#functional immortality

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? 

"You know what can happen when a lot of people get slaughtered in the same place. All that life has to go somewhere." Sooooo does this mean we now know what happened to Nightingale or am I misinterpreting things?

This is a reference to something that happened in the comics, but an oblique one - in issue #2 of Detective Stories, Peter and Lesley investigate a sketch that has appeared mysteriously in a museum. They find out the culprit is an ‘Old Soldier’ like Oberon, a term that turns out to refer to people who die on large battlefields and are then magically resurrected as immortals. 

Only an absence of evidence, which is basically:

1) The series has now being going on for three years and Peter hasn’t noticed Nightingale getting visibly older or younger (there are a couple of references in THT to Nightingale looking younger when he smiles which you could interpret that way if you wanted to but that’s it).

2) Varvara Tamonina, the only other non-aging wizard we know of, did not age backwards so much as stop aging - in 1966 she was in her mid-40s and based on both Peter’s descriptions of her and the comics she looks like...someone in her 30s/40s now. So assuming she and Nightingale are subject to the same effect, it’s certainly possible to age neither backwards nor forwards. 

3) Lady Ty tells Peter in THT that functional immortality, as far as she’d experienced it, seems to be a matter of looking the age you want to be - Oxley and Ty both look middle-aged but Oxley is nearly a millennium old and Ty is in her late 40s...and has a mortal husband she wants to look a similar age to. There’s no reason Nightingale would want to be much older - and probably not much younger - than he currently appears: old enough to be credible in his job, young enough to still run around and blow up the occasional farm structure. 

4) We assumed for a while that Nightingale had been aging backwards at a 1:1 ratio from the late 70s, because that’s about 35 years before the books start and he would have deaged 35 years to get to ~40, but if the recurrence of magic began in the late 60s (per Varvara, Lady Helena, and the Nightingale-PoV snippet on BA’s blog) then it’s quite possible he began to de-age then and only noticed it in the mid-70s when he should have been definitively old and wasn’t. He may have appeared 40-ish for a while now; it’s not really clear. 

and 5) I feel personally like Nightingale relentlessly aging backwards, which at some point is not going to be what he wants, is not really in keeping with the tone or drive of the series, but this is totally my personal feeling. 

Honestly, I’m surprised nobody has written this (I think there is one snippet around somewhere but I’m on mobile so I can’t find it.) A lot of it would be Nightingale being terribly polite, because it’s Nightingale, and people ignoring him, because that’s what older adults tend to do to teenagers, and then…someone underestimating him, oh dear. There’s comic potential there, certainly.

If you’re interested in that concept in fic go read @themardia‘s Changing the View, in which Nightingale is definitely hoping this (if you haven’t already). It’s kind of....pre-OT3 fic, in the same sense as we used to say ‘pre-slash’. 

But at this stage in canon I have a suspicion Nightingale just isn’t thinking about any of it much: when he tells Peter in RoL “Gift horse. Mouth.” I think he means just that. He’s not Peter or Walid or even Beverley who like to ask questions about why, he’s happy to take unexpected good things as they come. So I don’t think he’s moved on to wondering about what’s going to happen to Peter, since he’s now dating Beverley, quite yet. But give it a few years, maybe. (I do wonder, very much, what he thought when they found out about Varvara; is she the first other inexplicably immortal person he’s met? She’s the first one we see in the books, but that’s a different thing.) 

Some humans fight with blades, those who live on worlds that allow it, use firearms. Or for those aboard stations and ships, crossbows. Me? I refuse to use any of that. My body is my weapon. Sure I carry a utility knife, don't most of us? But it's never been used to draw blood. With a single blow I can knock a man down, with a well-placed kick I can knock over a being the size of a tree. My hand, small as it is, can strike a seemingly random spot, and in moments my enemy seizes up and then dies.

My body is my weapon, trained by an art that was many centuries old. It was taught for defense, it was taught for meditation, it was taught, to all things, peaceful monks in temples. Martial arts, kung-fu, tae-kwon-do, judo, tai-chi, ninjitsu, jujitsu, hapkido, aikido, capoeira, sambo, dim mak, kendo, and so many others. I've learned them all.

My body, a deadly weapon of war, meant to protect the peaceful. None shall harm those under my care. I won't let you die, not on my watch. -- Anon Guest

Deathworlders come up with so many methods of offensive defence. Their weapons are many and varied, but the most interesting things happen when various administrative forces attempt to ban a rebellion-minded proletariat from rebalancing the scales of justice. Banning weapons never really works. Banning certain types of weapons just leads to the peasantry inventing new kinds of weapons out of ordinary household objects.

When fighting with any kind of weapon is banned, the Deathworlders simply invent methods of incapacitating others bare-handed, bare-footed, and sometimes naked. Many an army has faced a throng of Humans wearing only paint and a grimace[^1], and that alone has caused them to turn around and think about their life choices.

Then there's martial arts. Training mind and body to be beyond normal Deathworlder limitations and exceed what should be possible with a Deathworlder body. This sort of thing generally takes years and one Human trained in one discipline is a being to be feared. The limit used to be one Human lifetime, but Humans have a way of cheating.