Ath'Agaar (Hyborian era barbarian chieftain; Void Indigo character)

athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-throne ATH'AGAAR
(please note that these stories are from Epic, part of a more mature line and may not be appropriate for everyone)

Real Name: Ath'Agaar

Identity/Class: Human warrior;
active circa 9000 B.C. (Hyborian era)

Occupation: Chieftain, warrior

Group Membership: Chieftain of unidentified barbaric tribes

Affiliations: Ren (lover/concubine);
his various reincarnations, including Jhagur, an Amerindian warrior, a Samurai, a Hun, a Visigoth, and a whole host of other warrior-types, earthly and otherwise (however, these were not blood relations/descendants)

Enemies: Dark Lords (Eeyod, Hemuth, Koth and Zepharr) and their people, Kaok

Known Relatives: Unidentified father (almost certainly deceased);
Ren may or may not have been his queen/consort, etc. vs. just being his long-term lover; she was referred to as a concubine, meaning she lived with him but had a lower status than a wife (or wives, either of which he may not have had); however, she was the only one for which he gave any thought, and she seemed to be his one true love
he was reincarnated within Jhagur, as well as an Amerindian warrior, a Samurai, a Hun, a Visigoth, and a whole host of other warrior-types, earthly and otherwise (however, these were not blood relations/descendants)

Aliases: King of Erok (self-proclaimed)

Base of Operations: Unrevealed;
    physical death in Kur, Novum Terra (see comments), in the region that would become New Mexico;
    formerly the Citadel of Erok, Novum Terra, in the region that would become New Mexico;
    formerly an unrevealed location in the glaciered northland of Novum Terra

First Appearance: Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (1984)

athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-battle .

Powers/Abilities: Ath'Agaar was a strong and powerful warrior, both in hand-to-hand combat and swordfighting.

He was strong enough to tear apart a magically-created constrictor serpent as it squeezed his chest, although this may be a matter of his will over the will of the sorcerer who had created the serpent.

He led numerous tribes in conquest over several citadels, although the inhabitants had been enslaved by the Dark Gods and their will had been markedly diminished.

His will to survive and desire for vengeance allowed him to endure days of torture and even to rise to his feet after a spike had been driven into his brain.

He was an experienced equestrian.

Height: Unrevealed (perhaps 6'2")
Weight: Unrevealed (perhaps 275 lbs.)
Eyes: Dark (presumably brown)
Hair: Various images make his hair appear to be brown or blond, so perhaps dirty blond, light brown, something.

History:

athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-youth-wrestle

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb) - BTS) - Circa 9000 B.C., Ath'Agaar was raised in a barbarian tribe in the glaciered northland of Novum Terra (see comments), which would later be known as North America.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - As a youth, Ath'Agaar lifted his father's sword as his father watched.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - Ath'Agaar rowed a boat alongside his father.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - Ath'Agaar wrestled with and dominated another youth.

athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-swordfight athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-initiation

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - Ath'Agaar was initated into manhood and given a bear- or other animal-head headdress.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - Ath'Agaar battled and defeated a pair of warriors in a swordfight.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - Ath'Agaar enjoyed romantic embraces with Ren.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb) - BTS) - At some point, Ath'Agaar became the chieftain of his tribe and ultimately of multiple tribes.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb) - BTS / Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - Seeking to avoid the advancing ice, Ath'Agaar led his barbaric tribes south, eventually assaulting, pillaging, and conquering four -- Kerei, Baalat, Tzerama, Erok -- of the citadels/enslaved city ruled by the ancient Dark Lords, seizing power by sheer, brute force.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb) - BTS) - Ath'Agaar established his palace and Erok, and he proclaimed himself King of Erok, overthrowing the former magistrate.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb) - BTS) - Appreciating that their stronghold, Kur, might be next, the Dark Lords began sacrificing their followers by the thousands, but the enslaved people granted them limited power. They resolved to capture Ath'Agaar himself, knowing that to him death without resistance was unthinkable and vowing that he would suffer as no living being had suffered before.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb) - BTS) - Despite Ath'Agaar's orders, Ren spoke to Erok's former magistrate and his witch-woman, who told her that the wizards had marked Ath'Agaar for vengeance.

athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-tortured-start .

