Demons

Introduction

Demons are animalistic creatures with little to no morals guiding them. They are cannibalistic scavengers driven by simple, short-sighted needs and impulses. Despite their immortality, their average lifespan is only a few decades, filled with competition, cunning deceit, and endless trickery to gain property and status. They respect nothing and no one, merely bowing to their more powerful kin only to save their hide and live to see another day.

When creating a demon, consider:
Their natural draw to power and ownership, true name, unique titles/powers, and rank.

Related

• Hell
• Ascended demons

Birth

New demons are born by three methods: naturally through conception, spirit corruption, or when a damned human's soul becomes irreparably broken from long-lasting torment. However, only a fracture of tortured souls is converted into demons, as training them is boring and time-consuming. Most of the time, new demons are born naturally and live short, dangerous lives before ending as a meal for more powerful individuals.

Bred demons are born in their true forms and spend their first few years in them, protected from Hell's harsh elements. Large litters ensure the survival of the fastest and strongest, leaving weaker siblings to be eaten by their siblings or even their malnourished mother. After they've grown their first set of horns and learned how to hunt for themselves, young demons are either abandoned or sold as slaves to their older kin and are expected to start climbing their way up Hell's unforgiving social ladder without the help of relatives. When the children gain too much independence, they are killed or resold until they find a master to serve, leaving more options to the aesthetically pleasing and verbally talented.

Names hold power in Hell; every demon has a true name that can be used to summon and bind them. Compared to regular names that can be as simple or pompous as the demon likes, true names are complex and unique, revealing the individual's family line and a personal, one-of-a-kind identifier. True names are written in the soul and can thus be read by higher-ranking demons, making old masters dangerous allies that must be bribed or killed to keep one's name from spreading too far and wide.

Essentially, the early life of a demon boils down to a few simple rules: do what you must to survive, kill those you can't threaten, and never trust your allies.

Appearance

Like wings define an angel, horns represent the demon. No two horns are alike—their design, amount, and size can vary wildly between individuals. They can grow on any part of the demon's body, yet the signature temple horns are the most common, like even numbers and dark, earthy colors. Breaking a demon's horn is like breaking a bone: equally painful and slow to heal. While a horn will eventually regrow, it can grow askew or never appear pristine again.

In addition to horns, some demons have a pair of featherless wings and long, sleek tails to go with their appearance. They, too, can differ greatly in design: wings are not always positioned on the upper back and may merely serve as decoration, while tails can have spikes or hard scales on them. Their color usually matches or compliments the demon's horns, never differing into the polar opposite.

A demon's natural appearance is primitive and animal-like, often resembling curious hybrids between humanoids and Earth's ancient predators. It sparks terror in anyone who sees it apart from those of demonic origins and can cause widespread mayhem if witnessed among humans. Most prefer to spend their time in a so-called half-form, displaying their horns, wings, and tail with their humane appearance.

Ranks

Unlike angels, demons acquire rank purely based on their service to Hell and its inhabitants. All demons and other descended souls answer to Lucifer, the appointed ruler and lord of Hell, but serve under the sin whose circle of Hell they inhabit.

Deadly sins

Deadly sins are the most powerful of their kind, also known as the princes of Hell. Their mere presence causes immeasurable destruction wherever they influence, affecting entire populations with an appetite for vice. The princes and their corresponding powers are Belial (Pride), Andras (Wrath), Leviathan (Envy), Mammon (Greed), Beelzebub (Gluttony), Belphegor (Sloth), and Asmodeus (Lust). Like archangels, the sins have gigantic true forms they can reveal to terrify and overcome their opponents.

Archdemons

Archdemons are ancient souls-turned-demons that have been given a specific title by Lucifer. Like the Knights, archdemons are independent and can have other demons under their command. They have been granted their own territory within Hell and given a particular responsibility, usually relating to Hell itself rather than its inhabitants. Often serving Lucifer since the underworld's formation, they are the most respected demons among their kin and rarely mingle with the common folk out of courtesy.

