Join the Flames

It's been a while, and Canon plus Word of God has revealed some new details. It's time I update this journal with new lies about Amascut.

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Powers and Immortality

Amascut is most definitely a goddess. What this means is not exactly known, though. Gods, according to canon, are immortal, yet they can be killed using one of the Elder Artifacts, tools used by the Elder Gods to create and shape the multiverse. The local neighborhood of the universes, anyhow. Amascut and her brother Icthlarin are unique among the Young Gods, however, as they did not attain godhood by killing another god or by prolonged exposure to the power of the Elder Artifacts. The twin aspects of death were born gods (if the canon if the Kharidian religion is reliable). Their adopted siblings, Het, Crondis, Apmeken, and Scabaras are also unique, as they were granted godhood by their and Amascut's father Tumeken. But, it probably doesn't effect their immortality or lack of it. Even then, death via an Elder Artifact is not a sure thing, as at least one god has escaped such a death by giving up his physical form and going incorporeal.

Still, I have written Amascut as possesing a human body that is not extraordinarily invulnerable, at least not anymore invulnerable than a human. But, since she is/once was a goddess of rebirth she has divine regenerative abilities. She has so far come back from an atomic explosion at close range and self-immolation using her own very destructive powers. So what are her godly domains? It used to be Death, Physical Rebirth, guiding the body into the afterlife, and bringing death through life where her brother's were Death, Spiritual Rebirth, guiding the soul into the afterlife, and bringing life through death. Amascut has renounced her role as Goddess of Rebirth, through, and is now goddess of Death, Destruction, and Slaying/Exterminating.

In relation to the other gods in her canon, Amascut and Icthlarin, godly children of the gods, lie on the second lowest power tier, above the tier where godly creations of the gods, such as Het, Crondis, Apmeken, and Scabaras or Avatars of the gods rest. Where this puts Amascut in relation to other gods and anthropomorphic representations at milliways_bar is unknown, of course.

Being at such a low power tier still means she can wield immense power, which has mostly manifested itself as fire based magic, intense searing columns of light from the sky, and mind control/body control/memory alteration psychic-like powers. It's odd that stories about the actual god of power and control never say he wielded such powers.

Appearance

Amascut has been described on separate occasions as handsome and statuesque. Amascut is most likely vain about her appearance as she has never disguised as someone not young and not beautiful. She is around 5'11" tall with a very athletic build. However, there are some jarring details to her appearance that can be noticed from afar but are less noticeable from up close due to some perception/attention alteration hoodoo she has got going on at close ranges. She is dark skinned, and how dark can depend on her disguise, but has red hair. She has red irises which usually go unnoticed (and unmentioned by me) because of the perception/attention alteration hoodoo usually effects all the people close enough to see the color of her eyes anyhow.

She usually wears dresses, and they tend to be of the ankle length, free flowing and light type. She also prefers sandals but because of the Milliways clime, she keeps boots in her room upstairs for the colder months. She also keeps (and sells) boots at home, but those are for different purposes.

As for her smell... she may have a slight odor of a dead cat about her which she tries to hide. Aura wise, she is a divine being connected to death, but she tries to tone that down to a nondescript feeling of unnatural power for those sensitive to auras and such.

LIES

Amascut introduces herself as Sarah Black in milliways_bar (if she ever gets around to it), an odds and ends merchant who teaches various arts of combat on the side. It might be harder to get her to admit that some of those odds and ends are weapons and ammunition. Well, most.

As for the goddess Amascut herself, she is supposed to be cursed. No one is supposed to be able to remember her name, although priests that tend to the worshipers of the Menaphite Pantheon seem to have no problem remembering her name. Neither does anyone important to plot. Names, memories, and attention are power for the gods, and its easy to see why Amascut's ex-followers would want to curse her so that the world would not remember her name. Yet, something must be perpetuating the myth that the curse stuck.

Amascut is not above erasing other people's memories, especially memories about herself. She is perpetuating the myth about the curse on her name by using memories of her name as inroads to other people's minds and devouring memories as she sees fit.

Another aspect of the curses upon her is that she is not supposed to be able to posses a body for any useful length of time. Neite, her ex-High Priestess, assures the player that Amascut will be forced out of her current body any day now. Or any year now. The curse worked, and it still works, Amascut didn't break it. However, if Amascut is pressed for information on the curses, she will say that she is trapped in her present body by the curse. It is a more believable lie.

So in Runescape canon, Amascut and Icthlarin are young gods. Not the youngest, but still, young. Working from their established mythologies, they are maybe 8,000 years old. They may be much older than that, existing as divine beasts native to the world or Colossi for millennia before being "lifted" by Tumeken, a god from another world and commonly viewed as their father, which is from where my 8,000 year guess comes.

