Ajqyod

In the religious tradition of the Eleven Cities, Ajqyod was the god of fire and the sun, and by extension a personification of human cultural achievement and activity. He was one of the central figures in the religion, worshipped in all major cities, but was evidently less popular in rural areas.
Despite his apparent cultural importance the cult of Ajqyod died out swiftly during the Wesmodian Reformation. Most of this dissolution appears to have been peaceful, though there were notable instances of violence and destruction in the city of Loros and in some of Ajqyod's rural cult centres. After the Reformation some of his clerics combined with those of Zargyod to form the Commercial Guilds that operate throughout the Cities, while some of his cult centres also became hotbeds of thaumatological research.

Etymology

The name Ajqyod fairly straightforwardly means "Son of the sun" in Old Zolian - Aj meaning sun and qod meaning son, modified with the y infix after the first consonant shifting the second syllable into the genitive case. The name refers to the myth of Ajqyod being born from the sweat of the primordial sun.

Origins

The most famous theory for the origins of Ajqyod lie in the Empty Quarter to the north-east of most of the Cities. This region, close to the equator, is noted by the people of the Cities for its pitiless sun, lack of water, scorching westerly winds, and infertility. They seldom cross it, since trade with Oluz and Hulumay can be accomplished just as easily (and more comfortably) via the Sea of Jars.
There are also stories of forgotten cities with populations of the living dead in the Quarter - stories that well-informed thaumatologists, both in the Cities and outside them, know better than to dismiss out of hand. The climate and topography of the Quarter are not natural phenomena. The Quarter was, some 4,000 years before the foundation of the oldest Cities (and thus some 6,000 years before the present day) a major battleground in the wars of the Shroud Kings, and the inhospitality of the region appears to be a long-term result of their violence. Those sufficiently bold to study what records of the Shroud Kings have survived may be familiar with the Ix'tanguliit and his "Dance to Make the Sun Weep." One of Ix'tanguliit's temple-cities was located in what is now the Empty Quarter, and there may well be information - probably in artistic rather than written form - on this ritual in the ruins of this complex. It is widely speculated that one of the early merchant caravans to or from the northeastern-most Cities lost their way, stumbled across the city, and emerged from the desert telling tales of images of a weeping personified sun. For this being to then be conflated with another born from the sweat of the sun as Ajqyod is traditionally held to have been would be a simple step. The worship of Ajqyod may therefore have links with the magic of the Shroud Kings.
The theory has problems, however. It requires a long chain of cause and effect - that people were travelling the Empty Quarter, sufficiently poorly prepared to become lost, at precisely the right spot to stumble upon a ruin that dedicated thaumatologists have been unable to authoritatively locate, then located (by chance) information only speculated to be there, that being ignorant of Ug'holcza'a they were able to absorb that information from purely pictorial evidence and that having done so - perhaps most unlikely of all - they not only retained their sanity, but shared this information with the wider world when they managed to find their way back to a living civilisation. Circumspect researchers into the magic of the Shroud Kings note that few people with that sort of knowledge would be predisposed to do so. The idea is therefore not widely accepted by orthodox thaumatologists. Some of those ambitious enough to research the Shroud Kings have reported success in incorporating aspect of Ajqyod's liturgy - including his ritual dances - into their experiments, though the secrecy usually surrounding such pursuits does not further the credibility of such claims.
The general drift of scholarly opinion retains the same general, less glamorous notion - that Ajqyod emerged as some sort of "hot" counterpart of Dahan - without dragging the dramatic effect of the Shroud Kings into proceedings. The cereal crops grown in the agricultural lands to the west of the Sea of Jars, where worship of Dahan was most entrenched, grow over the humid summers, requiring high soil temperatures to germinate, and the notion of both the sun and the rain being necessary for fertility - and therefore human prosperity - would easily lead to the emergence of two linked agricultural deities. It has been noted, for example, that in rural regions where Ajqyod was worshipped he was frequently referred to as Dahan's younger brother, and is even portrayed in some mummery, down to the present day. The notion of two gods associated with meteorological conditions - one of coolness and the other of heat - may well have made sense. Since the rain must come before the sun to ensure this fertility, the notion that the sun god would come after the rain god - and therefore be reckoned his younger brother. Thereafter, it might be supposed, he was more extensively adopted in urban areas where the apparent grandeur of the sun, the urban focus on human activities other than agriculture, and an emerging ignorance as to exactly how cereal crops are grown would make him a more popular god than one of rain and soil. There are even a small handful of mummeries in which Ajqyod is referred to as Dahan's son, though these plays are poorly-attested and require more research before this particular matter can be settled at all. Proponents of the "Empty Quarter theory" are quick to point this out, observing that ritual dances to Ajqyod are far better-attested and may constitute a link to the Dance to Make the Sun Weep. That argument is of course highly circumstantial and has been widely challenged. Beyond the observation that Ajqyod likely emerged as a function or functionary of Dahan, the issue of where this god came from remains controversial.

