The Darkling is over five hundred years old, and he managed to keep people from realizing it by faking his own death and returning as a long lost relative (I believe this is called “the vampire trick” in the Shadowhunter Chronicles). I have a few serious questions about this:
The most powerful grisha are functionally immortal; the Darkling would conceivably die of old age eventually, but it would be so far the future that its not even worth thinking about. Baghra is even older than he is (900+ according to the wiki) and it’s implied in Ruin and Rising that Ilya Morozova could theoretically still be alive. How old could the Darkling theoretically live to be?
Alina says that the Darkling “didn’t look much older than I did” (S&B American paperback, original cover pp. 41). Alina’s seventeen at this point so this implies the Darkling appears about eighteen or nineteen (which highlights a mistake in my imagining, because I’d been visualizing the physical age gap between them as something like the gap between Aelin and Rowan from Throne of Glass). This begs the question of how long the Darkling has looked eighteen/nineteen. This is a real problem because he’s been leading the Second Army for a long time, and there’s only so young he could have been when he first took the position before no one would take him seriously. Unless of course he’s been playing the “powerful Grisha age slowly thing” for all it’s worth, which I guess is possible.
At what rate does the Darkling age? This can actually be split into two questions:
Is the Darkling aging more slowly than Baghra? I’m going to hypothesize that the answer to this is yes because he’s actually half her age but his physical appearance is not that of someone half her age (if they were aging at the same rate if she appeared eighty he’d appear forty). The laws of the magic system imply this means he’s more powerful than she is.
Has the Darkling always been aging at a steady rate? This is actually a really important question because it means the difference between the Darkling growing up (say to seventeen or eighteen) and then beginning to age more slowly, and him literally being a child under ten for hundreds of years (which is funny, but sounds like a nightmare for poor Baghra). I don't recall the grishaverse having a concept of “Settling” like Throne of Glass does, but it admittedly has been a while since I read the Grisha Trilogy in its entirety so maybe I’ve forgotten something. Personally, I think that given the way the rest of Grisha magic works the only logical explanation is a steady rate of aging, which means we might have a hundred year time frame for “The Demon in the Woods.”
What kind of effect does wearing powerful amplifiers have on the lifespan of a Grisha? When I bring this up I’m thinking about Alina and now Zoya who both possess/possessed radically powerful amplifiers. Now I’ve admitted that it’s been a while since I read TGT, but as I recall part of the reason the Darkling was so obsessed with getting Alina all the amplifiers was so she could be mostly immortal like him and he wouldn’t have to be alone for basically eternity (which is...not the sanest plan ever conceived, but is this dude actually sane?). Now that Zoya has Juris’s scales as an amplifier is she basically immortal too?
And lastly: The Darkling himself is an amplifier so if someone were to kill him and wear his bones as a necklace how immortal would they become?
I might return to this topic and try to answer some of these questions when I inevitably do a reread of TGT in preparation for the TV show. I think functional immortality and the effect it has on the Darkling and Baghra’s characters is super interesting and I’d like to think about it more when I can bring some actual textual evidence to bear.
