“Just so—but not, as far as we’ve observed, excretion. Magic goes in, it doesn’t come out. Now, obviously the demonic plane, which demons inhabit, is magical in nature. That doesn’t mean that demons are totally disconnected from physical reality. Magic is real, it is measurable, it has meaningful physical effects. But their experience of that reality is by definition nothing like ours. They are not like us. They are much more unlike us than a dolphin or a gorilla. In fact, the most useful imaginative comparison probably is an alien. The key thing you all need to remember is that demons are not social. There is no such thing as demonic family or demonic friends. Because they don’t reproduce, they don’t conduct even the very basic social negotiations that most sexually reproducing animals need in order to produce offspring. Researchers spent centuries trying to learn the language of demons before concluding—fairly recently—that there really isn’t one. Which means that any demon that manages to communicate with us in English is actually doing something terrifyingly intelligent: it’s deducing human speech from first principles, without any help, without any of the underlying brain structures that let us learn language as babies. The first-order imp which seems so very stupid to us is probably, really, orders of magnitude cleverer than any of us could ever be. It’s simply that all that cleverness is being used up on something we have a biological cheat code to handle.” Year Eleven were truly interested now; some of them had fully turned around in their chairs to watch her speak. “Demons are not social; they don’t form groups; arguably, ‘demon’ is barely even a useful category. Every individual demon is a species unto itself, and the only thing they all seem to have in common are the predator-prey relationship which they apply without exception to every single other living thing they encounter: demon, human, animal. Some of them share hunting strategies—you might have heard of skinner demons, a subtype of archdemon which turns its prey inside out—but that seems to be a copycat behaviour, not a meaningful relationship. All of which brings us to the personhood question. Is a demon a person? Do we need to treat it as we must, morally, treat other people? If being very stupid doesn’t make someone not-a-person, does it follow that being very intelligent makes someone more a person?”

“If a person is trying to turn you inside out, you don’t have to be nice to them,” said the opinionated Anastasia.

“Inarguably correct. And—arcane safety—what will all demons do if you let them?”

“Eat your brain,” chorused the class.