Asuryan

The King

Asuryan was the eldest and the highest of the Aeldari gods — first to wake from the cosmic stillness, first to shape the early universe in his image, and the lord under whom the rest of the Aeldari pantheon orbited. He gave his children the sun, the sky, and the basic patterns of being. His seat was a palace of light at the centre of the Aeldari pantheon's mythic geography, from which he ruled with the kind of distant benevolence that abdicates more than it directs.

When Asuryan looked away, his children fought. He learned, eventually, not to look away as often.

The Quarrel

The central tragedy of the pantheon, in the long mythic narrative, is the quarrel that emerged between Asuryan's children — particularly between Khaine, the god of murder, and Vaul, the smith. Asuryan adjudicated these quarrels with mixed success. By the time his daughter Isha taught humanity the art of language and was punished for it, the pantheon was already breaking under its own contradictions.

Asuryan's authority was a function of his children's consent. When that consent eroded, his throne eroded with it.

I lit the sun. I drew the first morning. I did not draw the last.

— Words attributed to Asuryan

The Fall

When Slaanesh tore free from the Aeldari's decadence in M30, she came for the pantheon first. Asuryan, the eldest and weakest because most diffuse, was the first to be consumed. The Aeldari mythic record describes him as devoured rather than slain — Slaanesh's nature is to absorb, to fold into herself everything that resists her.

Of the major gods only Cegorach the Laughing God escaped intact. Khaine was shattered into fragments embedded in the Craftworlds. The rest, including Asuryan, are simply part of Slaanesh now.

Worship in M42

Modern Craftworld Aeldari still light hearths in Asuryan's name. The Phoenix Lord Asurmen — whose name means "Hand of Asuryan" — is the eldest of the eternal Aspect Warriors and serves as a living echo of the dead god's authority. His Dire Avenger shrines on every Craftworld are temples to a kingship that has not existed for ten thousand years and is still, in some unanswerable way, mourned.

Court of the Pantheon

Asuryan presided over a court of seventeen named Aeldari gods, each holding a defined portfolio: Isha (life and healing), Khaine (war and murder), Vaul (smithcraft), Kurnous (the hunt), Cegorach (mischief and story), Lileath (youth-dreams), Morai-Heg (fate), Ynnead (death, then dormant), and the lesser nine whose portfolios are not preserved in modern Aeldari practice.

Asuryan held the central seat. He did not rule the others, exactly; he arbitrated their disputes, certified their decisions, and held the formal power to call the court into session. The court met annually in the Aeldari mythic calendar's central festival. The court has not met since the Fall. The empty seats are preserved in symbolic form in every surviving Craftworld's central shrine.

The Phoenix and Eldanesh

The founding myth of the Aeldari species places Eldanesh, the first king of the Aeldari, in direct relationship with Asuryan as personal patron. Eldanesh ruled the Aeldari for an unrecorded period and fell in battle against Khaine, who killed him in a quarrel the Aeldari have never decided was Khaine's fault or Eldanesh's.

Asuryan retrieved Eldanesh's body from the field and resurrected him as the Phoenix — a constantly-reborn figure who would, in Aeldari theological prophecy, return at the species' moment of greatest need. The Phoenix has not returned. Aeldari interpretations divide on whether this is because the moment has not arrived, because Asuryan's death disabled the resurrection mechanism, or because the prophecy was always allegorical.

The Eternal Flame

Asuryan, alone of the major Aeldari gods, may not be entirely dead. The Aeldari Craftworld theological archive holds fragmentary records of an "Eternal Flame" — a relic the Aeldari recovered from Asuryan's death-place during the post-Fall scattering — that was sealed into the Black Library and has been maintained ever since by Cegorach's troupes.

The Flame's exact nature is disputed. The theological argument runs: if Asuryan can be partially reconstituted from the Flame's preserved essence, the King of Gods could in principle be returned to the pantheon during whatever final crisis the Aeldari are heading toward. The Black Library guards the Flame. Cegorach knows. Cegorach is not telling.