Reply To: Killing Demons
As a simple matter of principle, being a demon myself, I’d have to be insane to tell you how to kill me permanently.
Fortunately for you, most people consider me insane.
The C.O.D. is definitely one of the best known ways of killing a demon; it will completely rip up/consume its animus and mana.
One big reason demons are hard to kill permanently in Astlan is that as their mana bodies get too weakened they just return to the Abyss before you can completely destroy their mana body and their animus inside.
If you could somehow, keep a demon from returning to the abyss, destroy it’s mana body, it would eventually dissipate like the spirit of a dead person with no afterlife agreement with a deity. that would take some time so you’d want to hurry it along, maybe by doing something to dispell the animus or get rid of it. Obviously the right kind of pentacles could help, but most of them would serve to keep the animus intact so they’d just be stuck in bodiless/manaless state inside the pentacles. Very tricky.
A C.O.D. works because it’s generally too fast for the demon to escape from. A particularly high powered demon might be able to get away, but most can’t.
There are certain spells that extremely high up priests can cast; but these are part of a ritual, so you need the demon trapped by a pentacle or something because it takes a while. The dagger that Talarius had had a viral version of one these sorts of spells and was what was really dangerous. It’s magic interwove itself with his animus and would have followed him back to the Abyss (this is another way of doing it) However, he was able to use to the pure mana of the same god that created the viral magic to heal it.
The spell that the priests cast was more of a holy acid cloud spell. A lot more slow moving than a C.O.D. Think of it as a “Blessed” gaseous version of the dragon’s breath acid. He could have escaped that by returning to the abyss/getting out of the cloud. The other cloud they cast earlier was just a mana draining cloud; along the lines of what some undead creatures can do (although most of them also drain animus).
The point of these was to weaken him enough for Talarius to defeat him/kill him.
Next, if you follow a demon to the abyss and destroy so much of his/body (and do it fast enough) that there is nothing left to regenerate they die permanently. However, that’s usually a suicidal option. Same idea as C.O.D. but you get more time since the demon can’t shift to another plane…unless of course they are powerful enough to get off a demonic gateway or something to another plane…but that does require concentration.
Tizzy