“So, what’s the difference between a demon and a beast?” Lucas asked, somewhere on the road to Taunton.
Valerie pondered the question for a moment, staring off into the distance. “Have you ever encountered a demon, Ser Wick?”
“I have not,” Wick rumbled from ahead, eyeing her over his shoulder. “Though I once strayed into the Blighted Lands when I was young and foolish, I was fortunate enough only to face beasts and, I suppose, the horror of the Blight itself.”
Valerie nodded. “Considering how much influence demons have had on our world throughout history, it’s surprisingly rare to find people outside of frontline warriors who’ve ever seen one.” She paused, fists clenching. “The first thing you need to understand is this: demons abhor our very existence about as much as we despise theirs.”
~~~~~
For the second night in a row, the tolling of bells rang out over Taunton.
The town erupted in a frenzy of activity. Panicked shouts, pounding footsteps on stone, the scrape of weapons drawn. Any sense of calm had fled in the wake of Valerie’s bellowed warning, everyone who'd been out in the town rushing for the keep with reckless abandon, dropping anything they were carrying on the spot. Even the men who had been in the watchtowers and on the walls leaped to the ground and sprinted for the stone walls. In seemingly no time at all, the area outside the keep was devoid of life, and the keep’s gates slammed shut.
Lucas watched it all unfold from the roof of the keep itself. Valerie had dragged him straight here after her shout, snapping reprimands when he lagged behind for even a heartbeat. From on high, they gained an unobstructed view of the area surrounding the town in every direction. A patchwork grid of fields stretched towards the horizon, the flat land marred only by a few distant hills. Lucas strained his eyes, staring into the darkening land to the east; the sun was well on its way to setting, the sky transitioning to black, and the shadows cast by the town were lengthening along the plains like grasping fingers.
He saw no sign of any beasts out there, but admittedly that might have just been his own sight failing him in his current state; this world of grayscale was mightily disorienting, and it was hard to focus on anything other than the light of the moon—he could still see it hanging there, always in the corner of his vision no matter where he looked, luminant and loyal. When he let go of his thoughts, all else but the moon faded away, and it increasingly felt like he was standing at the bottom of a dark tunnel, with only the milky sphere shining upon him from the other end.
It was warm, comforting. A small part of him wanted to lose himself in that feeling, remembering the wrongness that had infected him upon coming into contact with the chaos in the weeds.
But a greater part of him knew he couldn’t close his eyes and cover his ears and detach himself from what was going on around him. As tempting as the moon’s gentle solace was, he couldn’t countenance the idea of being unaware while some monster assaulted the town. So he fought to remain lucid, to keep watch and understand. One day, he’d be fighting these monsters himself. Valerie’s lectures couldn’t substitute for an encounter with the real thing.
The moonlight pendant was the only thing affording him that kind of courage. Without it, he definitely wouldn’t have been able to keep his nerve when he finally caught sight of the demon for himself.
~~~~~
“The corruption of a demon and a beast are incomparable. Beasts wield chaos as a blunt tool, blindly throwing whatever they have at you without any kind of strategy or finesse. We even rank them by how much corruption they can cause, though it takes some skill and experience to measure the chaos effect of a beast.” Valerie narrowed her eyes, glaring at something far away. “Demons cannot be classified. Their contamination is more insidious, more malicious, and more targeted. A beast will just scream at you in the hopes it will contaminate you with infernal mana, but it will just as happily rip you apart physically. Demons won’t be content with just mauling your body.”
Lucas swallowed, shooting a glance at Elwyn and his kids up ahead. He spoke quietly, “Can you tell the difference between a demon and a beast by sight?”
“They look nothing alike. A beast’s form is corrupted, but a demon’s form is corrupting,” Valerie said grimly. “Believe me, you’ll know a demon when you see it. Namely, because you won’t understand what you’re seeing at all.”
~~~~~
At first, it was like a mirage on the horizon, rippling between lengths of shadow. For a moment he thought it a mere illusion brought on by the moonlight pendant, but as the anomaly became larger he realised other people were reacting to it, crying out warnings.
And then it crossed the distance between the far fields and the town’s palisades in the blink of an eye. Another cry went up, people screaming in fear and pain. Below on the outer wall, Deryk was shouting commands to those around him, but the Skycloak’s voice sounded muffled and far away, like Lucas was underwater and there was wet cotton wedged in his ears.
