunting, so many of them die at the hands of other communers.
The oldest form of the rite was eating a Rock Heart, which turned a person into an Ancient Dragon. The ultimate form is eating the Heart of Bayle.
Who practices it
You’ll meet plenty of communers on your travels: Drake Knights, hooded Banished Knights, the Ancient Dragon-Man, Eleonora, Violet Bloody Finger, Drake Warrior Igon and Great Wyrm Theodorix, plus several Magma Wyrms. Yura, by contrast, refuses to eat dragon hearts because he’s afraid of losing himself.