What might be more concerning, is that the Darkness is not a singular creature, but a gestalt ‘hive’ of spectral creatures, a legacy of the Black Empire not too dissimilar from the Faceless Ones, the Nerubians/Mantid/C’thraxxi and the Deep Ones.
We know the Old Gods delighted in sacrifice, not only the release of energy and power from the absorption of the vitality and natural energies of the sacrifice, but also their ability to absorb the soul of the sacrifice, sucking the anima out of them, denying these souls their ‘rightful’ place in the Shadowlands and condemning the soul.
We saw in Revendreth that if a soul is stripped of all of its anima, it can’t move on, it can’t change, it effectively becomes ‘trapped’ in its current state and becomes unusable in the ‘Great Cycle’ of the Shadowlands.
What if that’s what the Darkness is? The countless souls, millions of them, consumed, stripped, deformed and corrupted by the darkest expression of the Void within the Old Gods themselves, the waste-product of feasting cthonic entites left to seep deep into the earth. Stripped of individuality, of hope, of the ability to move on or even embrace oblivion, these stripped souls lost cohesion, melting together into a gestalt entity fueled by fear, hatred, confusion and pain, and it knows only three things.
Jealousy, hatred, and pain.
Jealousy of the living, who can know more than the unending torment that the Darkness exists as.
Hatred, of everything that is not it, that is not of the Darkness, of the Old Gods and their minions who condemned it to this nightmarish existence of half-remembered torments and agonizing hints of lives once lived and then cut bitterly short.
And pain. Pain caused as the insubstantial substance of the Darkness’s form comes into contact with the Light, which answers to the most fervent prayers and ardent hopes, the Light within the Candles of the Kobolds who prayed for safety from the endless hunger and malice of the Darkness, the Light of the Sun that reminds them of the blazing eyes of the Old Gods as they feasted on their sacrifices, the Light of hope that the Darkness can only see as a taunting reminder that nobody came to save them.