Taranis
Taranis was a mammoth of the time before time. He reemerged during the war as one of the leading members of the Original Mammoths, a group of surviving mammoths who had retained or otherwise recovered their mighty psychic powers, and became the Enemy of the people responsible for the anchoring of the thread, sparking a great war.
Early on in this war, the faction of Original Mammoths led by Taranis learned of a prophecy according to which they would be destroyed by forces from the 10,000 Dawns, a grouping of universes beyond the one where the war was being fought. Finding holes between their universe and the 10,000 Dawns, they sent painted warriors through to abduct their supposed foes, including the Firmament but also the entire population of the Dawns and especially Graelyn Scythes, who would supposedly become "she-with-the-golden-arm" wielding a gauntlet belonging to the Mammoths' foes.
In actuality, however, the Mammoths had been manipulated with independent operator Auteur, who hoped to use the power of the 10,000 Dawns and the gauntlet to single-handedly overwrite the war. Disguised as "the Emissary", Auteur followed Graelyn, Lady Aesculapius and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe back to the Mammoths' alter-time realm, where she revealed her true motives and took the gauntlet for herself, using it to turn most of the Mammoths and their painted warriors into fiction before inflicting the same fate on Graelyn's friends and on the temporally-frozen 10,000 Dawns natives who had been abducted by the painted warriors. Wanting to make up for his error of judgment, Taranis transmuted himself into a stuffed animal who still retained his metaphysical power, before Auteur herself could turn him into pure fiction. Graelyn, meanwhile, found her own way to mess up Auteur's ritual, deaging herself into a baby in such a way that Auteur would have to raise her up again until Graelyn was old enough to write her own ending to her own story, before which the ritual could not complete itself.
Over the next seventeen years, as she grew up again in Auteur's Town, Graelyn hung on to the Taranis stuffed toy. Thanks to his influence, she was slowly able to remember her original life in the form of dreams. Eventually, after she remembered the events immediately preceding her deaging, she was able to rescue her friends from fictionality and confront Auteur, also restoring Taranis to his true form. This turned out to be precisely what Auteur had hoped, as it counted as Graelyn "bringing an end to her story", and resulted in everything within the Town, including the mammoths, being fictionalised again. However, this reversal of fortunes was temporary as Graelyn managed to trick Auteur into fictionalising herself, leaving behind the gauntlet, which she put on an used to reverse everything that had happened, restoring all 10,001 fictionalised universes to reality.
On the day following the end of the White Canvas, representatives from both the 10,000 Dawns and the universe of the war gathered at the Needle to negotiate an Agreement whereby which neither reality would attack the other ever again. This included representatives both of the Mammoths and of their foes.
After the signing of the official treaty, Graelyn Scythes found Taranis and, in thanks for all his support during these seventeen years, impulsively gave him a Dawn badge as a token of gratitude. Overestimating the significance of the gesture, Taranis felt compelled to return it by imparting upon Graelyn the sigil of the Original Mammoths, which marked her in some deep and honoured way as metaphysically a mammoth in her own right, "granted the privileges of the herd and song, (…) and known to all to have the spirit of the tusk". As this new state of affairs was evidently a much greater guarantee of the Mammoths never attacking the 10,000 Dawns again than the signing of any written treaty, she carefully did not explain the insignificance of the Dawn badge, instead telling Taranis that he was welcome in Spiral at any time in a way which implied, without lying outright, that this was what the badge meant. (PROSE: White Canvas)
