When the world was new and time was young, there were no guardians for the gates. In the beginning, there was no need. Being fluid and flexible, time for many creatures wasn’t a linear experience at all. Rather sentient beings moved forward and back at their whims and leisure. They could be born in the future and yet die in the past.
To them, the ability to move back and forth, forward and back, was the same as breathing. They thought nothing of it.
For mankind who was born without such privilege, the concept was always a hard one to grasp.
To those who can bend time, the idea of a rigid linear lifetime without such freedom was just as inconceivable. These creatures didn’t understand man’s obsession with measuring and preserving what to them was an infinity of interwoven circles that bent back upon themselves with fluid ease.
But as with all things, abusers were born. Rather than being grateful for the abilities they had, they chose to prey on those who lacked them. They stole time from those who could least afford to lose it and used it as currency. Held it over the heads of those who needed it.
More than that, the abusers shifted history for their own gain, and created paradoxes and changes that ill-affected the entire world.
The entire universe.
It impacted everyone.
Even the gods.
The ancient writers claimed the original zeitjäger was born, not of a mother, but from just such calculated cruelty. When a demon abused time to hunt and kill his first victim for purely selfish reasons. That blood spilled in the name of hatred and violence hit the innocent ground of mother earth and mixed with her fertile soil to create a blood-red mud that made that firstborn golem. With no other emotion to nurture it than such malignancy, the golem became an insatiable nightmare that preyed on anything with a beating heart.
It became a conscienceless monster with an insatiable hunger for blood and bone.
Until the gods stepped in and gave the monster a soul. Worse, they gave masters to those monsters and assigned them a purpose. Enslaved them for their own needs, and made time a linear requirement for almost all creatures, everywhere.
One with rules and laws.
One with dire consequences for any who dared to tamper with its new rigid sequence.
Now tampering with it was something that not even the gods could do with impunity.
Tread not with time, for it slays us all in its own due course …