by Ethan "JB" Goldman
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. - Vladimir Nabokov
There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce. - Carl Sagan
The Dark One, of all names, perhaps its (And the pronoun IS It, the way you’d describe a tidal wave or age rather then a person) is the most feared, and the most absent. The Dark One is the void, darkness, ABSENCE, and more importantly to its followers, where it all goes. The Lord of Loss is, to its detractors, the ultimate threat, a vindictive bully and thief who takes everything it can and gives nothing back. To those who know it however, the Dark One is anything but. Of course it does mostly the same things, but the reasoning is completely different.
Existence is a pain, and the Dark One does everything it can to end that pain.
Curiously also, for the Entity of Ends (lots of titles with this god) the Dark One’s arsenal is… small. Aurora has a arsenal of weapons to kill, but the dark one only has the odd magical sword. But one has to consider that the Dark One doesn't NEED these things. Aurora has the knights of the crown with their swords of light. However the Dark one doesn’t have any magical blades, it has Blade. For a while the Dark One commanded the armies of one of the most militant and powerful nations that have ever entered the Realms, and for years that threat hanged over the lands like a Guillotine… but that order never came.
In fact, it was the Dark One who, briefly, died, not in a war with Light, or Gaia, but as a consequence of the war against Bedlam. This begs the question, why, why did It not simply end the Realms when it could, why did It die, heroically even, why do we persist in existence when the alleged greediest entity with the greatest army could have taken it all?
The answer is simple. The Dark One loves you, It’s grandchildren. Yes you, the butcher of its rivals, the ender of corruption and aberrations, the Means to It’s End. It wants you to be happy, but it knows that you are not, that you won’t be, under the unbearable weight of existence. Without even the peace of dissolution. When you can see so many more colors than seven, when your name is adrift in an ocean of consciousness like a grain of salt dissolving in the waves, only then will you full know the burden you bore, free of the weight of the sky pushing down on you, absent the sun slowly burning your skin away.
Only when it's over, when you are everything, will you understand how lonely you used to be… But that only answers half the question.
We know why the Dark One died for the Realms, but why is it strangely hesitant on killing for it? Even Dionin is more active and all his champion does is loom around Margaret and passive aggressively insult her.
To understand this let me tell you a tale about Dargoth.
Dargoth was one of the first to follow the Dark One, to know of him before we even knew of steel, and his tribe lived humble lives, hunting and waiting for their real existence to start after their lives ended, as promised by the Dark One. But Dargoth, mightiest of the tribe, saw the followers of the light and how they innovated with fire and stone and made dwellings and things that will outlast their blip of a existence. And Dargoth did not laugh at their stupidity, at their short sightedness… he was angry. Angry for all they had that he didn’t. So Dargoth, without the Dark One’s beckoning, lead his men to bring those innocent light dwellers into the Darkness, by hand and by stone, until the light dwellers had what Dargoth did, nothing.
And they PAID for this. The Light dwellers, who never knew violence, were quickly rallied by this almost traitorous act into reprisal, and the Light brought to bear all Dargoth’s jealousy and worldly attachments and used it against him.
Dargoth was forced to go from wanna be warlord to martyr, dying to ensure any record of the Dark One remained to be told at all…. All because he got jealous, and turned the Dark One’s gift into a way to try to be like the light dwellers…
Understand this, understand how insulting this is to the Dark One for this to have happened. To make people fear its charity, to use it as a tool to betray its love. To shackle yourself in the light’s ribbons and not even have the honesty to wear the tabard of your puppet masters, and for what ends? To end nearly all record of the Dark One’s existence, to teach the Light to be as you were? That is the price of confusing Mercy with Hate, that is the burden all of the All need to understand before we carelessly use our scalpels.
And that is the threat of not allowing those you are helping to actually want to be helped.
Things end in the Realms, not in the ways we expect, but they end often enough, timelines fall, universes turn to ash, and still we persist, still we fight, weaker and less enthused until suddenly… we stop. We walk away, and we don’t look back.
Flags burn, Gods die, the worms eat, blood is shed… and still many of us fight, connecting strings, sailing to new worlds, ending more ends… and there’s always something else.
Until there isn’t until it stops. Until the Dark One, the patient farmer that it is, harvests it’s crop.
