Guild Wars 2

So we know Glint used to be a champion of Kralkatorrik, the crystal dragon. Back then she was known as Glaust. She gained free will after the Forgotten performed a specific ritual at the Altar of Glaust in Orr, and in time, she began understanding the minds of mortals, and turned into a friend of all living things, abandoning the service of his former (at the time slumbering?) master.
She was the one who compiled the Flameseeker Prophecies, and hundreds of years later witnessed them happening. She also took part in these events, aiding the chosen heroes in their quest.

Over two hundred years later the Destiny’s Edge learned of her past as Kralkatorrik’s champion from Faolain, the grand duchess of the Nightmare Court, and set off to kill her. However, it came as a surprise for the heroes, that Glint was actually willing to help Destiny’s Edge fight her former master. She had been collecting and protecting Kralkatorrik’s crystallized blood drops from his last battle for the past three thousand years. Among these protected relics was also the only thing that could harm Kralkatorrik; a spear made of one of his own spines.

However, the battle didn’t go quite as planned, as Logain left the group to protect his queen and love interest Jennah, so both Glint and Snaff met their untimely deaths in the claws of Kralkatorrik and his minions.

We also know that a group of grateful dwarves had formed the Brotherhood of the Dragon after Glint concealed many of the elder races from Kralkatorrik. The purpose of the brotherhood was to protect Glint, who had become the oracle of Tyria.

After the dwarves transformed and disappeared into the depths of Tyria, the guardianship was shifted to a group later known as the Zephyrites. After the lost battle against Kralkatorrik, the Zephyrites sought out the remains of Glint and her draconic energy. From those remains the Zephyrites learned of the Aspects of Wind, Sun and Lightning, and began to study them deeper. After this they built the Zephyr Sanctum, and began their own peaceful culture of roaming in the sky of Tyria, and landing to trade with different cultures.

We also know Glint had multiple crystallized eggs in her lair. We saw, and could actually pick them up ourselves in a mission called The Dragon’s Lair in Guild Wars 1.
We also know Glint had at least one baby dragon. The destroyers seemed to have an interest towards this particular baby dragon, and the Brotherhood of the Dragon actually asked our characters to protect the baby from the destroyers.

I myself have a couple of mysteries bugging me.
1. Who is the father of the baby dragon/eggs? The mate of Glint?
2. Where is the baby dragon now? How fast does it grow?
3. Could the thing that appears in the middle of the golden light pillar, and lands in the midst of the crystals in Pale Tree’s vision be one of these eggs, or the baby dragon?
4. Where did Faolain truly find out about Glint’s past and the awakening of Kralkatorrik? She told Caithe the Nightmare Court had simply been observing things deeply, but I really doubt it. How could that lead into the revelation of Glint’s past?
5. Glint is a seer. Where does this gift originate from?

Do we know that dragons reproduce by sex?

Hmmn, that’s a good point. The question is trying to speculate the possible existence of another Glint-like dragon though, so let’s assume they function like most living creatures.

Klffxs Kruuhqgrxv Kdggrfn LLL nqrz wkh dzvhu

Before this gets deleted. 3 letters back

1) An important part to consider when speaking about Glint’s children is a little known fact:

Dragon minions cannot reproduce.

Dragon champions can make more minions – even more champions – but unless they were corrupted living beings that happened to be pregnant when corrupted, they cannot give birth (a side-effect of having no organic insides – working ones, in the case of Risen).

So while such was unlikely to be considered back in GW1, whether they continue using the terms “egg” and “baby” in a literal sense of reproduction, this indicates that Glint was once a living being that happened to be pregnant when corrupted. Thus, means that there was once a race Glint came from, and she is always only referred to as a dragon…

2) Unknown. We see a “Baby Dragon” that used Glint’s model but was slightly smaller in Eye of the North – 6 years post-Prophecies and seeing the eggs – but we don’t know if that was a baby that hatched from one of said eggs, or older and unseen prior.

3) A good deal of folks think it’s one of Glint’s eggs. So yes, a possibility.

