There’s a category of pantheon nobody on Tikor wants to belong to, and it has its own chapter in every priest’s book.
The Children of Xavian are everything the Withering King has made or claimed on this planet. They were never family in the way the Divinity or the Orisha are family. They were made to break things — to unmake Ishvana’s work, to pull Tikor apart from inside its own elements — and they’re held together by Xavian’s corruption rather than by anything resembling love. They serve him in their own ways. They almost won.
The Wretched Ones
The first thing Xavian did on Tikor was take the Elementals — the primal forces that nurtured the planet — and trap them inside Adume, a second sun of his own making. Adume was the prison, but more than that it was a forge. When the Elementals came out, they came out as the Wretched Ones: enormous, terrifying dragons stripped of memory and identity, fully bound to Xavian’s will.
There were eight of them. Yobida the Flame Elemental. Inkyaban the Sky. Ayida’we the Rain. Grootslang the Shadow. Uroborous the Iron. Masingi the Harmony. Apep the Light. Selvans the Leaf. They came down on Tikor to kill every god on the planet, and they nearly managed it.
The stalemate ended two ways. Ryuujin, the former Earth Elemental, broke free of Xavian’s hold and turned on his siblings. Then Ishvana sacrificed her own life to seal Xavian behind a planar barrier and cut the Wretched Ones off from the corrupted Ether that fueled them. Even weakened, the dragons couldn’t be killed. Their primal energies were too volatile. So they were sealed instead — entombed under Garuda, in the Grand Divide, beneath the ocean, in the Ebon Cascade.
The official story is that all of them were sealed. Whispers say otherwise. They call the rumored escapees “the Rogues,” and the storms and tremors that scholars can’t quite explain get attributed to them often enough that the rumor refuses to die.
The Rakshasa
The Wretched Ones arrived with apocalypses. The Rakshasa arrive on tiptoe.
A Rakshasa is born from Xavian’s Touch, a slow curse that eats a victim from the inside until the soul finally collapses. When the host breaks, a Rakshasa tears its way out into the world wearing whatever’s left of them. No two Rakshasa are the same — each one inherits a piece of the soul it consumed, and a piece of something older and far worse. Obalu the Ravenous terrorized Ghinor and its woods for fifty straight years, and bringing him down cost the Divine Order twelve hundred soldiers. The survivors say his laugh stuck around longer than his body did.
The Cultists and the Harbingers
Xavian collects the willing too. Cultists of Xavian are scattered cells operating across Tikor in secret, the most infamous being the Symbol of the Ruined in the 1500s. The Harbingers of the Dark are animal species that pledged themselves to him — owls, hyenas, jackals, anansi spiders, bats — usually after some break with the Animal Kingdom that left them feeling like they had nothing left to lose.
Toying with primal Ether forces and deific summoning never makes for a good combination. The Children of Xavian are the reason every priest in every culture says that out loud, every year.