Chronos

Real Name

Unknown

First appearance

Unknown

History[edit source]

Chronos is the Incarnation of Time. Because Chronos lives backwards in time, his past is everyone else's future, making him an isolated character even among the other Incarnations.

When he is living backwards, he is not visible to mortals. Chronos experiments with his hourglass, recognized by all the Incarnations as being the most powerful magical device in the world, to halt and/or reverse time, travel many millions of years into the Earth's past, and work with the Incarnation of Fate, who needs his hourglass to help fix tangles in her threads of fate.

Current Officeholder

Norton

Time's Accoutrements

The Hourglass

Time's hourglass is recognized as the most powerful single item any Incarnation possesses, and it is all Chronos needs. It has an incredibly large variety of functions, all controlled by Time's will. It can move Chronos forward or backward in time, reverse his personal time to allow him to interact with others, and pause time for himself or his local area (which is not a true stasis, as most of the world continues as normal. How this syncs up is never explained, it is simply magic). He can reverse time temporarily in an area, which simply rewinds a scene without the mortal participants being aware of it, which allows him to choose another course for it. He can also choose to put the entire world into stasis, or even reverse time for the entire world, which he is forced to do at one point. In addition, Time's hourglass is also his method of travel. By selectively moving himself slightly out of sync with the Earth's rotation and orbit as he travels in time, he can use it to travel in space. This travel is, of course, failsafed to not allow him to end up in deep space or inside a wall or the earth itself. Time's Hourglass cannot be broken or lost, as any attempt to leave it behind will simply cause it to float at the same relative distance it was released. It can, however, be folded up for easy storage, though it still functions just as well.

Time's Robe

Much like the other Incarnations, Time's Robe protects him from any kind of physical harm. Like the other incarnations, he is immortal and cannot be killed before it is time to pass on the office. Anything attempting to attack him would be immediately aged into oblivion upon contact. His robe is also the default area for his personal time flow, though he can of course expand it to bring other things along with him when he travels.

Sning

While not an official device of Time, Sning is a valuable companion to Norton throughout his career. A demonic, though benign, creature, it takes the form of a ring in the shape of a snake (where it gets the name Norton gave it, standing for SNake rING). While not omnipotent, Sning has an incredible amount of information, and appears to be able to learn many things about creatures just by touching them. It can respond to any question asked of it by squeezing the wearer's finger - one squeeze for yes, two for no, three for uncertainty, complex answers, or inability to answer (for example, if the asker foolishly poses a non yes/no question). It can also answer with squeezes representing a number, though Sning is actually quite bad at math, much to its embarrassment. In addition, it is capable of coming alive briefly, scouting an area, and reporting back. While alive, it is approximately six inches long, though it is shown that he can grow, and also poisonous. Its poison is strong enough to make a creature the size of a man sick for several hours, but not to kill.

Sning has a long and complex history, originally belonging to Mym, the prince fated to become the Incarnation of War. He later gave it to Orb, the eventual Incarnation of Nature, when they were forced to part, who gave it to her daughter Orlene, the eventual Incarnation of Good. She eventually bestowed it to Norton as a gift. Despite being in the possession of four major incarnations, Sning was actually only named by Norton and he was the only one to use him during his actual time as an Incarnation.

Method of Transfer

Time, because of his nature, is the only Incarnation that is actually required to pass along his office at an exact schedule. Though time can travel to any period, he cannot actually interact with the world outside the span of his own lifetime. Thus, as he lives backwards, when his lifetime is up he must pass on the office to an heir. Though he has some ability to plan the transfer, the exact timing and the fact that he lives backwards means he has very little ability to actually enact it. He is forced to simply leave the Hourglass and hope whoever he has set up to take it does so. The Hourglass will entice those around it to pick it up, for there must be an Incarnation of Time, but it does not always go smoothly. There is one instance mentioned where the proposed new officeholder refused the position, and it fell to a nearby seven-year-old boy who happened to pick up the Hourglass. Again, though the position would appear to be gender neutral, it is traditionally held by a male.

Time's Dominion

Time is responsible for scheduling all human events to make sure everything runs smoothly, and the natural laws like cause and effect are honored. He works most closely with Fate, helping her to fix crossed threads, caused by human error or simply random chance. He also schedules notable births and deaths, important events in people's lives and in history, and makes sure the flow of time remains stable when it is bent, as it is by his allowance that the other Incarnations are also capable of local timestops. He is also responsible for guaranteeing that the course of history flows as it should. As Time, he is immune to paradox, and to the possibility of multiple futures. Should actions occur to change the course of the future, his memories will change with it. However, typically his original memories are accepted as the desirable ones, as one of his major tasks is to make sure it does not get changed around without adequate reason. This is, of course, why he lives backwards - he would be unable to properly deal with making the future happen as planned if he was unaware of the plan.

Incarnations in Incarnations of Immortality

Thanatos• Chronos • Fate • War • Nature • Good • Evil • Nox