Agatae, the Beauteous Wasps
Demons of the First Circle
Progeny of the Whim-of-the-Wind
There are men who hate wasps and women who would see them dead, but these men and women have not seen the agatae. There is a brilliance of sunlight in their beating wings and a glittering of a thousand colours in their translucent forms. Their stings have every beauty of a blade, and their heads are crowned with gold. About them hangs a glory, a transformative light. It changes those who see it, marking them forever, in the same fashion as a cave-raised child's first glimpse of a sunrise or a Southerner's first sight of snow. Stories are written of the agatae, and songs, though this is a degenerate age with many of those stories lost.

The wasps of the demon world stand as high as a man, on six crystal legs. Their wings beat in one great motion, strong enough to hold aloft the agata and two armoured men. Their senses and intuition are keen. their voices peal like bells.

The agata thought process exceeds most human minds in its scope, and the wasps are both cunning and wise. At the same time, the strange philosophical thoughts that occupy their heads have no easy translation into any demonic or human tongue. These thoughts often fill them with random outbursts of emotion, from an all-embracing happiness that makes them hover in their ecstasy to outbursts of anger or jealousy that can make them attack their peers. In the agata's worldview, such emotions make perfect sense, and any questioning of their motivations produces a blank stare and the assertion that no other action was reasonable. Even sorcerers can have difficulty determining whether an agata's action reflects some deep understanding or a transient passion.

The agatae are riding beasts, and they accept this as their function. If one should lose a mortal rider out of its folly, or hers, or if it casts free its rider during some momentary temper, it feels a great sadness. Many have traveled long distances to fetch a fallen mortal's love to tend the human's grave, spend days mourning their rider of composed great poetry to mark a dead woman's passing. Others, realising that the natural order of the universe endorses their behaviour, proceed on without care.

Sorcerers do not lightly bring agatae into the world to face their deaths. Even the callous find it difficult to doom the Beauteous Wasps thus. Others have an easier time of it; those who must fight the agatae fight the agatae. One can love the sea and still kill the Storm Mother at one's throat.


Firmin, the Needlemakers
Demons of the First Circle
Progeny of the Keeper of the Forge of Night
Firmin appear human from the front. Their backs, however, are bristles of spines. Organs underneath their fingernails produce a thick black mucous. It is a firmin's wont to touch its fingers together and then pull them apart, a strand of this ichor spreading between them and, in an instant, hardening into a shiny black needle with a negligible curve. Such needles cannot harm a firmin, and if left along to work, a firmin generally builds a great nest out of needles and daub. Firmin are social creatures, and 10 or 100 firmin in a single place build one great nest rather than many smaller ones.

When she has constructed her nest, a firmin seeks to decorate it. At first, she skewers small animals or birds on the spines of her nest. Eventually, this fails to satisfy her. She augments an existing needle until it is long and strong enough to support a human or demon and seeks to pin one there. Many victims get away; the light of the Green Sun and the Unconquered Sun alike have an active, almost deliberate propensity to glint off firmin needles and betray their approach to their prey. Regardless of how the hunt ends, local settlements generally remove themselves or the firmin after the first encounter. If they do not, for whatever reason, the nest grows to support as many humans or demons from its spines as the firmin can catch.

Despite their appearance, firmin are not an intelligent species. They build their nests and hunt their prey on instinct alone. They understand the idea of communication and that it involves human noises. However, the firmin themselves only use a few miscellaneous syllables to indicate such things as "danger" or "food", and become extremely confused and irritated when spoken to in a modern tongue. Humans who know the language of the Old Realm can generally indicate such concepts as "kill that person", "sit" and "no! eat that outside!", but nothing more.

Firmin needles are extremely strong. Clever firmin can be trained to extrude their ichor into a mould, making light, durable tools and weapons. Sorcerers cursed with dull firmin can use firmin needles in ordinary smithcraft. Molten metal does not melt them, making a bundle of needles a suitable core for a sword.


Nyilsaska, the Firequills
Deva of the First Circle
Progeny of the Flower Maiden
Admire the scene; a forest glade as autumn draws in. Grass carpets the ground and the leaves of the trees are a fiery collage of red, yellow and brown. The sun beats down from above, and a faint ringing hiss and crack can be heard on the breeze, like the sound of a sword being unsheathed and a match being struck in its wake.

At this point, the wise or knowledgeable stop admiring, and start to run.

Firequills are insectoid demons the size of a child, and resemble nothing so much as a preying mantis crossed with a porcupine. From their long, bulbous abdomens sprout a thousand banded quills that radiate backwards and to the sides, each up to a metre long. Though the length of the quills changes colour with the foliage as its owner does, the tips are always a fierce and angry red. A nyilsaska can reach back with its front claws to pluck a quill from its back, lighting the flammable tip with a bite from the incendiary venom they carry in their jaws, and then throw it as fast and as far as an arrow. The characteristic sound of them preparing to fire is a warning well-heeded in their woods, since being shot full of burning arrow-quills often offends.

The typical nyilsaska is a proud and competitive creature which prefers to stay in the trees, hiding amongst thick foliage and observing without being seen. Their eyesight is keen, and colonies of them will often inhabit a stand of trees together, having frequent competitions of eyesight and accuracy. Finding firequill barbs lodged around target flowers or in the corpses of trespassers is a strong sign of these companies, but it is not necessarily death to stumble into one. Nyilsaskan pride is taken as much in metaphorical accuracy and insight as physical, and they can often be mollified and cajoled by flattery in the form of poetry or prose. New and perceptive ways of seeing or describing the world are particularly pleasing to them, and they will often refuse to harm those who impress them in this way.

