There was life in dark matter, as well as light.
Across the universe, dark matter outweighed the baryonic, the 'light,' by a factor of six. It gathered in immense reefs hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Unable to shed heat through quirks of its physics, the dark material was resistant to collapse into smaller structures, the scale of stars or planets, as baryonic stuff could.
-Exultant, Ch. 55