Azidos,
Red Swiftrunner
God of forest fires, fire prevention, and gunpowder, patron of military engineers, messengers, and postal networks
One of the youngest of the major gods of the Realmgardian pantheon, Azidos is the son of Akmon and Treza, a result of the marriage alliance that also saw his elder half-sisters Misa and Cora wed gods of the Ennead.
Like his mother, Azidos is a nature deity and like his father, he is associated with fire. He is primarily seen as the god of forest fire specifically — understood as symbolically reflecting the union of Akmon and Treza. Azidos’ domain is the logical result of Akmon’s fires uniting with Treza’s forests. Thus, Azidos is largely viewed, like his mother, as a god of renewal and regeneration. The old growth is cleared to allow the grow of new forests.
Like Pherais, he is universally depicted as a youth. Except in images specifically depicting his infancy or childhood, Azidos is rarely depicted as child, unlike Anassa, who is most commonly depicted as a young girl. The mythological accounts are not always entirely clear on whether Azidos or Anassa is the youngest of the family of the gods, and the matter is often obfuscated by the tendency to depicted Anassa as an eternal child.
To reflect the dangerous nature of forest fires, Azidos is often depicted as a young and reckless odd. Rarely actively or consciously malevolent, Azidos is nevertheless dangerous and there are many stories of the young fire god unwittingly bringing calamity upon both mortals and the other gods.
Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Azidos is also widely venerated as a deity of fire prevention and was in particular viewed as the patron of the buck brigades that were established to fight fires in the ancient Elven capital of Imperialis. Although a dangerous and often heedless figure, Azidos is pointed not seen as a deity of destruction for its own sake and he is known to have a particular contempt for arsonists.
Nevertheless, due to the ancient Elven Imperial armies’ penchant for novel new ways to launch fire attacks on their enemies, Azidos was also venerated as a military patron, particularly of the armies’ alchemists, mages, and engineers who were often tasked with actually carrying out these daring and often dangerous fire attacks. This view has not been completely abandoned with the rise of firearms and gunpowder weaponry, and Azidos has come to be associated with the use of gunpowder.
In the myths, Azidos is closely associated with his elder-half sisters. The emotional fires kindled by Cora are widely viewed as a counterpart to Azidos’ literal fires and there are many parables and fables revolving around the compassionate Misa attempting to moderate her half-brother literal hot temper and rash nature.
Similarly, due to the ancient conception of both the Sun and Moon being composed of fire and thus the two goddess of the Sun and Moon themselves being seen as fire deities, Azidos is well-attested as an on-again-off-again romantic partner of these two goddess, taking solace in the arms of one after being spurned by the other.
Established in the mythology to be fastest god, Azidos also came to be seen as the patron of the Elven Empire’s postal system, which boasted of being able to reach the Imperial settlements and outposts all over the continent as quick as wildfire
Discover the rest of the Encyclopedia Realmgardica here:
Also, be aware of the Tales of the Sea book giveaway I’m involved in:
US Residents only.
And follow along via social media or my email list:
Sign up for my email list here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
