Magasta the Churner is the Lord of the Sea. He is the god of the elemental Water. He heads a complex pantheon about which little is known by those who dwell strictly on land. The stories of Creation record that it was Magasta who formed the world's seas.
At a time Magasta was inconfident with his minions being dispersed too much or gathering unpredictable. Then he ordered water run downhill, and it has to follow the command still.
Temples to Magasta are not common, but almost every seaside town or village wil have at least one shrine to him.
From the Last Silence came the First Drop, the inky underworld ocean called Styx which was both motionless and ever changing at once. From her, Ever-flowing Mother of Water, sprang all wells and streams.
Mighty rivers roared from her womb, swirling and expanding to fill the void. From that Secret Power Zaramaka created himself, Great Elder, Keeper of the Source, Father and Mother of the Elder Three.
From the deep three rivers sprang separate and clear. Those Three met and mingled, the way the waters of a river mingle with those of the sea, sometimes washing salty far up the river mouth, other times sending dark brown mud far to sea. Within the surge and turbulence, that never-ending ebb and flow, the gods who made the seas we know, grew up and dwelt in fluid life.
The seas spread outward across the broad bosom of the Dark, flowing outward from the center, the unknown Deep.
The Three Children of Zaramaka are Daliath, Framanthe, and Sramak. They represent, respectively, Mind, Soul, and Body. Each had children by both siblings, and all were different. Magasta was a child of Daliath and Framanthe.
Magasta is a mighty and terrible god, born of eminent divine parents and imbued with great power. When he was born he disappeared from his nurses for three days, and became visible again only when lured by the music of the liquid syrinx.
One day, after the world was made, Daliath, Keeper of the Deep, divided the known world among the heirs of Zaramaka. He gave great things to his own children, but ignored the idiot brood of Framanthe and Sramak. Framanthe then ordered her own children (by Daliath) to tend the safety and well-being of her other children (by Sramak), whom she loved no less because Daliath did not understand them. But Daliath countermanded her, decreeing that Magasta would remain separate, to wait for the "Waters to Come." Some saw this as a curse upon the head of Magasta, for the Manthie, Magasta's siblings, became regal lords of the oceans and seas.
Magasta became the messenger for Daliath, carrying the deep tales of wisdom from the ancient god to the lesser races of Triolini. Magasta became well known to the peoples then, and the god moved through the secrets of all the worlds. He met and befriended Mastakos Mover in those days.
When the War of the Gods began Magasta became a mighty protector of the Triolini. Some early Brithini records state that an army was destroyed by "a hideous monster rising from the sea, whose glance destroyed ranks of soldiers, and whose maw's tentacles dragged the solid earth into its wicked toothed abyss." This monster was probably Magasta manifest on the physical plane.
Magasta confronted many powerful enemy gods. The awesome Storm Gods time and again destroyed the powers of the sea, and kidnapped the best as slaves, including even Mastakos Mover. Only Magasta could withstand them. In an epic struggle which caused the Raging Sea to climb and flood the Spike, the Terror of the Deep drove off the storm gods, and held Vadrus underwater so long that he gave up his niece in tribute. When the Storm Gods sought to break Brastalos free Magasta again defeated them, and subdued Brastalos to be his obedient wife.
Another time a worse monster, invisible even to most creatures of the Deep, stalked the worlds, wrenching beings from their lives into painful confusion. Like stagnant pools they stood, bewildered and unhappy.
Magasta took those lost souls of the sea, and sent, led, and carried them through the Hidden Stream back into the First Drop, a mystery beyond the understanding of all but those gods who have drunk of Daliath's Well.
Magasta then sought and confronted a terrible creature which wielded Death. He defeated it, and made the thing his slave. It became Magasta's invisible Net of the Sea which drags all eventually into death. The new slave was renamed Robber, and rules over the lost souls which live in the sea but are not in its flow.
The powers of death and darkness were inherited by the son of Robber and Magasta. When Wachaza first came to his father to claim a share of the world Magasta asked proof of worthiness. Wachaza sent Magasta to visit Daliath, and ruled in the Throne of the Deep until Magasta returned. Magasta recognized his son's rights and placed him in his household. Wachaza lives in a hidden ocean called Eat-Shark, with Varchulanga, Mother of Monsters, and Drospoly, the Cold Death.
A greater foe came when Chaos marched and slithered through it, moving inexorably towards the Spike, Sea-Heart. The forces of the Celestial Court did not muster to meet them, and the Spike collapsed, leaving an empty void where before had stood the Center of the World.
Magasta feared nothing. He armed with his best weapons and called his trusty allies. The armies of the seas marshaled behind the gods. Roaring out their death chant, all conscious life of the sea launched itself against Nothing. The Nothing, the Void, was manifest as Stagnation, absorbing all the seas and energies, stilling its movement, leaving it lifeless. Magasta saw this, and leapt forward into the midst of the dead meaninglessness whence had flowed his armies and heroes.
"Come, triumphant, into the Arms of Magasta!" he cried, "Flow, ever changing, into my Arms. The Times cannot have you, the Stagnation cannot touch you, if you hold to me, and follow me."
Then Magasta displayed his inside-out dance, the secret way to find the First Drop. The seas followed suit and washed the Nothingness along with them, inside out and back through into the realm of Time. The emptiness remained, but not at all times and not at all places, thanks to Magasta. The sea was saved from stagnation, and he and his minions remained to show the ancient way which fills the World's Center.
Magasta has remained the most important sea deity since the dawn of Time. All tribes of mermen worship him, as do a few sailor-folk. In the first and second ages, the mightiest sailors of the oceans were the Waertagi, half-breeds who tended physically toward their human part, and mentally toward their merman part.
The Waertagi dragonships dominated all overseas shipping for centuries. They met their doom in the Second Age, at the hands of the Middle Sea Empire. In a mighty battle, the God-Learners caused the water itself to burn and destroyed the Waertagi in the Battle of Tanian's Victory in 718. The Waertagi remained an obscure pirate race until 947, when they returned with gathered strength and managed to defeat the God-Learners and sink their island of Jrustela beneath the waves of death.
At the beginning of the Second Age, Zzabur, the First Wizard, wrought great curses and by many simultaneous means cleared the oceans of all surface traffic. This wrought the ruin of the Waertagi, but mermen in general were unharmed by the sudden cessation of ship travel.
Now the Closing has ended, and humans once more sail the seas. The mermen, unused to such activity, have caused trouble in some areas. In other areas, they have eagerly allied with humans. Violent underwater battles have been fought between rival merman tribes, and the water flows red. In some areas, the mermen have realized their own potential and begun to raid, compete with, or tax surface traffic.
Magasta teaches that only the sea is eternal. After death, all personality and knowledge is lost and the individual becomes part of the oceans. Each person is like a current in the ever-flowing mass of the sea. Some are large and strong, some weak, but all have a beginning, and all ultimately end. Through death, new life is brought about. The seas themselves continually die, swept through Magasta's Pool to the underworld. But new seas always return from the edge of the world.
Merman dead are taken to the deep sea and allowed to drop softly into an abyss. Weights are sometimes attached, and these may be made of gold, seametal, or other precious substances in the case of the important dead.
Magasta is the Source of the Ocean Rune. His other Runes are those of Change and Death.