Domains: The oyster-shell blade, the silent kill, clan-feud honor.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion. Cohort: current. Xikraen consolidated as the Xicrein refined the clan-feud killing into a craft whose central object — the oyster-shell blade — became the patron's body.
Worshipped by: The Xicrein, and the clan-feud assassins of the Bynü Island Tribes who carry an oyster-shell blade in the closed sleeve. The patron is invoked once at the blade's making and once again at every use; he is not invoked at any other time. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
He is the patron of the honest kill. The Xicrein doctrine — and the patron's, on the priests' account — is that a clan-feud death must be conducted with the blade and with no other instrument. Deoric magic is excluded as cheating; poison is excluded as cowardice; ambush by numbers is excluded as cheating dressed in cowardice. The oyster-shell blade is the only sanctioned instrument because the blade requires close approach, fine handling, and one cut to the right place. A killer who used the blade and then poisoned the wound afterward to be sure has done something the patron will not forgive in the killer's lifetime. The Xicrein call this the half-rite, and it is grounds for being struck from the feud-record.
He is not the patron of murder generally. The Bynü Tribes contain other lineages whose feuds run on other terms, and Xikraen does not claim those. He is pro-Xicrein-doctrine, not pro-violence. A clan-feud kill outside the doctrine is, from his position, a private act with no theological status; he neither blesses nor punishes it. This is a more discriminating posture than outsiders usually credit. A Drachman scholar visiting the islands once tried to render the patron as "the assassin god" and was politely corrected by every Xicrein she met. He is the god of the blade and of the cut. The killer is the killer's own problem.
The oyster-shell itself comes from a single bed in Bynü waters that the Xicrein keep under permanent watch. Blades are made one at a time, by hand, by smiths who are also priests; a blade carries the smith's name on the haft and the patron's blessing in the temper, and a blade that has taken a life is retired from feud-use thereafter — kept in the clan's record, named in the year-end recitation, never re-issued. A killer outlives the blade. This is the cult's central asymmetry. The patron does not require the killer to outlive the feud, but he does require the blade to be done with its work in one stroke.