Overlords

Overlords are higher-ranking demons that have been rewarded after proving their value to one of the sins. They may own land, property, slaves, and any luxury Hell offers, forming the "upper class" among Hell's residents. Their disputes have destructive power, as the loser tends to end up dead and have all their possessions taken, including any lesser demons under their ownership.

Workers

Workers—brokers, contractors, artisans, etc.—form the middle class: they are traders, merchants, distributors, suppliers, and every other kind of beneficial laborers that have earned a modicum of respect among their kin. Their lives revolve around their merchandise and pleasing their regular customers, all the while searching for the most precious goods to gain more fortune and status.

Runts

Runts have no particular value and are barely treated as fodder by Hell's higher-ups. Lowest of the lowest, they are expected to work without complaining and act respectfully under the threat of sadistic punishment and death. Those that earn their keep may eventually end up as a worker's apprentice or even make it into an overlord's personal entertainer and pet.

Titles

Besides the abovementioned ranks, demons often adopt self-proclaimed titles of dukes, barons, patriarchs, and commanders. These titles hold little value besides their pretentious affixes and merely serve as an ego boost to their holder. Many demons prefer to be addressed by their pompous labels instead of their names, including the sins and the Devil himself.

Powers

Demons are fearsome creatures that cause terror with their mere presence and demand respect with their powers. For ages, they have been feared, and for a reason—no human should underestimate even the weakest of Hell's residents. As masters of deceit, most of their abilities revolve around sparking panic and tricking humans into selling their souls to serve Hell's power. Even if faced directly, they are not easy to defeat, not even for Heaven's most courageous soldiers.

Immortality

Impervious to the effects of aging and disease, demons are not fazed by the concept of mortality any more than they are by the possibility of never making it past the first step on the food chain ladder. Theoretically, a smart, well-behaved demon could live to see the world end, yet most won't live to see their fiftieth birthday, let alone the hundredth.

Telekinesis

All demons are capable of basic telekinesis and moving small objects through the air. As they gain more experience using the ability, they can affect larger masses and less solid matter, even moving targets that may fight against the demon's will. While runts may only move objects the size of common household objects, overlords can fling modern cars across the air and damage building foundations. And if a sin wants to move something… Well, that'll leave behind a crater.

Fear induction

Demons are natural at causing fear through nightmares, phobias, and overall anxiety. Mental illnesses have been attributed to demonic influence throughout the ages, and it's no wonder why—combined with their other powers, different afflictions from anxiety disorders to schizophrenia can spark from a clever choice of words and prolonged torment. While invading a target's subconscious with nightmares is the easiest form of inducing, stronger demons can terrorize their victims even while they are awake.

Contract manipulation and empowerment

Demons operate through contracts, a potent loophole that allows them to move between realms and gain temporary powers within a signed contract's rules. As long as a demon holds a contract, it cannot be nullified by a lesser hellspawn, and any rules written within said agreement cannot be altered by anyone else but the demon themselves. A contract holds the demon responsible for carrying out any promises made, resulting in notoriously well-hidden fine print. Signed with blood, a contract can be powered anywhere from a single to infinite souls, with virtuous spirits having the most value. As long as the contract holds, its keeper can find their victim anywhere on Earth.

Curse creation

Archdemons and sins can design and create various curses, either within objects or inside designated locations. These curses have the power to curse the soul of anyone who triggers them—even weakened archangels. Hard to negate and nigh impossible to remove, curses demand extensive knowledge of the arcane and a personal sacrifice from their creator to work. Once a curse is released, its extent may surprise even its original designer, its nature may turn out to be unforeseeably volatile, or it can affect its creator.

Body creation and/or possession

Only sins, hell knights, and archdemons are capable of creating their own human appearances. Lesser demons must possess a human, known as a "vessel," by forcefully entering a living body. Neither angels nor demons are allowed to show their true faces while on Earth, and therefore have to find a suitable human to inhabit. These "meat suits" are often treated as disposable and temporary, yet some demons grow fond of their appearances and avoid damaging their borrowed bodies at all costs.

