dæmon worlds

“Why”

“All snakes are liars”

Long shadows

hmmm this his dark materials fandmade animated trailer is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen this year… wow

true souls... with animals 🐾

Bathrooms usually have a bed and/or a perch to give daemons a comfortable place to rest while their human bathes or showers other than the bath mat. Some daemons are happy to join their human in the bath/shower, but many don’t like getting wet or have forms that would make it difficult / possibly dangerous (e.g. a lot of rodents), and even for those that like water soaked fur can take a long time to fully dry so bathing isn’t usually an everyday thing.

Daemons don’t normally wear clothing, but there are times when it’s necessary or at least much more comfortable - for the same reasons animals sometimes wear clothing in our world. Not all fur and feathers are created equal, and a fennec fox, or a chihuahua, or a serval, or a parrot wouldn’t have a good time in cold climates. Children’s daemons can just turn into arctic animals and/or crawl into their human’s clothing (as shown in The Golden Compass), but daemons with warm-weather settled forms are out of luck, and often wear sweaters, hoodies, and/or earwarmers. Superheated pavement in warm climates, and road salt in cold ones, can also hurt a daemon’s feet just like a real animal’s, so many wear protective paw booties.

Human clothing made to accommodate daemons is also common. The most obvious is arm and shoulder pads which allow large birds - especially birds of prey - to land and ride on their humans’ arms or shoulders without injuring them. People don’t really wear falconry gauntlets because it’s not like they’re just putting them on for a hunting or training session with a bird, it’s daily life including times when you need to use both your hands for something else. Clothing may also have special pockets for very small daemons to ride in, sometimes incorporating clear plastic windows. Daemons that are too big for a pocket but small enough that walking around in crowded places is awkward - e.g. rats, ferrets, rabbits - most commonly ride on their humans’ shoulders, but sometimes being carried in a sling is easier, more comfortable, and warmer.

It is very common for tailors to have a primate daemon as this allows the human tailor to measure the human while the primate measures the daemon. There are also daemon weight scales in all tailors to ensure that specialised pockets etc are made secure and strong enough without a one-size-fits-all approach that could lead to unnecessary bulk, while also embedding it in the clothes in such a way that it does not strain the rest of the fabric in an unseemly way.

It is just a universal fact of architecture that all buildings are designed with perches of some kind dotted around a little over head height, particularly in seating and dining rooms. Styles have varied throughout the years, from stylised carved poles of stone or wood either coming straight out of the walls, to coming out a little and then running parallel for a more integrated look, to shelves or wide picture rails, and many more. You can use the style of perches to guess the age of a building.

Like, that story that sailor tells Lyra about the guy whose daemon settled as a dolphin and was never able to go ashore at all, and how he just more or less goes “Well if your daemon settles in a form you don’t like that sucks, but that’s life deal with it?” Lyra and Pan didn’t pay it that much mind because (a) they’re pretty darn resilient kids, and (b) they had a lot more immediate things occupying their minds.

But seriously… imagining pre-teen me, growing up in a world with daemons, Jesus Christ hearing shit like that would have traumatized me, and any living manifestation of my fucking soul would have been traumatized by that too, and I doubt I’d have been anywhere near the only one.

Because… I mean I’m still like this now but I’ve gotten better about it as an adult: when I was a kid I was not someone who just accepted that things were the way they were, I was someone who hyperfixated and worried. And not just about big stuff like climate change and politics and smaller but still out of my control shit like health issues and bad things happening to my family. I was scared of growing up, and not just in the sense of not wanting to have adult responsibilities and all that.

I remember, not so much when I was actually going through puberty (by then I was just depressed), but I remember in the years before, when I was being told that I would be changing soon, and of course not in a way that acknowledged that asexuality wasn’t just something you grew out of, and being exposed to the American media landscape of, like, old “teen” movies and other that portrayed puberty and adult sexuality in a really twisted, hypersexualized way that I don’t think was even accurate for the vast majority of allosexual people, I was afraid and repulsed. And not even in a Mrs. Coulter way: I was afraid on a deep, existential level that growing up would destroy the person who I was and I would become someone I didn’t like, someone I wasn’t comfortable with.

And growing up with a daemon would have made that so much worse, because then it wouldn’t have just been a fear of losing my identity and being unhappy with who I was, it would have been a fear of being unhappy with the one being I wasn’t unhappy with half the time, the one being who actually truly understood me and that I could always trust, and it’s not that humans and their daemons can’t argue or fight or be angry at each other - and God knows we probably would - but I think we’d have been the pair who had screaming matches and threaten each other’s lives knowing damn well what that meant, but could never stay angry at each other because the idea of losing that bond, of having it damaged, would be too terrifying.

So the idea of my daemon settling as a form that damaged that bond, that pushed us apart or limited us, would be such a huge source of anxiety. And that fear of becoming something I didn’t like, of not knowing and not being able to choose and not being able to control my self, is such a deep-seated part of me that I don’t believe for a second that my daemon wouldn’t be the same way.

We wouldn’t be like Jerry the sailor and Belisaria, who loved being a porpoise while her human worried about her settling that way, or like Lyra and Pantalaimon who kind of brushed it off and didn’t think about it. A being that was my soul given form would have to be just as much of a bag of nerves and insecurities as I was, and might never take a form like that again after hearing the dolphin story because we have the kind of personality that couldn’t not think about all the implications of being settled in a form, and what that meant losing. We’d be the sort to read an article or see a documentary about a daemon settling as a form that completely limited their lives, and the fear of changing and not being able to change back, of getting stuck like that, would always be at the back of both our minds. Because it doesn’t seem like daemons truly understand it either, and that would be scary.

And as we got older it would just get worse, because we’d be close and it could happen at any moment so taking a form she wouldn’t be okay with spending the rest of her life as, and that I wouldn’t be okay with her spending the rest of her life as, would be so risky. We’d be up until 2 AM making charts on spiral notebook paper and reading about animals on Wikipedia to try and feel some kind of control over it, and she’d just keep taking fewer and fewer forms.

Nothing aquatic because water is fun but being bound to it is obviously bad. No invertebrates because they’re so cool and different but they can’t feel things in quite the same way. No cold-blooded animals because what if she could never change into something with fur or feathers on a cold day again? Nothing too small that would have to be carried all the time in public, but definitely nothing too big to be carried at all because the fear of someone touching her by accident, kicking her or stepping on her or running into her in a crowd or being trapped and forced away from each other by a wall of oblivious human flesh. How could a wolf or a mountain lion daemon ever feel safe in a city? But nothing too small to defend itself from large daemons because other people are dangerous and anyone could be a threat. But no large birds that need to perch and their humans have to wear arm bracers or shoulder pads so they don’t hurt them and can’t just sit on their laps, and then no birds at all because being able to fly makes having to stay close together feel limiting since the tops of buildings are still out of reach and what’s the point of flying if you can’t go high?

And because of that fear of settling in the wrong form, the number of forms that were okay, that were safe to take, would just keep getting smaller and smaller, until one day we’d notice that she hadn’t changed for weeks, and we’d just be like…

Oh.

It’s already happened.

And then it’d probably be such a fucking relief just knowing it was okay and it couldn’t go wrong anymore. Occasional nightmares about just turning into an animal neither of us even liked completely against her will that wouldn’t stop until like halfway through college aside.