You've killed us both

[Renegade_]

I don't know/remember where it was pointed out that the Shadow is a universal force, but anyway.
For the major part of the game, the Shadow is after Daniel because, simply, he's in the way. Now, in the end, when Alexander, Daniel and the orb are in the same room, the Shadow's primary target is the orb: once it gets the orb, it returns to where it came from.
This explanation has one flaw though: why would they even try to escape if the Shadow won't stop for anything? Maybe it would take very long for the Shadow to reach them again? Years? Decades?

I think the exact term used was 'balancing force', towards the beginning/middle of the game Alexander explains (or Daniel reads in a note) that The Shadow is just the 'universe correcting itself'. Leading us to believe The Shadow isn't vindictive or personal, but rather more like a universal law, a blind force, like gravity.

It's not made clear what happens to The Orb in the end, but the problem with The Orb theory is that we learn it has been chasing Daniel for the better part of the story, when for the better part of the story Daniel does not even possess The Orb!
Is it possible he's just merely in the way for the duration? Still the major reason Daniel (as some like to suggest he do) cannot just escape from the castle is because The Shadow will hunt him. However if it were only after The Orbs, it should have simply ignored him...

I still maintain the blood sacrifice theory. The alleged disproof being that you die when you help Agrippa through the portal despite Alexander's death, but in this scenario, you did not directly cause his end like stopping his portal summoning ritual does; we don't know what Agrippa, or Weyer does in the short time he's been freed to whatever plane that is. (Nor do we know that, if you do indeed die, it's the Shadow. Agrippa could be severing you from your body to yank you into his plane.)

More simply, the intent of that ending is that you deferred your fear and your anger to the plan of a wiser being more attuned to the orb and their mythos. The Shadow is relentless and murderous. In the ending where you directly end Alexander, you embody that animus and have by thwarting him returned his orb and yours to the guardian.

This could be if The Shadow were made out to be a vindictive and spiteful god-like entity which keeps tabs on whom killed whom with what and when, etc. But the storyline, as mentioned above, portrays The Shadow as a 'balancing force', slow-acting but consistent, indiscriminate. This view of The Shadow is reinforced later in the storyline when Alexander reveals that the entire 'blood sacrifice' motif was a charade, and only served his private gains (for the creation of 'vitae'), while actually doing nothing to prevent The Shadow's coming. This reinforces the notion that The Shadow is not a god that can be appeased, it is a universal force which acts without spite, without intent; yet the one ending in question seems to contradict this...