Last updated: November 5th, 2022
Time
Time operates differently in different Realities; in some there are multiple timelines that are all considered "valid", some only have new timelines created when the past gets altered, and some are "flat": either the past outright cannot be changed or any meddling in the past alters a singular future. Those with dominion over time often have their hands full trying to prevent paradoxes and deal with meddling time mages, and Capricoris - the unlucky god who has time among her domains - is no exception to this rule.
In Siderea's Reality - which consists of just Siderea, its sun and moon, and the fake "space" encompassing them - time isn't quite flat but it is fairly restricted. There is a singular "canonical" timeline, which we'll call the Canon Timeline. This is the timeline in which everything I talk about takes place in, as well as the timeline any characters I use are from. The Canon Timeline is immutable: the past can be viewed but not changed, and any branching timeline has a level of... unreality to it.
Valid Timelines are branches off of the Canon Timeline that are one step removed from it. These branches are created only when some major diverging point - which we'll just call a Point for convenience's sake - presents itself. For instance, a war might be a Point. The Canon Timeline continues forth with the declaration of war, but a Valid Timeline branches off where King Warfucker had second thoughts and decided a war would be a poor strategic move. Note this specific example: oftentimes the Canon Timeline takes the "wrong" path to go down; the Canon Timeline is absolutely not the optimal timeline, and instead is only the Canon Timeline because I, the author, am naughty and made it so.
For instance, let's look at the Tragedy of Orion. The first Point was Orion having Arietis craft Galaxias, then Orion using Jupiter on Sagittaria, so on and so forth through all the gods due to their sheer significance up until the Point of Scorpius using Pluto on Orion. That was a shitton of Points burned through in very little time, and every single time the Canon Timeline chose the worst option - Orion succeeding in striking x god down - as the canonical one.
Any Valid Timelines run alongside the Canon Timeline and can be looked into by those with precognitive abilities and even visited by proficient time mages. They exist in a space between theory and reality, with its residents having loose connections to the souls of their Canon Timeline counterparts. They're sort of foggy and dreamlike with heightened vividness around significant events and people, with denizens having consciousnesses vague enough that no one is capable of noticing. In theory, were the Canon Timeline to somehow be irreparably destroyed, one of the Valid Timelines would automatically become the new Canon Timeline with presumably all of the "reality" that entails, with the connected souls being snapped into the chosen timeline.
As the Canon Timeline progresses, it's inevitable that Valid Timelines will drift further and further from it. Once the Canon Timeline reaches a Point that a Valid Timeline lacks, the Valid Timeline becomes an Invalid Timeline. The link between the souls of its residents and their Canon Timeline counterparts is severed and, with nothing to anchor it, the Invalid Timeline falls into Chaos and is consumed by chronophages: entities who exist throughout Entirety, consuming any time that is considered non-canonical.
Siderea being "unlocked" to the rest of Entirety has complicated things a bit, considering every Reality has its own mess of timelines that interact with others in even messier ways. Things are more or less the same as usual; offworlders will still be "copied" into Valid Timelines, time magic is still super illegal, and offworlders who do time travel will have the same problems as native Sidereans. On that note...
Time Magic
Time magic is deeply frowned upon by Siderean society. Things like pausing/slowing time are just barely accepted, but even then it's typically framed as significantly altering one's speed rather than the flow of time itself. Psychometry and precognition are accepted, though the latter is typically seen as something you need to have an active career in to hold any validity whatsoever. Physical time travel, however, is outright forbidden and extremely illegal to teach or engage in: even the gods are not permitted to engage in time travel without the express permission and supervision of Capricoris.
Though the common Siderean can only guess as to how time truly functions, they correctly assume that meddling in the past could endanger the integrity of time and alter the future. Unknowingly guided by the gods who do know how time works, every magic institution bans research on time travel and any recorded knowledge of it is destroyed. However, there are still a few who not only manage to learn how to time travel, but choose to engage in it.
