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Silicates are the one advantage humanity holds in the Omega Centauri cluster that the Celestials never worked out how to use. They appear to a Celestial as unremarkable crystals. In a human hand they wake up, and the human who survives the encounter becomes a Daemon.

What Silicates Are

Nobody in the setting knows where Silicates came from. They may be the work of a civilisation that died before the Celestials existed, or genuinely alien life that evolved on its own, in the cluster or somewhere further out. The official position is that the question is still open.

What is documented is the bonding process. A dormant Silicate looks like a rare but ordinary gem, which is why Celestials walked past them for thousands of years. Human contact is what triggers it: the crystal hatches and merges with living flesh. For most people that is fatal. For a small minority the merger takes, and it is permanent.

Daemons

The being produced by a successful human-Silicate bond is called a Daemon. The transformation is physical and irreversible. Skin turns translucent while becoming close to impervious. Musculature rebuilds for speed and strength well past the human baseline. Official material sums up what that means in a fight: Daemons do not need weapons, because they are weapons.

This is why Silicates matter strategically. Every other advantage in the cluster belongs to the Celestials, whose technology is tens of thousands of years ahead of anything the Traveler Dynasties can build. A Daemon is the one asset the Celestials cannot simply out-engineer, and it is something they are described as fearing.

The Cost

The bond does not come clean. Beyond the high chance of dying during the merger, Daemons are prone to intrusive violent thoughts. The transformation changes what a person is, not just what they can do, and the setting treats that as a live problem rather than a background detail.

How the Cluster Reads Them

Because Silicates bond only with humans, some communities treat the relationship as intended by something larger than either party, and read human-Silicate coexistence in religious terms. Others treat it as luck: one break in humanity's favour after a long run of hardship. Both readings circulate, and official material presents them side by side rather than settling the argument.

Relationship to Other Systems

Silicates are separate from Remnants, the salvaged Celestial technology a Traveler recovers on an Exodus. Remnants are built objects that humanity adapts and reverse-engineers; Silicates are living, and they change the person rather than the loadout. They are also distinct from the Changelings, which the Celestials engineered deliberately. Silicates were found, not made, and the Celestials never found them first.

A note on names: a tabletop product set in the same universe uses "Daemon" as a character class. The video game has not confirmed a class system, and the Daemon described on this page is the in-fiction result of a Silicate bond rather than a selectable build. See EXODUS for the boundary between the game and its companion media.

Not Yet Confirmed

• Whether the player can bond with a Silicate, or whether Daemons appear only as characters in the world.

• Whether any confirmed companion is a Daemon.

• What proportion of bonding attempts survive, and whether anything predicts survival.

• Whether Daemon abilities are represented mechanically, and how they would relate to the gauntlet toolkit.