The Daemon, pt. 2: Daemonology

Their chest began to quiver. The daemon was entering their heart.

Previously: An adversary named Alexei keeps Astra & her old companion, Crowley, trapped in an endless nightmare. That nightmare is presided over by a daemon – an autonomous mental agent programmed to target Astra’s inner child.

○ Opening Era: Winter, 2026, the Dreamworld

“Astra“ was the name of two beings in the same body: a woman and a girl. Now the girl was finally in control. 

Astra! the woman thought toward her inner child. I’ll fight the daemon. Go back to the room.

She meant the meditation room, where the girl’s parents always forced her to go. These days, the room was only imaginary. It was a place inside of Astra, the place where Astra-the-woman kept Astra-the-girl locked up.

The girl hated the meditation room. She hated meditation. She stamped their foot down on the workshop floor. The girl would do what she wanted now. And she didn’t want to fight the scary angel with mommy’s face. She wanted to hide from it. 

Astra, thought the Astra-the-woman more calmly this time. Let me protect you. It’s my job.

“Leave me alone!” The girl yelled through the lips of their shared body. “You’re scary too!”

The girl curled their body even more tightly inward.

An earthquake rippled through Astra’s abdomen up to their chest. The daemon was now working its way up their nervous system to the brain. It surfaced old memories. These memories dawned across the horizons of their mind: 

The girl’s parents crouched before her, lifting the lid of the box with the three-pronged vajra. 

Her father’s eyes flicking open as the girl’s meditation posture wilted – and she knew his stick would come next. 

Her mother’s last breath.

“No!” The wail was brittle; high in their throat. “Make it go away!”

You have to let me help you, thought the woman.

“I said leave me alone!”

Meanwhile, their chest began to quiver. The daemon was entering their heart.

Had the woman been in charge of her own lungs, she would have let out a resigned sigh. What she was about to do next was long overdue. Then let me teach you, she thought to the girl. 

“No!”

If you don’t let me teach you, the bad memories won’t go away.

The girl crossed their arms. 

I promise it won’t be like mom and dad’s lessons. I’ll be nice and you’ll learn fast. But you need to let me show you how to make the scary angel leave our body.

Crowley, slumped across from them, began to stir. “I didn’t want to abandon you,” he mumbled to someone in his dream, “Please…believe me, dear, you have to believe me.” 

She felt Crowley’s despair as her own. Fuck. The daemon was using Crowley as an amplifier. If it got her nervous system synced with his, the positive feedback loop could trap them both in perpetual nightmare.

We need to work fast, she thought to the girl.

Though the halogen bulbs around the workshop still shined, the room was starting to dim. The daemon was in their heart. 

The girl shrieked and grabbed their chest. “Show me what to do!”

But maybe it was no use. Maybe they deserved to be stuck in nightmare for what they had done to the world. Maybe–– no, that was the daemon speaking. 

OK, first, ignore that voice, thought the woman. It might sound like it’s our voice, but it’s not. It’s that bad thing that took the shape of an angel. It’s called a daemon and we have to get it out of us.

“How?” the girl wailed, kneading their heart as if to rub out a stain.

One step at a time. Next: get as far away from Crowley as you can. With each suggestion to her younger self, the woman attached a justification – nonverbal know-how borne from her adult experience. [Crowley’s nervous system is providing the daemon with more computational power. We are linked to his body through electromagnetic fields. If we move away from Crowley, the electromagnetic field grows weaker.]

Thanks to her upbringing, the girl had basic familiarity with most of these concepts. Still, the woman sent her webs of new associations to fill in the gaps.

“I don’t want to stand up, I want to stay like this.”

Fine. You can stay crouched over, just crawl to the door.

“OK.” The girl went to the floor on all fours and dragged their body toward the door.

Now open the door and crawl out.

The girl reached up for the knob. As they touched it, they both yelped in fear. Only Crowley was allowed to answer the door. Astra was supposed to stay in her chair; trying to leave would have bad consequences.

Murky memories arose: A man shocking them with a taser every time they touched the door.

Fucking Alexei. 

“Who?”

Former colleague. And…ex-boyfriend. He must have operant-conditioned us under hypnosis. 

“Operant condition…?”

No time to work on that now, just get to a corner of the workshop.

The girl crawled under machinery and workbenches across the dusty floor. 

