Ansotroolke

Ansotroḥlce is the god of the wilderness, he is also a god of raw food, lightning, carnivores, floods, storms, madness, caves, the deep sea, mountain tops, the uninhabitable north and solitude. Ansotroḥlce is the very embodiment of \cf{other}, of the danger that lies beyond the reach of human camps and nomad routes. By his very nature he is unpredictable and irrational, acting swift and unexpectedly. Physically he can manifest as cave lion, a stormcloud or a man dressed in fur with wide yellow eyes with a expression halfway between rage and manic laughter. When in the human form he often appears on the back of a humongous stag named \sco{Cnaccumit} (\cf{I, the untamed}) whose bellow is more like a terrifying shriek than any sound a deer would make. His abilities are quite diverse. As a lightning god he can produce bolts of electricity from his body, but his hold on that domain is far lesser than that of his half brother Tuirte, as Tuúirte is \emph{the} god of lightning. Being the son of the sky god he can summon storms of wind and rain (but he can't summon thunder and lightning as those domains belong to his brothers). Beyond these effects on the physical world he can cause tame animals to become wild, to make even the most loyal dog become no more tame than the freest wolf. Ansotroḥlce can inspire madness and deviation in men, causing them to lash out at every impulse, or more curiously when a human looks upon a wide and open landscape or a cave, he can instill a deep desire in the human to travel out alone. This desire is called \sco{huscarotâtïnsotroḥlcebinâsci}, which is a nominalised form of the sentence \sco{huscarotâti ansotroḥlcebina} \cf{I am lulled by Ansotroḥlce}. \\

Ansotroḥlce is the son of the sky god \sco{Bidûre} and the hunger goddess \sco{Gïlerudwodru}, making him the half brother of the lightning god \sco{Tuirte} and the thunder god \sco{Cialge}. The goddess of hunger Gïlerudwódru had fallen in love with the sky god from a distance. Being a minor spirit in comparison to Bidûre, she was nervous of approaching him. So while he slept, Gïlerudwodru placed a lock of her hair in Bidûre's mouth and quickly vanished afterwards. Upon waking Bidûre felt a hunger like he had never felt before. He felt a great pit of emptiness in his stomach, causing his gut to rumble fiercely and deeply. Bidûre attempted to eat as much as he could, yet not after long the howling hunger returned. It turned out that the lock of hair placed in his mouth had travelled down into his stomach and there it became a cave lion, eating any food in Bidûre's stomach which caused his great hunger. Whenever there was no food in the stomach, the cave lion howled out in its own hunger, causing the deep rumbling sound. The next day the cave lion burst out of Bidûre's stomach, revealing itself to be his son, named Ansotroḥlce. The bursting out of the sky god's stomach is analogous to childbirth with the roles reversed where the male god bore the child, having been impregnated by the goddess. The act of being impregnated by a lock of hair can be seen elsewhere in Sumric mythology, such as when the sun goddess Asilñe impregnated herself with a lock of King Merigon's hair and gave birth to the first bears.\\

Ansotroḥlce is the rival of the fire god \sco{Aiscolas} and in many ways they mirror each other. Like Aiscolas, Ansotrolḥce appears in older legends as an epic individual god while in later tradition he is seen as a race of spirits. These spirits manifest as shadows of cave lions which at night time may surround a human camp and roar but they will never enter the camp itself. This is in contrast to the aiscolas spirits which invade or are invited into the camp. So while the aiscolas is a household spirit which lives closely with humans, the ansotroḥlce are spirits which patrol the border of \cf{the wilderness}. Other parallels can be seen between the two spirits. Where the aiscolas has the domain of cooked food, ansotroḥlce has the domain of raw food. Its possible for an aiscolas to take the form of a domestic crow which is an obvious opposite to the untamable nature of the ansotroḥlce. The aiscolas has the domain of fire, which while it can spread easily, can also be contained within a campfire, created at the whim of a human. This is in contrast to the ansotroḥlce's use of lightning which is beyond the use of humans and even where it strikes can be difficult to predict and control. To highlight this parallel the two gods are actual enemies in the mythology. The two are often trying to outdo or trick one another. In some stories they fight in battles, with Aiscolas fighting in the form of a giant golden bird and Ansotroḥlce in the form of either a stormcloud, pouring rain to distinguish Aiscolas's flames, or in the form of a man firing bolts of electricity at the beast. In fact the last appearance of Aiscolas as an individual god is when he is struck down by the thunder god Cialge, Ansotroḥlce's brother. \\

This table summarises the parallels of the wild and homeley nature of the two spirits.

\begin{center} \begin{tabular}{c|c} Ansotroḥlce&Aiscolas\\\toprule solitary&often interacts with humans\\ lives in the wild away from humans&lives in camps with humans\\ raw food&cooked food\\ unpredictable lightning&controlled fire \end{tabular} \end{center}

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=Name= From Proto-Sumric *ansǫtrǭlkę, from Proto-Sumro-Naukl *ansǫtrǫhəlqu