Ghyll:Exis of Whunn
Lord Exis of Whunn, born Exis Ehnos in -440 EC, was not the greatest military mind of his time. The greatest military mind of his time was Eixis Anos. Fortunately for Exis, the town of Bute, and every modern day Ghyllian who enjoys celebrating Boxing Day, King Harandraff had a hearing problem. It is generally assumed that he meant to appoint Eixis as head of his army, but it was Exis who was dragged kicking and screaming into the throne room and summarily made a Lord under the king.
We know very little about Exis as a person, but from the few of his journal entries that have survived the intervening years, it is apparent that he was a very unusual child. In his own words, he was prone to running in circles for hours on end as a way of passing time, and he would often claim to see Aelfants in public places, whom he referred to collectively as "Johan". Before he became Lord Exis of Whunn, he was most famous for his habit of walking backwards wherever he went, trusting his unusually thick carapace to protect him when he ran into things. Modern scholars now know that these were most likely the symptoms of a particularly severe and protracted case of retrackets but, at the time, the disease was completely unknown. What the locals thought of Exis' strange behavior, and what they thought of their King after he appointed the man as head of his army, is lost in history.
Of course, Lord Exis is most famous for his construction of the Army of Whunn, the job he was appointed to do by King Harandraff in the first place. The army was supposed to raid the town of Bute as punishment for the publication of King H. is a Ninny and So's His Family Too. Under his own initiative, Lord Exis focused the training of his army on the Fine Art of Censorship, teaching them how to edit any potentially offensive written documents they should come across. The soldiers were given scissors and charcoal for the removal and subsequent destruction of any undesirable text along with their usual weaponry. This special training often was given at the expense of normal training, so when the time came to march upon the town, the army was extremely skilled at editing documents but completely incompetent as an actual army. Finding the town of Bute unconquerable due to the fact that the gates were closed and they couldn't get in, the soldiers proceeded to get extremely drunk and ran about dumping peoples' possessions on the ground. This led to the extremely popular holiday known as Boxing Day.
After the fiasco, King Harandraff revoked Lord Exis's title and exiled him from the kingdom. The severely disappointed and slightly mentally unstable Ex-Lord decided that if he couldn't be a Lord, he'd darn well better be SOMETHING, so he decreed himself an "Exis". From then on, he was referred to as THE Exis of Whunn, usually in sentences such as "Have you heard what that crazy 'The Exis of Whunn' fellow did last week?"
His retrackets had progressed severely by this time, and his few journal entries from his later years caused scholars to believe that in -384 EC, Shepenor (where Exis lived at the time) was periodically invaded by large swarms of flying sour licorice candy until The Great Doorknob drove them off. As more and more of his journal entries were found, it became more and more apparent that Exis was completely off his rocker, and the theory was eventually discarded.
Little is known of how Exis died, but his journal entries are still being recovered - he had a strange habit of tearing them out of his journal and hiding them in unlikely spots, sometimes in fragments. Even today, inhabitants of the Shepenor area will stumble across these fragments. This is the source of the local term to have "found an Exis Paper", which is used to refer to people who say things that seem out of place, or absurd. Besides these fragments, the only physical remnant of Exis that exists today is "The Exis Fish-Tree Farm", a small establishment on the coast of Marty, near Shepenor, that was supposedly originated and run single-handedly by Exis himself until the time of his death. When questioned, the current management refused to provide details.
Citations: Army of Whunn, Retrackets, Whunn.
--Dfaran L'Eniarc 20:58, 15 Jun 2005 (EDT)
