Amaunator

Amaunator (pronounced ah-MAWN-ah-tor ) was the Netherese solar deity of order, the sun, law, and time. He was viewed as a harsh but fair deity, revered by many rulers, soldiers, and powerful wizards in ancient Nethril.

It was eventually claimed, following the Spellplague, that Lathander, the Faerûnian god of the sun, was an aspect of the long-dormant Amaunator. By the Year of the Ageless One, 1479 DR, Amaunator was worshiped both as Lathander and by his own name.

Description
Amaunator's avatar, whose skin shed golden light, looked like a lanky, silver-white haired, and short man with a white tenday growth of beard clad in a long, flowing, black or purple gown with silver or gold trims, the uniform of a magistrate. He always equipped himself with two tools: a scepter and a legal tome in each hand. The former was the scepter of the eternal sun, which doubled as his melee-weapon.

Personality
The Bedine believed in an entity called At'ar the Merciless. She was thought be a spiteful who enjoyed an adulterous relationship. This woman was the result of stories about Amaunator becoming warped over time to the point of the entity becoming unrecognizable. The real Amaunator was a cautious god who did not just try to write down everything to be certain about it, but made sure to go through the pain of contracting, signing, sealing, and notarizing everything as well, a trait similar to the Celestial Bureaucracy.

He had tendency to ignore spirit of the law in favor of the letter of it except when he favored the spirit of the law a lot more than the letter. From time to time, he was invoked as the god of time. The reason for this was that a mispunctuation in a legal paper with another god allowed him to consider himself the god of time. That said, he did not actually act as one, because he did not want to be on Mystryl's bad side, the actual goddess of time, albeit an unofficial one.

His adherence to law was such that he knowingly did nothing to stop the fall of Netheril because he lacked contractual power to do so.

Amaunator was viewed as a stern and unforgiving deity dedicated to order above all else. Though not concerned with balanced natural order like Silvanus, he instead advocated for kept promises, contracts, and even that political order be kept among the gods.

History
When Netheril fell, the common people who were not killed by the fall of the enclaves (the only living worshipers of the deity) largely abandoned Amaunator, believing that he had done nothing to prevent the disaster. His followers were right, but contractually, his hands were tied. Magic in all its forms was under the exclusive control of Mystryl, and Amaunator had no lawful right to interfere in any way, even when a magical catastrophe, such as Netheril's fall, was in the process of occurring.

Over the centuries, many theories were put forward by later religious scholars as to what ultimate fate Amaunator met. Some insisted that he died, but others (notably the Sunmasters of the Brotherhood of the Glorious Sun) argued that he was reborn as Lathander. Still others believed he survived as the vengeful Bedine deity known as At'ar the Merciless and yet others asserted that he turned his back on Faerûn and entered the pantheon of the lands of Kara-Tur, or simply moved on to other planets (such as Oerth). The truth was that with the loss of nearly all his followers in Netheril after its fall, Amaunator began the long, arduous, and painful process of dying of neglect. After about a millennium, he did not have enough power left to maintain his power base in the Outer Planes and was exiled to the Astral Plane.

At some point, Amaunator reappeared in the Faerûnian pantheon, in the form of the greater deity Lathander. He gathered strength and allies to himself, and became Faerûn's dominant sun god once again.

Sages began to predict a clash between Lathander and the Mulhorandi sun god Horus-Re (assuming the merging of the Faerûnian and Mulhorandi pantheons), but such a fight never came. Even if the pantheons had had time to intermingle and merge before the Spellplague, the fight may not have occurred anyway: Lathander was sympathetic to Horus-Re.

In 1371/1372 DR, high-ranked clerics and paladins of Lathander began to receive messages regarding a mysterious event called the "Deliverance", leading them to begin an aggressive recruitment campaign.

Another major step came when the sunmaster Daelegoth Orndeir became the high priest of the Temple of the Morn. On Midsummer of 1374 DR, he performed a miracle, creating a second sun over the city of Elversult that never set, viewable from 150 miles away. Converts flocked to the city in droves while the church of Lathander pondered on what to do.

Lathander was revealed to be Amaunator in the Year of Blue Fire, 1385 DR, just after the Spellplague.

In 1486 DR, Amaunator resumed his identity as Lathander. However, by the year 1491 DR, Amuaunator and Lathander were once again worshiped as separate beings. It is unknown if they were actually separate beings by this time or if Lathander was simply granting spells to the followers of Amaunator.

