Physical Description

Daemons resemble common depictions of demons, they are bipedal creatures with two arms and two legs, standing at around six feet tall on average. Their arms are powerfully built and end in dangerous, clawed talons. They have powerful, agile legs, ending in usually cloven hooves, similar to a goat.

They have powerfully built bodies, with an appearance evoking skillfully made statuary. Indeed most of their body is made of a material somewhat akin to stone, though sharing many properties of more conventional biology. Indeed daemons appear to lack many of the organs that conventional scientists would describe as "essential" to life, and at times seem to be more akin to animate golems than living creatures. Still they need to eat, and they bleed as surely as any living thing, though it be more akin to a black ichor than what most creatures possess for blood.

Their skin has a texture similar to somewhat supple stone, being rough and abrasive, in some ways akin to a shark's. Most daemons are either a brick red, or an azure blue, but daemons can be found in a relatively wide variety of colors. As daemons get older their skin gets darker and rougher, though this is a particularly slow and gradual shift. Sprouting from a daemon's rump, is a long, slender tail, typically four or five feet long, and are agile and dexterous enough to act as a fifth appendage for most daemons. The tip of these tails comes in a variety of shapes, typically something pointed like an arrow or a spade, but can essentially come in any shape.

Daemons have a 'personable' head attached to their torso by a stiff neck. Their faces, nearly always twisted in an expression of either smug superiority or utter contempt, are pointed and sharp, refined and stylized in terms of features. They have a mouth filled with shark-like teeth, which re-grow fairly quickly, again like sharks. Snaking within their dark maw is a long and flexible black tongue, covered in tiny inward facing barbs, and split at the tip like a snake's.

Daemons have two eyes, with black sclera and glowing irises, and a pupil that comes in a small variety of shapes and stylized, though most daemons have a simple vertical slit, more like a lizard than a shark. Daemons have any number of horns growing out of their head, in a variety of shapes and styles, either in the same color as their skin, or a shade of black or gray. Daemons have a head of relatively normal hair on their head, only naturally appearing in black, though it is often dyed.

Piercing the center of their torso, all daemons are born with a hole where their heart should be. The hole doesn't quite go all the way through their torso, but seems to lead to a discrete pocket of space in the daemon's torso. These hole's are usually weathered and cracked along the edges, getting more-so as daemons age, but some vain daemons take the effort to keep them relatively clean and defined. In most daemons these holes are shaped like a typical depiction of a heart, but can come in most shapes, the most common being diamonds, spades, and simple circles.

Sprouting from their back, they have a pair of powerful wings, with about a four or five foot wingspan. Most daemons have wings of a chiropteran nature, similar to those of a bat or a dragon. Others, more rarely, are born with feathery wings similar to those of a crow or raven, usually in a deep glossy black, but sometimes they come in other colors. These wings, have the uncanny ability to carry daemons through the void of space, which combined with their ability to survive without breathing functionally forever, allows them to travel through space of their own volition.

Daemons occasionally develop one form of psychic power or another, in daemon fashion they insistently refer to these powers as 'daemon magics'. The most common form of power demonstrated is a form of pyromancy, fitting for most daemons incredibly destructive impulses.

Daemons have a fairly standard sort of gender dimorphism, though it has little role in their reproductive processes. Daemons rarely reproduce, but when they do it's as violent and destructive as everything else they engage in. In those rare moments they typically seek out a suitable mate, typically their blackest and most hate/loved rival and will engage with them in a struggle for dominance. Wherever this struggle occurs, it's usually quite destructive to the local populace, so a lot of daemons try to have it wherever might cause the most grief. Afterwards the winner will leave, and the loser will lay a singular black egg, typically only performing the most perfunctory of preparations, and then leave it on its own. Such unions usually only produce a single child, though rarely twins and even triplets might be born.

Personality

Daemons are above all else, aggressive, cruel, and arrogant. They are hateful, spiteful beings only driven by their profound dislike of all that is generally considered "good" and "reasonable" in this universe, as few and far between as those things can often be. A statement often made about daemons is that they're "heartless", which isn't merely referring to their literal lack of heart, but their profound difficulty with developing or displaying genuine empathy.

Relationships with daemons are often tiresome for those sorts of reasons. They typically regard themselves as superior to whoever they're associating with. Most relationships with daemons and non-daemons are hardly relationships between equals, at least as far as the daemon is concerned. They often regard their supposed friends as more like assets and minions in whatever schemes they might be hatching to ruin someone's day, or get one up on a rival.

They approach all their projects with a sort of brutality that is rather hard for most beings to stomach. Unchecked aggression, and a profound indifference to death mark a daemon's usual thought processes when considering what to do in any particular scenario. Indeed, many daemons will often pick the harder, more tedious path, just because it's more "fun", fun in this case usually meaning violent and destructive.

They are antagonistic, predatory beings, constantly on the prowl for prey of both in terms of meals and in terms of personal amusement, like sharks. They greatly enjoy ruining things that other people enjoy, the more irreplaceable and unfixable, the better. Most daemons, of course, prefer more simple acts of destruction and murder. Some daemons, particularly in this modern age, have taken to far less primitive and obvious forms of cruelty, and have taken towards the more psychologically abusive, but at the end of the day the majority find no greater pleasure in ripping out a living creature's throat and watching them bleed out on the ground, possibly while their loved ones watch.

They are typically loners, preferring their own company over that of others, particularly other daemons, and when they do get together they quickly demonstrate why. Daemons only respect the most atavistic of power dynamics: That defined by physical dominance. A group of daemons will generally struggle against each-other in mostly physical but also psychological challenges in order to establish who is the most powerful member of the group, a process which is far from clean as daemons are, even in these scenarios, loathe to accept the authority of others.