True form

All demons have access to a true form: a monstrous version of themselves where they are at their most powerful. Every demon's true form is unique but recognizable of its family line, carrying a set of features that reveal its ancestors. Occasional mutations can still happen and create new, distinguishable traits, ranging from peculiar colors to anatomical curiosities. While demons are in their true form, their animalistic instincts are strengthened, and their feral side is intensified, making some demons lose themselves to their wild self.

Innate abilities

All demons share a set of abilities they are gifted at birth, regardless of origin or age. While some demons naturally gravitate towards different skill sets, no hellspawn is born completely powerless.

Superhuman physiology

As supernatural beings, demons are far faster, stronger, and more durable than humans, allowing them to surpass regular mortal qualities by a wide margin. The more powerful a demon becomes, its physiology evolves a comparable amount, giving higher ranks an easy upper hand against their lower-ranking kin. Able to break bones with their bare hands and agile enough to match Earth's fastest mammals, ending up on a demon's bad side—or sometimes even in their field of view—puts any human in peril.

Teleportation

Demons have no limits to their teleportation ability: they can travel around Earth in a matter of seconds. However, because buildings and landscapes change rapidly, it is considered reckless to travel such distances, as many demons have suffered critical injuries after overestimating their sense of place and teleporting inside a solid object. Large, flat, building-free areas are preferred as a primary destination, and only after the initial jump should one continue onward their actual point of interest. hell knights can also teleport near their kin, including the Devil himself.

Illusions

Demons are masters of deceit beyond simple cunning schemes. Also gifted in illusion creation, they can fool even the most cynical individuals, transforming their familiar surroundings into horrors beyond human imagination. Most of the deception is temporary and passable as a vivid hallucination, mainly formed out of eerie sounds and visual stimulation, yet some stronger demons can build up utterly realistic surroundings to fool their victim. These masters of illusion can confuse even angels and are fearsome opponents to anyone without a particularly resistant mind.

Regeneration

Injuries are impossible to avoid in Hell, so every demon possesses the handiest form of healing possible: regeneration. While unable to regrow lost limbs, a demon can heal almost any other injury that leaves their core intact. Regeneration takes immense energy and forces the injured hellspawn to make up for the lost calories at any cost, lest they die of starvation before the rapid self-healing slows down. Once fully healed, the only mark left on the demon's skin is a patch of new, pale flesh, as if its owner was reborn anew.

Smoke form and flight

One does not simply hop from one realm to another by foot, leaving demons only one option: to take on a less corporeal form to cross the gap between Hell and Earth. They can project their spirit as black smoke, fitting through holes as small as keyholes to reach potential meat suits. Once a demon finds a body to possess, their soul becomes one with the vessel, killing its original owner. Demons powerful enough to create their own body can take its appearance wherever they wish, regardless of the realm they are in, using smoke form only for travel purposes.

Localization

Demons can locate and focus on any human they desire, torment them with illusions and nightmares, and drive them into despair with their presence alone. A mortal once possessed or haunted by a demon is an easy victim to others, as their soul has already been marked as prey. For this reason, some demons prefer to leave a mark on a target to ward off competition, returning to personally terrorize them whenever they please.

Soul reading

Just like angels, demons can see any mortal's past choices and the moral results of their actions. While not exact science, they can differentiate the most predominant sins a human has been influenced and affected by, using the knowledge to their advantage when pursuing a contract. Higher-ranking demons can pull forward memories of a soul's most notable moments, further humiliating and extorting their target.

Speaking in tongues

To deceive and manipulate their victims, demons can understand and replicate any mortal language native to or understood by the target. However, the ability is limited to spoken languages, leaving writing or signing them out of a hellion's expertise. Nevertheless, demons have plenty of tools to torment their victims with—hearing is only one of five human senses.