Travel into the past is straightforward enough: it already happened, so everything is perfectly vivid. Most commonly time travel magic will render one as a sort of ghost or projection, incapable of doing anything but simply observing the past. However, someone good enough at it could make themselves capable of physically interacting with the timeline, which runs the risk of them causing enough of a difference - be it through actively attempting to make a Point or through innocent actions butterfly effecting into something much larger - that the Canon Timeline might be compromised.
This is where Capricoris comes in. She has a sort of 6th sense for when time is being meddled with and has the ability to time travel freely. Upon finding an errant time traveler it is her duty to remove them from the timeline in such a way that integrity is maintained or restored. If the time traveler is lucky they'll get off with nothing but a Saturn to the soul restricting their ability to ever use time magic again, a stern warning, and a trip back to the future. Otherwise the time traveler may need to be killed, or worse: Capricoris may need to manually trigger a Point way back in time to create a doomed timeline to be immediately culled (with the time traveler still in it), causing the current Valid Timelines to be immediately invalidated and deadheaded as well. This is deeply risky, as Valid Timelines are essentially emergency backups for Siderea and triggering a Point in the past could cause the Canon Timeline to change lanes and destroy the no-longer-Canon Timeline.
Fortunately, it's rare that scenarios that serious ever arise due to Capricoris's vigilance and the gods's efforts to ensure that time magic is a forbidden art that even practicers of forbidden arts won't touch. The opportunities she get to spare people help, as said time travelers will usually warn their peers that Capricoris waved them around in front of Floor Slut for a while before bringing them back, scarring them forevermore. Furthermore, one of Saturn's abilities is to "whip things back into shape", allowing Capricoris to use her Astral Weapon to repair the Canon Timeline to a sufficient enough extent to keep it from falling into Chaos.
One other risk related to time travel involves time traveling to alternate timelines. Even an accomplished time mage will lack the ability to tell when a timeline is about to become obsolete, and anyone who's looking around a Valid Timeline when it becomes Invalid will be cut off from the Canon Timeline - unable to travel back through the "branch" to the "trunk" the way they came - and end up munched like everyone else unless Capricoris managed to catch them in time and was feeling nice that day.
There is, of course, another aspect to Capricoris's role in safeguarding time...
The End of Magic
First things first, lemme just copypaste the info on The End of Magic from the wiki rq:
Due to the nature of prima materia, this didn't go particularly well and the most "successful" efforts only seemed to explain it away. People began taking advantage of this discovered property, learning to get meta to combat prima materia.
The excitement over this led to mortals trying to explain more prima materia-related things, including their own anatomy and the nature of magic. In doing so, however, clear explanations couldn't be found, or when they were they didn't cover everything that prima materia did.
As a result, many things on Siderea began to fall apart. People struggled to use magic because they no longer believed it could work by simply thinking about it. Zodiacs like the Sagittarians stopped being able to hang between quadrupedal and bipedal form because the mechanics weren't fully understood, people failed to Disappear and instead simply grew lost or plummeted to their demises, etc.
Some people even began dying off because they thought too hard about how their very own bodies could possibly work, leading to localized outbreaks of people simply dying from the panicked realization that their world made little sense or becoming corrupted from their terrified pleas to be spared from demise.
As chaos reigned, people began noticing that the especially faithful, the unconvinced, and the ignorant seemed to be doing perfectly fine, leading to a resurgence of people actively worshiping the gods in hopes that they might restore the world.
The increase in prayers specifically involving being trusted to have the power to fix things in fact gave the gods the power to fix things to an extent, and so began the gods' campaign of making big public shows of "returning" people's magic.
As things began to settle down, the gods knew it would be too dangerous to let any knowledge of this particular apocalypse remain, lest people wonder why it happened and repeat history. They began a campaign of censorship and misinformation, inserting into history various conflicting reports and in general making information about the time period scarce. From a modern perspective it's usually seen as part of the Rigel era: issues with magic and the like transpired as a result of the level of corruption on the planet. In the rare event that it's not associated with corruption, the explanation was that it transpired as a result of a lack of faith in the gods - sometimes as a direct punishment from the gods or sometimes because the gods must need faith to be able to maintain the planet and the betrayal of them led to them growing weaker.
