Demonology

I was watering the flowers on the garden, just one of my many duties in the monastery, when Sage Hanor arrived to check on me.

“Do you feel any progress today, Bastion?” said Sage Hanor.

“I do not feel any different,” I answered.

“You are not supposed to. Balance is a subtle thing. When you have reached it, it will be as though you have always had it.”

“I see.”

“I believe you may be ready for the next test.”

“I disagree.”

“Oh? Do you not feel ready?”

“I sometimes feel I am making progress, other times I am not so sure. Right now, I am not.”

Sybille and Leona walked out from the hall and towards the cliff's side.

“Something going on?” said Leona.

“Bastion…” muttered Sybille.

“I do not believe myself ready for the next step,” I told Sage Hanor.

“Good,” he replied. “Overconfidence tips the scales. But let it be known, young one, that I see difference in you. Difference enough for us to try the Closing of the Path.”

The final test.

“This Closing…” I said. “What does it involve?”

“I have not told you of this before in detail,” said Sage Hanor. “But this monastery is not only for the housing of the Divine Scion. It was built with a purpose. It was to contain what the townsfolk believe to be a simple mana calamity… to contain an overflow of monsters. Well, arguably, it is not far off.”

“Not far off, you say?”

“It is not quite the same as monsters, what this place is containing,” continued the Sage. “It is an incursion of demons.”

“Demons…” I said. “They are not the same as monsters, are they?”

Sybille hummed as she collected her thoughts.

“Simply put, they are a whole other thing,” she said. “So, Bastion, you know how monsters are basically bad accumulations of mana, right? They are not really sentient, and are more like crazy plants that can move and kill.”

“Yes.”

“Well, demons are from… somewhere else,” she continued. “They are not from Mene, nor from Gaia.”

“So, they’re from hell?”

“Hmm… not exactly hell, if you mean the afterlife. There are a lot of demons in hell, but that is not where they are from. They are more like entities that live in the space between worlds.”

“Ah. Outer space, then.”

Sybille tilted her head.

“The what?” she said.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “So simply put, they are more like violent aliens. They are organic, and not magical. Is that about right?”

“Yeah, that’s right!” said Sybille. “They can use magic, but that goes for humans too, so yeah.”

“And they’re intelligent.”

“Sometimes,” said Sybille. “They have something like varying levels of intelligence among them, just like animals and people. Some are really just driven by instinct, but others are kind of capable of reasoning. Not that I’d recommend trying to reason with one.”

“Why not?”

Sage Hanor coughed into his fist.

“They have a powerful compulsion to kill non-demons,” he said. “There were attempts in the past to communicate with them, but the only thing that came out of it was betrayal. Simply put, we are hares, and they are wolves. Perhaps, by some miracle, we could achieve some level of understanding with an individual demon, but at the end of the day, that is a one-in-a-million chance. We cannot trust the demon. The only thing we can do is fend them off, and keep our existences separate.”

I looked towards the central building of the monastery. There was a certain basement there, where even though the architecture was clearly designed for that basement to be a focal point, even I was not allowed entrance.

“There was a demon invasion in this world before, wasn’t there?” I said.

“Invasion is one way to put it,” said Sage Hanor. “The demons were here in this world long before humans had evolved from the ancient apes of this world. For hundreds of thousands of years, demons terrorized the ancestors of men. Eventually, humans evolved, as did the other peoples like elves, dwarves, and beastkin. They existed for millennia under the enslavement and tyranny of the demons. Some made themselves some nomadic tribes to try and elude them, but could never make a civilization of their own. When Iona the Goddess arrived to this world, she and the humans, as well as the other sentient people of this world, combined efforts to drive the demons out from Mene, and make themselves a home.”

“That was the war where the Demon Lords were defeated, correct?”

“Yes,” said Sage Hanor. “The Goddess and her legions defeated the Demon Lords, but at a cost. Her life. She was gravely wounded from the war, and to stop the humans from killing each other in the ensuing power struggle, she sacrificed her life, and fell to a deep slumber in the moon. From her droplets of blood, the Divine Scions were created, and now act with what power they have to protect this world.”

“You said defeated,” I said. “Are the Demon Lords not dead?”

“They are not. Like the Goddess, they are in deep slumber. Should any of them awaken… well, that would spell some big trouble for this world.”

“Why did the Goddess not just kill them?”

“It is particularly difficult to kill gods,” said Sage Hanor. “Demon Lords do have divine essence in them. Should they die, they would simply dissipate, and one day reincarnate someplace unknown to wreck havoc once more. It is more effective to simply seal them.”

“I see. So that is why the Goddess did it that way.”

“Yes. Now, there is a reason I am telling you all of this…”

It was going to be for some kind of test, I assumed.

“And what might that be?” I asked.

“This place, you see, is a seal,” said Sage Hanor. “This monastery contains an artifact known as the Void Gate. It is a portal that connects to a demonic realm. It was once used by the Demon Lord of Darkness to bridge his army into this world, but was sealed by the Goddess in ages past. Unfortunately, the seal has since weakened, and needs routine maintenance so that it does not allow demons to come into this world again.”

“Why not just destroy it?”

“If it could be destroyed, we would have done it a long time ago. Unfortunately, you cannot destroy an entrance path, can you now? If you go to your home and break down the door, sure, you broke the door, but you still have a hole leading into your home. What is worse, you now have no control of who goes in or out. It is the same principle. The Void Gate should not be destroyed because if it is, then demons would come flooding out until it was sealed again. The power to close the tear in reality that is the portal s just not something that we have. Very few people have even the faintest grasp of demonic magic, and those that do, tend to be violently insane and more prone to join the demon’s side than to restrain them.”

“What about the Church? Do they not handle demons?”

“Ghosts, vampires, ghouls… yes,” said the Sage. “Demons? They will fight them, but they do not understand them. There have been some attempts to study them, but eventually those scholars, no matter how devout, always ended up becoming cultists for the demons.”

“Why would someone willingly worship something that wants to kill them?”

“I don’t know,” said Sage Hanor. “If I did, I fear that I may just be among those cultists, myself.”

“Ah, I see.”

Who knows? Maybe the cultists are unto something, after all.

“Now, the maintenance of the Void Gate is a simple, but dangerous thing,” said Sage Hanor. “It requires not only the strength of the body, but also strength of will. It requires one to be able to withstand horrors out from this world, and come out unscathed.”

“And what would that be?”

“It requires one to cross the Void Gate, and enter the demon realm itself.”