The Darklings are pitch-black goblins who dwell in the shadowy realm of Lethos, their skin so dark it seems to absorb light itself. These unsettling creatures belong to perpetual darkness, subsisting on a diet of rodents and bats, and they wield an unnatural mastery over shadow itself.
Unlike other goblins, Darklings are genuinely frightening, their darkness attunement creating impenetrable shadows that only they can see through. They move like living nightmares through their underground lairs, and those who encounter them in the dark rarely live to tell the tale.
The making
Lethos is dark the way deep water is wet, completely and without edges, and the shadow there is thick enough to hold a resonance the way standing water holds one elsewhere. A goblin brood that wandered into that dark did not learn to live in it. The resonance caught on the shadow and set, all at once, the way the first brood set in rot and rain. From that moment the Darklings were a brood that runs on darkness instead of water. The darkness they run on is Vulus, the element, shadow drawn as a substance through the darkness layer of the Elemental Planes. It is not the shade-energy of Malstaris that holds the Gorathi dead woven into the Binding, though the two kinds of dark lie side by side in Lethos and no outside eye has ever told them apart. Their skin took the color of the substrate that holds them. Their eyes opened to the only medium the working now moves through. And the loop will not close anywhere else: carry a Darkling brood into daylight and the thread that copies it has nothing to sink into. The Darklings stay in Lethos not by preference but because the dark is the only place they remain themselves. A Darkling dies the ordinary mortal death, and the Vulus affinity ends with the body, leaving no shadow-remnant behind.
Aspects
- Child of eternal darkness
- Predator in the shadows