A bunch of beings trying to survive in a broken clock
This page is for fleshing out more story specifics. While I am aiming for stories somewhere between action and atmosphere driven, it is worth keeping a tab on where I want to take characters and generally bring back focus to what I was set out to do.
Alongside, I mentioned about psychopomps looming, and I think it's best to think about the "dark" part in the dark fantasy I'm trying to do by spouting some "poetic" nonsense too.
The point of making them seem more noble than they are is to give more emphasis how relatively aberrant they are to the rest of the setting, where they're in the middle of a setting more negative than them.
They share less of the emphasized nobility of their human counterparts and are more in terms with their decaying emotions. For a newer daemon like Noteala, it's a question whether or not love or hate becomes her base emotion, where as an older daemon like Clari is about being more despite having emotions rooted in anxiety.
Both the daemons and humans are demented than anything. Most are rooted in their unknowing servitude to outer daemons, and a number are rooted in corruption of the past, and sometimes they form shaky alliances on their collective vindictiveness towards the protagonists alone, over feuds forgotten.
There is a sense of dire fleetingness in general. Once great temples are destroyed or forgotten, the cities noticably more quiet than they once were, the many efforts that took time to develop always on the verge of dust, celebration to dead silence, etc. From the more fantastical side: the daemons in a miserable state of eternity, the holistic nature of magic pointing to an ingrained cycle, and the ambiguious state of magic users and daemons suggesting every mortal is bound to the fate of dying and becoming daemons, and another part of the clock they all reside.
Alongside time not changing back, actions do not seem to add up to reasonable results for neither protagonists nor antagonists. Alongside, there is a lingering sense of judgement over every action, regardless of the outcomes of the action. Directly to the theme of time, treat it as tragedies which cascade over the course.
There is no hope to be found in the material outlook on time, but there is hope in a different look on it realized down the line, to re-learn what it means to hold the past in rememberance, the future the dream, and the question of value left to legacy.
Where the hope applies to the protagonists, there is a thrashing against time all around, and most from the antagonists. Accepting differently from railing against it invites hostility, and hostility becomes stronger as protagonists grow.
If this sounds confused, then maybe it is, but I don't see it as an issue because the confusion carries a statement in of itself: that a satisfactory answer is hard to come by, a part of hope versus uncertainty and loss.