The Fire and The Storm - The Nexus of Kellaran #2

Part 25

"Eat a god?" Val exclaimed. "Aren't gods completely immortal?”

"A god who has been eaten is not dead. If the Demon Lord is subsequently killed, the god can escape. But it is definitely the worst experience that one of us can be forced to endure.

"Also bear in mind that even gods can be killed, if they are forced into a tear in reality or a collapsed star of infinite density. There is no escaping from either of those for any thinking being, for only complete chaos can exist within them. Even the orderly nature of the energy of a mind is impossible there. And the most powerful DemonLords are capable of causing tears in reality at will, though it costs them dearly. It is also risky for them, since they are as vulnerable to the tears as any other, but they are not very reasonable.

"Still, let there be no doubt; so long as the demons exist, none of us are completely safe. They are incredibly hardy and resilient, and even the tiniest demon will eventually grow to be a terrible DemonLord if allowed to feed unchecked."

"What do we really know about them, anyway?" Fire asked. "I mean, have you ever been able to interrogate one? I know that we learned to understand a bit of their communication during the last demon war here, but I never heard that we really learned anything about where they came from and what it was like there, and how they came to be ravagers of the void."

"Ah. Well we have been able to interrogate them, but we learned little from them that way." First Mauve admitted. "The concept of co-operation to evade torture is inconceivable to them. A captured demon will fight constantly to kill or escape until it succeeds or is exhausted to the point of complete immobility, and that is all. We have learned more by various psionic techniques that glean some meager information, and by spying out their communications.

"Here is what we have learned;

"Know that in its original state, a demon is an animal with no conscious self, it has no cares, no worries, no fears, only the instinctive nature to kill and consume. They come from a world that is midway between an inner rocky world and an outer gaseous world in size and composition. It has a huge rocky core even larger than Kellaran, and the pull of weight at the surface is many times that of your world. Everything there must be immensely strong simply to move about, and they move quickly and constantly. Their world also has vast oceans of alien liquids, and a very deep and dense layer of a gas that bears no resemblance to what you call air. The pressure at the surface is extreme.

"It is a completely hellish place, with poles far colder than on either of our worlds, and an equator much hotter than ours. Still, life thrived there in incredible abundance, and all of it vicious and violent and intensely competitive. There were thousands of kinds of life-forms there that were more dangerous individually than demons, and the first ancestors of the demons only survived because they were very adaptable and bred with incredible fecundity whenever possible.

"But like all races, the lucky and capable survive to breed while the unlucky and less capable die, and over time the demons developed considerable intelligence. This intelligence did not give them distinct personalities; they are a very uniform race in their thinking, if highly variable in their physical forms. Compared to us, their thinking is still very primitive in style, despite their intelligence. They have never developed any arts or entertainments, beyond killing and torturing and consuming. They have no loyalty or feeling of family ties, but they have a brutal practicality that allows their society to function in its basic way. The weak obey the strong, or they are punished or consumed.

"After hundreds of eons of existence with gradually increasing intelligence and a very slow domination of their world, the demons developed the ability to use a kind of magic. We have no idea how it works, but it appears to not be powered by the energy given off by stars, as the power of our mortals is. We deduce this since the demons' power appears unaffected by their distance from stars. Even in the deep void their power is undiminished.

"A few eons after they developed magic they had killed and eaten almost everything they could eat on their world, and most of them died off from starvation. They eat each other when there is no easier prey, but without other food sources, their numbers diminish quickly. When most of them were gone, the life of their world recovered somewhat, then they recovered and stripped it bare and died off again, and this became a cycle that was repeated many times over hundreds of eons. Each time the demons were reduced it was a winnowing that improved their race, as only the most tenacious and capable survived to breed.

"Eventually they attained the power to spread beyond their world, and began to ravage the void. Some wandering hordes still obey the most powerful DemonLords on their homeworld. Certainly the hordes operating in the void relatively close to their homeworld do so. Some other hordes have lost contact completely, and probably prefer it to be so.

"Their homeworld and their population there have stabilized, not because the demons learned to live within their means there, but because the other native life-forms eventually developed into a few varieties that grow so quickly and ubiquitously and tenaciously that they thrive despite the constant consumption of a population of demons that covers almost all of the ground and much of the seas.

"The five DemonLords who rule their homeworld are now very old, and very, very powerful. None of them could kill any of the others without being killed, and if one orders their horde to attack another's, those two hordes would certainly be decimated, and the other three ruling lords would slaughter the survivors and the two lords that led them, and take their territories and power. Thus they have enjoyed a bitter stalemate for a few eons.

"We do not know where their homeworld is. We have studied their travel through the void and tried to deduce their initial point of origin, but it is impossible because they have been ravaging the void for so long that many of the wandering hordes have passed back and forth through this part of the galaxy many times.

"Each horde tries to establish a hunting territory with enough life-bearing worlds that they can fly a repetitive route. They rarely stay on a world long enough to eat absolutely everything alive except that which is too small for them to see, and visit each life-bearing world every twenty to seventy million years. That is long enough for the life of most worlds to recover, building and growing anew from the tiny and few survivors the demons miss in their depredations. It is seldom long enough for new intelligent races to emerge, which keeps things easy for the demons.

"They almost never stay long enough to poison a world completely with their excrement and their breath and their very presence, until all life there is completely exterminated, including the most invisibly tiny. The life of such worlds never recovers, though it is likely that new life would develop there in one to two billion years, if the conditions for it persist.

"And that is all we know of the demons, beyond what we have learned of them directly by fighting them. It is meager intelligence, and was difficult to get.

"When we learned of what had happened here over seven million years ago, we were very concerned, and still are. It was unheard of for us that a force of demons had arrived through a Gate, and had modified a few individuals from one of your races in order to create a new race that was obedient to them and more to their liking.

"We have encountered hordes of demons with more than enough power to be very dangerous to all of Kellaran and all of us here together, but we have never seen them do what the demons here did.

"It is worth noting that less than one world in ninety-seven with intelligent life successfully resists the demons' attack.00000