Atar

Atar
Category	Demon Mud Beast Old God
Mortality	Immortal
Appearances	Dead in Desert Bleak

Related Pages

  The Bahutha

  Watchman

Atar is an Elder Demon of pride that thrives off the worship he receives from the Bahutha cult.

Upon the development of the first civilizations, a Lux demon (later known to be Atar) realized the potential in dealing with humans and grew immensely in power, along with three others: Asag, Uzuk, and Lama. This contact with humans transformed the demons from benign Lux into Mud Beasts. These four initial Mud Beasts are known as Old Gods by the modern Bahutha, and Elder Demons by Lux witches.

The four Old Gods grew with so much evil as to warp reality around them, causing mass delirium in humans and animals alike. Atar became so focused on the achievement of power and worship as to consume the three other Old Gods, sparing their eyes so that they could be turned into relics. Eventually, Atar's power became too much to contain in the corporeal dimension; his sphere of madness encompassed the nation he had built around him, causing his Bahut kin to become useless as servants, and his physical body to wither. In order to contain this effect, he commanded his children build and encase him in a massive dome-like temple called the Abscess. In the Abscess, Atar could no longer communicate with the Bahutha, and so he separated part of his consciousness to possess one of the Bahut's unborn. This child grew to become the first Watchman.

Despite the sheer size of the Abscess, Atar's growth in power continued and the temple was never intended to hold him forever.

The trophy eyes of Asag, Uzuk, and Lama were passed on to Atar's closest apostles in the hopes that, if the dormant Atar or the Bahutha was ever under siege, the power from the relics could be used as a last resort of defense. He even offered one of his own eyes, which was crafted into a phylactery that contains instructions to channel the eyes' power, legible only by his kin. However, all but the eye of Lama eventually slipped out of the Bahutha's possession.

When Walker Madison decides that Atar must die, the eyes of the Old Gods are ironically his weapon of choice. The betrayal of Atar unto his brothers only festered within their remains over the millenia, with Fate remarking that the eyes are imbued with "potentially apocalyptic levels of power."

Atar, being a Mud Beast, is a sadistic demon that is obsessed with a certain aspect of the human psyche- his primary fixation being one of pride. He derives most of his power from ceremonious worship. A constant flow of human and animal corpses are assimilated into the mass of flesh which is his vessel, ever growing within the Abscess dome. The dome is built in such a way that, once Atar is unable to contain himself within it, he will finally have enough power to satisfy his pride, and will go on an apocalyptic rampage, claiming the world all for his own.