4) Unknown.

5) Unknown.

On 1), I should note that this is something we disagree on. The statement that ‘dragon minions cannot reproduce’ and the idea that the hive queen in the skritt storyline comes from the order mentors, and being a franchise with unreliable narrators, a better way of reading this may be ‘we have never known dragon minions to reproduce’.

Considering how many Risen we see laying viable eggs in Orr, personally I think it’s more likely that they do reproduce and it just hadn’t been observed up to that point. There’s a lot of Risen spiders and drakes laying eggs for them all to have been corrupted while pregnant (particularly since half the point of eggs is that they typically have a shorter gestation time than internal gestation), and even if they were, over the centuries I would have expected most of them to have run out of eggs by now. So at the very LEAST, it seems a minion that was corrupted while gravid has the ability to generate more eggs pathogenically – and at that point, the distinction between that and conventional reproduction gets pretty blurred. The only distinction is probably that it’s asexual – the dragons probably don’t care about their minions evolving and minions competing for mates would serve as a distraction from carrying out the dragon’s orders, making parthogenic reproduction a more efficient source of new minions.

On 5), my gut feeling is that Glint is less a prophet than an Asimov-style psychohistorian, with the added advantage of being able to read minds and thus having that advantage over Hari Seldon in the Foundation series. The Flameseeker Prophecies are essentially self-fulfilling – the mursaat may not have focused so much on sealing the Door of Komalie if not for the prophecy that its opening would result in their destruction, and if the mursaat hadn’t been sacrificing Krytans to seal it, then the events after the Searing would have played out quite differently. However, Glint knew mursaat psychology well enough to know how they’d react.

Now, where she got the ability to read minds in the first place is a mystery. She says in EoD that this was her purpose under Kralkatorrik… but presumably if Kralky had that ability himself he’d use it directly rather than rely on a champion, so it’s likely that it’s an ability she had before Kralkatorrik corrupted her.

We are actually told on multiple occasions – not just that one story step – that dragon minions cannot reproduce. There’s a few events – some related to the egg events – in Orr where this is highlighted if you stop to talk to the related NPCs, explaining that dragon minions have been proven to be incapable of reproduction thus far, and the cases seen are all of pre-existing eggs that likely were corrupted. In some such events, with the talk of “making more minions” what we see is cases of some minions spawning different kinds of minions (similar to how the ice shards the Claw of Jormag sends out spawn various icebrood models, or the crystals in the Brand do similar).

As to your point 5: How would that account to telling that the “Shiverpeaks will be covered with blood” and that Ascalon would fall, and the dead rise to attack humanity? While the part with the Mursaat is most certainly self-fulfilling, I find it hard to believe that Glint would predict the Searing, the Cataclysm, the Stone Summit rebellion, Khilbron assaulting Kryta as the lich lord, etc. even if on a general scale? Khilbron was certainly self-fulfilling that prophecy to a degree, but that still wouldn’t account for the charr and Stone Summit’s actions.

And she even says at after completing Hell’s Precipice but before completing the titan quests:

“The Titans the lich loosed upon the world are causing more trouble than even I could have foreseen.”

Just to put my two coppers in on the first topic, it’s been my observation that only egg laying creatures are seen to reproduce after corruption. Considering that, I would say that suggests risen are capable of asexual reproduction (as drax pointed out, there just seems to be too many cases where egg laying creatures lay corrupted eggs for them all to have been fertilized just before corruption) but incapable of pregnancy. (At a guess, I would attribute this to eggs being developed to be largely self-sufficient, whereas development in the uterus requires a sustained reliance on the workings of the mother’s body- workings that may no longer be functioning post-corruption). As we also see, as Konig point out, minions apparently being generated by undead fish or icebrood crystals, I’ve also tended to think that those two, at least, are capable of replication without biological reproduction, replicating a template apparently out of raw materials. (The crystals might be waved away as actually being a form of icebrood troop transport, but risen fish spewing out streams of risen humans/other creatures? When they’re occasionally explicitly referred to as replicators? Not so much.) I’d tentatively add the branded to that list, due to an event that ominously alludes to them always coming back no matter how many are destroyed, but there again, an alternative explanation is possible: that branded regenerate rather than replicate. Of course, destroyers are primarily (perhaps exclusively; we know Primordus can corrupt, but not if he actually does ) produced through this generation method.

