Xonthar, Herald of Osoyo

Xonthar is Osoyo’s herald, and the distinction between the two is essential to understanding how a being imprisoned beneath miles of polar ice continues to exert influence across an entire world. Osoyo is vast. Osoyo is alien. Osoyo exists partially outside three-dimensional space and perceives reality in ways that have nothing in common with mortal cognition. It cannot, in any meaningful sense, talk to a human being. It cannot comprehend the difference between one mortal and another, between a decade and an afternoon, between a city and a forest. These distinctions are beneath its notice in the same way that individual bacteria are beneath ours. Xonthar bridges that gap.

Those who have glimpsed Xonthar describe a figure that is vaguely humanoid in the way a praying mantis is vaguely humanoid: the shape is there, but the intent behind it is entirely wrong. The body is gaunt and fibrous, wrapped in what appears to be desiccated sinew or bark, as though something once living had been dried and stretched over a frame not built for flesh. Its face is a skull-like ruin dominated by five luminous green eyes that burn with a cold, calculating awareness. From the crown of its head, dark tentacular appendages writhe upward like smoke given solidity.

Its torso is draped in hundreds of coins, tokens, and carved medallions, layered so thickly they form a kind of armor, each one presumably a relic or trophy from a civilization Xonthar helped guide toward ruin. In one clawed hand it grips the staff through which it translates its sign language into speech; the staff’s head blazes with sickly green-gold light, and around it orbit arcane sigils and geometric patterns that hang in the air like afterimages burned into reality. With its other hand often it has been seen as if it is offering something. Survivors universally report that the offer felt genuine. They also universally report wishing they had never seen what was being offered.

What Xonthar is remains a matter of considerable scholarly dispute. The creature communicates through sign language, translated by that staff, which suggests a physicality at odds with most heralds of cosmic beings. It has been encountered in dreamscapes, in the spaces between the Dreamlands and Leng, and in the peripheral visions of those who have handled Black Sand.

Gregor Pendergrast, who summoned Xonthar into his own dreamscape through the first Gate of Slumber to be his tutor, recorded its instructions with the faithfulness of a student who did not realize he was taking dictation for his own destruction. It was Xonthar who directed Gregor to seek Osoyo…

“In the realm of his confinement, not where the elves have bound it,”

A distinction between the physical prison at the Crown of the World and the dream-prison in which the Leviathan also dwells.

It was Xonthar who instructed Dr. Ritaslin in the uses of Black Sand and suggested infusing black dust into ink to create formulas that could twist reality itself. And who visited Gregor during the night of his failed ball he was throwing to introduce his latest musical compositions with warnings veiled as prophecy:

“The Leviathan stirs, and your fate like the tides shall be drawn inexorably into its maw.”

What emerges from the surviving records is a portrait of patience measured in civilizations. Xonthar does not hurry. It does not threaten, or at least not in ways most would recognize as threats until far too late. It offers knowledge. It suggests experiments. It provides just enough guidance to keep its chosen instruments moving in the correct direction while allowing them to believe the ideas are their own.

Gregor thought himself a genius pursuing forbidden melodies. Ritalsin believed he was conducting groundbreaking research. Neither understood that they were components in a mechanism whose blueprint predates their species.

The herald’s influence can be traced through the centuries in fragmentary accounts, always at the periphery, always working through intermediaries. It appears to those who have already been touched by Osoyo’s influence, whether through blackfrost exposure, proximity to damaged gates, or the psychic residue left by the Gatewalker event. It cultivates, it guides, it waits. And when its servants inevitably break under the weight of what they have been asked to carry, as Gregor broke, as Ritalsin broke, Xonthar simply moves to the next.

There is, however, an aspect of Xonthar’s activities that resists easy explanation. Not all of its machinations point clearly toward Osoyo’s liberation. Certain of its recorded actions seem to serve no purpose that any mortal scholar has been able to identify, patterns within patterns whose logic operates on a scale or according to principles that our understanding of causality simply cannot accommodate.

Whether these represent preparations for contingencies we cannot foresee, service to imperatives that have nothing to do with the Leviathan’s freedom, or simply the incomprehensible behavior of a consciousness that is itself only partially present in our reality, I cannot say. I note it here because honesty demands it, and because the temptation to reduce Xonthar to a comprehensible villain with comprehensible motives is precisely the kind of comfortable simplification that gets scholars killed.