Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-27060727-20170106065555/@comment-28081000-20170409031721

Eskaver wrote: Yeah, fairies don't seem to age or die unless magicked to. Rumple likely means evil shenanigans rather than the conceptual darkness.

Blue is far older than Rumple, so it stands to be that fairies could be really old. We don't know much about Merlin's time period. What Rumple means is that she created the Dark Curse (confirmed in recent sneak peek) which caused all of Emma's problems since birth. Darkness has always existed. The Darkness inside the Dark Ones is a gesalt entity born of Nimue's and all succeeding Dark Ones' corrputed souls and magic accumilating over the centuries.