In order to protect things in the immediate era, however, the gods likely would have had to engage in some wide-scale memory-manipulation, though the exacts are a mystery that likely only they know...
Asterismorum was invented by the gods and their associates - particularly Raziel as well as Metatron, who wasn't yet even an archangel - to create a sort of "logic" to magic that would keep mortals occupied enough to not dig deeper. It was spread around as a way to help magic achieve consistent results, teach it to children and those who struggled with magic, and a way to enhance once's magical strength. As it caught on, the gods increasingly manipulated records in order to make it seem to progressive generations that it was always a thing and a fundamental part of magic, with those who use magic without it simply being of incredible power and mastery.
The TL;DR is that after Rigel went apeshit on Siderea and got prima materia everywhere, the planet was kinda fucked up. Overloaded with prima materia, mortals did their best to try and understand it so that they could combat it. Unfortunately, prima materia doesn't like to be researched, and mortals kept "explaining it away". Considering how heavily imbued everything on Siderea is with prima materia, this led researchers to the conclusion that magic had no explainable basis, causing those that accepted this conclusion to lose the ability to use magic, and then to realize that their own bodies did not operate on scientifically-explainable logic, nor did the planet, and what about time...?
Long story short, The End of Magic was a devastating apocalypse that took a rapid nosedive into destabilizing the entire planet and almost everyone on it, the "epiphany" that Siderea could not reasonably function spreading like a plague. Even the gods were not wholly immune to it, and as her co-workers began to doubt their immunity to this collapse and began to panic over the disintegration of Siderea itself Capricoris knew something had to be done.
I'd like to draw your attention to a certain bullet point:
In order to protect things in the immediate era, however, the gods likely would have had to engage in some wide-scale memory-manipulation, though the exacts are a mystery that likely only they know...
Capricoris traveled to the other Valid Timelines, debating trying to force one of them to become the new Canon Timeline even though it would have unknown consequences, especially for her native timeline's people: if the soul is transferred to another being with mostly the same memories, are they still the same person? Do they have the same identity, the same qualia? Unfortunately, the nature of Points meant that any "unsullied" timeline had long since been culled, leaving only a bunch of timelines in varying specific arrays of devastation.
Desperate and with no way to get off-planet considering Cetia still wasn't around, Capricoris got in contact with Ganymede, who had left for Hell College not long after the Rigel business was finished. Or maybe he didn't really get the option until after this mess and they had to try and get in touch with Sariel. Can you imagine?? Either way, the point is that Capricoris managed to go meet with Asena, despite her immense shame over failing to protect Siderea and the gods's general anxiety over whether she would still hold any attachment to them after the many years since her last visit.
Having learned of chronophages and their ties to Asena through Ganymede and/or just the nature of her own work, Capricoris proposed that she and her fellow concerned Capricorises be consolidated into a singular chronophage. This would allow mega-Capricoris to exist outside of time rather than within it, allowing her to engage in unrestricted and far easier meddling with Siderea's Valid Timelines in hopes of maybe cobbling them together into a Canon Timeline that wasn't completely doomed. Furthermore, existing outside of time would allow mega-Capricoris to see future Points and cull undesirable branches in advance, allowing her to help Siderea avert such devastating tragedies. Finally, mega-Capricoris's consumption of Invalid Timelines would allow her to absorb the consciousnesses and knowledge of Invalid Capricorises, becoming a living record of Siderea's unwritten histories and invaluable counsel.
Additionally, it was to her understanding that being turned into a chronophage was often used as a punishment against those who interfered with time. As someone who had been trusted by Asena and failed her, Capricoris thought it a fitting punishment for herself, to bear the burden of that failure for eternity in hopes of averting the need for anyone else to ever again.
