All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.
This Week’s Inspiration: Demons
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Gods, he was tired.
How could his limbs feel like lead and still move like lightning? Tochtli’s speed surprised even him as he launched himself into the fray. His body had been hewn into a weapon by four years of endless battle. He was built for this, he was never more perfectly within his element, but all he wanted to do was to go back to his tent and try to get a few more hours of sleep.
A macuahuitl sword flashed in Tochtli’s hand, the wooden club ringed with razor shards of obsidian. It carved through the face of a Little Eater, trailing ribbons of dark, bloodless flesh as it tore free. Pain did little to deter the hunger-demon. Tochtli reversed the swing and split the demon’s head. He did so while still moving, not waiting to watch it fall.
Dozens of corpses already decorated the battlefield. Surrounded by jungle and swamp, they steamed under the bright morning sun. Most were Little Eaters who, as always, supported the demons’ forces in their hundreds. Diminutive creatures but ferocious, the hunger-demons were only the size of children but wizened as ancient men with limbs like broomsticks and heads half the size of their bodies. Their mouths gaped like buckets, ringed with teeth made from obsidian shards. It was how most of the warriors refreshed the blades on their swords, by plucking them from the heads of Little Eaters. Behind them were the pain-demons, less numerous but more dangerous individually. The size and shape of men grown but warped, twisted, slower because their every movement was a torture. Quills of invisibly sharp obsidian sprouted at random from their flesh.
Most of the demon corpses had been downed by arrows and spears. It was the job of Tochtli and the warriors he led to hold back the horde while the spear throwers and bowmen, and the youngest warriors who carried nothing but slingshots and jagged stones, did their work. At sixteen, Tochtli was older by two years than most of the warriors he led. He’d stopped caring to learn their names, few lasted long enough for him to have cause to use them. As he separated two Little Eaters’ oversized heads from their shrivelled bodies, he watched another tackle one of the warriors beside him. He ran to help the boy but the Little Eater had already torn a great hunk of flesh off the boy’s shoulder with its obsidian teeth. A second Little Eater got under the boy’s armour and ripped a gaping hole in his stomach. Haemorrhaging from two wounds, the boy gawped like a fish. Tochtli’s macuahuitl sword ended both hunger-demons before they could savour their meal, and then he showed the boy a merciful end as well. He had died in battle, it still counted. His soul would ascend to Heaven instead of disintegrating into nothingness before Lord Death’s throne.
Behind the first wave came a twin-demon, towering above the Little Eaters and pain-demons. Tochtli’s face showed no emotion, because there was nothing to show. He had fought twin-demons before. He had fought endless hordes of hunger-demons and pain-demons. He had fought rage-demons and spider-demons and fish-demons and Laughing Ones and Centipede Men and Screamers and pride-demons and bird-demons and tree-demons and child-demons, and many more. A vast network of scars covered his body like markings on a tablet no living eyes could read. For four years he had fought in the Tlatoani’s endless war to carve out a little more territory from the demons that surrounded their empire on all sides. To find other cities of humans that they might connect with and defeat and subjugate. He never, in those four years, ever questioned the divine will of the Tlatoani to guide them as he did, and never gave anything less than his all to the fight. But he was still so very, very tired.
“Form up!” Tochtli yelled, and he pointed his sword at the twin-demon. “Together, together, and push forward!”
Tochtli and his warriors pressed together to form a wedge of lean, muscled, pubescent bodies. Of wooden armour and swords. It was vital they push back the twin-demon and keep it from getting too close to the bulk of the human army. Behind them were the spear throwers and bowmen, and then the generals who guided all of their movements. Grown men dressed in full warrior regalia, jaguar skins with jaws that framed their faces, brilliantly coloured peacock fans of bird-demon feathers. Their swords and other weapons were at rest beside them.
“Push! Tochtli shouted above the din.
Tochtli led from the front. He ignored several shallow cuts that were opened on his sides. His macuahuitl hewed through hunger-demons like stalks of maize. The boys with him were scared. It had been drilled into them again and again by their priests and their generals that the only way for a man’s soul to reach Heaven was through death in battle. For men, it was battle, for women it was death in childbirth, all other souls would face oblivion if they were to die from old age or accident or disease. They’d been told again and again before entering the fight, and they looked forward to the glory they had been promised. But when the battle raged upon them, fear took hold and made their stomachs loosen and their hands shake, and many felt perhaps they might prefer to dwell in the mortal realm for a day or two longer. Still, those with Tochtli performed admirably enough. And it did not matter that they died afraid, only that they died fighting.
A pain-demon lunged at Tochtli with a sudden quickness. The obsidian spikes radiating off the demon were sharper than jaguar claws but they were also thin and brittle. Tochtli sheared through the quills closest to him, shattering them, and then ran his sword across the demon’s middle. What spilled out looked like the black pulp and seeds of a rotten fruit. The pain-demon bent over the wound and Tochtli used the opportunity to lop its head from its shoulders and kill it.
