Devil

Devils — or demons; in the Vale the words mean the same thing — are the blood of the underworld walking in mortal shape. Most stand human enough in outline, but none pass unmarked: skin in some shade of red or blue, dull crimson to deep violet, and always at least one hellmark to give them away — a crown of horns, a barbed tail, cloven hooves, a forked tongue, teeth made for tearing, a pair of wings too withered to lift them. The marks keep no rank. A prince of the underworld and the lowest of his servants may bear the very same horns.

They name their homeland the Seven Cities of Hell, though “cities” flatters it. They are seven houses — rival dynasties of the damned, each ruled by a prince who claims the others’ seats and holds none but his own. Their courts turn on old and cruel pleasures: flattery and torment, beautiful things and broken ones, hungers a mortal would rather not have named. But what every house wants, beneath all the rest, is souls — and the endless quarrel between the houses is, at its heart, a contest over who will gather the most.

A devil reaches the living through the bargain. Where a mortal can be tempted to call one up — for power, for knowledge, for a death turned aside — a house will send a servant to seal the pact and stand surety for it, and the price, always, is the soul, collected at a time of the devil’s choosing. It is patient, hungry work, and the houses have been at it a long while.

Not every summoning ends as the summoner hoped. When the rite breaks before the pact is sealed, the devil it called is left here, cut off from its house and its hell with no way home. Some claw after a way back; many do not. Generations on, their descendants are simply part of the Vale — born here, raised here, carrying the old marks and little of the old purpose, making lives as merchants and soldiers and neighbours among peoples who have mostly chosen to forget what they are. Mostly.

And not all the blood of Hell wears a courtly face. For every devil who keeps a name and a trade, there are things in the deep places that kept only the hunger — feral, half-shaped, going by other names if they are named at all. The Vale calls those demons too, and is not wrong to.