Demons¶
"A Demon is a spirit from another world. A Demon is an agent of chaos spawned from the void. A Demon is a twisted, broken and irredeemable soul. Whether they are twisted souls, alien entities or agents of the void, even the oldest demons do not know their true origin." — an unattributed Fourth Age primer on the demonic (S334)
Contested
This page is named in the open question Demon's Thread: Dae'medeis, Dae'cilia and Dae'Morticus. The two newest sources assign the demonic words for a demon's essence, its tether and its Mortiquery differently; the page follows the newest and records the other reading under Earlier accounts.
Demons are the great enemy of life on Terrun: spirits that have no soul of the ordinary kind but an essence, which grows only by consuming other essences and other souls. They cannot abide on the Material Plane without a body to hold them, so they take bodies by force, and what they take they slowly ruin. During the Demon Wars "several millennia ago, the mortal races, with help from the Gods, drove back hordes of demons and imprisoned them in a separate plane of existence: the Abyss (also called Hell)" (S334). They have been slipping out ever since, through rifts or at the call of reckless spellcasters. Where demons come from is a matter of open scholarly dispute, laid out on Origin of Demons; their lords are the Archdemons; the bodies they wear are catalogued under Demonic Forms; how they take them is Demonic Possession; how they grow is the Demonic Lifecycle; and the demons who followed Asmodeus out of the Abyss are the Devils.
Also called: Daemonium in the scholarly tongue of the Sancturi (S132), "children of the Void" (S019), and in the oldest writings "a cancer of the spirit" (S384).
Three kinds of demonic entity¶
The Fourth Age scholarship distinguishes three things that are loosely called demons (S334):
| Entity | What it is |
|---|---|
| Demonic spirit: | A formless demonic entity, essence without a host. |
| Demon: | A living creature possessed by a demonic spirit. |
| Demonspawn: | A living creature that is not possessed but has been corrupted into a thrall under the control of a demonic spirit. |
A demonic spirit that has just crossed into the material world "begins decaying almost immediately" and has only a short time to find a body (S333). Most spirits that cross are the smallest kind, and "most of which will suffer complete essence decay before they can secure a host" (S333). The Demonlands demons have slang for the newly arrived: Riftgrub or Released for a demon with neither a derivative form nor full essence, "very new and inexperienced … most end up as food for other demons"; Fleshlings or Uncast for those who have a body but no demonic form yet; Slacklings, Half-Shell or Unformed for demons whose essence has not yet filled their form; and Unbound for a demon with no master (S329). The wardens of Valyr call fresh arrivals Riftspawn (S341).
Essence¶
A demon's essence (Dae'Medeis) "represents the core of a singular demonic entity. It is a measure of a demon's power and identity" (S334). It is the demonic equivalent of a soul, and the source of a common misconception: that demons have essence and not souls (S019). Essence is gained by consuming other demons; when a demon absorbs a defeated rival's essence it keeps about a fifth and the rest "is lost to Demonic Corruption" (S334). Living souls that a demon corrupts also yield essence. Essence "is neither created nor destroyed" (S019); it can be captured, siphoned off by magic, or decay back to the Abyss.
Essence comes in strata, from Minor through Lesser, Legion, Greater, Lord and Monarch to Arch, and the stratum sets how much essence a body can hold and how a demon climbs; the strata are described on Demonic Lifecycle. Demons fight for essence in essence contests: "when demons fight each other there are usually two fights happening at once - the physical fight (host vs host) and the essence fight (essence vs essence). The essence battle is ultimately more important" (S333). A master testing a minion may hold a contest of essences alone; to an observer it is "just a battle of twisting shadows and incorporeal wraith-like shapes assaulting each other while the physical forms touched each other" (S333). Demons cannot sense the size of another demon's essence, "which makes them naturally wary of engaging in Essence based conflict unless they are assured to have the upper hand, or a good escape plan … or both" (S019).
