| Ti'an, Celestial Dragon Mythical creator of Beneterra |
One ancient myth from the Yamagura Empire tells of an ancient and massive dragon sacrificing itself to create the world of Beneterra. The myth gives the dragon a name, Ti'an, literally meaning "heaven" or "sky" (though modern translations break the name into two characters roughly meaning "bloody paste". Linguistic evolution. Go figure.). The myth refers to Ti'an as a Celestial Dragon from that point on. Ti'an supposedly has scales made of the purest metals: platinum, mithril, and adamantine, and its body glows with starlight and holy fire.
The myth starts with the Celestial Dragon flying across the universe, creating life in its wake as it travels. It weeps comets and breathes dust and fire to ignite the stars in the heavens. Sometimes it hovers and watches what it created, and most times its creations die out in short order, but mostly it moves on to the next patch of sky that craves more than emptiness. Ti'an eventually tired of its journey after millennia of seeding the heavens, and it decided to sacrifice itself in a final concentrated burst of creative energy. It found a warm, welcoming, yellowish sun, then curled up and slept until it expired, laying the seeds of life and intelligence in its own corpse.