#absolute darkness (Void) can't survive for long in the brightest of lights (Radiance)

[somniumoflight]

Part 7 of Shade Lord as Ghost ideation:

What actually happened between the Radiance and the Void/Shade Lord for her to pronounce the Void/Shade Lord her “Ancient Enemy,” and what would make it mutual?

Since I’ve already mentioned the Radiance a few times in other ideation posts, and mentioned the possibility of her calling the Void her “Ancient Enemy” being a mutual sentiment from the Shade Lord’s side of things, I feel like I should give some serious thought as to what exactly might have happened to make this epic rivalry happen.

I’m going to start from the Shade Lord’s side of things.  I’ve already mused about the Shade Lord finding light uncomfortable, but not necessarily lethal, but since then another thought hit my mind like one of Grimm’s cloak spikes – what if it’s only certain kinds of light that could harm them, instead of none of it actually harming them unless they’re weak?  This probably will need some elaboration to help this make sense, so I’ll go into that first before I go diving into the mind of the Abyss here.

If you look at the different kinds of light that three of the known/semi-known higher beings in Hollow Knight – Grimm, the Pale King, and the Radiance – have or are attributed with, they’re all very different kinds of illumination, with different intensities and attributes. Grimm is linked to scarlet fire, I tend to compare the Pale King with artificial lights like lightbulbs, and the Radiance can arguably be compared to either the Sun or the Moon.  Since this isn’t a post about light symbolism in Hollow Knight or anything, I’ll try to quickly summarize my thoughts on the matter:

Grimm’s light, scarlet fire, is arguable the least bright of all the lights just mentioned, fire being mostly a low-energy output, mostly heat kind of light – it might be able to burn you, but it’s sure as hell not going to blind you either.  

The Pale King’s light is like that of a fluorescent lightbulb – it illuminates a hell of a lot more than fire, and is bright enough to put spots in your eyes if you stare at it, but at the same time, it’s cold, artificial, sterile, and artificial lighting can make it harder to see natural lighting, such as stars at night.  (Also moths get drawn to artificial lights a lot and pay the price for it, hmm, doesn’t that sound familiar?)

The Radiance, on the other hand, could arguably be attributed with both sunlight and moonlight – sunlight because of the pretty blatant sun imagery when she appears for the first time in her boss fight, plus her colors of yellow and orange, and moonlight because in many mythologies, the moon is actually attributed to madness and insanity, which is definitely something going on with the Radiance’s Infection in the game.  Sunlight is utterly blinding if looked at the wrong way, is hot enough to warm an entire planet, and is easily the brightest of these three kinds of light… and thus, the closest we see in canon to the complete and utter opposite of the Void.

So, with my Hollow Knight light theory (it’s like color theory but more glowy!) foundations set, it’s time to actually get into the whole “different kinds of light cause more harm to the Shade Lord” thing.  I’ve already mentioned that not all kinds of light would be harmful to the Shade Lord – in this case, most likely, it would be the scarlet flames of the Grimm Troupe that cause them the least amount of harm, followed at a wide margin by the Pale King’s much brighter, sterile light, which is canonically seen in the doorway that closed off the Abyss before the King’s brand is acquired.  It might be able to chase off the darkness, but it doesn’t eliminate it entirely, just sort of… puts up a wall to keep it away.

Sunlight, though?  Literally lights up the whole sky, chases away the night, all that poetic nonsense.  It eliminates any absolute darkness it finds, until the only place it can escape is in places the light just plain cannot reach, such as underground. Which… puts a much less humorous twist on the whole “Shade Lord was just chilling in the Abyss for a long time” thing I was contemplating. Anyway, the point of this long shpeal about yet more light symbolism was that while the Void can theoretically coexist with the Grimm Troupe’s light, and is chased away by but not exactly threatened by the Pale King’s, the Radiance’s light is absolutely a threat to the Shade Lord. When the Radiance first arrived in Hallownest – I doubt she was always there, c’mon, moths can fly – SL’s immediate reaction upon encountering this blinding, burning ball of sunbeams would have probably been some ancient Abyssal equivalent of screams of agony, and then lashing out to try to extinguish the light.

And, when we look at canon, trying to get rid of the Radiance in any way shape or form is definitely her berserk button.  Look at how utterly she ruined PK’s kingdom, just because he made people forget her.  Now imagine her when she was at her strongest, and when she’d just had some shadowy abomination try to kill her… and, because of the all-consuming nature of the Void, probably nearly succeed in killing her.  Not only would she have been furious, she probably would have also been terrified out of her wits. And terror and great power is not a great mix.  She wouldn’t stop at salting the earth like she sort of did with the Infection, where the land could theoretically still recover afterwards.  She would go full scorched earth tactics, and try to raze everything to the ground – which would begin a cycle of violence between the Old Light and the Void, each trying to kill the other over and over again until they both finally decided to retreat.

So, in short?  I think the whole “ancient enemy” thing between the Radiance and the Shade Lord was caused by utterly incompatible natures.  Absolute darkness cannot survive in the light, and light can be smothered and consumed by absolute darkness.  Thus, the Shade Lord and the Radiance were literally at each other’s throats from the get-go and kept trying to eliminate one another until they eventually retreated to their individual domains – the Radiance to Hallownest’s Crown, at the very top of the world where that glowing village stands, and the Shade Lord to the Abyss.  And SL, rather than risk running into the Old Light again, simply chose to stay in the Abyss, and let her have the run of everything above.