Funny thing that I realized today – 12,000 years is about half of a certain Milankovitch cycle here on Earth, specifically the cycle of axial precession. 12,000 years ago, the Sahara was a green savanna which experienced torrential seasonal rains. By that time, humans were living in the area, living near sources of water that flooded every year and hunting abundant game. They developed complex cultures and learned to work with the seasonal floods, but as the African Humid Period ended around 6,000 to 5,000 years ago, those cultures had to shift from from hunter-gather cultures to pastoral cultures. As the Garden of Eden faded away, the memory of those seasonal floods served those humans that retreated to the now less swampy Nile well, as the Nile continued to flood, year after year, though in a greatly diminished manner.

I wonder if the story writers for Runescape had this in mind when coming up with the lore for the game. Much of it was developed in a piecemeal fashion, quest by quest. The overall skeleton may have been established in at least this much detail by Paul Gower decades ago, however. I used to think that the lore timeline was absurdly long. But in light of this, the timeline of the desertification of the Kharid fits almost too well with timeline of the desertification of North Africa. I also used to think it was too short of a timeline for non-anthropic climate change, but nope.

Hell, we are seeing so much climate change happening now, in the span of our relatively short lifetimes.

It's something to keep in mind when writing a character as old as even a few millennia. Or even as young as a few millennia – That timespan could be a significant portion of a planet's axial precession period. It's not long enough for the continents to drift but it is long enough for climates to shift. And long enough to watch culture adapt in response.

Wild to think how much the African Humid Period affected us as a species. The glacial period just before it was another very dry period for north Africa, which was a great impassible desert. Almost like the Sahara's ancestor.

So, few pieces of lore pertaining to Amascut from the new quest:

Amascut and Icthlarin stood at the Gates of the Underworld on the far side of the river that divides the Realm of the Dead, Noumenon. Icthlarin would shepherd all souls through the Underworld and to the Afterlife, but to the worthy Amascut would offer reincarnation as an alternative. It is Death's responsibility to take souls to the bridge over the Noumenon, and it was up to Icthlarin and Amascut to decide what to do after the soul crossed the bridge.

As it currently stands, only Icthlarin waits at the gate. Amascut has populated the Underworld with devourer beasts that consume wayward souls, so now it seems the gates function to keep the beasts in the Underworld and out of the rest of the Realm of the Dead. The Afterlife still lies beyond the Gates and the beast-filled Underworld, so Icthlarin's job of shepherding souls across the Underworld is still important but much more perilous.

Icthlarin still hopes that Amascut can be redeemed.

Speculation: This could entangle Amascut in the respawn game mechanic and the importance of the player character. The mention of the devourer beasts might legitimize the Spirit Beast/Corporeal Beast as one of Amascut's pets as well. There was a lot of speculation in the weeks before the Spirit of Summer quest update that Amascut was the Devourer draining away the ghosts in the wilderness.

wait, I knew about daemonmuses already? It was in my autocomplete.

Anyhow, in case I want to stick Amascut into daemonmuses, her daemon is a male spotted hyena named Yandu. from Hausa Daemonology, a demon notorious for causing paralysis, most times a black hyena (a genus to which superstition grants the ability to mute dogs anyhow), but sometimes a legendary blacksmith who killed his enemies by cracking open their skulls and who crafted the kankara (thunderstones). Can be appeased by the sacrifice of a bird of a specific color and gender, according to the demon's whimsy.

That being said, here's some potential backstory that bubbled up in crackchat:
an amusing thought re:settling. Amascut's daemon spent so much time as a lion when Amascut was young that everyone was sure he would settle that way, but, nope, hyena.

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Sooo, I was googling random stuff... well, not random stuff, just a phrase that popped into my head... and it lead me to a very interesting article on Kali that just totally resonated with some ideas I had for Amascut's future-plot/past-plot

Anyway, the article mentioned the Romani patron saint, Saint Sarah, or Sara-la-kali. In one story, she was the dark skinned Egyptian (the Roma, or Gypsies, were once thought to be originally Egyptians) maid of one of the Three Marys. The Three Marys and their companions were refugees from Judea who made the trip to Gaul during the first century AD on a boat without sails, oars, or rudders and included Mary Magdalene and Martha, sisters of Lazarus, Lazarus himself (Yes, the same Lazarus that was lamented and resurrected by Jesus), Mary Salome, mother of James and John, Mary Jacobe, or Mary of Clopas, and Maximinus, one of the 72 given power over demons by Jesus, often conflated with various later saints of the name Maximin. Another story states that Sara-la-kali was the chief of the the Rom tribe living at the mouth of the Rhône. The Rom at the time had the tradition of carrying a statue of Ishtari or Astarte to the sea to receive the goddess' blessing. One day before one of these benedictions, Sara received a vision informing her of the arrival of "Saints who had been present at the death of Jesus" and that she should rescue them from their distress. Sara was there when the Three Marys and their companions arrived and rescued them on a raft constructed from a cloak of Mary Salome's which had been thrown overboard and floated onto the beach.

Another version, popularized by recent novels, especially The Da Vinci Code, claims that Sarah is the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Interesting.