Divine portfolio

Ajqyod was in the first instance the god of the sun. This made him the god of fire and by extension the accomplishments of human civilisation that are contingent upon the knowledge of fire-making. He was, alongside Zargyod, one of the two patrons of smiths; he is also attested as having been venerated by bakers and cooks (professions the Eleven Cities appear to have regarded as wholly distinct). The duirinal cycle of dawn and sunset carried connotations of birth, death and rebirth, meaning that his cult likely overlapped somewhat with those of Hayan and Krezzan .
His control of fire also makes him a household god, associated with the hearth and with parenthood, particularly in colder cities. It is in that capacity that he enjoyed most of the following he had in most rural communities.

Worship

Temples to Ajqyod existed in nine of the Eleven Cities, the exceptions being Oluz and Hulumay on the eastern side of the Empty Quarter. All but two of these temples were dismantled following the Wesmodian Reformation, however. The two exceptions were those in Pholyos and Chogyos, which were retained due to their practical secular purpose as venues of governmental debate - functions that hint at the social significance of the cult of the god in the pre-Wesmod era. From study of these two buildings, and historical sources, it is possible to build up a substantial, but incomplete, image of Ajqyodian liturgy.
These temples existed primarily as venues for ritual dances performed on the solstices and equinoxes of each year, days of obvious significance for the veneration of the sun. Stone bas-reliefs on the temple at Pholyos depict these dances in action, making it clear that they were performances intended to be viewed by the city as a whole. The dancers - groups of young people in robes and what appear to be extensive jewellery - appear to have issued from the temple in single file and then formed up into a precise circular formation for the duration of the performance, which seems to have lasted some considerable time, involved extensive arm movements, and been regarded as a dignified and cerebral pursuit requiring mental as much as physical discipline. Nickel and brass statuettes of robed, jewelled dancers, mostly seeming to be manufactured in Chogyos, have been found in other cities, suggesting these dances took place in communities beyond those in which they are pictorially attested. The exact steps and measures of these dances, however, are not recorded; thaumatologists with an interest in pyromancy have had to invest considerable effort and guesswork in reconstructing them.
There is also discussion in ancient sources of sacred fires being kindled or maintained in several of the ancient temples of Ajqyod, though the exact aspect of this rite appears to vary from place to place. In Loros and Dypholyos this was accomplished by means of a system of lamps and censers kept fed with sacred plant oils blessed by priests; any fire kindled from such oils, it was believed, would be considered sacred to the god. The reliance on vegetable oils is cited as further evidence of a long-standing implicit link between the cults of Ajqyod and Dahan. How this blessing was undertaken is unclear, but it may have been accomplished by means of the ritual dances. The amount of sacred oil available at any given time would therefore have been limited to the amount of oil the cities could acquire at the time the dances were performed. In Tyros, by contrast, sacred fires could be kindled, at only a few hour's notice, almost year-round via an elaborate system of sacred brass mirrors that could be arranged, amid much ritualism, to concentrate the heat of the sun onto kindling. There are several mythological instances, backed up with some less well-attested historical evidence, of fires kindled from such oils "answering the calls" of masters and mistresses favoured by Ajqyod, building and ebbing as they dictated and burning without fuel; study of and experiments with such instances are common among thaumatologists.
Another interesting aspect of the worship of Ajqyod is his liturgical link with bulls. The sacrifice of bulls was a feature of the worship of the god in Dypholyos, Dyqamay, Adymalon and Tyros. These sacrifices were provided by private citizens, and in Dyqamay and Adymalon the chosen animals are said to have been brushed with red ochre for a parade to the temple to have their throats cut by the priests. Artistic depictions from these cities show these parades being significant public events involving trails of liveried dancers, musicians and torch-bearers, many of them children. The torch-bearers might be taken as evidence that these events took place at night, though this is speculation. Indeed little is known for certain about these rituals; where these processions departed from, what they were intended to achieve and what was done with the dead animals is not clear. The blood sacrifice has been used to back up the "Empty Quarter Theory" about the origins of Ajqyod, though this seems faintly desperate; more likely the economic value of bulls rendered them prestigious and potent sacrifices to the god. This raises the possibility that other animals were sacrificed as well, but that bulls were the only subjects deemed worth recording. It might also serve as some sort of link to the cult of Pergyad another god whose worship involved the ritualistic killing of economically significant animals. Like Dahan Pergyad was a predominantly rural god, and this parallel may bespeak ultimately rural origins for Ajqyod.
Ajqyod also had a major cult centre on the slopes of Mount Ruaj, an understandable location for such an institution given its capacity as an active volcano. A temple existed there which contained a brass statue of Ajqyod - one of only a handful of visual depictions of the god himself - that is said to have stood four metres high. The priests of the temple venerated the volcano's crater lake - another interesting sacerdotal link with fluid - and controlled access to the geothermal ponds located around the mountain by means of an order of soldiers who wore brass armour (examples of this armour have survived and are sought-after thaumatological artefacts). This particular temple suffered a wildly uneven reputation during the several centuries it existed, being respected and even revered by some commentators but equally reviled by others for the perceived superciliousness of its priests and their (alleged) susceptibility to corruption. Modern commentators have observed that periods where the Ruaj cult were viewed negatively appear to have closely coincided with periods when the sanctuary was presided over by female clerics. This point may simply indicate a degree of misogyny among contemporary commentators rather than genuine commentary on the institution, though it serves to demonstrate that, at this location at least, the priesthood was gender-integrated. How usual this was within the broader cult is unclear; the handful of references to other individual clerics of Ajqyod from the pre-Wesmodian era suggests a large majority of them were male.