If you are afraid of the Dark One, or hate him, or whatever emotion you attribute to the nervousness of returning to the spacedust you always are… its not that hard to stave him off, call the soul exists, raise dead is simple enough. You can run, everyone does, It won’t even blame you…
But you won’t run forever… but it will. It will run as long as it takes until you wait for it to catch up, just like a human hunts a tiger. Because mortals are impatient, we seldom find something worth waiting for… but for us? The Dark One will wait forever. Because it loves you.
You are its grandchildren.
So right where were we? Rules? How to actually LIKE the Dark One?
Fair enough, and not as hard as you think. The Dark One is a dangerous, eternal figure, but it’s not complicated. It takes things, and holds it forever. And nothing is more valuable in todays age.
Consider not the misery of life for once and look to those trying to end it. Corruptive figures, fallen knights of undeath, whatever hell they claim to be safeguarding the Realms from, Unmakers, Change, Change with Crown, every time Bedlam timetravels, and at least two entities that are arguably just extra-planar counterparts to It.
These are all creatures of Corruption, things that don’t simply kill but turn death into a cesspit they weaponize, fell light that end healing magic, nightmares, STEALING THE VOID TO MAKE CORRUPTED MOCKERIES OF THE LIGHTS WORK, and Bedlam! Twice!
The Dark One is very unhappy with these false ends. If Change makes everyone into Change then Everyone doesn’t get to be Everyone, they only get to be One and the Light wins forever.
And the inevitability of the All means nothing when everything that has entered the All somehow reexists itself from the past and retroactively never died.
The Dark One liked the Realms where it is, slowly imperceptibly careening towards an oblivion of its own making where everyone goes to their judgment, and eventually judgment goes to it. To protect that status quo, the Dark One will hand you the keys to its castle. And that castle is made from every ruin that has ever fallen so it’s preeeeeeetty big. In this, and in many ways (Hope is a entropic force after all, you do not hope for continuation you hope for change), the Dark One mirrors Aurora, they often want the same thing, but their explanations on why they desire that wildly vary.
Outside of safeguarding the Realms from Corruption, the worship of the Dark One offers ancient secrets, every secret never known infact. And it is happy to extend it’s help to those who willing to return it’s favor… but there is one simple caveat to this.
When my lord saw the word of the Dark One, and the follow of Dargoth, he interpreted this as to Hate Everyone Equally, to not weaponize the tools of the end for petty grudges but to seek the universal destruction that fits everyone under it… I disagree. You may hate all you want, but you can’t Kill out of hatred.
To understand the Dark One, to fully look into the void and hear it’s words in the silence, you need to understand that death IS a mercy, you can not weaponize kindliness. Do not go into the work if you are not ready for the Dark One to return the mercy you return to others… and always know there is so, so much worse then death.
And if you are interested in that…. Well Chaos is right next door.
Be patient, be painless, and always remember that, eventually, when you enter the All, all you have brought before it will be there too. Try not to bear a grudge.
Incidentally, the Dark One has its own trappings, its sacred symbols and rituals. The most sacred of them is Alcohol, which is twice blessed.
The intoxication is the feeling of the mind slipping into togetherness with the All, the bliss of togetherness and promise of eternity.
The weakness of tomorrow is the body yearning to return to it, withering itself to be closer to the All. In this way alcohol is twice blessed…
I am not sure how to wrap this up, but that’s the thing isn’t it, we never know how it all en-
Mantra 3: Just because you do not respect the darkness does not make it less real. Power is present, Dionin, Aurora, Zargon, all these gods have noticeable impact on the world around them. Just because you ban the worship of Asmodeus doesn’t mean he suddenly just stops existing, you can not ignore your way into world peace. Understand that not all the gods who can operate in your lands perhaps are beneficial to your lands, be willing to acknowledge threats, to try to placate them away, or curse their names. The world sucks, not every aspect of it, including gods, are going to be your friend. You will find the land has more color when shadows can exist INSIDE your borders instead of just surrounding it.
Many pantheons have evil Gods, that doesn’t make you a bad person just because your nation is victim to harsh winters or is at risk of flooding and thus may have a devious sea god.
PS: Dark One, I know the forces of good all have these signature weapons and ways to kill people and we don’t really need them… but it’d be nice if we could have one given we are going to be called butchers anyway.