Loxias

Loxias was an eighteenth-century warlock who seized the wand known as the Elder Wand from Barnabas Deverill, renamed it the Deathstick, and used it against anyone who displeased him. His rise and uncertain end form one episode in the wand’s troubled history: a chain of claims to invincibility repeatedly contradicted by the violence through which its owners acquired and lost it.

Place in the Wand’s History

The available account places Loxias after Barnabas Deverill, who called the wand the Eldrun Wand and used it to establish a reputation as a fearsome warlock. Loxias ended Deverill’s reign of terror, took the wand, and gave it a new name: the Deathstick. Under Loxias, the wand became an instrument of power directed against people who displeased its owner.

The wand’s history before Loxias is itself uncertain. Godelot is believed to have died locked in his cellar by his son Hereward; the account assumes Hereward took his father’s wand, since otherwise Godelot might have escaped, but cannot establish what Hereward did with it afterward. The wand called the Eldrun Wand appeared in Deverill’s possession in the early eighteenth century. This gap leaves Loxias’s acquisition part of a broader sequence whose transitions are not fully documented.

Power and Violence

Loxias’s reputation depends on his use of the wand, but the account does not present his power as secure or lasting. He used the Deathstick to lay waste to anyone who displeased him, extending the pattern of violence associated with its ownership. The wand’s renaming also signals how its legend could be reshaped by its possessor: Deverill called it the Eldrun Wand, while Loxias claimed it as the Deathstick.

The book’s commentary sets such claims of exceptional power against the known fact that the wand passed through many owners and was repeatedly taken from them. Each owner who asserted that it was unbeatable was contradicted by the very history of its transfer. Loxias’s notoriety belongs to that contradiction: possession could make a warlock feared, but it did not make him invulnerable.

Uncertain Fate and Significance

The account cannot trace what happened to the wand after Loxias. Many people claimed to have finished him off, and his own mother was among those named as possible killers; no single version is established as certain. This unresolved ending mirrors the difficulty of reconstructing the wand’s ownership from competing claims.

Loxias’s episode contributes to the wider warning attached to the Elder Wand: the pursuit of power can make its possessor a target and draw trouble in its wake. The wand’s reputation rests on promises of supremacy, while its recorded history shows a succession of owners who were overcome. Loxias is therefore remembered not through a confirmed final defeat, but as one of the notorious figures in a history that undermines the wand’s promise of invincibility.