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - As Ath'Agaar romantically embraced Ren in Erok's palace, he noted that her unsure and faltering touch and her rigid spine indicated that she had disobeyed him. She reluctantly admitted her conversation with the former magistrate and his witch-woman and her fear that their time on Earth was nearly finished. After Ath'Agaar reminded her that they were the sorcerers' lackeys, which was why he had forbidden her to speak to them, Ren encouraged Ath'Agaar to discipline/crush her as she pulled him nearer, before screaming as the Dark Lords materialized in their bedchamber.

After the Dark Lords magically sealed-over Ren's mouth to stop her screaming, Ath'Agaar grabbed his sword and threatened to cleave the skulls of these dregs of Hell, but one of the Dark Lords transformed his sword into an immense serpent, which coiled, crushed, and bit him (in the shoulder), causing him to topple to the ground. The Dark Lords then transported both Ath'Agaar and Ren back to their sacrificial chamber in their stronghold, Kur. After the Dark Lords mockingly noted how the pain he would endure may open a door to the spirit so that he might see their lord, Kaok, "...or you may simply die -- like the stupid savage you are," they told him watch as they tortured his woman. When they refused his demands to release Ren, Ath'Agaar summoned his strength and tore apart the serpent holding him.

Ath'Agaar then threatened to similarly tear apart the Dark Lords' necks if they did not free Ren, one of the Dark Lords magically bound Ren in an unbreakable filament. Ath'Agaar then argued that Ren had done nothing to them and that he was the one they wanted, one of the Dark Lords explained that they wanted them both, especially now that they knew the strength of their bond: Watching her perish by degrees will fuel his hatred for them, and the fierceness of his loathing was what they needed. As Ath'Agaar watched helplessly, the Dark Lords tortured Ren into twilight of the next day before she perished, and the Dark Lords devoured her vital force.

Ath'Agaar was then chained naked to the sacrifical altar atop Ren's blood, and he realized he had no chance of escape. His suffering was made to last for days, as the Dark Lords tirelessly and precisely subjected his body to an unremitting succession of punishments. He was scorched with hot irons, scourged with barbed whips, gashed, punctured, hammered, and mauled. As the torment progressed, the individual wounds lost all significance, and the pain became an environment. The only escape from the pain was in memory of his past life, but as the mental walls separating these eventually began to crumble, and all memories -- from victories to Ren's embrace -- came to feel like pain as well. Nonetheless, Ath'Agaar retained his will to survive, and his rage still smouldered, to the Dark Lords' pleasure.

athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-revive

.
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Finally, on the third night, the Dark Lords announced their intent to end him. Although Ath'Agaar vowed he would have his vengeance and hunt down and slay their very souls if it took all eternity, Koth placed a jeweled spike on his forehead and hammered it into his skull until Ath'Agaar finally lied still.

Koth then noted that Ath'Agaar was meant to perish at their hands, and he further considered that if he had not ridden into their midst, their empire would have eventually fallen, while if Ath'Agaar had loved life less, he would not now be dead. Zepharr advised him to remain silent until Ath'Agaar was on the pyre, and Hemuth agreed, as the effect of Ath'Agaar's death would fade if Kaok's hosts were denied their feast.

However, as they removed the shackles, Ath'Agaar's hands twitched, his eyes opened, and he screamed a cry of outrage. Although not fully conscious, Ath'Agaar's spirit refused to abandon its mortal shell, and his hand pulled the jeweled spike from his head.

athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-hand-severed

Although he did not seem to see them, the Dark Lords appreciated the danger he posed with the jeweled spike in his hand, and Koth (apparently) fired a mystic blast that severed Ath'Agaar's athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-hand-severed-orb hand from the wrist. However, the hand, holding the jeweled spike, was sent flying and it crashed into the center of the Dark Lords' Living Orb, a mystic item connected to Kaok, rupturing it.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb) - BTS) - The ruptured Orb spewed forth a cloud of force that engulfed the domed chamber and all within it -- their bodies flayed and their bones ground to powder -- before similarly destroying the walls of Kur and then all of the nine citadels formerly ruled by the Dark Lords. Within hours, the entire civilization was obliterated.

Only the jeweled spike (and Ath'Agaar's hand, holding) it remained, magically borne 1000 miles away, almost to the sea (in what is now Santa Monica, California).

