Sea Tsar
Vodyanik. CN lesser power of seas and other waters, aquatic humanoids, non-evil vodyanoi, sailors and wealth [He/Him]
Pantheon: Slavic
Symbol: A fish with golden scales
Realm:
Arborea / Ossa / Lukomorye
Proxies: Tsarina Vodyanitsa (merfolk proxy [she/her] / CG)
This power may look like a wizened old man, though he is neither very old nor particularly wise. The Sea Tsar—some say his actual name is something like Vodyanik, but not many cutters actually call him like that—is huge in size and adorned with all manners of underwater treasures; pearls, corals, sea lilies, you name it. He wields two divine artefacts, both decorated with sapphires: a trident (which he uses to create tidal waves) and an oar (it causes the opposite effect, calming any storm down).
Though some inhabitants of his watery realm think of their ruler as benevolent, the Sea Tsar is as chaotic as they come. He doesn’t believe in such thing as restraint, so if he wants something, he takes it. Fortunately for everyone, the Tsar is rarely willing to hurt a body, with one exception. You see, more than anything else, the Sea Tsar is fond of parties, and the best thing about partying (at least in his opinion) is music and dancing. So, he sometimes kidnaps talented musicians by destroying the ships they’re sailing on, or ensured they are sacrificed by drowning. In both cases, said musicians do not drown to death, but are turned into merfolk and plane shifted to the realm of the Tsar.
The Sea Tsar himself doesn’t think of this as an wicked thing to do, he figures that his magnificent undersea palace is a much better place to live in than any kind of settlement on the ground. Those unlucky sods who aren’t willing to stay in the luxurious palace for the rest of their life will just have to figure out a way to leave the realm and regain their initial shape.
Tsarina Vodyanitsa (merfolk proxy [she/her] / CG) is a wife of the Sea Tsar and a mother of his one hundred daughters. She is huge in stature, some 15 feet in height, though she doesn’t have much power. Tsarina is oftentimes compassionate towards kidnapped musicians, and secretly tries to help them escape the realm.
Sources: Margarita and Jon Winter-Holt. Margarita notes: While this homebrew power is based on Slavic folklore and beliefs, the amount of actual information we have on pre-Christian Slavic deities is so minuscule that building any kind of lore out of it is impossible. However, there are a lot of folk beliefs about things these deities are thought to represent, which I have worked into the piece.