The Templars of Time are an order of paladins of the chronological balance of the extended cosmos. They close demonic cycles by ritual intervention, at need through the self-immolation of one of their own.
| Type | Faction (paladin order) |
| Affiliation | The Regulators |
| Known members | Ärsvan, Ariadna, the immolated Templar of the Dark Chapel |
| Houses of the Cycle | ⏳ House of Carnal Time · ☷ House of the Descent · ⟳ House of the Rotating Office · ⛓ House of the Band |
| Spanish entry | Templarios del Tiempo |
Description
The order works within the Regulators, the wider clandestine arm of temporal justice, but its members are paladins, not administrators. It has no fixed seat, appears wherever the extended cosmos summons it, and is not registered by the official Decadian apparatus as a stable body. Its numbers, recruitment and dwelling are unknown.
The doctrine of immolation
When a demonic cycle threatens the chronological balance and conventional interventions fail, one of the Templars immolates himself in a voluntary, ritual sacrifice. The immolated Templar is not lost among the ordinary dead; he becomes the nerve of the closure his sacrifice sealed, and each major closure of the extended cosmos keeps that immolation within its structure. Without it, the sealing does not work.
History
From the Temple to Neo-Paris
In Jerusalem in 1120, with the Temple newly founded under Hugues de Payens, four pilgrims came to its gates: the paladin Lirio, bound by a leonine oath, Ärsvan, the alchemist-physician Michel and the champion Alexio.
Demons lay beneath the order. Alexio died permanently in a crypt. Hugues de Payens proved to be the vessel of something older that split him into a hooded, scaled and fiery androgyne; killing him took seven days and the blessing of the Patriarch. He died in the Sancta Sanctorum with Ärsvan’s lance in him, but the demonic form escaped.
Behind the demons, Time itself was sick. Chronomon — god of Time, Heredeth, the Black Titan — had written a Blue Book with the coordinates of an apocalypse set for Christmas 1889; if Time dies, the universe stops like a clock. In the Omniporal Labyrinth, a zone 34 outside space-time, the group found Carlos, Rolando and Ganelon, temporal knights of the year 800 frozen in a mission. Michel unlocked the Akashik Communium and saw the structure: Chronomon at the center, the Guardian of Time (a beheaded angel with spheres of creation and destruction) as neutral arbiter, and the apocalypse as self-fulfilling unless someone intervened. The Guardian took Michel away first.
In Paris in 1889, in Notre-Dame, the Daughter of Baphomet waited in the catacombs, the Black One, a specter exorcised but never destroyed, prowled, and the Clock of Destiny, an avatar of Chronomon, counted down. Ärsvan seized the Clock and threw himself onto the Sphere of Annihilation, which devoured him and Chronomon. The prophecy broke. Lirio renounced his paladin powers and swore custody over something that may be Chronomon redeemed. Ariadna, once a dark spirit and enemy, was reborn at dawn because Ärsvan had loved her. Neo-Paris, the City of Times, rose from the broken clock; the pilgrims of 1120 emerged 769 years later as rulers of an open cosmology.
Three years later, in the cycle of the Descent, Ärsvan reappeared as a damned Templar in Hell.
Documented operations
- Rite of Sacred Reconnection (Caldero). As diabolic ambassadors probed the temporal energy beneath Caldero’s dormant volcano, the Templars lit great torches for a purification ritual in the nave of the Dark Chapel, and the ambassadors retreated. Pablo the Chronomancer, caught between both sides, made an emergency time jump. The immolation of one Templar completed the partial sealing of the rift.
- Destruction of Notre-Dame (Uchronic Paris). Ärsvan, operating with the sphere of obliteration for Ariadna’s sake, completed the destruction of the Cathedral. The Time Bandits, partly Regulators themselves, acted in coordination.
- Uchronic geographies. Templar doctrine intervened in Belgrade, Sarajevo and Constantinople, without full detail.
- Folds of the Ante-Inferno. Parallel to the operations of Bertrand and Adam Arlequín: the Templars hold the external seal while the damned work the internal one.
Relationship with the Regulators
The Regulators administer, plan and keep a trans-geographic archive; the Templars carry out closing operations and the paladin part of temporal justice. A Regulator need not be a Templar; a Templar is always also a Regulator in the broad cosmological sense. Ariadna, Ärsvan and the immolated Templar of the Dark Chapel are documented examples.
Open questions
- Whether the order will act in the next cycle of Caldero: if the Cageewrights complete the ritual of the zodiacal marks and the rift sealed by the Rite of Sacred Reconnection reopens, the cosmos is expected to summon the Templars again, probably with a new immolation.