The twin-demon loomed. It was almost twice the height of Tochtli himself. The tallest of tall men would have only come up to the lower curves of its ribs. The demon had the appearance of two men, warriors, lean and perfectly formed in every respect except that the two of them were fused together around the smalls of their backs and the curves of their buttocks. They wore only loincloths and what looked like grotesque masks, although Tochtli knew from experience the masks were either their actual faces or also fused to the front of their heads. Their skin resembled liquid copper. In each of their four hands they carried an enormous macuahuitl sword, same as the one Tochtli carried but far larger.
Back to back, twin-demons always looked awkward when they moved, crablike, until they got close to their opponents. Reaching another small company of warriors, they threw themselves into motion. Their movements transformed into an incredible performance of leaps and whirls as they spun and their swords fanned around them, slicing through the air. Enormous chips of obsidian lining their clubs removed chunks of heads, took limbs, and tore through slats of wooden armour and through torsos like they weren’t even there. A beautiful dance done in perfect unison, dealing death in every direction.
Tochtli and his company pushed toward the others. Little Eaters and pain-demons parted before them. One of Tochtli’s warriors, holding a spear he’d picked up from somewhere, charged the demon ahead of him.
“Watch for me, father! I am coming to you!” the boy cried.
The twin-demon spun and struck the boy backhandedly, like a man swatting an insect. Its sword split him open from neck to groin, and stove in his chest. The spear he’d found tumbled from his grasp and landed point-first in the bloody soil. Flung into the sky, spilling entrails, the boy’s body flew across the battlefield. He’d gone to his reward before his mortal remains landed heavily in a pool of swamp.
Always in motion, Tochtli swapped his sword to his off-hand and snatched the fallen spear as he ran. In one fluid movement, he hurled it ahead of him. The point of the weapon gleamed right before it punched through the side of one of the twin-demon’s throats. Spears and arrows already studded the twin-demon’s coppery sides. There was only one way to kill a twin-demon and that was to separate its two halves from one another. They couldn’t live without both halves connected.
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The well-placed spear did not kill the twin-demon but it did throw off the demon’s rhythm enough for Tochtli to get close. Keeping his sword in his left hand, he instead drew his knife with his right. For this, he needed precision. The knife’s blade was a large, horn-shaped curve of obsidian with an edge that had been chipped down until it was able to cut with the slightest of pressure. Its handle was bone bound in poorly treated leather, which he clutched in his fist.
Reaching the demon, Tochtli let his feet go out from under him and he slid beneath its fanning blades. He skidded to a point directly between the twin-demon’s two pairs of outward facing legs. A tendon ran from each of the creature’s heels and up the back of their ankles, under the calf muscle, just like in a human leg. Tochtli slashed into the cord of the closest leg’s tendon. It gave way with an audible snap. The leg went limp, immediately refusing to take the demon’s weight. He turned and sliced through another tendon on the other side. Continuing to roll, he got out from under the twin-demon before it collapsed.
Masked faces swung, searching, and the twin-demon raised both swords on the side Tochtli faced. Tochtli sheathed his knife and took hold of his macuahuitl in both hands. He batted aside the weaker of the demon’s two swings and sliced down the inside of the other arm’s wrist. More tendons gave way and the demon’s hand released, dropping its oversized sword.
Tochtli raised his macuahuitl over his head and hacked at the point where the demon’s twin halves fused together. Flesh parted beneath the obsidian shards. Blood like oil spilled from the injury, painting his arms and chest. He chopped and sliced, finding what felt like a hard knot of bone and muscle. With one final swing, he severed it and the demon’s two halves pulled apart.
Tochtli got some distance from the demon but they appeared to forget him instantly. Studded with spears and arrows, both halves gushed blood and fluids from the gaps at the bases of their spines. One reached gently for the other half with an open hand as if to remove their mask or just to touch their face. Ringing around them, other warriors cheered. Tochtli only felt a moment’s pity, and perhaps envy. Simultaneously, both halves collapsed.
Sensing movement behind him, Tochtli turned on his heels and swung his macuahuitl upward. Another pain-demon, more obsidian spines broke off and the macuahuitl met the demon in the throat, ripping its head clean off. That was Tochtli’s curse. While others threw themselves suicidally into battle, and died in droves, he couldn’t stop. No matter how exhausted he got, his guard never dropped. No matter how much his arms and legs seemed to weigh, they never slowed him down. No matter how dull his senses, he always saw and heard and felt all that he needed to in order to keep on fighting.
“Tochtli! Tochtli!”
Someone yelled for him in the temporary reprieve. Mazatl, Tochtli’s only friend and leader of his own company of boy-warriors. He was the only other warrior who’d lasted anywhere near as long as Tochtli on the open field, even though he believed as fervently as any of them that death in battle was the only path to Heaven for a warrior. Black fluids and tatters of demon flesh covered his armour and matching macuahuitl. The remains of Mazatl’s company mixed with the remnants of Tochtli’s own.
“Good to see you haven’t gone to your reward just yet, brother!” Mazatl said.
“Why should today be the day my fortunes change?” Tochtli said, and he turned to the warriors. “Together, press together!”
