Selected scenes
BRZRKR in pictures.
Spoilers: This article discusses the complete historical material concerning Azaes's family in BRZRKR: Poetry of Madness #1.
Overview
The parents of King Azaes are the unnamed king and queen of Atlantis who rule before their son and are killed during a coup attempt while Azaes is still a child. Their deaths are shown only briefly in BRZRKR: Poetry of Madness #1, but the event defines the political and emotional history of Azaes's reign. The coup nearly ends the royal line. B intervenes before the attackers can kill the young heir, then remains in Atlantis as Azaes's protector.[1]
Neither parent receives a personal name, extended dialogue, separate biography, or detailed reign. They are best documented together until later canon provides enough information to distinguish them. Treating them as a combined historical article also avoids inventing personalities, accomplishments, or dynastic details unsupported by the comic.
Their most important legacy is the relationship created by their deaths. Zubatai says her father believed B recognized in young Azaes the familiar pattern of powerful men attaching their ambitions to a child's fate. B, himself exploited as a weapon from childhood, refuses to let that happen and protects Azaes. Decades later, when Azaes lies dying during the fall of Atlantis, B tells him that his parents are waiting at the end of the path. The parents therefore frame both the beginning and the end of Azaes's known life.[1][2]
Reign before Azaes
Almost nothing is stated about the parents' reign. The comic establishes that they are the reigning king and queen before Azaes becomes monarch, but does not describe the length of their rule, political program, alliances, military campaigns, religious policy, or relationship with the ordinary citizens of Atlantis.[1]
Because Atlantis is later depicted as wealthy, culturally celebrated, and heavily fortified, it may be tempting to attribute that prosperity to Azaes's parents. The source does not permit that conclusion. Some of the city's institutions may predate them by generations, and Zubatai's narration focuses on Atlantis during Azaes's adult reign rather than providing a dynastic history.
The wiki should therefore avoid phrases such as "they built Atlantis's golden age," "they created the guardwall," or "they established the reliquary." None of those claims is confirmed.
Their presence does establish hereditary monarchy. Azaes is identified as their son and intended victim of the coup, making his survival politically consequential. The attackers do not merely assassinate two rulers. They apparently intend to eliminate the heir as well.
The coup attempt
Zubatai's historical account states that a coup attempt claimed the lives of Azaes's parents. The flashback shows the king and queen wounded or dead with the frightened boy beside them. Armed attackers close in, and the narration says the child would have followed his parents into the next life but for B's intervention.[1]
The coup leaders are not named. Their number, faction, social class, ideology, and ultimate objective beyond seizing or reshaping power remain unknown. The story does not identify a rival royal house, priesthood, merchant faction, foreign government, or military commander behind the attack.
The event should therefore be titled conservatively, such as Coup Against the Atlantean Royal Family, rather than assigning responsibility to an invented faction.
The parents' exact individual causes of death are also unclear. They are shown as victims of the coup, but the comic does not isolate who kills each of them or with what weapon.
B's intervention
B's appearance changes the outcome for the royal line. He enters the coup scene and prevents the attackers from killing Azaes.[1]
This act is more than another battle in B's long history. Zubatai explains that B remains afterward. Her father believed the immortal saw his own story in the child king's circumstances. B recognized that evil men had bound Azaes's fate to their ambitions, much as powerful people had used B as a tool throughout his own life.[1]
The parents' deaths therefore indirectly create B's most sustained known attachment to Atlantis. Had they survived, the relationship between B and Azaes might have been completely different. The comic does not explore that hypothetical, but the causal chain is clear:
- the coup kills the king and queen;
- Azaes is left vulnerable;
- B intervenes;
- B becomes Azaes's protector;
- B remains in Atlantis for decades;
- Atlantis becomes one of B's few chosen homes.
That chain makes the parents historically important even though their direct page time is minimal.
Relationship with Azaes
Azaes's parents are central to his psychology because their deaths form his earliest known trauma. He grows from endangered child into king while the immortal who saved him remains physically unchanged.
The story never shows Azaes speaking about specific memories of his mother or father. It does not state which parent he was closer to, whether they trained him for kingship, whether he witnessed their actual deaths, or how long he lived with them before the coup.
