born in the dust and cradled in the dark
Description
It was always fascinating to her how much dæmons were more honest than their human counterparts, even without saying a word. | or Wheein’s encounters with everyone and their dæmons.
Foreword
title taken from Henry Van Dyke's poem, Stars and the Soul. A good read!
For those that aren't familiar with dæmons, they are the external physical manifestation of a person's soul that takes the form of an animal, from Philip Pullman's HDM trilogy. For this fic I followed the general rules of dæmons that Pullman created BUT the setting isn't in the HDM universe. Just the regular old SoKor that we all know. Everything follows MMM-canon, it's just that they have dæmons too!
A short dæmon primer:
1. Every person is born with a dæmon, parents usually name their kid's dæmons just like how they would name their kid. A person's dæmon is usually the opposite from them.
2. As children, dæmons can shift from form to form, taking on different animals. This is cause kids haven't come into their full selves yet and are still exploring who they are as people.
3. A dæmon usually "settles" or takes its permanent and final form when the kid reaches maturity. Usually the animal they settle as represents the person entirely. There's no specified age but it's usually agreed that this is sometime during teenhood.
4. Dæmons can't go far from their humans. A meter or so is usually the farthest. Too much distance is painful for both dæmon and human, cause it's like your soul is being ripped from you.
5. It is totally taboo to touch another human’s dæmon. Dæmons can, on occasion, touch other dæmons, usually when their respective humans are physically touching. But it’s considered a huge violation to touch a daemon that is not your own, similar to getting physically violated. You can only touch another person's dæmon if it is consensual and that person is your true soulmate/the love of your life.
There's a lot more about dæmons and other nuances that I didn't bother covering here or in the fic, but if you want to learn more before reading the fic, a quick Google search ought to do you right!
When i was planning this story, I had initially researched DIFFERENT animals to be the MMM daemons BUT, fearing the ire of fans who might get mad at me for not using their fandom-approved animal counterparts, I decided to just use those instead. I think it turned out alright in the end, don't you?
This work is crossposted on AO3
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