The demon was a living distortion, warping everything it touched. It had no true form of its own. Even reality itself couldn’t comprehend this being of absolute mayhem. To his small, mortal mind, it looked like a translucent blob the size of a building rippling along and through anything in its path, leaving disorder in its wake.
In truth, he wasn’t even seeing the demon itself, just the effect it had on the world, the corruption.
The demon moved through the outer palisade walls like they weren’t even there, and behind it they started to distort, the pointed wooden stakes twisting and bending around themselves until in mere seconds they appeared like a great hand had snatched up a handful of trees and squeezed them together. Some rotted, some burned, some spawned smaller palisades in fractal patterns, and some turned into different types of wood entirely.
The defenders of Taunton seemed to take that as their cue to attack. Dozens of arrows, spells, and other projectiles flew for the demon.
And they did nothing. Worse than nothing, in fact.
~~~~~
“Perhaps the biggest problems with demons,” Valerie said, “is just how few techniques actually work on them, and how inconsistent the effectiveness of our few known techniques are. The trouble is, the vast majority of magic has a chaos factor; in a contest of chaos, demons are going to come out on top.”
“Like making a plant do something it’s not meant to,” Lucas realised after a moment, eyes widening. “Making a pine tree grow apples, for example, would be against the natural order, and that would create chaos?”
“Somewhat,” Valerie said, tilting one hand side to side. “In a way, one could argue that all magic is chaotic. Even if you’re simply feeding mana to something to make it more of what it’s meant to be, it’s still unnatural.”
“So what kinds of magic actually can affect demons then?”
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“As I said: it’s inconsistent.” She paused, drumming her fingers on her breastplate over her heart. “A slash of my sword will part one demon’s form like paper, while another will barely feel the blow.“
“But generally?”
“There is no generally when dealing with demons.”
Lucas gave her a flat look.
“Chaos is the most important factor,” Valerie said. “The less chaotic your attack, the more effective it is. They’re not like beasts. Their physical form isn’t so tangible. Even if your attack deals no damage, you can still beat a beast back through sheer physical force. If you’re reckless, your attack too chaotic, a demon will corrupt the effects of your attack and turn it against you.”
~~~~~
Arrows warped the moment they entered the demon’s body as if they’d passed into a funhouse mirror. Their trajectories went from straight and true to zig-zagging all over the place, and those that held magical effects were especially distorted; an ice arrow twisted up like a wrung towel, disgorging worm-like figures of frost; a dark arrow grew to thrice its original length and started to spiral in on itself; a crossbow bolt disintegrated into a hundred smaller crossbow bolts, and each of them started attacking each other.
Every single arrow went hurtling back towards its shooter, forcing the Bows to dodge away.
The demon didn’t even let the pure magic attacks reach it. A bolt of soundless lightning veered off at the last moment, crashing into the side of a house and blowing it apart in a spray of debris. A beam of dazzling light refracted around the demon’s form and scored a smoking line through the building behind it. A wall of dirt slammed up in its path, but the demon rippled straight through the obstruction; the dirt crumbled and collapsed in its wake.
A myriad of fey winds picked up, the air itself disturbed by the demon’s passing; they moved in a thousand directions at once, tiny hurricanes curling about without any kind of pattern. Lucas was vaguely aware of a familiar woman on the outer wall of the keep below trying to fight back against the miniature maelstroms, only for them to converge on her like a school of piranha. She went flying from the wall with a scream, plunging through a thatched roof.
It hadn’t even slowed down. It moved forward slowly, ponderously, as inevitable as the tide. An oscillating, high-pitched sound echoed across the town. Lucas didn’t recognise the noise at first, and his heart dropped when he did.
Laughter. The demon was laughing. Mocking them.
It had already shown it could cross great distances in an instant; it didn’t need to roll forward at this almost leisurely pace. Taking its time.
It was enjoying their fear.
~~~~~
“Another difference is one that will immediately become obvious within moments of encountering a demon: they aren’t mindless monsters like beasts. They have a base cunning to them, and they can strategise.”
Lucas winced. “Beasts being so single-minded was probably what saved us, back on the hill. Can’t imagine those things with actual brains.”
“Indeed,” Valerie said. “But take heart: while demons may be intelligent, they’re no geniuses or masters. There’s no… ruthlessness to them. No pragmatism. They’re sadists. You can almost always count on a demon to revel in causing fear and pain and misery, and you can exploit that, if you’re smart about it.”
“You know,” Lucas said, “that doesn’t actually make me feel better.”