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb) - BTS) - The spirits of the hundred thousand entities slain in the conflagration demanded that the sorcerers not know peace until they had paid for their atrocities, and the spirits of the Dark Lords were sent back to the physical plane, into a cycle of death and rebirth, repeatedly reincarnated.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - Th athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-spirit e spirits of Ath'agaar and Ren, half-crazed with pain and hate and unable to accept their integration into the spirit world, tore loose from the cosmic fabric and willingly followed, seeking vengeance and one another.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb) - BTS) - Ath'Agaar, Ren, and the Dark Lords all lived innumerable lifetimes -- some as brief as a moth's, others as long as redwood's. Their souls were scattered over continents and seas, and across the vastness of space.

(Void Indigo#5-6: "DOMINION AND REBELLION" (unpublished, from Gerber's script)) - Those in whom Ath'Agaar was reincarnated included an Amerindian warrior, a Samurai, a Hun, a Visigoth, and a whole host of other warrior-types, earthly and otherwise.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - By the late 20th century (see comments), the incarnations of Ren and the Dark Lords were on Earth, while Ath'Agaar had been reincarnated in the extraterrestrial Jhagur of the planet Gebura (some 50,000 light years away on the far side of the galaxy), whose forehead bore a curious birthmark in the precise location of the jeweled spike that had penetrated Ath'Agaar's skull.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo - BTS) - Touching Jhagur's birthmark, Koth found that Ath'Agaar's fury and his lust for vengeance abided there undiminished by time or space.

(Void Indigo#5-6: "DOMINION AND REBELLION" (unpublished, from Gerber's script)) - As Jhagur underwent a ritual of purification in the desert outside Hollywood, California, Ath'Agaar and Ren appear to him in a vision. His ancient self cautions Jhagur against merely seeking empty vengeance. There are better reasons than that for destroying this evil. In the last moments of his life, Ath'Agaar noted that he had learned the limitations of rage. When Jhagur reaches out for Ren, her form replicated the wounds inflicted upon her by the Dark Lords before crumbling to dust. Deteriorating in a similar manner, as Ath'Agaar crumbled into dust, he saod that, on the other hand, Jhagur ought not forget vengeance entirely.

When Jhagur eventually confronted the Dark Lords, Jhagur peered past the horizon of the mortal world and saw and called upon all the past incarnations of his soul to aid him in his battle. Ath'Agaar returned, as well as an Amerindian warrior, a Samurai, a Hun, a Visigoth, and a whole host of other warrior-types, earthly and otherwise, whose lives he's lived. Jhagur lived -- or relived -- all these lives at once. Together they battled their way past the Dark Lords and down into the den of the demigod Kaok himself.

    Jhagur tackled Kaok bodily, directing his eye-blasts at the creature, and they tumbled out of the creature's den, through several dimensional planes, to the Void Indigo itself.
    Here Kaok was very vulnerable, not only to Jhagur's attacks but also to the psychic assault of all the hundreds of thousands of souls whose lives he cut short those 11,000 years ago. Kaok met his end: torn limb from ectoplasmic limb by a million psychic fingers from beyond, delivered to those fingers by Jhagur.
    Upon Kaok's death, the Living Orb/Eye of Kaok exploded again, spewing its substance over the desert, depositing Raka, Cosima, the surviving cult members, etc., on the sand. Jhagur's other incarnations had vanished.

Comments: Created by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik.

I would not normally capitalize the letter after an apostrophe, but as Gerber's scripts had "Ath'Agaar," I'm going with it.

The Void Indigo is somewhat nebulous, but it exists beyond the mortal veil, into the continuum of pure spirit. It is a "horizonless, liquid space from which all things -- material and spiritual -- originate, threads of the great chain of being. Each perfect, pearl-like bead along its infinite length glimmered with the light of a soul. From its position on the chain can be determined the condition of that soul and its location in the cosmos."

VOID INDIGO athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-backcover

The Void Indigo stories -- creator-owned by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik -- referenced Zhered-Na and Sominus, both creations of Gerber and Mayerik back in the (Adventure into) Fear series.
Marvel Graphic Novel#11 / Void Indigo has the aged Dark Lords Eeyod, Hemuth, Koth and Zepharr invoke "Kaok, lord of Sominus, whose seed spawned Zhered-Na in the world's dark womb" and call upon his power via blood sacrifice. They sacrificed thousands of young men and women from their five citadels under their rule, regaining some small measure of their lost vigor. Seeking greater power, they then tortured and sacrificed the barbarian chieftain Ath'agaar and his lover Ren for greater levels of power.
The graphic novel Void Indigo references Atlantis and the Great Cataclysm (with the Dark Lords being survivors of pre-Catalcysmic Atlantis) and the above conflict took place circa 9000 BC, fitting in with the Hyborian era. An artifact from the conflict was mystically borne nearly 1000 miles away (almost to the sea), ending up in what is now New Mexico. The region that is now North America was known as Novum Terra in the Hyborian era and was minimally referenced in the Conan stories.

