The Chronovore is without a doubt the strangest Behemoth I have ever seen, and that’s saying something.
—Dr. Shaed Priyani
The Time Monster
The unexpected appearance of the Paradoxicon on the fringes of the Ram formation – Ramsgate’s local island neighbourhood – has led directly to a pair of major scientific discoveries: fractures in the very fabric of reality radiating out from the island, and the emergence of a bizarre, alien Behemoth that appears to feed upon the timestream itself like a skywhale drifting through a charged thundercloud.
Arkan Drew, who claims to have seen the creature once (a very, very long time ago) says it is called the Chronovore.
Possessing an elegant, stunning, and beautiful shape somewhere between a cloud manta and a Jellikoi, it can form gaps in reality that allow it to easily traverse the dimensions and timelines. These gaps do not seal up on their own, leading some Behemoths to fall into different time periods, or become trapped in the timestream until they do.
If we activate the Paradoxicon, we may be able to lure the Chronovore like a moth to an impossibly large flame.
—Arkan Drew
This is no problem for the Chronovore. When the Paradoxicon’s central control column – all that remains of a once-massive control center, according to Arkan Drew – is activated, the Chronovore cannot resist the call. It manifests in the “real world” upon the radiant island cluster called the Paradox Breaks, just one singular instance of the entire Chronovore’s lived timeline.
Every Chronovore that slips from the Infinite Radiance, in fact, is the same Chronovore. But once slain, that exact Chronovore from that exact point in time cannot ever manifest again.
Time is the fire in which we burn.
—Pre-Upheaval Proverb
Eating Into Our Time
Priyani reports that initial readings show that while the Chronovore is essentially a radiant-feeder like the Rezakiri and Valomyr, it seems to have evolved to survive almost entirely on the temporal frequency of radiant: i.e., time. And her colleague Arkan Drew believes the Chronovore was drawn to the Paradox Breaks by the time machinery within the long-abandoned Paradoxicon.
Capable of moving through space itself like water and able to manipulate time and use it as a razor-edged weapon, the Chronovore represents both a fascinating and unique scientific discovery – only the second known Behemoth, after the Thrax, believed to have evolved outside our visible dimension with little-to-no human interference.
We’re looking at either a temporal apocalypse or a total reality collapse. Or both. Probably both.
—Arkan Drew
Biding Its Time
As it swims upstream and downstream through the timeline, it continues to feed on (and drain) that energy. When time is consumed, forward progress stops. The effect is not unlike the defensive powers of the typical radiant Behemoth, resembling refracting crystals, but actually pieces of reality frozen in time.
Meanwhile, Arkan Drew fears this behaviour could lead to a temporal disaster – a world-ending event that would finally finish what the Upheaval started – and has charged Ramsgate’s Slayers with doing all they can to contain the Chronovore and the time-lost Behemoths it’s dragging into our present.
Will the next Chronovore to imperil the Paradox Breaks (and the entire Shattered Isles) be the last? It seems highly unlikely, but when one battles the Chronovore, victory should be considered the exception, never the rule.
