The Three That Remain

The Three That Remain is an apt title bestowed by daemonologists to three supernatural entities, two of which are daemons, and one of which probably is. They are said to "remain" since there are no other credible reports of daemonkind anywhere since the mortal world set aside hate and pride and put an end to warfare and poverty.

It is anyone's guess as to where the rest of daemonkind has gone to.

## The Shape of Teeth

The Shape of Teeth takes the foul form of many otherwise beautiful beasts enmeshed as one. The proud antlers of the caribou, the great staring eyes of the moth, and the beauteous fur of the beaver are what one first sees on its approach. Up close, one could not avoid its cartoonishly wide mouth, and its dozens of squared human teeth. It has the withered hands of a raccoon, the legs of a snow hare and the tail of an otter. It could pass as a natural creature were it not for its “human” smile and insectile eyes.

The most coherent of The Three That Remain, it can be bargained with - which is good, since a bargain is surely the only way to escape with one's life while in its presence.

The Shape of Teeth's overarching ambitions are not fully understood, although its continued presence and activity in an area almost always results in calamity. The Shape is actively murderous, and continuously works to extinguish intelligent life, and bend the minds and bodies of the living to its insidious will. The purpose of its myriad machinations has never been known, and whether these are petty acts of cruelty or part of a greater design is a mystery.

Legends tell of ages past when The Shape was overpowered and turned back, though anyone seeing The Shape today would surely dismiss these accounts as fiction. Its power is awesome, its ferocity is terrible, and its wrath is as inescapable as it is unpredictable.

In the modern era, despite its enormous power, The Shape prowls the dark places of the world in secrecy, and for the most part, leaves intelligent life alone. It is only when the ignorant and the arrogant make the ill-advised journey into The Shape's demesne that it reaches into the living world. Through iron-clad daemonic contracts, shady schemes, and irresistable worldly temptations, The Shape moulds and forms entire civilisations, only to crush them between its perfect porcelain teeth when the time is right.

## The Tree of Hanged Beasts

The Tree of Hanged Beasts takes the form of a gnarled wispy willow, whose barren branches are thin and twisted bundles of nervous tissue and blood vessels. Upon its branches appear the hanged corpses of lesser beasts, who mewl and screech an unending cacophony of heresies in a language long since dead, if ever it existed. It lopes around, in a slow uneven gait; ambulation is a chore it does not undertake lightly.

Its weird, disturbing appearance hints to its role as a keeper of magics and methods that twist and pervert.

It appears to foolish knowledge-seekers, but only in their dreams. If its labyrinth of lies and riddles can be muddled through, the misguided adventurer may dance with the tree until daybreak, whereupon the rotting bloated corpses of the pathetic creatures that adorn its oozing boughs will speak a single twisted truth. Those who forget the dream when they awake are spared a terrible fate. Those who recall their divine visitation are lost to madness.

If The Tree of Hanged Beasts has a worldly dwelling, it is not known, and not even the other two that remain know of such a place. Whether the tree is indeed a real daemon or a shared delusion is an unfortunate riddle of its fiendish frame.

## The Truth in the Woods

The Truth in the Woods takes the form of a six-headed, two-winged goose that treads the earth on four legs. Each of the heads has red eyes, and honks a clamourous dissonance of profanity with no end.

It is a wild, untamed thing and a terrible destructive force. Its heads each whip and cast about, violently bashing into anything unlucky enough to be in reach, and the heads, when not supplied with an external foe, will move immediately to attack each other.

The Truth in the Woods moves as though by an invisible will; its feet, legs, and wings move without concern or input from any of its warring heads, and instead guided by a personality otherwise unseen.

The Truth in the Woods is the daemon of hatred, gluttony and wrath. A purely worldly creature occupied only with consumption and domination. The Truth lords over no willing subjects, and courts with no other great beings, instead being a wild unpredictable calamity that roves the wildest places of the world, appearing without warning, and vanishing without reason.

## Trivia

* Ijzeria is a mostly utopian world. There are no warring states, there are no starving nations. There is still strife and struggle and competition in the world, but very few people suffer needlessly. This makes the job of a daemon quite difficult indeed.
* Of The Three That Remain, only one of them (The Shape of Teeth) can still hold a full conversation. The Truth in the Woods is essentially a strange kind of weather pattern, and the Tree of Hanged Beasts could possibly be a shared delusion. Only the Shape of Teeth’s motives are intelligible and (somewhat) clear, however all we truly know of them is that they are fundamentally evil and cruel.
* When designing The Three That Remain, extra effort was made to make them bizarre, unique, and "Canadian".
* The Tree of Hanged Beasts perhaps contains some relatively common imagery, but the creature as a whole is deliberately strange and off-putting. This is to exemplify the fact that whatever intelligence may be behind The Tree of Hanged Beasts’ bizarre façade, it is alien to human temperament.
* The Shape of Teeth combines many animal traits with the smile of a human. Unlike the Tree of Hanged Beasts, which usually is seen as quite disturbing, but then quickly passes from the viewer’s imagination, the Shape of Teeth has an absurd smile that sticks with the audience, even though a human smile is perhaps one of the most familiar things in human society.
* The Truth in the Woods uses the simplest form. It is the form of something familiar and safe, yet twisted ever so slightly. Unlike the Tree which is alien, and the Shape which is cunning, the Truth is simply destructive. It revels in the struggle of survival, something that the general population of the world hasn’t had to do for thousands of years. Incredibly, despite being a six-headed Canada goose that walks on four legs, there are actually illustrations of this exact creature available on the internet made by artists unrelated to **Key of Ijzeria** or the Ministry of Distraction. Originality is… Challenging.
* The three daemons that remain on Ijzeria were designed to be “Canadian”. Most demons in popular culture are European or Asian. Fallen angels and oni ogres are both in the public consciousness, but what sort of horrors lurk in the minds of Canadians? We think it's geese and raccoons.
* The Ministry of Distraction seeks to explore a concept that it calls “Canadian horror”. It is fundamentally different from Gothic horror, which can be seen to deal with crises of the soul, as well as different from American horror, which can be seen to deal with fear of the unknown. Canadian horror is instead fear of the known. Canadians are not often bothered with high-minded spiritual concerns, nor are we too excited about the mysteries of the universe at large. We know the true horrors lurk at the bottom of an empty ice box, and that death is always one lean winter away. Thirst and hunger are monstrous enough, and they are realer than any vampire, werewolf, or Jersey Devil. Ijzeria’s daemons then, are a mixture of the lovecraftian, the gothic, and the natural. A diseased and inscrutable mind; a persistent gnawing hunger; and an unpredictable and indifferent ferocity. They are known, and have been overcome before - but today is a new day, and we might falter in our duties to one another.