Demonic corruption¶
Essence that is not sentient is known as demonic corruption or taint (S019). It comes in two forms (S333):
- Passive corruption is demonic essence embedded in non-sentient organic matter: "trees, roots, bones, insects, worms, tiny animals, grass." Essence released in a contest or lost to decay settles as passive corruption, and demons draw strength from standing in it. At its lightest the corruption is not obvious, though growth is stunted and small animals show minor mutations. Then living things "appear cracked, sickly, wilted or in the process of dying. Parts may appear charred or black. Liquids may ooze green or yellow and often have a slight glow." At its worst "biological functions have stopped. Living things are dead."
- Active corruption is a demon infecting a mortal soul so that it can "siphon off the corrupted portions of that soul as Essence," by making a thrall, by a demonic contract such as the pacts spellcasters make, or by torment, which gives quick but short-lived gains. A body corrupted far enough can no longer serve as a host.
Corruption that has fully taken a region burns as Felfire, whose colour tells the corrupting aspect: red for the Infernal, Maw and Bladed; yellow for the Horned, Barbed and Rot; blue for the Night, Winged and Frost (S329). The lore of fel energy itself belongs to Fel Magic. Powerful demonlords' Mortiqueries "alter Demonic Corruption in a region to favor their Prime Aspects" (S333). Corruption also binds minions: a demon invests its underlings "with a small amount of associated corruption," which lets it communicate with and draw power from them without splitting its own essence (S019).
Bond and the Mortiquery¶
A demon's Bond (Dae'Cilias) "measures its link to the material planes — the tether keeping the demonic essence from being drawn back into the Abyss" (S334). Bond belongs to the host, not the spirit; it is taken from the souls of the sapient creatures a demon kills, and it bleeds away day by day. Demons spend it to heal and reshape their bodies and to fuel spells, and when it is gone the spirit is torn from its form (S334) or, in the stricter account, "banished to the Abyss" (S333).
The Mortiquery (Dae'Morticus) is how a demon stops the bleeding: "a collection of spirits or organic remnants bound to the demon. It acts as a reservoir of Bond that the demon can draw from. While it may be stored within a single relic, most Mortiqueries are gruesome assortments of flesh, bone, and soul fragments harvested from victims" (S334). Only sentient souls bound to deities can be added to it; animals give a moment's Bond and no more. The souls trapped inside are consumed slowly, over years or even "hundreds or even thousands of years" if the demon draws on them sparingly (S333). The Mortiquery is also the demon's anchor: when its host is destroyed, its essence is drawn back to the nearest Mortiquery rather than to the Abyss, and from the organic matter heaped around it the demon may build a new body (S333). Another demon can sense a Mortiquery when close, can steal Bond from it, and can destroy it only with the magic of souls or of dispelling; destroying one frees the remaining spirits to the afterlife (S333, S019). The soldiers of Valyr bear a glyph that binds form and soul "such that their souls cannot be trapped after their body has decayed. This limits their use in demonic Mortiqueries" (S329).
Forms¶
Demons "must find and possess a native form/body on any plane they inhabit outside the abyss or suffer essence decay which will return their essence to the abyss" (S019). The body they take is their host, and a host can be reshaped through a metamorphosis cycle into a derivative demonic form, the hellhounds, imps and vrocks of common report, catalogued on Demonic Forms. A demon's essence "often doesn't 'fit' properly in a given form. These forms suffer terrible and uncontrollable mutations and leak essence" (S019). Demons do not sleep: "they transform" (S334). How a demon takes a body, and who can be taken, is the subject of Demonic Possession.
Masters, minions and demonkin¶
Demons form hierarchies by subjugation. When one defeats another in an essence contest it may consume the loser or instead enslave it: "the victor imprints their will on the defeated demon's essence, forming a Master–Minion bond" (S334). A demon may serve only one master; the bond persists even if either is banished to the Abyss; a master may draw Bond from its minions at any distance, override their actions, sense their direction, and at any moment consume a fifth of a minion's essence, which ends the bond (S333, S334). Demons related through such bonds, and the demonspawn beneath them, are demonkin, and demons recognise their own kin on sight (S334). In the Demonlands the Gut-Queen Gharmatha keeps her demonkin under three rules: the Maw-Sanctum Rule, that any temple, den, feeding ground or hatchery of her kin is neutral ground; the Vessel-Spoils Rule, that any new body larger than a human be presented to her within ten days so that she may claim it; and obedience, on pain of being dropped into the Great Gore Vats (S329). A master punishes failure by the Culling, taking a fifth of a minion's essence and breaking the bond, and inviting the minion's own underlings to replace it (S329).