The glaciered northland from which Ath'Agaar originated could be northern Canada, or it could even be the Arctic.
The end of the Hyborian era, which featured another lesser Cataclysm (not to be confused with the lesser Cataclysm that followed the Great Cataclysm (circa 18,000 BC) that again affected Earth's topography, is usually placed around 8000 BC, but it's not an even year, and it makes sense that the rupturing of the Living Orb and the energies unleashed that wiped out all evidence of the Dark Lords' nine citadels could have gradually spread across Earth and contributed to the post-Hyborian Cataclysm.

There was a six issue follow-up Void Indigo series planned, but it was cancelled after only two issues. The scripts for issues #3-6 can be found here.
The modern portions of the Void Indigo story does not reference other modern aspects of Earth-616.
Ultimately, there is no official ruling on Void Indigo...for whatever reason, I didn't review the series until someone told me in March of 2022 that Zhered-Na was referenced in it, which led to my appreciation of all of this material. I was therefore unaware of this information when I wrote the Zhered-Na profile for the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
Having reviewed the Void Indigo graphic novel and series/scripts, it my assessment is that there are elements of Reality-616 present in this storyline, which would either make them the same reality or just a reality with common elements. However, there is nothing to exclude it from being Reality-616, and when that's the case, I would certainly not err on the side of exclusion. I think it would add nicely to the tapestry that is Reality-616..
I think it would fit perfectly -- even if likely not what was intended at the time of publication -- to have the modern Void Indigo stories locked into 1984, the time in which they published, rather than being part of the sliding timescale. That would have them taking place decades before the Fantastic Four's space flight.
Regardless, it is interesting to consider Zhered-Na's connection to Kaok and Sominus.

Specifically, it says that Kaok's seed spawned Zhered-Na. That would seem to make him her father, although "seed" could also refer to his child, making Zhered-Na his granddaughter.
Sominus being a realm of demons puts an interesting spin on Zhered-Na, who was a benevolent sorcereress worshipping the god Valka.
Clearly there's more to the story, but tragically, Steve Gerber passed years ago, and we can't ask him.
I talked to Val Mayerik, but unfortunately, he doesn't remember the details. But, I'm hoping that doing these profiles may jog his memory...

A few images of Ath'Agaar from his youth can be found in the sub-profile for his father.

Profile by Snood.

CLARIFICATIONS:
Ath'Agaar should be distinguished from:

other "Ath" or "Agaar" (or apostrophied) characters, groups, items, races, or places

Ath'Agaar's father

athagaar-hyborian-voidindigo-youth-sword

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - As a youth, Ath'Agaar lifted his father's sword as his father watched.

(Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (fb)) - Ath'Agaar rowed a boat alongside his father (presumably).

Note: All we have is these two panels, but his father was presumably a warrior as well, and his guidance likely contributed to Ath'Agaar's skills and willpower

images: (without ads)
Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo back cover (upper body/face with sword in outstretched arm);
        story pg. 2 (horseback, leading army);
        pg. 5, panel 4 (on throne, presumably with Ren);
        pg. 11, panel 1 and pg. 12, panel 4 (tortured);
        pg. 11, panel 6 (youth, holding father's sword);
            panel 9 (initiation into manhood, given headdress);
        pg. 12, panel 5 (in boat with father);
            panel 7 (wrestling with another child);
            panel 8 (swordfight);
        pg. 13, panel 2-4 (jeweled spike);
        pg. 14, panel 4 (reviving with spike in head);
        pg. 15, panel 5-6 (wrist cut off; spike stabbing Living Orb);
        pg. 20 (spirit in the Void Indigo)

Appearances:
Marvel Graphic Novel#11: Void Indigo (1984) - Steve Gerber (writer), Val Mayerik (artist), Laurie Sutton (assistant editor), Archie Goodwin (editor)
Void Indigo#5-6 scripts (unpublished)

First posted: 05/08/2022
Last updated: 08/13/2022

Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.

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