...To her (for a sizeable number of deep psychological reasons I will not bore you with here) surprise, however, Asena hardly thought Capricoris deserved eternal punishment for a "crime" that was neither really a crime nor her fault, like, at all. Siderea needed a funny little gay goat god more than it needed another time roomba skulking around. However, the other Capricorises were going to get slurped up by Floor Slut and cease to exist anyway, so she supposed that if they all truly wanted to become a mega-Capricoris now with added suction, well, why the hell not? It could be funny. A Capricoris who was co-workers with Floor Slut and Dreadmaster Dreadfang was pure laugh track material.
Though Capricoris insisted it was absolutely her burden to bear and it wouldn't be fair to basically just tell her to go home and get back to living a normal life while a bunch of other hers fused and cleaned up her (perceived) mess for her. The other Capricorises insisted otherwise, reminding her that they were all doomed anyway; it was only through Capricoris's initiative and drive that they were avoiding a death beyond death. They insisted Capricoris go home in preparation for the trials to come, made their own final arrangements, and were then converted into a singular chronophage that would become known by the name...
...Butter...?
She calls herself Caprichronos. But, legally speaking, her name is Butter now.
Caprichronos set to work immediately, using the combination of her extant Capricoris powers and her new chronophage abilities to put all of Siderea's timelines on hold and make an absolute fucking mess out of the Canon Timeline, cutting things out and splicing things from the Valid Timelines in. The idea was to create the most redeemable Canon Timeline possible while causing the least amount of "damage" to it; things she was splicing in would inherently have minor differences that she would need to either fix herself or leave be and hope Siderea's "current" chaos would make it not particularly noticeable. Overwriting as many memories as possible was also a necessity, causing Caprichronos to need to go back in time and force new Points she could grab some fake memories from. She would need to even tamper with the gods's memories a bit, including Capricoris to some extent, just enough to keep them from succumbing to the same fate as the mortals were. It was an unprecedented task, but Caprichronos had all the time in the world and this sense that someone, somewhere, was guiding her hand through her weaving...
In the end, Caprichronos had made something salvageable. The Canon Timeline had bits of the best of all the Valid Timelines and had replaced the worst bits with the least-bad bits she could find, throwing around enough memories and conflicting chunks of past to make mortals lose any consensus over what exactly was happening. This chaos ironically made it easier for the gods to gain control over the situation, especially once Caprichronos told Capricoris in careful terms that she was done and all was as well as it was doing to get. The End of Magic gradually came to an end itself, and Caprichronos began her new life in earnest.
It was a lonely existence, given that Floor Slut and her kind don't make for the most satisfying company. She was busy most of the time, and didn't feel like she should be hanging around Siderea anyway. The rest of the pantheon was made aware of her existence - a physical reminder of how grave The End of Magic was and why they should not peer into the gaps in their memories - but she actively distanced herself from them unless explicitly called upon for advice. She knew her "human" outlook would not last long against the infinite expanse of time and didn't wish to interfere with Capricoris's life: partly because she knew her presence would only make Capricoris feel guilty, partly because of her own quiet envy.
She wouldn't remain alone for long, however.
I haven't decided on the exact timing for this, but at some point or another Cancri became aware of the reality of Caprichronos's existence and was immediately heartbroken. Cancri and Capricoris have been girlfriends who refuse to admit that they are girl friends who are in love romantically, so the idea that Caprichronos had accepted an eternity detached from everyone she had ever known and loved for the sake of duty was emotionally devastating to her. This might've happened when the ~Valid Cappies~ were giving their timelines their final farewells, or maybe one or more Cancris managed to evade Floor Slutting afterward through sheer gay power, or some Cancri or another became aware of her later.
In any case, again through sheer power of lesbianism or something this Cancri or Cancries(??) got into contact with Asena and begged her to make her a chronophage as well. She had some scraped-together excuse about how she couldn't truly protect Siderea without being able to protect time but it was obvious that it was a thinly-veiled attempt at not just saying "please i am SO sad and SO gay :pleading_face:". Fortunately Asena once more has a heart and more importantly had been waiting for those two fuckers to kiss for literal eons so she was like "lol lmao yeah ok" and so Time Crab was born. She calls herself Chroncri or something less funny than Time Crab.
