The Chronomancer’s Gambit

The Chronomancer’s Gambit

A Myth of Leann, the Kingdom of Time

In the twilight days of the God-Titan War, the world cracked.

The skies wept blood. Fire rained from the heavens. Mountains crumbled, and seas swallowed cities whole. In this unraveling, Leann, the Kingdom of Time, foresaw its end.

Led by their grandmaster, the last chronomancers gathered within the Tower of Stillness. They had uncovered a ritual buried in the forbidden layers of history. A desperate spell to exile Leann from time itself. It would lift the kingdom from the stream of hours and days, placing it in a still sanctuary outside the grasp of ruin. But the price was steep: every chronomancer would give their life, their magic, and their soul.

And so they did.

At the ritual’s peak, when the last words were uttered and blood had sealed the spell, a cry rang out in the Queen’s chamber. The Dragonborn Queen, weakened and dying, gave birth to a daughter, Sigrid, with an hourglass shaped birthmark glowing on her cheek.

Then the world stopped.

Time froze in place. Even in the Cave of the Gatekeeper, where death are judged, all things halted. The Gatekeeper turned its gaze to the still world, and in the silence, something moved. From the shimmering breach between moments came a towering presence, covered in gears, sundials, and pendulums. The God of Time, summoned against its will, stood before the Gatekeeper, flanked by the shimmering souls of the fallen chronomancers.

Time was not meant to be unraveled. Furious, the Gatekeeper exiled the god of time and cast the chronomancers’ souls into the void between seconds.

Time resumed for the world. But not for Leann.

Leann floated in silence, untouched by years. Within the bubble, the child grew but slowly, strangely. Decades passed. She never aged beyond her early thirties. And when she bore a daughter, Hilga, too, bore the same hourglass mark and stopped aging in her teens.

Decades after the war’s end, Leann returned to the world, untouched, timeless.

The Gatekeeper remembered.

It sent its avatar to collect what was owed. But the avatar returned aged and broken, its sands nearly spent. It spoke only this: “She said no.”

The Gatekeeper came in person, stepping across reality to appear in the Queen’s chambers. The queen awaited him, serene, unafraid. “You’ve come to make a deal,” she said.

The god peered into her. What it saw, no tale agrees upon. Some say it beheld the faces of the fallen chronomancers swirling within her eyes. Others claim it saw the future, the slow extinction of its own power if it dared oppose her. And some whisper the queen offered the god a vision: itself crowned in temples, worshipped as Leann’s patron, its name spoken in every village and prayer.

The Gatekeeper agreed.

From that day forth, Leann honored the Gatekeeper as its patron deity. Shrines rose, temples rang with hymns, and even the smallest hamlet offered candles and prayer to death incarnate.

But Who Is She, Truly?

Time has passed, and still the Queen reigns, her daughter beside her, both unchanged, ageless, serene. Scholars, priests, and sages have argued, whispered, and theorized.

Some say she is truly ageless, blessed by the divine moment of her birth, a child of prophecy forged from the stillness of time itself.

Others claim she is the vessel of all the fallen chronomancers, their minds and memories fused into one being, her soul a collage of sacrifice and sorrow.

Some whisper darker things: that the ritual wove necromantic threads into her bones, and that her youth is stolen from those who die too soon in Leann.

And a few dare suggest that she is no longer mortal at all, but a new god, born in the moment when death, time, and sacrifice intertwined.

But no one knows for certain.

The Queen does not answer questions. She smiles with the patience of time.

And her hourglass has never emptied.