Time eater

Time eater

(Creature)

Type

Outsider
(extraplanar)

CR

2

Environment

Drift

Alignment

LG	NG	CG
LN	N	CN
LE	NE	CE

Source: Alien Archive 3, pg(s). 24

Time eaters are outsiders who roam the Drift in search of prey to steal time from.

Appearance

A time eater looks roughly like a spherical, crystalline, gigantic neuron bristling with transparent, flexible tentacles that extend far from its body. Time eaters often entangle with each other, forming large webs known as ganglions.

Ecology

Time eaters have limited mobility by themselves, but can steal the momentum of other creatures with their tentacles, stopping the timeline of their foes and speeding up theirs. For this reason, most of a time eater's indeterminate lifespan is spent gliding in the Drift in search for creatures to steal time. Due to their unusual relationship to time, it is speculated that time eaters were born when pieces of the Dimension of Time were pulled into the Drift, but this explication provides few clues.

Starship crews swap horror stories of moon-sized ganglions of time eaters descending upon a planet and freezing it in time. Even more horrifying tales speak of a time eater stowaway trapping a starship's crew in an endless, timeless, hopeless moment. The few surviving records of time eater encounters tell that they use the energy drained from victims to reproduce, either expanding their own ganglion or sending out spores to start one elsewhere.