Something within their chest trembled and then there was a shadow in the middle of the room. It rose out of Crowley. It began to plod toward them as if it were under great effort.

“What is that?” the girl whimpered.

The form was human-shaped but vague, like an out-of-focus video. As it lumbered their way, it borrowed features from the workshop for its body – giant plyers for legs, a 3D printer for its torso, a circular saw for one hand and a welding gun for the other, an oscilloscope head. 

It’s just the daemon taking another form. It’s trying to scare you. But remember, it’s only a illusion.

The hallucinatory tools of the thing’s body came to life with deafening sound. Sparks flew.

The girl ducked and covered their ears.

Don’t bother; the sound is in your head. Now, we’re going to put up wards. They’ll lessen the daemon’s impact on us. [Wards: a shorthand term for referring to mental protections. While the best wards are constructed through therapeutic introspection, imaginal wards are faster. Imaginal methods harness the mind’s capacity to compress its own complex dynamics into more user-friendly metaphorical images. These––] Quick, look away.

The daemon’s oscilloscope head had lit up. On the screen, an image was resolving that the girl was not ready to see. The girl distracted herself by staring at a shelf of circuit boards.

The woman continued unfurling her knowledge: [Metaphorical images map in convoluted ways onto actuators that control the brain and body. By interacting with such images, one can intervene upon perceptions, beliefs, and actions – for instance, to shut down an undesired information process like a daemon.] 

The girl remembered the statue of a goddess that she used to keep on her nightstand. Her mom said it would chase away the nightmares. Maybe that was a ward? “What about Kali?” she asked.

Only as as a last resort.

“So what do I do?”

Remember Blanky? Use that as an imaginal ward. It can protect you here.

The daemon now “stood” only a few feet away.

The girl imagined herself wrapped in the imagination of Blanky, the way she had wrapped herself when mom got too crazy. This imaginary Blanky was woven with white light and this made it so that no bad stuff could touch her, no daemon, no anything.

Now look. It can’t hurt you anymore.

The daemon’s oscilliscope head had resolved into a picture of her mother. Murderer, it thought to the girl. I wish you’d never been born.

But she knew Blanky was protecting her.

“You’re not my mommy!” she said to the thing. “You’re just an illusion!”

Good. Now let’s prepare a banishing spell. [Spells: a shorthand term for actions that intervene upon a mental process – either one’s own or others’. Spells might take advantage of imagery, belief induction, hypnosis, tempo, body language, and more. A ‘banishing spell’ can terminate an undesired semi-autonomous mental program, such as a daemon or tulpa.]

“I’m gonna banish y––” The girl’s voice got caught in her throat. The daemon had entered it. Their imaginary Blanky was fading. 

Hm. The woman had missed something. The girl’s ward was good; it shouldn’t have broken. She scanned their body for signs of a second undetected invader. Nothing.

The daemon crouched down and drew its oscilliscope-face close. The screen shifted to an image of a yellow-eyed devil. It was laughing at them.

Their own mouth spoke: “I’m evil. I deserve to be punished.”

Don’t listen to that, thought the woman. You didn’t say that, the daemon did. It possessed our lips.

But maybe it’s right, thought the girl, having lost control of their mouth.

Shut up for a moment. Something is wrong. I need to concentrate. The woman focused all her will on the distant form of Crowley. She imagined what it would be like to be him, slumped there, the texture of the maroon leather on the skin of his arms. For a moment, Crowley’s eyes flicked open. For a moment, she stared out from Crowley’s eyes and caught a glimpse of herself from across the room.

From this perspective, there was no shambling mass of electronics crouching near her. There was only a 31-year-old woman, huddled against shelves like a scared girl. She was covered in needles.

The woman lost the connection to Crowley’s eyes. She returned to the perspective of their own eyes, which saw…but somehow didn’t notice…the needles across her body. Rationally, she knew they were there, but she could not hold her attention on them.

Alexei, the clever bastard, had installed inattentional blindness into her mind so she wouldn’t focus on the needles. She tried to recall what she’d seen from Crowley’s perspective: they had wires coming out of them, leading down to something else that she could feel, but not attend to in her pocket. It must be an e-stim device. It would be programmed to stimulate her muscles in a conditioned pattern. And that pattern cohered the daemon.

Shit.

They felt a sensation like spider legs crawling into their head. 

The daemon was their brain.

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Next release: Two forces war within the dream of a vast collective mind.