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Kylo Ren/Rey daemon!AU

Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person’s ‘inner-self’ that takes the form of an animal. 

Aerex settles at the worst possible time.

They��re deep in the guts of a star destroyer when it happens. Rey’s balanced precariously on an outcrop of metal, arm reaching for a hypercoil high above them. Her fingertips graze the rusted part before the ground gives way beneath her with a shrieking groan. She doesn’t even have time to scream before she’s falling, the ground coming up to meet her at terrifying speed. When she hits the floor the breath is knocked out of her and tears prick the corner of her eyes.

That’s nothing compared to the tearing ache that springs into her chest, beneath the hollow of her ribs. The pain blocks out everything else, becomes a roaring in her ears that threatens to overwhelm her. Aerex. He’s too far, the physical separation between them too much to bear. She doesn’t hear the flapping of wings or the scuttle of reptilian claws, no animals that would navigate the bones of the wreckage swiftly. 

Instead the pain leaves gradually, like grains of sand slipping through fingers. When he finally crawls into the circle of her arms, saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over again the pain has left behind a dull ache that settles in her chest. A small, rough tongue licks away the tears that trail down her cheeks.

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@bluish-rose here’s Jayce and Viktor with their Tiger and Ocelot- daemons for your au. I adore Cerys and Anya to much and this au makes my heart all happy.

small comic bellow-

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A warm embrace, featuring Iorek Lyra and Pantalaimon. I did this as a secret Santa art trade piece, for someone on a discord server I'm part of. Their favourite books are his dark materials, and since they're great books I thought it'd be fun to do a fanart piece. I really wanted it to be warm and cosy, and I think I succeeded! They seemed very happy with it, too.

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SW Daemons AU - MASTERPOST

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Jedi lore

The Jedi’s daemons settle later, their deep connection with the force lets them keep changing for longer It usually it’s towards the end of their time as Padawan, it’s part of their trials, it shows mastery of oneself.

Everyone, at the order, has flying daemons; insects, birds, flying mammals, although some exceptions exist.

It is not frowned upon, it only may complicate their efficiency on the field by the nature of their (current) missions.

Also because flying daemons have an easier time archiving endurance for long-distance separation. With meditation and the force, they can stand to be separated.

Yoda has a firefly, she can always light the way even in the deepest darkness.

Mace has a Vampire bat, everyone who has to debrief to the council swears she stares at them.

Sith lore

An important part of becoming Sith is severing your bond and reabsorb your daemon/soul by using an ancient dark ritual, it proves your commitment to the dark, and what better way to fill your anger but with an eternally open wound on your soul.

Sith have no preference of the species or kind for their daemons, they aren’t there to stay.

The Chancellor’s daemon is mute. A small scarab but it’s not really his, he killed her a long time ago. By using the power from the dark side, Sidious severs a daemon from someone else and tethers them to himself, it’s flimsy at best and needs to be replaced constantly but it keeps his cover.

Not all Sith attempt this or has this knowledge.

Maul and Savage weren’t given a choice, they were forced to go through the ritual.

Count Dooku didn’t go through it until AOTC, encouraged by his daemon, she told him to accomplish their goals and to never forget her, she was an Iberian Lynx.

Ventress still has her daemon, a Wyyschokk (spider). She would have never done the ritual, for the Nightsisters their daemons are sacred.

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“Lee Scoresby wasn’t concerned for his comfort so much as for his instruments, and he spent some time making sure they were securely lashed to the main struts. According to the altimeter, they were nearly ten thousand feet up. The temperature was minus 20 degrees. He had been colder than this, but not much, and he didn’t want to get any colder now; so he unrolled the canvas sheet he used as an emergency bivouac, and spread it in front of the sleeping children to keep off the wind, before lying down back to back with his old comrade in arms, Iorek Byrnison, and falling asleep.” -The Golden Compass

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Loving soul

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Lovers eye jewellery, daemons!au style, pt4

A ‘daemon miniature’ brooch c.1800-15, featuring scrimshaw depicting an otter and human hair, mounted in a gold frame. The jewellers hallmark on the frame indicates it was purchased ready-made from a Portsmouth jeweller. The maritime theme of the frame and location of purchase suggests it was a memento gifted by a sailor, who may have carved the scrimshaw centrepiece himself.

With thanks to @amarguerite​ for coming up with Frederick Wentworth’s sea otter daemon.

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Pantalaimon art by @artofhafi on Instagram

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Having more fun with His Dark Materials characters ✨

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@sashaforthewin I tried so hard but I am sorry I could only come up with one Thor Variant and it's very obvious which one

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Most of the daemon imagines posted on Tumblr.com are too wholesome. To paraphrase George Carlin, “one of the things I really like to do in my life is complain,” so I’ve come up with some that are more accurate to the Salty Bastard Experience.

