Colossal Beast - Ti'an the Celestial Dragon (Promptober 2025 #24)

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.

Rocks and dust kept falling onto the dragon's body, eventually spinning into a single compressed sphere and forming a planet. Life sprung from the interior and coated the surface with vegetation, sea creatures, trees, monsters, and eventually intelligent bipeds. Dragons developed early on, training the early races of dwarves and elves before the accelerated humanoids (humans, goblinoids, gnomes, orcs, and others of similar lifespan) sprang up and spread.

This story has huge holes born from centuries of oral tradition, but scholars and madmen through the ages have searched for the kernel of truth in the long-winded yarn. Is the Celestial Dragon dead or merely sleeping? Can someone wake it? Can someone raise it as a controllable undead creature? Would owning a piece of Ti'an's body give the owner some control over life itself?

On a more basic level, does any of this story actually contain anything remotely like the truth? Are Celestial Dragons a thing? Are there any more of them flying across the cosmos? How did we get so lucky to have a colossal dragon form the core of the world? If we dig deep enough, will we find huge dragon bones? Has the Molten Throne found any of Ti'an's relics, and do they secretly hold dominion over all living things through those relics?

So many questions from a single ancient myth. Let's play the game and figure out some answers.

Part of the Promptober project for 2025.
I'll also use this lore in Fellport, so it's listed in the Fellport Almanac as well.