Wesmodian Reformation

Ajqyod is the subject of the fourth of the Wesmodian Invectives, which happens to be one of the most rhetorically elegant. Wesmod begins with a succinct but incisive discussion of the social value and worth of fire, noting that almost nothing humans do could be done without it. He observes its centrality to cooking and metal-working, activities unique to humanity and necessary preconditions to other human accomplishments. The first few paragraphs of the essay could in fact serve as an explanation as to why a god of fire ended up becoming such an important deity to a settled, urbanised community.
From this starting point, however, Wesmod goes on to observe that fire is something humans make and, except in cases of neglect or incompetence, something they control. If the power of a god can be nullified with a blanket or a pannikin of water, he reasons, the god surely cannot be reckoned as especially powerful. He queries how humans first harnessed fire, explicitly rejecting the notion that it was a gift from Ajqyod, one of the few occasions he engages with specific points of mythopoeia. He argues that while it makes sense that such a potent tool might be attributed with numinous significance, doing so damagingly undersells the human initiative and ingenuity involved in learning how to create and utilise fire. Humans, Wesmod argues, really ought not to undervalue their own contributions to their happiness and progress by turning that tool into a sign of indebtedness to any outside power.
Rapidly disseminated, partly by the offices of the cult of Zargyod, these ideas appear to have rapidly acquired a degree of currency, probably because they flattered the educated professionals - metalworkers and cooks - most likely to have revered Ajqyod. The resulting withdrawal of support for the god is hard to precisely judge, though it is worth noting that the temple of Ajqyod in Pholyos was unable to attract enough volunteers to perform its ritual winter solstice dance the year following the publication of Wesmod's essays, suggesting a serious disengagement from the ritual aspects of the cult. The attitudes of the priests themselves appear to have been divided. Priests are people like any other, and many evidently saw the merit of Wesmod's arguments or, at least were resigned to their influence. There is, for example, no evidence that the priests of the temple in Pholyos responded to the lack of public interest in their rituals with any particular vitriol or rhetorical counter-attack.
Matters were otherwise in Loros, however, where the priests of Ajqyod appear to have launched some sort of malediction against the populace for abandoning their god. Results were unfortunate for all concerned, but give rise to rich speculation and experimentation for thaumatologists. For three nights, according to chroniclers, nobody in Loros could kindle a fire, the priests having somehow withdrawn that privilege from the populace. Taken at face value this would seem to wholly discredit Wesmod's objections to the cult of Ajqyod by demonstrating that the god's clerics had some especial power over the creation of fire. Thaumatologists are divided on whether this is possible, though yea-sayers observe it as a central justification for the study of pyromancy as a thaumatological sub-discipline. Whatever the case, it is clear that an angry mob descended on the temple of Ajqyod in Loros at dusk on the fourth night, demanding the return of fire. The priests responded by throwing fire at the mob, either in the form of pots of burning oil or (as believers are keen to suggest) some sort of pyrotechnic projection, lighting the clothes of many. In the resulting conclusion the fires spread to nearby emporia, and within an hour a substantial proportion of Loros was burning. It took three more days, the story goes, to extinguish the fires. One of the buildings consumed in the conflagration was the temple itself, and among the many people killed were most of the priests, who seem to have chosen to die in their temple with their god rather than seek safety. This is far and away the most dramatic incident of the Reformation, and almost the only historically verifiable example of the Reformation being the matter of angry mobs and fiery public unrest that uneducated people tend to imagine it being. Human consequences of the event outran the considerable loss of life caused by the fires. Loros never wholly recovered as a commercial centre and, while still a substantial community, is looked upon in cities like Tyros and Pholyos as something of a backwater.