Worshipers
Members of the church of Amaunator were powerful political figures at the height of Netheril's rule. Amaunator's clergy were extremely hierarchical and rulebound. Each Righteous Potentate (high priest of a temple, called a "Court") oversaw all aspects of church functions. No one could perform or be relieved of their duties without the consent of the Righteous Potentate or one of his seven Monastic Abbots. Under each of the seven Monastic Abbots, there were an additional seven High Jurists (priests) who served relentlessly, performing whatever duties were assigned to them. Lower ranks of clergy members served beneath the High Jurists, and were known as (in descending order): Jurists, High Magistrates, Magistrates, Defenders of the Law, Lions of Order, Radiant Servants, and Clerks. Within Amaunator's church, there was an elite sect of clerics and holy warriors called Sunmasters, who later represented a branch of the church of Lathander known as the Brotherhood of the Glorious Sun.

Priests of Amaunator encouraged the establishment of lawful order and bureaucracy in the world at large. They were called on to witness contracts and apply a signatory stamp with the symbol of Amaunator to verify its validity.

Day-to-day activities
All clergy members had to learn, understand, and know how to reap the benefits from (or exploit) the laws of the land, the city, and the province they lived in. In order to completely understand the nuances of law and legislature, the clergy constantly drilled each other, practiced law in court whenever possible, and rehearsed law in practice courtrooms. They could not resist investigating the scene of a crime or taking part in the construction of new laws in their locale, and did so with great intensity and fervor.

Amaunatori served often in court as judges, to present cases, and to hear legal arguments and disputes. They were paid well to settle merchant disputes over contracts, agreements, and trade practices and made a comfortable living for themselves and their church as arbitrators of all sorts of commercial and personal claims not worthy of the attention of figures of power in ultimate authority.

Heresies
The church of Lathander was not without its notable heresies, including the Risen Sun heresy and the Three-Faced Sun heresy, both of which were prominently focused on the return of Amaunator. The former later proved true when Amaunator returned.

Orders

 * Brotherhood of the Sun
 * This order was an association of itinerant monks who served the faithful in the field, bringing the comforting words of Amaunator to the peasants and common folk and preserving order throughout the land. Although the Brotherhood survived the fall of Netheril and the death of Amaunator, it never coalesced around a proper successor. Instead, each monastery chose its own deity to serve, with most eventually gravitating to Lathander or Selûne, but a few choosing Sune. By the Age of Humanity, the Brotherhood of the Sun was known as the Order of the Sun Soul, and the group's original association with the church of Amaunator had been largely forgotten. The order admitted both men and women during this period, but retained its itinerant nature and ancestral focus on serving the common folk of Toril.


 * Brotherhood of the Glorious Sun
 * This order was a group of sun priests who believed Lathander to secretly be the incarnation of Amaunator during the Era of Upheaval. Divine spellcasters in the order who could manage to acquire an original holy symbol of Amaunator had the option to become sunmasters, and gained many useful powers relating to sunlight.

Temples
A group of Amaunator's followers existed in the catacombs beneath the city of Athkatla. This group of followers had been bound by divine contract to forever guard half of the planar rift device, an artifact so powerful the gods cursed it and split it in two. Millennia of guarding took its toll, and gradually the people grew weary of spending their entire lives in this catacomb, dying, and having their souls recycled to the next generation. Amaunator had not spoken to them in many years, and the people lost faith. Their bodies became sick and diseased as a symbol of their despair, and the hatred they focused towards the temple resulted in the formation of a Hate Incarnation, which repeatedly destroyed Amaunator's avatar.

In 1368 DR, when Gorion's Ward and companions entered the catacombs to retrieve the guarded piece of the planar rift device, Amaunator offered no resistance but also no help. Entering the temple, they found that the Hate Incarnation could not be killed in combat (a wound in faith could not be healed by fighting) but could be dispelled via healing magics. Amaunator's avatar then appeared and gaves the party the device, telling them to reconstruct it and deplete its power so it could be destroyed. After the party returned the depleted rod, Amaunator and his followers, renewed in their faith, departed.

Astronomy
Amaunator's belt was a constellation that appeared in the sky above the Spine of the World during the summer.

Connections
Amaunator