Demon slayers aren’t what you think. Shit, demons aren’t what you think. For so long demons were considered supernatural, and even when they weren’t, even after all the metaphors for the human condition became tired and cliché, even then, they were considered myth. But now we know they are real. The clinical evidence of their existence, found more than 100 years ago, was irrefutable. Demons were real, and with that knowledge, we figured out how to kill them. With time however, we discovered that killing them only created more demons and on top of that, the demon’s host always paid some price.
Whenever a demon was exorcised from its host, it always left a mark, a demon mark. Demon marks were unpredictable, but usually fell within a few categories: psychological, physical, emotional, and psychedelic. Marks could also be classified as either good or bad, depending on how the mark affected the life of the host. We continued to hunt and kill demons for a long time until we realized that the marks had been getting worse and worse. It seemed like the more demons we killed, the worse the marks they left. At some point relatively recently, it became impossible to kill a demon without it leaving a mark on entire communities. Once each demon’s death began causing the deaths of thousands of people, we decided to stop killing demons. For a long time, the best way to stop them was to let them live.
As demons repopulated hosts around the world, the power of their marks began to get weaker and weaker. Huge amounts of time and money were poured into demon research until one day when they discovered that a demon properly isolated from human populations before exorcism would only leave a mark on the host and the exorcist. By this time, the demons had grown their population to numbers similar to before their discovery. Once we started killing demons again, we realized their marks had stopped killing people. It seemed to many that killing demons was a waste of time and always resulted in more harm. but this opinion was buried under the loud voices demanding demons be killed at all costs, forgetting what it could lead to. Ultimately, demon hunting resumed, and as a precaution, demons were always killed in isolated locations called outposts. It was in one of these outposts where I was sent to kill my first demon, and where I finally learned the truth about demons.