Chapter 1: To Learn of Others

Ruth McErther

Holisine is the second largest continent of the currently known three. We Humans control the lower southeast of this continent but it is the remaining three fourths that I traveled to see those that lived there. In my exploration of the non-human races, I spent a large portion of my twenty years of study in this part of the world due in part to the large collection of various races that can be visited using our homeland as a central hub of sorts.

The first race I visited is one that we have warred with off an on for the entire recorded history of humankind. There have been times of peace but they never seem to last more than two to three hundred years as the drive for more arable land than their own pressures them to expand.

This could be to them inhabiting most of the central and southern west of Holisine, arguably the more volatile half. Due to its geographical locate, it sees frequent droughts and torrential monsoons and in some places is located far enough north that the ground is covered in permafrost year round. It is this part of the continent that the Demons make their home and it is where I spent half of my time abroad.

To set the scales right and dispel any preconceived notions that one may have of Demons, it is safe to say that they are no different from us at a base level. Most of their wars have been caused by wide spread famine and both Human and Demon records confirm this. When the waters return to feed their farms, the Demons are at peace with us and the other races at or within their boarders.

Demons are a mix of Human in anatomy and complete monstrosity in some rare cases that I will touch on here but go into detail on later. The Demons divide themselves into three categories and I have added a fourth.

The first are the Wakeen. These Demon rely on the land for their movement and are usually stronger ad more violent than their counterparts. That’s not to say they are overly violent, just that anger issues and high levels of sadism are not uncommon. This can and does manifest itself in extreme cases such that the Demons in question cannot reproduce without inflicting considerable harm to their mate. In the rarer situations this can lead to these Demons being unable to reproduce because no partner can survive the required levels of abuse to successfully conceive.

Second are the Flinian. These Demons are smaller and nimble with a vast majority of them being able to fly or having remnants of traits that would have allowed their ancestors to do so. If there is any Demon to be wary of it is the Flinian since what they lack in muscle they make up for in shrewdness. In several dealing with them I found myself penniless from a scam or directed to walk in circles while the owners ransacked my luggage stored at their inn. In both examples anything taken was returned and it seems to be the act of doing is the goal and not to keep what is taken. When I asked about this I was told that the more outlandish plans garner more social praise.

Third, and if you asked a Demon last, are the Swari. I only met a few dozen Swari and sadly my reporting on their kind is lacking. The Swari are water dwellers and arguably the most monstrous in looks. The few I met I did so at port as they guided the ships in and out of the docks acting as guides and ferries when needed. I cannot say much about them, as most that I was able to converse with preferred a pleasant conversation than an inquiry about their kind.

The final type of what I would classify as a Demon are the Deamons. There are some unique points to hit here and I spent a total of two years with the tribes that would let me stay with them. In my academic opinion, the Deamon are the pivotal ancestor that the Demons came from. Each tribe expresses different traits of the other three and are a various mix of heritages and traits. Many of the tribes grouped themselves by their traits and would interact frequently without hostility.

Like the Demons, the Deamons have a purple tint to their skin though it is several shades lighter making them more of a lavender color as opposed to the dark near black purple we see in most Demons. The two races share elongated pointy ears that are closer in shape to triangle extending towards the backs of their heads. Both have slanted eyes with pupils that can range in shape from circular to ovular silts.

Demons do not recognize Deamons as people or even as an extended part of their race and I’ll emphasize some of the differences shortly. First, we must talk about the Demon’s society at large. Like us, Demons have an agricultural society and rely heavily on the yearly monsoons for water to irrigate their crops. Each district in Demon society is controlled by a Duke and a grouping of Dukes are, in turn, controlled by an Overlord. The Overlords are controlled by the Emperor, a title that is passed down through a hereditary line.

The Demon’s religion features a pantheon of rotating gods. Each time a new Emperor takes the throne this pantheon changes either in composition or what the gods allow. Most scholars like myself think that the changes in the pantheon are the way different ideas and social actions are accepted or given a reason to be accepted and, the more gods in the pantheon that portray an idea, the more it is accepted. Because of this, you see many of the gods being okay with violence and very few of them solving problems through diplomacy.

Demons grow in number easily and reproduce quickly relying on the fact they have two children per birth to lower their high infant mortality. Male Demon are polyamorous usually having at least two sexual partners and the sharing of partners is common in tightly knit communities. The use of violence in controlling these harems is common but only enough to assure subservience and very rarely after the fact.

The Female’s place in this harem, and most of Demon society, is largely subservient unless there are three or more females present. In these cases the males answers to them, not the other way around. While violence isn’t uncommon in any races discussed in this text, Demons and Angel are the two that use it the most freely in most aspects of their societies.

This allows me to now discuss the Deamon. Most of these points I mentioned do not hold true for Deamons. They are a hunter-gatherer society that is both nomadic and highly community driven with a heavy emphasis on the family unit. This contrasts to the seemingly individual importance that Demons place on themselves with the strongest male at the top.

Where the Demons have a pantheon, the Deamons have only two gods. These goddesses do not change and are representative of our binary moons. Many of their stories focus around them and some of the older Deamon have claimed to have met them. Without evidence these claims are dubious at best. Deamons are relaxed and live simply, preferring the chaos of nature instead of the structures that we see in our modern cities.

While Demons pass their ideas and stories through text the Deamon do so orally through song and dance. They hold family and equality in higher regard due in part to everyone needing to do the work to keep the tribe functioning.

Deamons, from what I saw and was told, mate for life and have a much lower birth rate because of their longevity, a trait that seems to have been lost in their Demon cousins. Using calculations that you can find in Appendix ‘C’, I found that a tribe with twenty fertile mating pairs would on average have a child every five to ten years if the tribe was able to support it. These births are of a single child with twins being highly celebrated for both the number of children and the relation to the goddesses that seem to be in every part of their lives.

Violence from the Deamons was different when in the family setting. The parents would fight, but it was through skill of words or actions instead of physical harm. The overall victor could choose the heritages that expressed themselves in their children but I was never allowed to know the details of how this happened.

The only intertribal conflict I saw resulted in a Deamon male impregnating two females. Because the Deamons hold so much value in their pairing this was seen as undermining the trust between the male, the females, and their natural tendency to mate for life. The conflict resolved itself with the two females killing the male and forming a family unit to raise the children. From this, I can say that the Deamon have the ability to be savage in their actions but will refrain from fighting unless they have too.

This has caused them problems as much of their hunting land is being taken by the Demons in an attempt to mitigate the damage caused by the droughts that come before the rains. Small skirmished have broken out in extreme cases and I was able to witness one while in the company of the Demons.

To say that the Deamons were treated like animals would be an understatement as the stragglers were hunted like game before finally escaping. This relationship between the Demons and Deamons can only end badly with the Deamon either finally fighting back or remaining passive until they run out of room to retreat.

In either case, it will spell the end for their race since their numbers are barely above a thousand while the Demons easily number over a hundred times that.

A deeper telling of my times among the Demon and Deamon peoples can be found in my book Journey to the Demon’s Den and more information about the the Demon people in general can be found in this book, The General Compendium of Angels and Demons.