~~~~~
To the west, in the opposite direction from the demon, a great boom thundered, and a gout of flame flared up. A handful of small figures pranced around inside the flames, bleating with panic. The firesheep. Fear clamped icy fingers around Lucas’ heart, but the moon reached in and pried them off one by one. Calm settled over him like a warm blanket, and he turned back towards the demon.
In the town, hay and wood and any other organic materials seemed to melt together; the demon flowed through the world, and it dragged the things it corrupted in its wake, like a living avalanche of anarchy. Shapes started to appear in the disordered mess, twisted figures forming the vague approximation of monstrous bodies, silhouetted in the waning light.
They all started moving on their own, and they screamed.
Beasts, Lucas realised with muted, distant horror that the moon graciously swallowed before he could descend into a panic. It’s creating beasts.
The pendant saved him, there. He didn’t think he would’ve been able to get a handle on his mana in his disordered state, but the moon had control of his system, pulling his soul into its tender hold. He felt cold, like he’d been out all night. A shiver thrummed through his body.
That was surely a far better feeling than the others who’d been foolish enough to look upon the demon without an iron grip over their own soul—or, indeed, without a magical pendant to immunise them from the demon’s corrupting presence.
All of a sudden, Lucas was surrounded by screams and shouts, people thrashing, clutching their heads, clawing at themselves, running madly all over the place. Most of the warriors had managed to maintain their grip on their sanity, but there were still a few who’d lost control, and the handful of civilians down in the courtyard who hadn’t had time to get somewhere safe were going ballistic. Many of the defenders were suddenly distracted trying to subdue their frenzied comrades and charges, and Lucas’ head was on a constant swivel, trying to follow a dozen different conflicts at once.
Throughout all the carnage, Valerie was still as a statue, barely seeming to breathe, gripping Lucas’ upper arm as she glared at the demon below. When he looked at her, the moon seemed to merge with her face, turning her ghostly pale. The effect only seemed to accentuate the gauntness of her cheeks, the hollowness in her eyes, the wrongness of her corrupted mien. Her expression wasn’t one of loathing or disgust or contempt or any other hateful emotion a measly human word could encapsulate. It was all of them and more, a dark thing within her that was desperate to get out and destroy the abomination approaching them.
She held her sword out before her in her other hand, radiant with moonlight—though it paled before the majesty of the real thing, he couldn’t help admiring it. Moonlight, he realised, was the embodiment of order in the world; it could be blocked, distorted, and manipulated in a myriad of ways from the ground, but no creature on Aerth could hope to affect it at its source. The moon was eternal. Unchanging. It had lit the night for millions of years and it would continue to do so far millions more, regardless of what happened down here in the mortal world. Among all the orderly things anathema to demons, the light of the moon could certainly be counted as one of the strongest.
And yet, Valerie wasn’t attacking. He could feel her urge to eliminate the abomination, but she hesitated. Why? She was whispering under her breath rapidly, too quiet and quick for him to make out any words even as he strained to listen. There were tears in her eyes, threatening to spill over.
Before Lucas could formulate a theory or even just ask, the demon reached the walls, and everything got worse.
~~~~~
“Despite how little we know about demons, there are protocols in place for how we combat them,” Valerie said. “On the frontlines, we move in squads of five parties of five. We’ve found that greater numbers of well-ordered warriors is effective in counteracting a demon’s corruption—it’s imperative that all warriors be assured in their identity, their soul solidified and steady.”
Lucas wondered how steady Valerie’s soul was, considering some of what he’d seen. He didn’t dare voice that thought. “And the strategy?” he asked instead.
“The strongest warriors engage the demon directly, utilising techniques with minimal chaos factor. Others act as support, working to ensure the combatants can stay strong against the demon’s corruption; just as you can enforce your will to steady your own mana, there are people who are particularly skilled at helping others steady their mana.” Valerie turned from the horizon for the first time in this conversation, her pale eyes piercing into Lucas, filled with resolve. “Every battle against a demon is a drawn out, arduous process, and often the demon will flee if it realises it’s in danger of defeat. But they can be defeated. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Dealt the final blow with my own hand. The trick is to keep it distracted, baiting it so it can’t focus its attention on one target for too long, and whittle down its strength.”
“What do you do if you don’t have a squad of Skycloaks?” Lucas asked.
“You run,” Valerie said simply.
“And if you can’t run?”
Valerie thought about that for a moment. “You pray it loses interest in you.”
“Is that something that happens often?”
Valerie looked away.