Caprichronos and Chroncri almost single-handedly handle all of Siderea's time-slurpin' needs and tend not to touch much outside of it. Any versions of themselves who become "invalid" are immediately "added" to their respective god, sparing them (in particular Capricorises) from having to munch down repeated "oh fuck I'm not real anymore am I" trauma or anything like that. Due to their aforementioned specializing in Siderea they don't have too much contact with other chronophages, but are familiar with a few.
Misc.
i organized this post poorly heres other important things im too tired and lazy to find a better place for
- I put a segue too early into stuff about offworlders, but something to note is that they interfere with knowledge of the future. Because it's beyond Siderea's scope, Siderea's reality can't "think" about futures where offworlders enter or leave. When "generating" possible Points and branches, it assumes that any offworlders currently there won't leave unless they already have explicit plans to leave at x time in x fashion, and it likewise assumes no new offworlders will enter. So, for instance, no one was able to foresee the Great Cetan Invasion because anyone who leaves the Reality isn't anticipated to return by "time's programming", so to speak.
- This means precognition has become a suggestion at best on Siderea in every Entirety other than the En2reties, where Siderea has become subject to the same flattened time as everywhere else and Caprichronos and Chroncri are just kinda chillin. The ability of the chronophages to cull unwanted future timelines is also thus impaired, as offworlders are constantly exiting and entering and messing up ~the algorithm~.
- As vaguely foreshadowed earlier, it was Arachne's "hand" Caprichronos felt while stitching together the Canon Timeline during The End of Magic. Though she had yet to physically manifest, Arachne still existed in some sense as the will of mortals and lemme tell you, mortals across all timelines were absolutely fucking Begging for salvation. Unable to really act on her own, much less in a way that could fix everything, all she could really do was imprint upon Caprichronos the knowledge of metaphysical weaving and the confidence to believe she could do this thing she wasn't even sure was possible.
- Arachne's association with time doesn't end there. In modern times she like, actually exists, and she and the Araneans are known for their psychic abilities. Arachne in particular has strong precognitive talents, though her manner of speaking always makes it a challenge to parse what the hell she's trying to tell anyone. I haven't gone too much into her role as a god, but part of her self-made duty involves attending to "webs" she's weaved across abstract concepts like space and time which capture unwanteds. In addition to being able to capture unwanted offworlders or keep in desired natives, these webs can catch people attempting to travel backwards, forwards, or sideways in time. This has significantly reduced the number of people who mysteriously and permanently vanish after trying out time magic, though it's caused a bit of an uptick in attempts among adrenaline junkies who want to see if everyone talking about time spiders is just making shit up for a meme or what.
- Arachne and the Siderean chronophages have helped reduce Capricoris's workload by quite a lot, so you'd think maybe Capricoris would relax a little or something. You are wrong she just keeps finding new things to make her problem to work on constantly, forever
- If you're wondering why a ton of bad shit still happened on Siderea after Caprichronos came around - The Death of the Sky coming shortly after in the grand scheme of things, for example - well... one can only imagine how much worse the other futures must have been for Caprichronos to make the picks she did. Furthermore, there's only so far ahead she can look and still have it be reasonable; she would rather not waste the "time" and energy on deadheading routes the Canon Timeline doesn't end up going anywhere near, after all. Little things can add up over time, though, meaning that eventually there will be Points where all possible choices lead to something bad. Finally, you need some bad things to happen here and there so that complacency and naivete doesn't lead to greater disaster later, not to mention the risk that people will pry into forbidden places if they get too bored...
- As The End of Magic never happened in Altirety, Caprichronos and Chroncri never came into existence there. Altirety is very different in general. If you're wondering how time works there, well let me tell you, it's [REDACTED]