What is confirmed is that their memory retains emotional power to the end of his life. When Azaes is dying after Cthulhu's attack, B tells him that his parents await him at the end of the path. Azaes's final scene thus returns him symbolically to the family from which the coup separated him.[2]
The moment also reveals B's understanding of Azaes. B chooses the parents, not the throne, Atlantis, Vizane, or immortality, as the comforting image to offer the dying king.
Relationship with B / Unute
The comic never depicts the parents interacting with B while alive. It is unknown whether they knew him before the coup, employed him, had heard legends about him, or encountered him only indirectly.
This is a crucial limitation. Because B later becomes Atlantis's protector, it would be easy to assume he served the previous king and queen as well. No supplied page confirms that.
The safe statement is:
B intervened during or immediately after the coup that killed Azaes's parents and saved their son.
The unsafe statement is:
B was already the royal family's bodyguard when the parents were assassinated.
Unless later material establishes a prior relationship, the graph should not connect either parent to B with EMPLOYED or ALLIED_WITH edges.
Relationship with the Atlantean monarchy
The parents are the immediate predecessors of Azaes and establish the dynastic succession that the coup attempts to destroy.
The comic does not clarify whether both hold equal sovereign authority, whether one is monarch by birth and the other consort, or how Atlantean succession works. The narration simply identifies them as "the king and queen" and as Azaes's parents.[1]
The wiki should therefore avoid assigning labels such as Queen Consort, King Regnant, co-rulers, or House of Azaes unless future canon supplies them.
A dedicated Atlantean Monarchy page should list them as the earliest individually depicted rulers currently known in this story chronology, followed by Azaes.
Appearance
The coup flashback depicts an adult man and woman wearing royal crowns and court clothing beside the young Azaes. Both are visibly injured or dead.
The father is shown with light or gray facial hair and a crown. The mother wears a crown and pale royal clothing. Because the scene is stylized and brief, the wiki should not over-document eye color, exact costume construction, or apparent age.
Their canonical portrait status should be joint depiction only unless a later edition or supplemental source identifies separate character designs.
Personality
No reliable personality profile can be constructed from the existing material.
The comic provides no direct dialogue from either parent and no narration describing them as kind, cruel, wise, corrupt, brave, or weak. Their victimization in the coup does not itself establish their governing character.
A definitive wiki should resist the common tendency to turn dead royal parents into idealized benevolent rulers. The story is interested in what their deaths do to Azaes and B, not in presenting a detailed evaluation of their reign.
Political significance of their deaths
The coup creates an immediate succession crisis. Because Azaes is targeted too, the attackers appear to seek more than removal of the reigning adults. The attempt threatens dynastic continuity itself.[1]
B's intervention prevents that result, allowing Azaes to become king. The later prosperity and security of Azaes's Atlantis are therefore downstream of B saving the heir.
The event also demonstrates that internal political violence can threaten Atlantis in ways foreign armies cannot. During Azaes's adult reign, outside invaders are routinely destroyed by B before they breach the city. The coup predates or bypasses that security model. It originates close enough to the monarchy to kill the rulers themselves.
What the flashback establishes
The flashback is economical, but its order of images gives the succession crisis a clear shape. The royal couple occupy the visual center of the first panel, with the child Azaes close enough to share their danger. The attackers are already inside the protected space; the scene is not a battlefield at the edge of the kingdom. The parents are therefore presented as rulers struck at the point where royal authority should be most secure. Their crowns identify them as the reigning pair, while their injuries make the coup's success immediately legible before the narration explains it.
The next beat shifts attention from the dead adults to the living heir. Azaes is still a child and has not yet inherited the public authority associated with the crown. The attackers' continued presence implies that removing the king and queen is not enough for the faction behind the coup. The boy is a remaining political fact who must also be eliminated. B's intervention interrupts that sequence. The comic does not provide a speech from the parents, a last command, or a named conspirator; the historical weight rests on the change in Azaes's position from endangered child to surviving monarch.
That visual progression also explains why the couple remain important in later scenes even though they never reappear as active characters. When B speaks to the dying Azaes, he invokes the parents as the people waiting beyond death. The line returns the story to the same family triangle established in the flashback: parents removed by violence, a child saved by B, and an adult king finally approaching the fate from which B once protected him. The comic gives no separate memorial scene, so the flashback and the final bedside exchange together form the complete surviving record of their place in Atlantis's royal history.[1][2]
This theme returns with Vizane. Atlantis is not destroyed by the barbarian armies waiting outside its walls. It is destroyed by a religious conspiracy operating inside the king's own court. The deaths of Azaes's parents therefore foreshadow the civilization's eventual vulnerability to internal corruption.
