In the world of Sultan’s Child, daeva are a source of much of the world’s malice. Daeva (singular and plural) have no physical presence. They can’t touch or be seen, but they can communicate and subtly manipulate things in the physical world.
Daeva are ghosts of things that never lived. They are more numerous than living creatures. They are not evil, but they are almost always insane. It might be more accurate to say they are madness.
Daeva are more random and chaotic than living things. Living things need some level of rationality to keep themselves alive. Many living things need some kind of cooperation. Daeva are created from pure chaos and don’t need to live, so they don’t require a basic sense of self preservation to persist.
The most reliable source of harm from daeva are witches. Witches are partly in the metaphysical world, so daeva have an easier time communicating with them. The power to wield magic is not genetic, but it does rest in someone from birth, and from the moment a witch can speak, daevas become aware of her and try to corrupt her.
A witch isn’t safe from daeva until she comes to a moment of awareness of herself and her power called an “awakening”. From this moment, the witch can use her power to keep the daeva at bay. Quite often, the witch stays afflicted somehow, being rational and in control but unusually suspicious, unusually doubtful or otherwise changed.
Without awakening, almost no witch can make it to adulthood without being corrupted.
A discipline of witches called a “midwife” is charged with protecting a witch from daeva until her awakening. The midwife tries to find unawakened witches and protect them. It is rare for a witch to awaken without the help of a midwife, but it happens. The coven of the Mountain Inviolate, for instance, was founded by a witch who awakened and became a midwife.
Daeva can talk to the non-magical, but they can’t possess or torture people. They can’t even keep talking to a non-magical person who doesn’t want to listen. In the story “the Curses”, the teller says the King of Govion was visited by a “terrible understanding”. This is another way of saying the King spoke to a daeva.
Vizier Lugal was also visited by a daeva as a child when he was near death. In both cases, the daeva offered secrets.
Some daeva can sometimes alter things as they’re being born. This is less scientific than manipulating genes, but it’s a less rational thing along similar lines. This includes creating chimera.
Some daeva can send back the souls of the dead, but only if the souls are unknown within moments of death. If any living person has a memory of the dead in the moments around the death, the soul is too protected from the aura of the physical world to be within the daeva’s reach.
However, if someone dies completely unknown by anyone in the world, daeva can enslave that person’s soul and send it back as a ghoul.
It’s possible, but very rare, for daeva to be good. There is a cult, “the daeva heresy” that says the prophet was listening to a benevolent daeva. The author offers no opinion as to the truth of this theory.
