Demons

Demons are the wild predators of the Spiritual World. They do not belong to a God, require a contract or derive their nature from membership in an infernal hierarchy. They persist because they can.

One major source of Demonic existence lies in the innumerable non-sapient magical creatures of the Material World. Most such creatures die completely in the ordinary way appropriate to their nature. A tiny fraction possess enough magical and spiritual persistence that something survives death and enters the wider Spiritual World.

That survivor is no longer merely the creature that died. It is a Demon. Across a world containing immense populations of magical beasts, predators, aberrant creatures, elemental organisms, and other supernatural life, even an exceptionally rare transition is enough to produce a continuing population of spiritual predators.

Most begin without the kind of sapience possessed by mortal peoples. They may retain instinctive echoes of the creature from which they arose: territoriality, hunting behavior, mating drives long stripped of biological purpose, fear responses, preferred environments, or patterns of aggression. Spiritual existence changes these instincts without necessarily replacing them.

What drives Demonic growth is consumption. A Demon that feeds upon souls or other spiritually potent beings becomes stronger. Most die before becoming extraordinary. The Unbound Reach is dangerous to Demons as well as to the souls they hunt, and predators compete with one another just as living creatures compete for food and territory. The few that survive across immense spans of time can become horrifyingly powerful.

This creates an important distinction between Demons and Devils. A Devil may want a soul's service, through its signature, its obligation, its usefulness. A Demon does not require any of those things. To the Demon, the soul may simply be food. Nor does this make ordinary Demons morally equivalent to calculating infernal tyrants. A non-sapient predator cannot make the same moral choices as a being that understands suffering and chooses it deliberately. It is still lethally dangerous. The wilderness does not need to hate the traveler in order to devour them.