Verse:Mwail/Ròdh Xa̱y

This is a Thean name; the surname is Xa̱y.

(Todo: Classical Thean forms)

Ròdh Xa̱y /ɻoːð̞ˤ˥˧ xaj˩˩/, known by her artist name ???, nicknames ???, and reverentially referred to as Noble Lady Xa̱y (Na̗r Xa̱y /naɻ˩˧ xaj˩˩/) by her worshippers, was an Alliance xenharmonicist composer and entrepreneur. She was deified posthumously and is worshipped by many ethnic Theans to this day.

Life

Xa̱y was born into a technological world much like early 21st-century Earth. She gained wide appeal within the Angaian pre-apocalyptic xenharmonic community for her compositions, approach to xenharmony, and various other accomplishments. Xa̱y was murdered at the age of 30 at the height of the Late Old Thean political turmoil.

Complete or partial printed transcriptions of a number of her pieces survive (that can be attributed to her with some confidence by later historians). However, there are also many pieces that were spuriously attributed to her.

Growth of the Lady Xa̱y cult

Todo: read more of Guan Yu: The Religious Afterlife of a Failed Hero

After Xa̱y's death, climate change caused most of the existing Internet infrastructure to submerge underwater, causing most data online to be lost. Thus historical sources from her lifetime are scant, and most available sources are by her acquaintances relying on their memory (they agree that she was extraordinarily creative and funny). Many of these people apparently had supernatural experiences involving her; she appeared to them as a vengeful ghost.

In the first few centuries after Xa̱y's death, oral tradition played a major role in developing and maintaining folk religious material about Xa̱y. Later embellishments also claim that she excelled in combat when she was alive.

Divine attributes

Lady Xa̱y is a goddess of creativity, wisdom, and craftiness. Her allegedly unjust death led to her being regarded as a deity of retributive violence able to avenge other victims of injustices (according to post-apocalyptic Thean beliefs, such a death in addition to being a great figure during one's lifetime boosts one's spirit's power posthumously). In fact, she is worshipped by both powers that be (such as police and entrepreneurs) and dissidents in Thean society.

In Thean "Buddhism", Lady Xa̱y is a "bodhisattva".

In-universe critical scholarship

The only scholarly consensus about the historical Xa̱y is that a woman named Ròdh Xa̱y existed, that she was a composer and entrepreneur active in the Classical Thean xenharmonic movement, and that she was murdered or executed. Detailed reconstructions of her life and work are under debate. Due to the dearth of sources from her life, a minority of Angaian historians posit that Xa̱y is a purely mythical figure.