The Fifth Age bestiary describes the same structure in terms of threads: "demons often give a thread of themselves to each of their powerful underlings, while holding a much larger share of their underling's power. This not only allows direct communication, but provides security from destruction. Demonic betrayal then usually comes at a very great cost to both parties" (S019).
Demonspawn¶
When a demon "lacks reasonable ways to expand its essence and finds an abundance of spirits/souls to corrupt, it often turns to creating Demonspawn. These are corrupted spirits under the influence/control of the demon via Associated Corruption, but they are not full demons, but instead corrupted and twisted mortal minds/spirits with limited agency. For the inexperienced, it can be difficult to distinguish between a demon and a demonspawn" (S019). The Maw hordes of Vulgurak are mostly demonspawn: the Engorgers, "large Maw demonspawn with powerful bites," and the Devourlings, "swarm-based Maw spawn, semi-sapient, partially telepathically linked" (S337), described with the other spawn on Demonic Forms.
Speech¶
Every demon understands two languages. Maw-Speech, "hisses, grunts, rumbles & clicks," is "a simple guttural language capable only of rudimentary communication": demons "don't 'discuss' in Maw-Speech; they command, threaten, or react" in sentences of one to three words, "Go now," "Kill man," "Obey master" (S334). Abyssal is mostly written and telepathic; when two essences touch, a demon conveys its thoughts directly and senses the other's emotions and passing thoughts, "which makes it very difficult to lie to a demon" (S334). Some forms are mute, some only guttural, some fully vocal. The languages themselves are described on Languages.
The Abyss and the Demon Wars¶
The Abyss "was created by the Gods during the Demonic Wars as a set of prison planes to hold Demons and other outcasts. The Seven Hells were originally Astral Shards repurposed as prisons," with the Mithis Plane raised as a further barrier (S001). To a demon it is "an empty plane filled with incorporeal, immutable demonic essences, which are always struggling to find a way out" (S019). When an essence returns there "a large portion of that essence is split off and forms manes (the smallest unit of sentient demonic Essence)" (S019). Demons leave it through spawning rifts, "places where the Abscission between the Abyss and Material planes is very thin. These rifts are very difficult to close and most scholars believe that closing one simply forces another to open somewhere else" (S333), or through summoning. Ages of soul drought and inter-demon war have thinned them: "there are now many fewer demons than there were during the Demonic Wars" (S001). Since the Mithis Plane fell, "there is no real distinction between the Astral Plane and the Abyss" (S001), and in the Fifth Age "demons are no longer confined to the Abyss and can navigate freely across the planes" (S014); demons and warlocks make and hold the fissures between the islands of the Rift (S017).
Demons and mortals¶
Spellcasters summon demons through portals "crafted with a particular demon in mind," usually providing a host and a first sacrifice of spirits, for one of three reasons: a pact, a symbiosis; a contract, an exchange of services; or because a subjugated minion is summoning its master (S333). A demon's own magic is a derivative of Ethereal magic worked through its Mortiquery, and it reveals its incantations to those who make a Demonic Pact with that Mortiquery (S208); the warlocks, witches, summoners and daemus who trade with demons are described under Demonic Magic and Witchcraft. Aphotic witches trade blood for spells "that the demon may perform" (S218). Two peoples carry demon blood: the Silek, bred by the archdemon Bhaal, and the Riftborn, part demon and part human, of whom at least one, the Ebonheart monk Aqiran, could sense other demons nearby and raise a Mortiquery of his own (S002).
