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Once there was a maiden...

...whose domain was the ages
Her wings spanned the changing seasons
Her fangs dripped the passing seconds
The day turned to night by the twisting of her tail
"What became of the Dragon of Time?"
But no one knew to ask.

The Dragon of Time

When the Primordials built Creation, and gave pieces of themselves to become the Incarnae, Haht'hek, Gaia's Elemental Dragon of Time, volunteered to oversee the Loom of Fate, which weaves the strands of the future into the tapestry of the past. The Primordials took Haht'hek and divided him up, spreading his power among his seven subsouls, turning them into Incarnae. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are well known. Alongside them were Neptune and Pluto. At the moment of their creation, they spun backwards and forwards through time, their true origin wiped from all knowledge (though Jupiter may still remember). In the times before the moment of their birth they were the Fates, and from then on they were the Maidens of Destiny.

The Sons of Neptune and the Twilight Clock of Ages

When the time came to create the Exalted, the first Five Maidens each chose 20 strands of Fate to become the Fivescore Fellowship. Gaia meanwhile was creating her Elemental Dragonblooded. Neptune, having been the Reflecting/Reproductive soul of the Dragon of Time, lent her Elemental Aspect to a host of Dragonblooded: the Sons of Neptune, the Princes of Time. Pluto chose 100 of these souls for Autochthon to forge into Celestial shards, and these became the Chosen of Hours.

Pluto's Chosen were charged with keeping the Loom running smoothly through the ridiculous amounts of reality-breaking essence use that would accompany the Primordial War. The Division of Hours operated out of the Twilight Clock of Ages, a skyscraper the color of the sky at sunset with a clock face at its apex that could be seen from anywhere in Yu Shan. The Chosen of Hours were given power over healing the Loom, smoothing out the places where essence use snarled its fibers. They were both overseers and assistants to Autochthon's Pattern Spiders, easing their workload and accounting for the actions of the Fivescore Fellowship. In fact, each Chosen of Hours was matched to one of the other Chosen, similar to how each Lunar is matched to a Solar, and each Chosen of Hours was responsible for smoothing out her mate's actions in the Loom (in theory; in practice, some Sidereals took far more work to account for than others, and Chosen of Hours often found themselves sharing responsibility).

In Creation, the Sons of Neptune had similar responsibilities, though remotely. Every Solar Circle, every Airship, every Magitech Engine of Primordial Destruction was manned by at least one Son of Neptune, whose charms were designed to mitigate the damage such titanic use of Essence was sure to cause the Loom. By their protection, hopefully the war against those who created reality would manage not to destroy the machine that maintained it.

Neptune herself approached Autochthon, wishing for a ship with which she might sail through the Loom itself, along its threads of future and past so that she might better find and correct and flaws in the flow of time. Autochthon obliged her request, though in a tragic misunderstanding he used Neptune herself as a component in its construction. The Timeship was built, and Neptune was both its powering force and its guiding intelligence. Pluto permitted none but herself to pilot it, or in cases of dire emergency six Chosen of Hours could cooperatively sail the Timeship through the Loom. With the aid of the Timeship, many events that would have been too vague for astrological prophecy and thus otherwise could have caught the Exalted off guard were found and prevented.

Medicine Man: The Final Chosen of Hours

One of the Chosen Heroes of Time had grown tired, of both the war as a whole and of the bureaucratic posturing of his fellow Sidereals. One night, as the war was drawing to a close and the Incarnae and Exalted gathered to accept the remaining Primordials' surrender, he snuck away, back to the Loom, and did the unthinkable: he stole away in the Timeship. He had always loved sailing through the Loom at Neptune's helm; he often felt he knew her, could sense her thoughts, and he felt she knew him as well. He had never piloted her alone - only Pluto had ever done so successfully - and he had a very difficult time managing six control stations by himself. For a while, he thought he wouldn't make it, but finally he reached a solid destination. He checked to see where and when he had landed, and was horrified to see not a future age of Creation, but a prophetic vision of total annihilation, crystal fires burning away the fabric of reality all across the sea of time. In that instant he knew. In that one terrible instant he knew in his very bones that there was nowhere left to run, and only one way to save Creation.

Only the Blood of the Dragon of Time could quench these ageless flames.

He agonized over the decision as long as he dared, then returned to Neptune's helm. He sailed her back, back, back along the threads of destiny, back to the moment of the creation of the Maidens. As the core of the Dragon of Time was about to be poured into his Defining Soul, he sailed the Timeship right into Pluto's heart, and detonated it. Neptune and Pluto collapsed into one another at every moment across time, from before the beginning until after the end. Their blood and their tears poured out over the ages and quenched the fires set there by She Who Lives In Her Name, along with the blood and tears of every Son of Neptune and every Chosen of Hours; the Maidens and their Heroes who now would never have been. The Dragon of Time was slain, the Sixth and Seventh Maidens destroyed, and the Final Chosen of Hours sat at the Timeship's helm at the epicenter of this destruction, closed his eyes, and accepted his Fate.

...and then he awoke.