Profanish language

Creatures of Hell share a common language referred to as Profanish. To human ears, it sounds nothing more like growls, hisses, and other crude sounds screamed by 60 people at once, causing overwhelming pain to those who hear it. Demons can use Profanish to whisper to their victims, filling their heads with intolerable shrieks of the damned, causing the most sensitive to commit suicide to escape the effect. Angels are less affected, instead acting annoyed in the presence of evil.

Weaknesses

Divine weapons

Divine weapons can be classified as anything holy and pointy, ranging from angelic blades to blessed artifacts. Any object imbued with primordial material, like tears or blood, counts as divine, as does any weapon dipped in holy elements. Even a crude shank made from a dead pope's bone would qualify. Coming across weaponry created by God is incredibly rare, but if one did, one could wound even the deadly sins themselves.

Holy items and elements

Items blessed by the church or other religious rituals count as holy and are impossible or intolerable to touch by hellspawn. Fire and water can also be blessed, causing fire to change its color to blue and water to intensely reflect even the tiniest glint of light and then be used to trap a demon in place and shut off its powers.

Hallowed ground

Even land itself can be consecrated, as usually is the case on all kinds of burial grounds. Hallowed ground cannot be crossed by demons in any form, protecting any buildings and people standing on them from the presence and powers of the unholy. As long as the consecration holds firm and the ground undisturbed, even the Devil himself can't step onto hallowed soil.

Exorcisms and magic

Any demon possessing a human vessel can be sent back to Hell or, in the case of sins and archdemons, disarmed and forced to return to their home realm to regain their powers. In general, magic is neither offensive nor defensive, yet it can also be used to repel and ward off evil or trap it into an enchanted object. All kinds of protective seals are dangerous to demons since they can hide powerful entrapment within them, thus enslaving the curious demon… Or worse.

Summoning

A mortal who knows a demon's true name can perform a summoning ritual to force them onto Earth and bind the hellspawn to their will. While knowledge of these rituals is rare, its existence means the possibility of embarrassing slavery to a lesser being, should the summoner succeed in their binding. Only the sins are completely immune to summoning, yet even their attention can be demanded with a potent enough ritual—and once it is gained, it's up for the summoner to contain the aftermath.

Contract nullification

Demon contracts are not indestructible; they can be nullified or broken by either the victim or the demon itself should something contradict the contract's settled terms. A higher-ranking demon might intervene and claim the contract to themselves or find its physical copy and destroy it, leaving its original creator with no claim or power over the victim's soul. While a signed contract is immune to most common forms of damage, holy elements can burn the paper, wash away the ink, or cut and pierced apart by divine weapons. For this reason, it is the contract holder's responsibility to keep their contracts well hidden and unattainable by outsiders, preferably transformed into another object or sealed behind a cursed seal.

Salt

Salt has been used in purifying rituals throughout humankind's history, where its protective nature originates. A circle made of salt cannot be passed by a low-ranking demon or any demon in smoke form, protecting potential vessels from being possessed. Pure salt has the most substantial effect, even working as a weapon, able to be thrown or shot toward hellspawn.

Silver

Silver has the same effect as salt, with the added potential for different uses. It can permanently scar a demon's flesh and cut through into their true form or burn their skin severely in its molten form. Less pure metal can still be used as shackles or imprisonment, especially when combined with powerful magic.

Damage to true form

Despite their regenerative powers, any harm that comes to a demon's true form has the potential to be deadly or, at the very least, exceptionally painful. While damaging a true form takes immense power, the healing will take an equally long time and can even momentarily incapacitate the injured hellspawn. Turning into smoke form may make demons immune to further physical damage, yet it won't remove the earlier injuries but stalls their healing.

Primordials

Primordials are far more powerful than demons and pose an extreme threat to them. Not even the sins compare against a primordial, making them all but squeaky toys for the cosmic entities. No sane demon should try to square up against a creature of incomprehensible power imbalance, yet some have been known to meet their bloody end by barking at the wrong tree.