PRAETORIAN

"none...will harm...the hive."

THOUGH it now serves as a protector of a Consciousness, PRAETORIAN was not designed to be this way. When an army of the Icewarden's exalted dragons discovered that a Hive was brewing in their territory, they recruited the Lightning flight's best biomechanical engineers to craft a Hijacker to spy on them. Thus, HIJACKER, as it was then called, was born. Created to infiltrate the arctic Hive by means of its undersea ice tunnels, HIJACKER's bioluminescent markings attracted drones so it could then break into their memories and steal their secrets. It was very successful at this job--so successful, in fact, that the exalted Ice army attacked and destroyed the Hive it was spying on...leaving HIJACKER at the bottom of the ocean to rot, its mission complete.

HIJACKER remained in those icy waters for so many years that its original memory began to fail. It lost detail after detail until finally all that remained was the knowledge it had stolen from the drones. It subsequently mistook itself for just another Hivemind drone, and one without a Consciousness to guide it at that. So it stretched its massive wings and left the sea, searching for signs of the Hive it thought it was part of. It eventually discovered the mutated, yet familiar signal coming from Turnback Cave. It latched onto FRAGMENT and REMNANT as its new Consciousness and tasked itself with guarding them from any threats they may encounter. The mutant Consciousness renamed it PRAETORIAN, and its previous life as a Hijacker was completely forgotten.