Daemons, as mentioned, have a reputation for being both literally and metaphorically "heartless". This expresses itself most clearly in daemonkind's conception of romance. Daemons, are certainly capable of what most sentients would consider love, but the majority of daemonic romance is cast through the pitch black lens of profound hate. A traditional daemon couple appears to the observer to be more like a rather intense pair of rivals than what might be considered a conventional pair of lovers, though there is generally just as much of those traditional romantic activities between the two.

History

Nobody knows the full history of daemonkind, as the daemons are loathe to give out their secrets or personal history to others. It is known, that long before they were properly encountered and cataloged by spacefaring civilization, the daemons, capable of independent spaceflight, had long meandered from their homeworld across the cosmos.

Everywhere daemons went they spread chaos and misery to the peoples of those worlds. Sometimes it was just one daemon, causing mostly harmless mischief. Other times though it was whole packs of daemons, ripping through primitive worlds with not a care at all for the consequences of their actions, as if it was all just good fun to them. This state of affairs lasted on and on, even into the eras of spacetravel, as nobody knew where these mysterious beings actually came from.

Then one day, a ship happened to chance upon the daemon's homeworld. This ship was captained by an aftik by the name of Lilac Jones, and only by report, only happened upon Pandaemonia by sheer happenstance as it turned out to be right outside of the portal of a theretofore uncharted system, and they then promptly crashed into it. She appeared about three weeks later, stranded on a random planet covered in odd scarring, weird piercings, and unusual tattoos. She would later give a report of her harrowing experience in a book: In the Heart of the Heartless, which was released to rave reviews.

After that account, daemons were regarded as oddly popular, in spite of, or perhaps because of, their violent antisocial tendencies, and they were welcomed as another quirky aspect of universal society. Pandaemonia was even statically allowing for the unprecedented interaction between daemonkind and the rest of the cosmos.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, some rather sooner than others, a mere few years after this, Pandaemonia simply vanished from where it had been. Yet perhaps more distressingly to a lot of people, basically everyone who had regularly interacted with it, had also vanished, including Lilac Jones, who left behind a half finished manuscript of her next book: At the bottom of the Hellrock, which also proceeded to be a best-seller when it was published shortly afterwards.

Home Planet

The daemon homeworld of Pandaemonia, sometimes called "The Wandering Hell-rock" is less of a planet and more of a cluster of planetary debris held together by collossal chains, collectively about the size of a moon. Covering nearly the entirety of these planetoids is the vast concurbation also referred to as Pandaemonia, and wending and weaving throughout the rock is a vast and impenetrably complex network of tunnels and caverns full of who knows what. Pandaemonia does not exist in a single static location, as it's title implies, The Wandering Hell-rock meanders about space, sometimes even entering within the orbits of other celestial bodies for a time.

Subspecies

Gargoyle: The typical daemon, described here.

Imp: A diminutive subspecies of daemon, lesser than 'proper daemons in just about every respect. They are smaller, and weaker looking, having shorter horns duller complexions, and tiny wings. Frequently mistaken for juvenile daemons, and indeed, they often congregate around them for their strength and assurity. They are typically treated with contempt and scorn by the rest of their kind.

Imps are small and generally, rather stupid, typically following around daemons and other destructive beings and scavenging whatever scraps they can find in their wake. They are very cowardly and insecure and thus form into either very big gangs or join up with stronger creatures to make up for their own weakness. The one way they are not lesser than other forms of daemons is numbers, as their are at least ten imps for every other sort of daemon, not that this makes a difference in their treatment or behavior.

Kyubi: A rare, deceptive variety of daemon, they generally prefer subterfuge and trickery to infiltrate places they seek to ruin for their own amusement, and profit. To this end they possess a limited degree of shapeshifting ability, specifically, they're able to alter their form to appear as a "daemonic" variety of a given species, horns, wings, weird skin, the works.

Overall, in terms of physical distinction, they have a far more 'delicate' build, compared to the more muscular common daemon. Kyubi more typically develop psychics. Namely the ability to affect moods, and suppress people's instinctual fear of daemonic monsters that plan on, in the best case scenario, maiming them and stealing their stuff.

Special

Heartless: As mentioned daemons are born with a hole in the center of their chest. This hole, according to daemonic folklore, is the result of the ancient daemons literally tearing out their hearts to spit their ancient rivals. Why the ancient daemons did this, they will not say, usually due to muttered excuse of it being "stupid and sentimental".

Some daemons believe somewhere out there in space, every daemon that exists has a heart that is just waiting to be found. What happens when a daemon finds "their heart" is unclear, some simply believe it makes it easier for a daemon to experience "positive emotions", while others believe it is the key to unlocking their true power.

Trivia

• Against common expectations, daemons do in fact have a form of government and leadership. Their conception of it, of course is more of a vaguely directed series of dominance struggles between various power groups. At the top of which is the Daemon Sovereign, the strongest or simply most survivable daemon in the universe. Notably since the daemons were properly registered as a species, there have only been two new Sovereigns.

• Daemons hate angels, the exact reasons for this aren't entirely clear, but seem to be largely rooted in angels resemblance to what were the daemon's ancient enemies in their folklore. Confusingly enough, these being's name in the daemon language is also angel, which combined with the apparent similarities, lead some to speculate if the two beings aren't one and the same.

• Daemons are exceptionally proud of their wings, especially those born with feathered ones, and therefore the greatest disrespect one can pay to a daemon is to damage their wings, and the greatest sign of scorn to shear them completely. As with most things in daemon culture this is much part of their idea of romance as it is actual disrespect.

• Daemons are exactly as fire proof as they appear to be.

• Contrary to popular belief, and entirely unlike sharks, bopping a daemon on the nose is a terrible way to convince them to leave you alone. In fact it will probably just make them more angry.

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