Time Dragon

INTERVIEWER: And welcome back to PNN for the first annual Dragon Debates.  It’s time for opening statements from the candidates.  Lord Red, we’ll begin with you.

RED DRAGON: Of course, for I am the only dragon that matters.  I am the Lord of Flame.  I am the Emperor of Fear.  My very breath is a holocaust of—

GOLD DRAGON: Really?  We're using that word already?

RED DRAGON: Lower-case H.  I’m not a monster.

INTERVIEWER: Honored Gold, your response.

GOLD DRAGON: I am a force for good and righteousness.   My breath burns just as hot as Red’s, and I breathe chlorine gas as well.

INTERVIEWER: That was, like, three editions ago.

GOLD DRAGON: Wait, what do I have now?

INTERVIEWER: Weakening gas.

GOLD DRAGON: See?  Strength damage!  I am mighty.  And my benevolent hand has guided the course of dynasties.

INTERVIEWER: Most Resplendent Lungwang, you have a rebuttal?

SOVEREIGN DRAGON: Guide dynasties?  I am the living embodiment of dynasty.  I am a guardian of balance.  The scrolls say I was “placed in the skies by the gods themselves to safeguard harmony in the world.”

RED DRAGON: You should be placed in a Pokemon ball.

INTERVIEWER: Gentlewyrms, please—

TIME DRAGON: Hey, am I late?  Ha, just kidding; I’m always right on time.  Check it: time dragon here.

INTERVIEWER: Um…I don't see anything in my notes about a…did you say, “time dragon”?

TIME DRAGON: Yeah, I’m an outer dragon.  We’re kinda busy in space.  And I’m their leader.  Not to brag or anything.  Which basically makes me the most powerful dragon in existence.

INTERVIEWER: Actually, all these representatives on stage have approximately the same stats…

TIME DRAGON: Um, can they survive in space?  Can they fly to another planet?  Can they travel through time?  Are they immortal?

INTERVIEWER: Um, no, I don’t believe so—

TIME DRAGON: That’s what I thought.  WOOOO!!!  TIME DRAGON OUT. *flips table, teleports to before the debate was supposed to start, eats the interviewer, flies to a tropical paradise planet to tan*

Sometimes even time itself needs a guardian.  And while the Watcher may be enough for the Marvel Universe, Pathfinder universes’ watchers need to have a bit more bite.

Adventurers attempt to stop a fell ritual…and only partially succeed.  While they stop the cultists’ plot to call the Great Old Ones, they don’t close the gate in time, and the entire tower is ripped out of reality and time into another realm.  Now hounds of Tindalos and worse crawl out of the walls, and a time dragon sentinel pursues the flying tower, intent on smashing whoever is inside for so badly unraveling the fabric of history.

While many time dragons watch history from the edge of space and reality, others lead quiet lives closer to their charges.  Deep in the desert lies a sunken archive that contains, among other things, all the world’s historical records, tended by a time dragon and his loyal syrinx librarians.  Except the owl-faced scholars are not loyal—they are participants in one of the longest cons in the universe.  The syrinx and select yak folk and rakshasa allies are slowly rewriting the world’s history to craft a darker, more totalitarian existence firmly under their rule.  (This is no easy task beneath the nose of a dragon with share memory and legend lore, but the beast-men are nothing if not patient and careful.)  After millennia of service no amount of evidence will persuade the time dragon of the syrinx’s duplicity, so adventurers who wish to save the present will have no choice but to fight.

Those who know of the Aeon War speak of it in the past tense—an age where time dragons and aeons took up arms against each other across the spaceways and throughout the multiverse over a fundamental disagreement about the nature and destiny of universal balance.  Eventually, four mortal heroes from a backwater world turned the tide, using words and blades to forge an accord between the mighty powers.  All this is far in the past…only it’s not, as adventurers find out when their time dragon ally takes them back in time to fight in the war and assume the roles of the mythical mortal heroes.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 70–71

Shades of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Dr. Who in those seeds?  Yes.

ME: Is this post okay? 

ARTISTICLICENSETOKILL: Ha!  I like it.  Jew-approved.

ME: Score.  I mean, shalom.

ARTISTICLICENSETOKILL: Quit while you're ahead.