Imagine you and your daemon swearing at other drivers together.

Imagine the suffering of everyone else in the car, because there are two of you.

Imagine your daemon watching while you play video games and making fun of you every time you die.

Imagine writing a “strongly worded” email to a coworker, landlord, etc. and your daemon looking over your shoulder and giving you advice on how to make it more subtle, or more polite… or more blatantly passive-aggressive.

Imagine your daemon baring their teeth and snarling at people who try to make small talk on public transportation.

Imagine un-settled daemons intentionally turning into the largest form they can to strategically blockade the entire couch from their siblings.

Imagine your daemon actively encouraging you to turn on the sprinklers when the neighbors’ kids are in your front yard again.

Imagine instead of getting the children of people you hate a recorder or a kazoo as a present, getting them an “educational” picture book about extremely loud animals like the White Bellbird, because their daemons will definitely try out those forms.

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More little logistical conveniences in a world with corporeal daemons:

Bathrooms usually have a bed and/or a perch to give daemons a comfortable place to rest while their human bathes or showers other than the bath mat. Some daemons are happy to join their human in the bath/shower, but many don’t like getting wet or have forms that would make it difficult / possibly dangerous (e.g. a lot of rodents), and even for those that like water soaked fur can take a long time to fully dry so bathing isn’t usually an everyday thing.

Daemons don’t normally wear clothing, but there are times when it’s necessary or at least much more comfortable - for the same reasons animals sometimes wear clothing in our world. Not all fur and feathers are created equal, and a fennec fox, or a chihuahua, or a serval, or a parrot wouldn’t have a good time in cold climates. Children’s daemons can just turn into arctic animals and/or crawl into their human’s clothing (as shown in The Golden Compass), but daemons with warm-weather settled forms are out of luck, and often wear sweaters, hoodies, and/or earwarmers. Superheated pavement in warm climates, and road salt in cold ones, can also hurt a daemon’s feet just like a real animal’s, so many wear protective paw booties.

Human clothing made to accommodate daemons is also common. The most obvious is arm and shoulder pads which allow large birds - especially birds of prey - to land and ride on their humans’ arms or shoulders without injuring them. People don’t really wear falconry gauntlets because it’s not like they’re just putting them on for a hunting or training session with a bird, it’s daily life including times when you need to use both your hands for something else. Clothing may also have special pockets for very small daemons to ride in, sometimes incorporating clear plastic windows. Daemons that are too big for a pocket but small enough that walking around in crowded places is awkward - e.g. rats, ferrets, rabbits - most commonly ride on their humans’ shoulders, but sometimes being carried in a sling is easier, more comfortable, and warmer.

Doors with round handles are rare. Daemons don’t go far from their humans so it’s not incredibly limiting or dangerous to not be able to open a door, but it can be annoying and inconvenient to not be able to, especially when the human’s arms are both full of dishes or grocery bags or something. You’ll sometimes see ladders or rough surfaces attached to doors so small-ish forms can climb them, although this is probably seen as tacky.

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Wonderful Theta art from Minnow and Kanteros 🐺

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Actually Wholesome Daemon Imagines

Reading a book aloud to your daemon so they can enjoy it too without reading over your shoulder.

Taking a nice, warm, relaxing bath with your daemon. Thoroughly grooming and shampooing their fur, then lounging around in your bathrobe for the rest of the evening while they curl up on your lap wrapped in a towel.

Little kids holding their daemons upside-down, tossing them in the air and catching them, and running around the house carrying them like it’s a roller coaster (parents: this kind of play is normal and healthy, and helps young daemons develop their sense of balance)

Kids and their daemons spinning around and around in opposite directions to see if it cancels out and keeps them from getting dizzy (doesn’t work).

Unsettled daemons taking the biggest forms they can and trying to pick up their humans or drag them around.

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Very small daemon Discord server

If you or a friend are interested in joining a new, and currently very small, daemon server let me know! I started up my own server with a focus on getting to know our daemons and improving projection and communication techniques. Right now we have some small prompts happening throughout the week! It's pretty slow paced and casual at the moment but with more members I expect it to liven up! New, old, or just curious? Everyone is welcome.

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Something I haven’t really seen talked about in the His Dark Materials fandom (for all the like 2-½ weeks I’ve been here) but I think would definitely be a thing is Pre-Settling Anxiety.

Like, that story that sailor tells Lyra about the guy whose daemon settled as a dolphin and was never able to go ashore at all, and how he just more or less goes “Well if your daemon settles in a form you don’t like that sucks, but that’s life deal with it?” Lyra and Pan didn’t pay it that much mind because (a) they’re pretty darn resilient kids, and (b) they had a lot more immediate things occupying their minds.