Azaes's later repetition of the cycle
The parents' death scene is tied to a larger thematic reversal.
As a boy, Azaes is nearly used as an object in other men's political ambitions. B saves him because, according to Zubatai's father, B recognizes the pattern from his own life.[1]
As an adult, Azaes later participates in a ritual that uses B's body, blood, and artifacts for the king's own desire to become immortal. The protected child grows into someone willing to instrumentalize his protector.
This does not make Azaes's parents responsible for his later choices. Their deaths instead provide the trauma against which those choices become tragic.
Death and burial
Both parents are deceased after the coup. The comic does not show funerals, tombs, burial rites, cremation, succession ceremonies, or public mourning.
No grave or royal mausoleum is identified. The later statement that the parents await Azaes "at the end of the path" is spiritual reassurance from B, not geographic evidence of a burial site.[2]
A location page should therefore not create a Tomb of Azaes's Parents without primary evidence.
Status in the afterlife
B's final statement to Azaes is intentionally ambiguous. He tells the dying king that his parents await him. The line can be read as comfort, metaphor, belief, or knowledge gained across B's long supernatural experience.[2]
The comic does not show the parents' spirits or confirm an afterlife. Their database status remains deceased, not active supernatural entities.
Legacy
Their legacy includes:
- the survival and eventual reign of Azaes;
- B's decision to remain in Atlantis;
- the surrogate-parent relationship between B and Azaes;
- a royal trauma that may help explain Azaes's fear of mortality;
- the emotional framing of Azaes's death;
- an early example of Atlantis being threatened from within rather than by foreign invaders.
They should appear in the site's Family of Azaes, Atlantean Monarchy, Coup Against the Royal Family, B Through the Ages, and Fall of Atlantis relationship clusters.
Appearances
- BRZRKR: Poetry of Madness #1 - joint flashback appearance as the slain king and queen; later referenced by B during Azaes's death.
- BRZRKR: Poetry of Madness Pen & Ink #1 - alternate presentation of the same story.
Canon limitations and unresolved questions
Unknown information includes both personal names, ages, dynastic house, parentage, length of reign, political ideology, relationship with B before the coup, names of the coup leaders, exact causes of death, succession rules, burial location, other children, and whether any relatives survive the fall of Atlantis.
The phrase Azaes's parents should remain the default page title until canon supplies names. Separate stub pages for the father and mother would add little value and create duplicate thin content.
The family behind a king
Azaes's parents are visible only at the edge of his story, yet their absence helps define the kind of ruler he becomes. They belong to the generation before the Atlantean court that welcomes B, and the comic gives them no speeches or independent ambitions. Their place in the story is familial rather than political: they are the people from whom Azaes inherits a throne, a city, and a set of expectations about what a king owes to the beings who protect him.
That inheritance matters once B enters Atlantis. Azaes treats B as a protector and a companion, but he also permits the court to place B inside a system of ritual and political pressure. The parents are not blamed for Azaes's decisions. Instead, their brief presence reminds the reader that a monarch's choices grow out of a structure older than the individual. The palace has customs, priests, guards, and inherited ideas about divine protection before B ever arrives.
The family relationship also reinforces the contrast between bloodline and chosen loyalty. Azaes is connected to his parents by birth and to B by trust, service, and shared danger. When Vizane's movement turns the court toward the gateway ritual, those bonds are tested together. Azaes's failure is not simply a private mistake; it is the failure of a dynasty to recognize how easily a protector can become a tool.
The comic does not establish the parents' names, reigns, deaths, or relationship to the later destruction of Atlantis. They are best remembered as the unseen foundation of Azaes's kingship and as part of the human history that B encounters before the city falls.
References
[1] Keanu Reeves and Steve Skroce, BRZRKR: Poetry of Madness #1 (BOOM! Studios, 2023), flashback stating that a coup attempt claimed the lives of Azaes's parents, showing the boy threatened, and describing B's intervention, digital page image 015.
[2] Reeves and Skroce, BRZRKR: Poetry of Madness #1, B's final words to the mortally wounded Azaes telling him that his parents await him at the end of the path, digital page images 037-038.