The tradition records that Zarathustra was killed at the age of seventy-seven while praying at the fire altar, cut down by a soldier during an invasion of Balkh — most commonly named as Turanian, and the assassin in some versions called Bratrok-resh. The death is ordinary and unavenged: there is no ascension, no vindication, no dramatic final revelation, and the religion continues under royal patronage rather than through any transformation occasioned by his end. It is worth registering how unlike the deaths of most founders this is, and how little theological weight the tradition places on it — the death is not redemptive, not a sacrifice, not the hinge of anything. The account appears in the Middle Persian sources and in Firdausi's Shahnameh, which describes the killing of eighty priests at the fire temple alongside him.