But seriously… imagining pre-teen me, growing up in a world with daemons, Jesus Christ hearing shit like that would have traumatized me, and any living manifestation of my fucking soul would have been traumatized by that too, and I doubt I’d have been anywhere near the only one.

Because… I mean I’m still like this now but I’ve gotten better about it as an adult: when I was a kid I was not someone who just accepted that things were the way they were, I was someone who hyperfixated and worried. And not just about big stuff like climate change and politics and smaller but still out of my control shit like health issues and bad things happening to my family. I was scared of growing up, and not just in the sense of not wanting to have adult responsibilities and all that.

I remember, not so much when I was actually going through puberty (by then I was just depressed), but I remember in the years before, when I was being told that I would be changing soon, and of course not in a way that acknowledged that asexuality wasn’t just something you grew out of, and being exposed to the American media landscape of, like, old “teen” movies and other that portrayed puberty and adult sexuality in a really twisted, hypersexualized way that I don’t think was even accurate for the vast majority of allosexual people, I was afraid and repulsed. And not even in a Mrs. Coulter way: I was afraid on a deep, existential level that growing up would destroy the person who I was and I would become someone I didn’t like, someone I wasn’t comfortable with.

And growing up with a daemon would have made that so much worse, because then it wouldn’t have just been a fear of losing my identity and being unhappy with who I was, it would have been a fear of being unhappy with the one being I wasn’t unhappy with half the time, the one being who actually truly understood me and that I could always trust, and it’s not that humans and their daemons can’t argue or fight or be angry at each other - and God knows we probably would - but I think we’d have been the pair who had screaming matches and threaten each other’s lives knowing damn well what that meant, but could never stay angry at each other because the idea of losing that bond, of having it damaged, would be too terrifying.

So the idea of my daemon settling as a form that damaged that bond, that pushed us apart or limited us, would be such a huge source of anxiety. And that fear of becoming something I didn’t like, of not knowing and not being able to choose and not being able to control my self, is such a deep-seated part of me that I don’t believe for a second that my daemon wouldn’t be the same way.

We wouldn’t be like Jerry the sailor and Belisaria, who loved being a porpoise while her human worried about her settling that way, or like Lyra and Pantalaimon who kind of brushed it off and didn’t think about it. A being that was my soul given form would have to be just as much of a bag of nerves and insecurities as I was, and might never take a form like that again after hearing the dolphin story because we have the kind of personality that couldn’t not think about all the implications of being settled in a form, and what that meant losing. We’d be the sort to read an article or see a documentary about a daemon settling as a form that completely limited their lives, and the fear of changing and not being able to change back, of getting stuck like that, would always be at the back of both our minds. Because it doesn’t seem like daemons truly understand it either, and that would be scary.

And as we got older it would just get worse, because we’d be close and it could happen at any moment so taking a form she wouldn’t be okay with spending the rest of her life as, and that I wouldn’t be okay with her spending the rest of her life as, would be so risky. We’d be up until 2 AM making charts on spiral notebook paper and reading about animals on Wikipedia to try and feel some kind of control over it, and she’d just keep taking fewer and fewer forms.

Nothing aquatic because water is fun but being bound to it is obviously bad. No invertebrates because they’re so cool and different but they can’t feel things in quite the same way. No cold-blooded animals because what if she could never change into something with fur or feathers on a cold day again? Nothing too small that would have to be carried all the time in public, but definitely nothing too big to be carried at all because the fear of someone touching her by accident, kicking her or stepping on her or running into her in a crowd or being trapped and forced away from each other by a wall of oblivious human flesh. How could a wolf or a mountain lion daemon ever feel safe in a city? But nothing too small to defend itself from large daemons because other people are dangerous and anyone could be a threat. But no large birds that need to perch and their humans have to wear arm bracers or shoulder pads so they don’t hurt them and can’t just sit on their laps, and then no birds at all because being able to fly makes having to stay close together feel limiting since the tops of buildings are still out of reach and what’s the point of flying if you can’t go high?

And because of that fear of settling in the wrong form, the number of forms that were okay, that were safe to take, would just keep getting smaller and smaller, until one day we’d notice that she hadn’t changed for weeks, and we’d just be like…

Oh.

It’s already happened.

And then it’d probably be such a fucking relief just knowing it was okay and it couldn’t go wrong anymore. Occasional nightmares about just turning into an animal neither of us even liked completely against her will that wouldn’t stop until like halfway through college aside.

So yeah, I hope this is relatable to somebody out here in this community because seriously I think the uncertainty around settling would be a major source of anxiety for a lot of kids and a lot of daemons.