Demons
Demons are what remains when a magical Function survives the person, Time and Memory that should have contained it. Some are hungry ritual failures; deeper traditions describe a Burning Chancellery where debt itself has learned to keep records.
A Function Looking for Work
The shortest definition of an Aurelion demon is brutally technical: Function without Time and Memory. The racial taxonomy places demons outside the Great Cycle, with no Body in the ordinary sense, no personal Time, no Memory, no Will and no Soul. They arise from deep ritual failures and broken spells - impulses that should have ended when the casting ended, but did not. A command, appetite or transaction remains active after the subject has disappeared. What lives on is not a person deprived of humanity; it is an instruction deprived of an owner.
This explains the hunger attributed to lesser demons. The source calls them evil fragments of spells and rituals with an insatiable appetite. They feed on destruction, strengthen the Dark Lord and cannot continue without a magical source. Destruction is not necessarily their moral preference. It is what a damaged Function does when it has lost the conditions that once gave it a finite purpose. A spell meant to consume may continue consuming; a binding may keep binding; a demand may keep demanding payment after no creditor remains to receive it.
Yet the deeper Edge material gives demons a second, more organized face. There they are keepers of the Great Burning Chancellery. Promises, oaths and debts are recorded in their 'files'; the Book of Flame can rewrite an enemy's fate, while every use creates new obligations. The magic treatise likewise places demons beside contract and bureaucracy, describing reality as a ledger of debts. These passages need not describe a separate species. They can be read as the same metaphysical principle at institutional scale: once Function can survive its maker, a bureaucracy may be more immortal than any bureaucrat.
The resulting horror is characteristically Aurelion. A demon may have no Will, yet it can enforce yours. It may have no Memory, yet the Chancellery can preserve the consequences of a promise longer than the person who made it. It may have no Soul, yet its documents can bind souls. To fight a demon is therefore not always to overpower a monster. Sometimes the only victory is to discover what Function is still running, what source is feeding it and what clause would make it finally stop.
