Djinn

Djinn
Also called	the smokeless; jinn; a great many regional names, all of them older than ours
Class	Other — among those that came before man
Dwells	the natural world, at a distance from human settlement
Feeds on	nothing we can identify; the bargain is not feeding
Approach	negotiation, on terms it will honour exactly
Earliest account	the oldest continuous body of testimony on this wiki, and the only one held by a living tradition
Claimed by	documented across the Islamic world for fourteen centuries; the Elder Cults claim terms with them
Consensus among us Real, common, and the single best-attested class of Other we have. We are not agreed on whether the flesh-price is universal or a regional variant, and the tradition that knows most about them is not one we have access to. inherited contested

Those that came before man. Beings cursed with longevity and an affinity for the dark. Djinn carry a distinct animosity to man and his creations. They live in the natural world and avoid the realm of man. Their talents attract ignorant seekers to beg for boons of power or worse yet, attempt to forcefully harness their potential. inherited

A djinn lies as he breathes. It will sell its kin if it means its own freedom. A Djinn's imperative in its pitiful existence is its freedom. It can create and achieve far more than any man but it has no reason to exert itself. It has no desire for kingdoms nor gold nor women, for it cannot procreate and pass them on to offspring. It lives for pleasure. inherited

The best-attested Other we have

This entry is unusual on this wiki and the reason should be stated plainly: we are not the primary source on djinn and we never have been. firsthand · Gershon

Across the Islamic world they are not folklore, not a cult secret and not an esoteric speciality. They are ordinary, discussed openly, addressed in scripture, argued about by scholars, and treated as a routine fact of the world by very large numbers of people who have never heard of The Dark and would not recognise anything else on this wiki. There is fourteen centuries of continuous, literate, internally critical testimony about a class of Other, and it is not ours. unverified

The reading commonly given is that they were created before man, from a different substance, and that man was afterwards placed above them — which is the replacement grievance stated by a living tradition rather than reconstructed by us from a repeated phrase. Interpretations differ, sometimes sharply, and we are not equipped to arbitrate between them. inherited

Two consequences for anyone reading here:

• The djinn entry is the one place where this wiki's normal posture is wrong. Everywhere else we are assembling scraps against silence. Here there is a vast literature and we have read almost none of it. firsthand · Gershon

• Where our account and that tradition disagree, the prior should be against us. We are a few dozen people with a decade of board archives. They have fourteen centuries and a habit of writing things down.

The wish, and what it costs

The bargain is the part every seeker has heard and almost none has understood. ⚠ warning

A djinn can grant what is asked. This is the first thing to take seriously and the thing seekers dismiss: it is not a trick and the wish is not twisted. The djinn fulfils the request, accurately, often generously, and by every account it honours the letter and frequently the spirit. It has no reason to cheat and considerable reason not to — a reputation for honouring terms is the whole of its leverage. contested

The price is taken afterwards, and the price is the flesh. unverified

Not the soul, not obedience, not service. The body itself, taken as the djinn's own to walk the earth in — which reads as horror until it is read against the grievance, at which point it stops being cruelty and becomes the entire point. A being that can only reach the material world through a human has, in a single transaction, obtained a human to reach it with. The wish is not the trap. The wish is the fee the djinn pays for a body, and it pays honestly because it wants the arrangement to be available again. contested

What walks away afterwards is not the man. It is under no obligation to behave as he did, it has his face and his history and his voice, and the accounts differ on whether anything of him remains inside it to know what happened. contested

Competing accounts

unsigned— board archive, attributed to a translation of a much older text inherited

The price is not always the flesh. It is always the thing that the man would not have offered had it been named at the outset, and for most men that is the body. For some it has been the child, or the name, or the years. The flesh is the common case and not the rule.

Against it: A translation of a text nobody here has seen, arriving in a form conveniently more general than the specific claim it replaces.

unsigned— correspondence, forwarded defector

I grew up with this. What your wiki is describing as a bargain is understood at home as a category of encounter that mostly ends in nothing at all. The overwhelming majority of them want nothing to do with people. You have taken the rarest and worst outcome and written the entry around it, which is what outsiders always do with us.

Against it: We record this as a correction to the entry and not as a competing account, because we think it is probably right and we have not restructured the page accordingly.

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The existing entry, inherited from an unnamed hand. Board archive. One forwarded correspondence. A tradition of fourteen centuries that we have read at second hand and in translation, if at all.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: We are summarising a living religious tradition from outside, badly, and the second account above says so more sharply than we would have. The flesh-price reading is ours and is satisfying enough to be suspect. Every generalisation on this page is drawn from the worst-case encounters, because those are the ones people write down.

Wanted: Anyone who can read the primary material. Any account of an encounter that ended in nothing, which by the correction above should be the overwhelming majority and of which we hold not one.