Current status of cult

In cities other than Loros, priests of Ajqyod appear to have liaised closely with those of Zargyod when the latter cult was in the process of reinventing itself as the organising force of the Commercial Guids that began to operate in the cities after the Reformation. It is widely believed that their influence led to the prominence, wealth and power of the meal-working and chemist's guilds within the broader organisation. Their skill at kindling fires, reputed to be of preternatural heat and brightness, is speculated by outsiders to be the root cause of the metal-worker's ability to produce unique and powerful alloys from which the guilds profit so highly. Such skills, after all, are not attributed to the cult of Zargyod, whose contribution appears to be substantially bureaucratic. Thaumatologists are interested in this proposed power but, as with so much else about the guilds, it is hard to get solid information out of them without swearing oaths binding one's future actions primarily to the organisation. The consequences of violating those oaths is unclear but is said to be dire.
Also of note is the glassblower's guild, which operates branch offices in several cities but is particularly wealthy and powerful in Pholyos. This organisation is renowned for the quality of its products, though a substantial proportion of that output is always reserved for the chemist's guild of Dypholyos, and rumour has it that this product is of extraordinarily fine, not to say bafflingly complex, manufacture. It is widely speculated that these instruments, presumably the product of the guild's control over the fires used in their construction, are part of what gives the Dypholpyan chemists their remarkable capacity to produce tinctures, oils and infusions of bizarre effectiveness. Such concoctions are, of course, fabulously expensive, and those who own them do not hand out samples; getting reliable information about them, let alone the equipment used to concoct and distil them, is hard work. Again, this leads thaumatologists to take an active interest in what can be learned about the cult of Ajqyod, both historical and current, in order to further their research into the manufacture of potions.
In Oluz and Halumay the sacrifice of bulls was, interestingly, retained as a mass public spectacle, giving rise to the bullfighting traditions of those cities. Though widely dismissed in other cities as barbaric, the bullfighting appears to have been retained by the cities as public entertainment, put on by wealthy citizens in much the same way the original sacrifices were and eventually rarified into a sport celebrated within the cities as a manifestation of local culture. In Anymalon the bulls have not been actually slain for at last two centuries, with the fighters instead being challenged to vault over charging animals a set number of times, Interestingly, the geographer and thaumatologist Kaydre Ysparo observes that bull-vaulting is practised as a spring ritual in some rural communities, most of them closer to Chogyos and Elpaloz, regions with no tradition of bull sacrifice in their worship of Ajqyod.
Ysparo is also one of the commentators to have discussed the post-Wesmodian state of the rural Cult centre of Ajqyod at Mount Ruaj. Accounts of this temple complex are also found in the writings of Agrysal Roqoro, Qolondym Sapheld and Rasendos and Anasyn Phylamoros. It is largely due to the work of such post-Wesmodian thaumatologists that any record of this temple exists. Sadly none of these writers provide information on exactly when it became extinct, or how it operated to begin with. Nor do any of them discuss its precise location, though Ysapryo, Chesn and Sapheld all claim to have visited it; this taciturnity may well have been deliberate in some cases. The four writers also give contradictory accounts of its layout and what is to be found there. Folklore in the cities describe it now being haunted by the ghosts of its former guards, somehow denied a place in the afterlife by their dedication to Ajqyod, while other tales tell of fire demons and fire lizards, fanciful beings whose precise nature varies with each telling. Of course, this is exactly the sort of discussion that piques the interest of thaumatologists, who attach considerable importance to the location and exploration of this complex.