Anyhow, the 'Kali' in the name 'Sara-la-kali' is something more than coincidence. The Rom/Roma/Romani have had their origins sorta pinned down to the Indian Subcontinent were Sara/Kali/Durga worship was common and practiced in much the same way described in versions of the story of Saint Sarah as Ishtar/Astarte worship. In fact, ceremonies performed at shrines to Saint Sarah in France are very similar as well. Sara-la-kali could be interpreted as Sara the Black, in reference to her dark skin. Kali is derived from Kāla apparently, a Sanskrit word associated with black, time, and death. Kali is sometimes known as "the black one", and is seen as an aspect of/conflated with/confused with Durga who is at times depicted with a black face.

Now for a whole mess of connections to Amascut as she's depicted in canon, fanfiction, and by me in Milliway's bar. Amascut is a goddess of destruction and death in a mythology that vaguely represents Egyptian mythology. Her closest analogue in Egyptian mythology is Ammit, although Ammit doesn't take an active role in destroying the world as Amascut did in her last days as a goddess. The god/demon Ammit just destroys the souls deemed unworthy of going on to the afterlife by Anubis/Inpu (who is a very close analogue to Amascut's brother, Icthlarin. Both are jackal headed and gods of the dead and the afterlife) after weighing the heart against the feather of Ma'at. Ammit does this in some traditions by devouring the hearts and souls of the unworthy. The most popular name for Amascut in game is The Devourer, presumably because she does something similar to the dead if she can get to them before Icthlarin does. The connection between Amascut, Ammit, and the Sara/Kali/Durga entity here is only that they are all goddesses of destruction.

Amascut is depicted in places as a woman with a lioness' head. Ammit herself is sometimes depicted as having a lion's mane. Ishtar/Inanna/Astarte (goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex), mentioned above in the stories of Saint Sarah, was also depicted as a woman with a lioness' head. Now, those wanting to keep the analogies between the game's Menaphite pantheon and real world mythologies pointing at the Egyptian pantheon point to depictions of Sekhmet (A warrior goddess, Avenger of Wrongs, Lady of Slaughter, Bringer of Plagues) and Bast (also a warrior goddess, goddess of protection, ointments, and cats) and say Amascut was like Bast before she went mad, and like Sekhmet after, almost succeeding in destroying the world as Sekhmet almost did.

Funny thing about Ishtar/Inanna/Astarte, she has stories that are very similar to some of those of Demeter/Kore and Aphrodite. Ishtar once descended into the underworld and was imprisoned there, causing everything to become unfertile and all sexual activity to stop. Kore, Demeter, and the explanation for winter anyone? The difference, though, was that Ishtar forced her way into the underworld by threatening:

If thou openest not the gate to let me enter,
I will break the door, I will wrench the lock,
I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors.
I will bring up the dead to eat the living.
And the dead will outnumber the living.

which the fanfic Age of Zaros has Amascut do in her attempt to destroy the Empire of the Empty God, Zaros. Incidentally, Durga of Hindu mythology creates a similarly massive army to defeat Mahishasura and his army. In Aphodite's case, Ishtar is a goddess of love and sex, but had a series of disasterous relatonships, one of which eventually turned into the story of Aphrodite and Adonis. Ishtar is also a prostitute, a route I was thinking of sending Amascut down. Now if only I could find out who operates the Milliway's brothel. X-23 only seems to be a bookkeeper and bouncer of sorts.

Before this derails further into more discussions of parallels between and mixing of the polytheistic religions (and even monotheistic religions) of the Indian subcontininent, Persia, the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea (Heck, I can even involve the Norse with this with an Asura/Ahura/Æsir connection, among others), I'll stop right here. The rise and fall of empires and the movement of people like the Roma across these particular lands makes such discussion deep, involved, and at times confusing.

Onto pseudonyms for Amascut. Well, Amascut itself is interesting. In fact, the name for the Menaphite deities seem Latinized or Hellenized, much like the way some Egyptian deities had their name Hellenized. The Runescape wiki points out that Amascut carries the meaning "to gather, hoard, enlarge" in Latin. Perhaps this is an allusion to Amascut gathering souls and devouring them? Anyway, because the Sara-la-kali story, I think Sarah would make an awesome pseudonym filled with just the type of deep and not so obvious symbolism I love using. It has an awesome connection with everything I have mentioned up above. Plus, Sarah is a pretty meek name, despite its historical significance. Tis a perfect cover.

I know there is a Kali coming into the bar. I know her app was accepted or something. (Batya, when is forewarned_is gonna walk into the bar?) I know I shouldn't use that one, nor Ammit nor Sekhmet nor Ishtar nor Durga. That is just pushing Amascut's knowledge of a foreign universe which I already decided she knows nothing about too far. But Sarah and Sara is commonly used in her world, I am sure (in fact, Sarah was the name of the first herblorist and medicine maker in her world).

In a thread with Naruto, Amascut was given the psuedonym Red or Aka, perhaps short for Akane. Akane translates into 'red root', or Rubia cordifloria, the madder plant. The meanings of Akane, red, and madder have been confused/played with for comedic effect in animes before, so why not use it as a possible pseudonym? Besides, why not play to the anime trope of the dark skinned red haired woman? It fits Amascut somewhat.