Generals moved the human forces up while a second wave of demons appeared at the edge of the jungle. More Little Eaters and pain-demons, and other, larger, more dangerous demons under the command of a spider-demon matriarch. Kill her and the others would scatter, leaderless. Tochtli stifled a yawn.
“It is a good day to die!” Mazatl said.
Some of the boys cheered. Others regarded the oncoming horde with open terror. The spider-demon matriarch stood head and shoulders taller than the twin-demon had been. The upper body of a human woman supported by the eight legs and abdomen of a giant spider, with huge, clawed hands and a necklace of skulls.
Tochtli felt nothing but tired. He no longer cared for a death in battle and earning his place in the afterlife. If Heaven was full of warriors, well, he’d had enough of warriors over the last four years. Warriors stank. They told the same stories over and over of home, or boasted and exaggerated to hide their fears. Warriors snored and screamed in their sleep. And while any woman could die in childbirth of course, many did, even with their first children, there was a certain pious type that made it their mission to do so. Birthing child after child, one after the other, no matter when bodies told them to stop. Perhaps oblivion might be preferable to an eternity with warriors and pious women. Truth be told, it sounded peaceful. Like the sleep he so desperately craved.
“Together now, courage!” Tochtli said, as the demon horde closed in.
“Take a few more with you on your way to your reward!” Mazatl said.
xXx
As the leader of his own company, Tochtli got a tent to himself. That night, long after the battle, he lay on his bedroll and stared at the ceiling of it as firelight danced outside. The last of the demons fled after he struck the killing blow on the spider-demon matriarch, breaking its head from its shoulders. Victory was theirs, and the celebrations seemed to go on forever. But as much as he desired sleep, and needed it, and could finally indulge in it, sleep wouldn’t come.
Cries broke out from the camp outside his tent, as he’d almost known for certain they would. Guards placed around the camp yelled warnings. Fortifications let out a loud crash, tents were torn apart, and some of the warriors screamed.
Sighing, Tochtli slid out of his bedroll and collected his macuahuitl and knife. Bare chested, he went to the entrance of the tent. The camp was in chaos as guards, warriors, and even generals sprinted through the wreckage.
A kind of demon Tochtli had never seen before rampaged through the camp. A monstrous jaguar made from slabs of solid jade that nonetheless moved like a living animal. One of its paws came down on top of a bonfire, scattering embers. Seizing a general in its mouth, the demon ripped the man messily in two. While Tochtli had never seen its type before he’d seen so many demons in the last four years that even its uniqueness failed to make an impression on him.
“Tochtli!”
Mazatl appeared at Tochtli’s side, also bare chested but wearing a wild grin. He carried his own macuahuitl in both hands. Fresh scars marked his chest and one arm, sewn up after the morning’s battle.
“We missed our chance for our final reward today, but the gods have given us another!” Mazatl said.
“Very good, brother,” Tochtli said. “We meet it together.”
As it was, Tochtli had far more opportunities to die in battle than in any other fashion but it hadn’t happened yet. He was comparatively unlikely to die from simple accident or disease. So, it seemed, his only choice was to keep fighting the Tlatoani’s endless war, and win it. Then he could go home and grow into an old man, and pass peacefully into oblivion when age took him. Only then it seemed would he finally get some sleep.
The monstrous jade jaguar turned, its stone jaws dripping blood. Its face looked more human than cat, eyes wide as if with horror of its own existence and oversized fangs forcing its mouth open. Tochtli rubbed his aching eyes and suppressed another yawn. Together, he and Mazatl launched themselves at the demon with weapons raised.
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Sean: Saying that this story was inspired by “Demons” is a bit vague I’ll admit, I have written stories inspired by specific demons from the DnD Monster Manual before, or demonic kinds of creatures. But the twin-demon and the pain-demons and the hunger-demons weren’t inspired by anything specific, although for the spider-demon matriarch I was picturing something like a Drider of course. In a general sense though, I was inspired by how Pathfinder in particular gives their demons titles like Wrath Demon, Mutilation Demon, and Pride Demon, and then there’s the likes of the Shadow Demon, Bone Devil, Chain Devil and Ice Devil.
Actually the twin-demon is another example of me plagiarising myself, which I know I’ve done before although I can’t remember specifically where, where I’ve taken the ‘design’ of a monster from something else I’ve written or wanted to write and placed it in a new context. The twin-demon came from a kind of horror-post-apocalyptic-superhero series inspired in part by Tarot, called The 666, and they were originally called The Lovers. I actually wrote two books in the series not long before 2022, they’re sitting in my big box of drafts, but I hit a roadblock with book number three. If you’re curious, the Aztec aspect was always part of The Lovers but unrelated to why I decided to write this story in an Aztec-inspired world. Once I had the overall story idea I decided to mash them in there.
In personal news, my partner and I just got a cat! We moved to a new place not long ago which meant we could finally have a pet. His name is Cain, I know it sounds like something I would name a cat but he actually came with that very edgy name and I think it suits him too much to change. He’s pretty beat up and scarred but just the sweetest boy, really affectionate and with a super loud purr.