Codex

Ezzaróth

Daemon

Domain: beasts, the hunt, predator-prey; dead cohort (Golden Age); the wild counterpart to Aedorath, outlasting her by a single bad decade.

Type
Daemon

Domains: Beasts, the hunt, predator-prey.

Era of ascension: Golden Age of Man (~155,000 years ago). Cohort: dead. Died: God War & Long Winter (~75,000 years ago), when the Long Winter killed the great herds and the predator cults that depended on them collapsed within a generation of their goddess's wheat-paired sister.

Worshipped by: Golden-Age hunters, beast-keepers, and the frontier polities outside the agricultural heartlands — peoples who took meat by spear or trap rather than by plough. No living culture maintains his worship. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)

There were two honest ways to eat in the Golden Age, and each had its god. Aedorath was the cultivated; Ezzaróth was what crossed the open and was killed for the table. His worship was practical to the point of secularity in the agricultural cities and central in the frontier zones, where his priests kept the kill-counts, blessed the new spears, and pronounced the rules under which a hunter was permitted to take an animal at all. The hunter who took without the rite was not damned — he was simply known to the others as the kind of man who took without the rite.

The Long Winter killed the beasts before it killed the grain. Calving seasons collapsed first, then the migrations stopped arriving, then the great herds of the temperate plains were gone in three winters. Ezzaróth's cult outlived Aedorath's by roughly a decade — long enough for the hunters to grasp that they had outlasted the farmers only because the predators had outlasted the prey, and to recognize, distantly, what that left them as. The last of his priests starved in a cold that no animal moved through.

The decade he outlasted Aedorath bought him nothing at the root. The anchor-vessel rite that seated Ezzaróth depended on Krathokh's priesthood, and as the God War broke those orders his hold attenuated beneath him while the herds were still failing above.

Vaelos is sanctioned war among men, not predation; Aedorath is the cultivated. Ezzaróth is the eat that does not get planted.

The Codex of Alaria