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OVERVIEW
Xainu: from the Old Draconic word for "abomination", it became the proper name
of an ancient deity which once invaded the Prime Material plane, and was the
first to manifest bodily on the Prime since the Creation.
Xainu is commonly believed to have arisen as the undead remains of an aborted
divine offspring conceived in the rape of an unidentified female deity by one of
the male deities. The identity of the parents has throughout the history of the
world been a tightly-guarded secret, which no deity has admitted knowledge of
having, let alone offered to share with the mortal world. Many suspect even
today that the male deity in question was the orcish deity of fertility and
lust, who coincidentally has survived a number of concerted assassination
attempts by divine agents, the first attempt made not many decades after the
first rumors of the violation had begun to circulate.
HISTORY
Accounts differ regarding the rise of Xainu.
One series of legends holds that the infant deity had been stillborn, and that
the divine mother had secretly buried it at a location on her home plane. The
burial had been witnessed by a band of adventuring outsiders from the lower
planes who sold the information to a dark power, which then recovered the corpse
and raised it to undeath to use as a weapon of war. The undead deity wrested
free of its master's control during its first campaign on the Prime Material
plane.
Another series of legends has the infant deity being born live and in a state of
undeath because of the total opposition of alignments of the parents. The
abomination was exiled to the lowest layer of Pandemonium soon after its divine
mother had given birth. The undead deity escaped from Pandemonium and found its
way to the Prime Material.
All accounts of the history of the undead deity agree on the results of the
abomination being let loose on the Prime Material. Whole armies were destroyed
and cities levelled in mere days as the infant deity, having the mind of a child
but the intellect and ambition of a god, exerted its infantile will and
fulfilled every capricious desire over every people and country it encountered.
Most of the great noble patriarchs and matriarchs of all the dragon clans --
metallic, gem, and even chromatic -- were slaughtered by Xainu when of one
accord they confronted the god. Their decimation ensured the subsequent decline
of the race of dragons, and their earthly dominion over all other mortal
creatures has never recovered since.
The tenuous reign of the undead god persisted for twenty-three days before the
abomination was lured into a trap, contained, and subjugated by a cadre of the
gods themselves who chose to forgo their avatars and intervened directly,
bringing all of their divine might to bear. Though the presence of the naked
glory of several gods and goddessess in one place instantaneously slew the
thousands of mere mortals who looked upon them, their sacrifice was reckoned a
reasonable if tragic price to pay to save the lives (and souls) of millions. Not
since that time has any god been known to bodily visit the Prime Material plane.
PRONOUNCIATION
As the name of Xainu originates in Old Draconic, "X" in the Common script
represents a consonant in that tongue which is not easily reproducible in
humanoid speech; humanoids can best approximate it by trying to pronounce the sh
and kh sounds simultaneously. Words and proper nouns in Old Draconic with the
"X" consonant are usually transliterated in the Common script using sh, kh, or
shkh. Other humanoid tongues approximate this esoteric consonant with their
letters that represent one of the phonemes /sh/, /zh/, /kh/, or /k/ (and more
rarely, /s/, /z/, /h/ or /gh/).
The middle vowel of the Old Draconic name has a peculiar nasal quality to it in
Old Draconic which the humanoid linguists of old did not generally represent in
their transliteration; only the meticulous elven scholars persist in marking
those words borrowed from Old and Modern Draconic to represent this type of
nasal vowel. It is best described as a "deeper" nasalization in which a dragon
circulates the air through its furnace before exhaling the air past its vocal
cords and out through its esophagus, giving its speech the peculiar resonant
quality that makes the roar of a dragon seemingly supernatural in origin, which
most lesser creatures find terrifying in of itself.
OTHER NAMES FOR XAINU
The following are derivatives of the Old Draconic name "Xainu" from various
humanoid tongues and dialects: Zheno, Shannu, Zinu, Zaynus, Shayno, Zhen,
Sheenao, Hoinos, Zaan, Zeno, Khan, Ghewneh, Hazin (derived from "Ha-Zeni" in the
archaic language of the fey, where "ha" is an archaic honorific prefix of Sylvan
reserved for deities) ...
--
Matthias (matthias_mls@yahoo.com)
"Scientists tend to do philosophy about as well as you'd expect philosophers to
do science, the difference being that at least the philosophers usually *know*
when they're out of their depth."
-Jeff Heikkinen
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