Against them stand the demon hunters. The Druids of Nyx specialise in "hunting, capturing and imprisoning demons" and in curbing warlocks (S019); the Light of Kalar keeps secret prisons for demons on the Material Plane; the Knights of Lothos and the Order of Valyr hold the Demonlands. Priesthoods keep "rituals to detect and exorcise and banish Demonic Spirits" (S384). Hunters' blades are made "more effective against Rift creatures (+3 damage vs Demons, Undead and Outsiders)" in the words of one Boreal Elf spear's enchantment (S005), and a Kalari rite releases a soul from a corpse "preventing the soul from being consumed by demons" (S004).
Earlier accounts¶
The Fifth Age bestiary of demons (S019) uses the demonic words differently from the Fourth Age primer followed above. There, Dae'cilia (plural Dae'cilias), "the literal translation … from demonic is 'Demon's Thread'," names the demon's essence itself, "what tie a demon to existence and where it draws its power from," and Dae'medeis, "Demon's Magic," is "another name for a Dae'cilia … frequently used by warlocks and mortal scholars," who also call it the Demon's Soul or Demon's Heart; the Mortiquery is likewise called Dae'cilias. In that account a demon "may only maintain a singular form, which is formed around one of their threads," reforms at the nearest thread when the form is destroyed, must physically keep a thread on a plane to have power there, can see and speak through living beings near any of its threads, and ceases to exist if every thread on every plane is destroyed. Each thread "bleeds a tiny amount of ethereal energy back into the Void." Demon hunters exploit this by form entrapment, killing the body without the thread so the demon remanifests "where the demon hunters have prepared a living prison (usually a crippled humanoid form which has already had the soul removed)"; and a pentagram holds a demon because inside it the demon cannot draw on its other threads (S019).
The cosmologies of the Earlier Ages describe demons as "wandering souls" who "arrived en-masse from the Void" and who "destroy not just forms, but also souls by consuming them." Each had two souls: a Demon Soul in its Abyssal form and a Chained Soul on the Ethereal Plane, used "as a power source and to anchor themselves to this existence," with no coherent intelligence of its own (S421). A later revision kept the idea that a demon's soul "does not exist in the Ethereal Plane, but in fact have a material manifestation," a "quasi-immortal form, which reforms at the nearest fragment of their Soul" (S018). The in-world essay on demonic origins calls the demon's soul "an empty vessel capable of absorbing the energy from other ethereal souls," and says that what a demon absorbs while still unformed "is often a driving factor in the definition of their form" (S520).
The oldest compendium (S384) has demons made when the Light of Kalar, the moral compass set in every soul by Kalar, "is removed and then the soul sufficiently damaged, twisted and corrupted." Summoned demons were "constantly being pulled back to the Abyss" until, by blood-bonding, "after consuming enough of the local inhabitants, they become bonded to the plane through the matter they have consumed." The Mortiquery there is "a demon's trophy collection. A place where mementos are kept with a strong spiritual connection to its victims," and destroying it cuts the demon's ties to those it has killed (S384). The demonologies of the intervening years (S518, S114) made the Mortiquery "a collection of the souls that the demon has consumed/is consuming … a power source and recharging station" that "can only exist on the material plane," and the Overview of the Gods says that the Destroyer "tricked many of them [the Dark Gods] into helping him create the Demons," with each Dark God making a kind: Blade-Demons from Rakkan, Shade-Demons from Necatus, Horned and Sea-Demons from Uaros, Fire-Demons from Pyri, Bone-Demons from Moros and Frost-Demons from Cordia (S429); the competing origins are weighed on Origin of Demons.
In Play¶
Most demons a party meets are small and desperate: spawning-rift arrivals hunting for any body at all, where "only small animals are available … and even those are hotly contested" (S329). Possessed beasts are the commonest demons on the road1. Demons gather where souls die in numbers, racing to a shipwreck on the Poisoned Shore "to scavenge any souls or survivors" (S329), and a wizard's manor in Proturas can be thick with them when a warlock has been careless (S044). A demon's weak point is the Mortiquery it hides, and its hierarchy: strike the master and the minions scatter, or sit back and let demons and cultists thin each other out, as one Rift expedition did (S011).