Svarog
The Heavenly Smith. LG intermediate power of crafts, labour, community and love. [He/Him]
Pantheon: Slavic
Symbol: An anvil with a hammer, a mace
Realms: Bytopia / Shurrock / The Red Spire / The Kremlin of Svarog
Proxies: Svarozhich (fire elemental [they/them] / N)
Svarog is a simple power, typically appearing as a tanned, black-bearded man in simple clothing. He claims craftsmanship as his domain—of course, this includes metalworking, but also stone masonry, woodworking, pottery and most other things needed by cutters across the planes. Chant goes that Svarog shares knowledge of how to craft like an artisan with his followers. He’s credited as the inventor of many tools, most importantly—the plough. Interestingly, despite having similar interests, dwarves can be quite condescending towards worshipers of Svarog, considering him an inferior human copy of their favourite Moradin.
However, there’s another aspect to Svarog. He is also the power of the community—both the family and the village as a whole. He’s the closest thing to a father figure the Slavic pantheon has, and he’s also the only one who has a goddess as a wife, Mokosh. Faithfulness and trust are the things Svarog values the most, and conversely he punishes those who cheat on their partners, betray their relatives, or ostracise one of their peers without good cause. A popular folk belief claims that while Mokosh weaves the threads that represent each body’s life, it’s Svarog who welds them together, making cutters fall in love.
Now there’s a story going around that Svarog used to be a greater power who had the whole sky as part of his domain too, but that he lost it as his worship diminished. In this period he allegedly fathered Perun, Veles, the Sea Tsar, Stribog and Marena and crafted Dazhbog and Khors. He’s also said to have also defeated a draconic deity, whose name is lost to time.
Svarog doesn’t have a constant proxy, but he does occasionally grant proxy powers to one of the fire elementals who work in his forges. When they’ve been empowered in such a way, the fire elemental is given the title Svarozhich.
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.