Darkness

Darkness.

It is often described as an absence of light, as if without the light there would be nothing, and the need to describe that nothingness was what brought about the definition of "Darkness".

But it isn't nothingness, is it?

If there was truly nothing, why do we instinctively fear the darkness? Why do terrors and horrors only appear at night? If these fearsome creatures were merely a figment of our imagination, then surely we would be able to imagine them in the daytime as well.

Conventional wisdom suggests that it is only in the absence of light that the notion of such terrors can exist, not to mention their actual existence. But by that logic, there is a baseline for darkness: in zero light, there should be maximum darkness.

But that also isn't true, is it?

Intuitively, all of us know that isn't true.

Intuitively, we know that in the darkness there is much more than we can perceive.

The ancients were well attuned to this notion. Well before the orthodoxy equating light and dark with good and evil respectively was established, our predecessors understood very well that it was all about balance.

Light and Darkness are two sides of the same coin. The coin of reality.

One complements the other: a surplus in one corresponds to a deficit in the other, but not in the form of an absence, no. Just as a negatively charged electron corresponds to a positively charged positron, the world of the darkness corresponds to the world of the light.

For everything that we know of, there exists a negative-thing, since the opposite of "something" is not "nothing". Likewise, the opposite of "someone" is not "no one".

Sometime in our past, this balance was toppled. The orthodoxy that we are constantly reminded of, that "Light is good, darkness is evil", is merely a farce, made up to artificially maintain the order that we see today. Is everything that is bathed in light necessarily good? Can atrocities be committed in broad daylight? Of course they can.

A false dichotomy.

The shadows that we see, even those that we think are moving on their own, when nothing is around; the feeling of absolute dread that we get when left in the dark; our very existence intuits the existence of a different world, filled with creatures and objects that are different, yet inexorably linked to the world that we know.

We can't see them now. Maybe because we don't want to, or maybe because they no longer want to be seen.

Our forefathers could. From them, our predecessors learnt to harness powers that would, in these times, be considered unnatural.

Legends tell of Legions that could bend reality, reconfiguring the nature of time, and therefore space, itself. These lived in the world of the light, hence their stories are recorded and passed down the generations. But even in the world of Magic, their abilities were of an altogether different world.

The inscriptions on ancient Azurite tablets told of a great battle, in which the Light prevailed, led by the five Genesis Legions. Yet nothing is written about the vanquished, and these Legions with supernatural powers remain but a myth.

Did they ever truly exist? And if they did, were they killed?

If they survived, then where are they now?

For how could anyone perceive the absence of something that has never been seen?