Should a firequill be rejected or ignored by one who it has challenged to a competition, its wounded pride will cause it to gain a point of Limit. When a burning arrow snuffs out the life of an insect on the wing, a nyilsaska may use its landing point as an entrance into Creation.


Farisyya, Cataphracts of the Flower and Thorn
Deva of the First Circle
Progeny of the Flower Maiden
Alone, a farisy is a beautiful charger; fourteen hands or higher, with a coat the colour of wood and a mane of willow-fronds. Mahogany, chestnut or ebony are the most common colourations, though paler breeds exist, and those who touch the sleek and graceful horse’s flanks will find they feel like warm, yielding wood with a pleasing grain.

Farisyya long for riders, for they are not recognised as an adult among their kind until they have one. They will go to great lengths to convince mortals - and even other spirits - to climb astride them, though they are fastidious in the extreme in those they select. This is because the choice is a permanent one. If an unfortunate passenger rides a farisy for too long - seven hours of hard riding - it can worm tendrils up into their brain and render them a puppet rider.

Once this occurs, the roles of horseman and steed are reversed, and it is the farisy that controls its rider. Farisyya often make their puppets wear armour to cover up their overgrowth, for the horse will grow vines and coilers around and through their puppet’s limbs. In particular, a thorn made from the horse’s wood will sprout from the puppet’s left hand. Eventually, it will grow into a sharp and straight lance that can pierce lamellar and mail alike. Those farisyya who have won their creator’s approval display her favour with a seven-petalled flower on their breast or at their helmet.

Farisyya are loathe to give up their puppets, as the aesthetics of their puppet-rider decide their status in the courts and jousting tournaments they hold among themselves - the rarer, more beautiful or more difficult to catch, the higher the status awarded. A farisy that managed to snare an Exalt would be honoured above all its kin for the rest of its days. Accordingly, cataphracts of the flower and thorn rarely if ever dismount or remove their armour, but sound imperious and look dashing and beautiful as they give orders and make demands. They are forever loyal and very attentive to their creator; the fair princess who they serve, and bear an especial hatred of the luminata.

Cataphracts of the Flower and Thorn can escape into Creation in response to a well-born individual offering a mighty sacrifice for a steed. A farisy seeking a rider for the first time gains Limit whenever their attempts to gain one are thwarted. Should an adult lose their rider, they gain a point of Limit each day unless they can replace it, and may continue to gain it at a slower rate should the replacement not compare favourably to its predecessor.


Szamszerji, the Twice-Crossed Bows
Demon of the First Circle
Progeny of the Living Tower
The libraries of Orabilis recount certain tales of the Primordial War, and speak of the vile and treacherous ways of humanity, Dragon-King and Mountain Folk. Late in the First Age, though, scholars in the service of Octavian (during one of the times when he was not bound to service in Creation, which happened lamentably often) managed to draw his attention to the description of some of the least of the weapons of the Mountain Folk; a t-shaped bow which was reputed to be more effective in the hands of weak beings. The Living Tower - who was not yet the Quarter Prince - had fought against the lamentable constraints of how most demons grabbed off the street and thrown against a foe as cannon fodder lacked skill at archery, and saw that this had potential as a cheap piece of equipment for discardable troops.

Octavian's invention of the crossbow was triviality itself - for demons may make many beautiful things, but they also make many clever ones, and soon iron-limbed crossbows were seeing use, handed out en masse before assaults. But still they were too costly for the troops he cared nothing for, and worse they were still not effective enough in such unskilled hands. The szamszerji, the twice-crossed bows were his solution.

A szamszerj is a living beast which somewhat resembles a crossbow, made of gnarled horn over pale green flesh. Two sets of bull-like horns extend forwards from it, one set vertical and the other horizontal, around a needle-jawed mouth, ringed by four eyes and four spinnerets. The latter produce iron-grey thread, which connect the horns together. Its gullet extends almost the entire length of its body, and at the rear of it is a tongue made of amethyst, far too short to reach out of its mouth. It has eight legs on its underside, and a strong and muscular tail. The tongue scrapes off fragments of its own shell, and loads it into the thread pulled back by the peristaltic motion of the gullet, before releasing it.

Oh, they are dangerous enough predators as it is in the Demon City, packs of them roaming wild and ambushing a lone demon, before they descend and tear off the flesh with needle teeth and even devouring the bones. Some gangs tame them - for they are as intelligent as the cats of Creation - and let them roam around areas they want others to keep out. But when picked up, their true purpose becomes clear, for their tail lashes tight around the bicep of their holder, and their legs cling onto one arm and then the other, like bracers.

They are not light beasts, and most demons require both hands to carry one, though some strong breeds are known to let one latch onto an arm and carry a blade or a second twice-crossed bow in the other. They were bred to aim and fire themselves without intervention from their carrier - thus solving the problem of ill-trained conscripts, who need only carry the slow-moving creature into battle - but with knowledge of the right pressure points one can use a twice-crossed bow almost as if it was a conventional weapon. Such knowledge is also required to have it let go; Octavian did not wish his troops casting them aside and fleeing.

A new szamszerj can come about when a twice-crossed bow is used to shoot a specially engineered species of demon whose essence was engineered for Octavian for this purpose. He hoped to keep sole command of the living technology that way. Of course, Malfeas being what it is, within a year of their innovation neomah-made copies had hit the streets, and their proliferation was rapid - made worse by the discovery that with sufficient shooting on rare occasions a new twice-crossed bow would gestate in any corpse.

Summoning: (Obscurity 1/4) Many have heard of the weapons of Octavian, but most assume that they refer to his arsenals of magitech. Those who do discover the truth are often rather shocked by the simplicity of the concept. A twice-crossed bow can sometimes escape into Creation when a man with no skill at archery stews in bitterness after his lack of skill costs him dearly.