Before humans and gods inhabited Nova, dragons ruled the planet. Or at least that’s what those of them who were alive in that time like to say. Millenia ago, a dragon named Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia was born in a clutch of eight on the Cliffs of Tal’Moyn in Svlat, which are now the Tekk Mountains in Tossec. Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia was the only survivor of his clutch, and also the only survivor of his colony when Svlat was destroyed in a summoning ritual gone entirely right.
Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia, like most dragons, didn’t pay much attention to the construction efforts of smaller creatures. But he was aware that the construction of three large ziggurats across Svlat was significant, as was the construction of the statue in the centre of them. As a result, he decided to go observe the completion of the statue, and the ritual that followed. He is the only person living today on Nova who was a witness to what happened that day.
The summoning ritual as far as Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia understood it was designed to attract a new god to Nova. It did this by seeking out the most powerful god it could find, opening a portal, and calling it to the planet. Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia witnessed the portal opening and for a few moments that lasted a number of weeks, his world and the world on the other side of the portal became one, and Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia was on a world that was dying, a war raging for its survival that it was losing. And that war began to spread to Nova with the portal open.
Realizing that they had not summoned a deity who would help them, the original Novans attempted to banish the entity and failed, and in so doing they accidentally trapped the entity on their side of the portal. All the power that had gone into their summoning ritual was redirected to a more powerful version of a similar spell—a sealing ritual anchored through an obelisk built elsewhere on the planet. This succeeded, despite the entity having already killed most of them, but they were able to anchor it with the obelisk and the statue they’d built to summon their new god. This created a new southern pole for their planet right where they were standing, which caused an ecological apocalypse that destroyed nearly the entire planet and killed most of its inhabitants.
Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia survived this apocalypse, and went about collecting as much material as possible from the alien visitors to the planet who’d helped seal the mysterious creature, who were hesitant to work with him. Fortunately, he did not require their consent for this, though at least one war between dragons and elves occurred because of Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia deciding he would take something that they did not want to share with him. He was the only one to realize that the appearance of humans on the world four thousand years after it passed was related to what had destroyed it in the first place. Because of his status as an eyewitness to the apocalypse, he was able to convince most other dragons to largely leave humans be, lest they trigger another global event. This remained the case until the malenvar war not long after, when the dragons joined the fight to repel the demonic entities. Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia wasn’t personally present when the entity was briefly unsealed at Thunderfall, but he recognized its presence and realized that the planet would never be safe as long as it was sealed here—especially not because he also sensed a second power at Thunderfall that he recognized from his time in the other world as being one of the entities that had tried to destroy it and everything else.
Then came the Catechism War. In the second (or third, depending on who is writing the history) phase of the Catechism War, in which the Spider Corps had inserted itself as a third side in the conflict dedicated to destroying the gods at all costs, a series of now famous experiments on dragons were carried out. A considerable number of failures led finally to the first success when Cameron and Raphael managed to capture Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia, who was then given shapeshifting abilities and became the first dragon to be able to properly communicate with humans. He spent considerable time negotiating with the Spider Corps’s leader, Klaus, who wanted him and the dragons to help fight the gods. Offering him leadership among the dragons, Klaus convinced Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia—who had taken on the human name Osmond—that fighting on the humans’ side was in everyone’s best interests. Osmond agreed, because he had felt the return of the entity at Thunder’s Falls and realized the gods could not be trusted with the safety of Nova, because in their desire to conquer the world, they would unleash something they didn’t understand or respect, and nor could the elves, who at that point had forgotten much of what they had once known that would let them be a valuable ally.
Osmond told Klaus that his cooperation was contingent on Klaus’s agreement to help him stave off this much larger threat to the safety of the whole planet, ultimately telling Klaus about the summoning ritual, the entity, and the other world, and even taking him to the south pole to observe the remnants of the ritual. In return, Klaus shared what he had been told about the Right and Left Hands of Creation by the Left Hand itself. Over the period of speaking with Klaus, the two of them shared their respective information and went in a few trips, both magical with Klaus’s spells and mundane with Osmond’s salvaged spaceships, to find more information to supplement it, Osmond came to learn that the other world he’d been transported to had been four thousand years in his future, called Earth, and that the humanoid creature that had come through the portal was related to the Hands of Creation, but separate from them. With nothing else to call it, Osmond and Klaus called it the Third Hand. These discussions happened over a period of several years, during which Osmond and Klaus went from being antagonistic allies to antagonistic friends to antagonistic lovers, whose relationship reshaped both their lives and continues to this day. Osmond continued to work with Klaus even after the other dragons refused to continue participating in the war and even after Klaus left the Spider Corps, helping him uncover as much of the truth about the Hands of Creation and the destruction of Nova and Earth as he could, using any and all technologies and magicks available to him.
When Klaus faked his death, he lived with Osmond in his new home in what were then called the Dannok Mountains, which are now the Yakkin Mountains at the north pole—the farthest point from the summoning circle that Osmond could find to live. Osmond founded the colony that now resides there and though he is not the leader, even the matriarchs of the colony respect his age, wisdom, strength and authority. To this day, Klaus lives with Osmond whenever he is not masquerading as a normal human somewhere in the world (which he currently is), and so Osmond’s cave, despite being at the north pole, is extremely habitable for mortals and contains a variety of mysterious machines and artefacts made to measure, analyse and find entities similar to the Hands of Creation, among other uses.
Over the millennia, Osmond worked closely with Klaus, rarely interfering in human affairs as Klaus does, but rather focused on discovering the secrets of the Right and Left Hands, as well as the Third Hand, which they still presume to be related to them but are unsure of how, as it remains sealed and Klaus has never encountered it like Osmond has. Using a variety of spells and artefacts that he and Klaus devised, Osmond has travelled through time and space to find answers, and to a number of different realities, in order to discern the true nature of the Hands of Creation and the threat they pose, as well as how to stop that threat.
It is Osmond who came up with a plan to end the existential threat posed by the Hands once and for all. Though his plan to kill the Right Hand (and therefore also the Left) is only a hypothesis, both he and Klaus are confident that it will work if enacted under the exact right circumstances, and are also confident that it will siphon the power of the temporally displaced Third Hand. They have conducted a number of experiments in other corners of the polyverse, where they have found fragments of the Hands present. Thus far, Osmond and Klaus have managed to use this polyverse-traversing loophole to hide the bulk of their actions from the Temporal Bureau, because the Bureau does not observe other verses as closely as they do vers-0. Unfortunately, they have not found a way to destroy the power of the Hands, only to detach it from the entities who own it now and transfer it elsewhere. Osmond believes the power should be given to Klaus, but because Klaus prefers for it to be kept separate from him, they have devised a mechanism to store the power to be used safely without anyone having to become a creator god.
Neither Osmond nor his partner are interested in remaking the universe in their own image. They merely want to make some corrective changes to the current universe to make it safer for the people who live there. At the end of the day, Osmond is still a dragon, and he knows that the best way to mitigate a threat is not to destroy it—which simply encourages another threat to arise in its place—but to force it into submission. Osmond watched the Third Hand of Creation nearly destroy Nova once, and also watched the Right Hand try to destroy Earth (and the universe) and as well knows it tried to destroy Nova (and the universe, again) more recently. He is convinced that neither it nor the Third Hand can be reasoned with or destroyed, and therefore the only way to deal with it is to defang it entirely, by showing it that even the creator of the cosmos is no match for a dragon on a mission.
From “What the Fuck Is up with This World?” a journal by Tegan Spark, SC 3777.
How Best to Use a Sword 