Quasit

A quasit is a demon, and it does its work by talking. Nobody in Idir has studied them. What is known comes out of stories, and out of the street puppet shows of Galderia, where children learn the horns before they learn anything else. The shows have the shape of it right. A quasit reads what a person wants, and then whispers that want back to him. Money, fame, a woman, a better town: whatever the goal is, the whisper builds the man up until he believes he is equal to it. The goal is then reached. It is simply never reached the way he pictured, and the cost he did not think to price is always paid. A wish from a genie, or a monkey’s paw.

They are small, between a large cat and a small dog, with ram’s horns far too big for the head and curling unevenly, one off to the side and one straight over the crown. The body under them is thin and wiry and winged. They turn invisible at will and change shape as easily, and they stink of sulfur so heavily that a room they have lived in has to be aired for days and the bedding burned. Wounds close on them; the stories agree they heal from nearly anything, and holy water poured over what is left is the way to stop it. Iron makes them uncomfortable after long exposure rather than injuring them outright, and only certain metals are truly painful, so a quasit keeping a room will have quietly seen to it that there is no iron in it.

Whether they are properly demons or something nearer the infernal is a distinction the scholars keep and a street education does not settle.

Campaign Updates

One came to Loshev and made a friend of Cleven Gemsmith, councilman Yullen’s son. In the house it wore a toad, which Cleven kept and explained as a pet; the wolf that howled at the edge of town when he was frightened into silence was the same creature. It could hear what he was thinking. It warned him when the relic hunters were coming, and it laid out a plan to change the town: bribe the councilors who would take it, ruin the ones who would not, replace the rest. About a third of that was done. It burned the processing building at Fox’s vineyard itself, to put pressure on a man who was not moving.

It was the sulfur that gave it away. Aldo, who had turned down his drink at that table to keep his nose clear, tracked the smell to the Gemsmith fireplace and watched the smoke curl around something invisible in the chimney, put two blunt bolts up the flue, and poured holy water over what came down so it could not knit itself back together. The thing said something in a language nobody could name and boiled apart in the grate, and left no corpse. Cleven had to be held down, crying that he needed it, and the longest work afterwards was convincing him it had never been his friend.

Whether there are others was never discovered. Cleven knew of none.