I would be interested in being pointed at this dialogue, though. I can’t remember any place outside of the personal story where pregnancy is brought up. I know that the chicken event in Malchor’s is mentioned to be pre-existing, artificially corrupted eggs, but it never says there that the chickens can’t reproduce. I’d have to check in on the drake one, and those are the only two egg events I know of.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

1) An important part to consider when speaking about Glint’s children is a little known fact:

Dragon minions cannot reproduce.

Dragon champions can make more minions – even more champions – but unless they were corrupted living beings that happened to be pregnant when corrupted, they cannot give birth (a side-effect of having no organic insides – working ones, in the case of Risen).

So while such was unlikely to be considered back in GW1, whether they continue using the terms “egg” and “baby” in a literal sense of reproduction, this indicates that Glint was once a living being that happened to be pregnant when corrupted. Thus, means that there was once a race Glint came from, and she is always only referred to as a dragon…

2) Unknown. We see a “Baby Dragon” that used Glint’s model but was slightly smaller in Eye of the North – 6 years post-Prophecies and seeing the eggs – but we don’t know if that was a baby that hatched from one of said eggs, or older and unseen prior.

3) A good deal of folks think it’s one of Glint’s eggs. So yes, a possibility.

4) Unknown.

5) Unknown.

Dragons like glint are a race, this was proven whit the saltspray dragons.

The saltspray dragons and Glint are entirely different species, each one being similar to a dragon in style, but can probably be classified as “drake” like the various “drakes” of Guild Wars Prophecies. Drakes and Dragons may not be that close of a classification, or maybe they’re all dragons and only a handful of them are special (or near god like in this case).

As for things reproducing, I don’t know if the how of it is all that important. Can Glint do it naturally as a champion of a dragon? Irrelevant. She’s not a champion. She hasn’t been since she was freed from its influence. That may have made some physiological changes overtime to make her less of a mindless killing machine and more of a living organic possibly child bearing creature. Or maybe not.
But then there’s the fact that even if Glint DID learn the ability to reproduce somehow after gaining a normal style of living she doesn’t seem to have anything that she can mate with sexually. We’d probably know if there was another Glint like creature running around. So that probably leaves the means of reproduction to asexual.
Are her “eggs” even organic? Did they come from Glint genetically? Under the “she had to be pregnant beforehand” theory, either she has an INCREDIBLE gestation period, or those eggs have been just lying around for a very long time. Or did she somehow materialize them from something? Like crystal? There’s certainly plenty of it around her, and her eggs are awfully crystaline in appearance. Kralk and his champion spawn all kinds of crystal minions, maybe Glint just put a lot of effort into just a handful that she can raise from birth without the Kralk style mind control.

As for questions I’d like answered, Was Glint even a around before she was a champion? Did Kralkatorrik, corrupt a member of a now extinct Glint-like species? Or did he create her from nothing? Something to note on that is that, with the exception of the shatterer, who looks to be made entirely of energy and rocks, the dragon champions look organic. We don’t have any living examples of ANYTHING that looks like the champions in size shape or ability, but Zhaitan certainly has a lot of smaller Tequatl looking dragons flying around the final missions in Orr. I figure in Zhaitan’s case, it’s possible that he can merge organic matter into looking like all kinds of things. He turned a human king of Orr into a floating eye, essentially. So that just leaves the question of wtfook is the claw of Jormag and Glint?
If Glint WAS an organic creature before corruption and not entirely fabricated by Kralkatorrik, why did he pick her? Was it random? Was she special among her breed? If she alone could read minds, that could be one reason he chose her.

There’s a lot we don’t know about champions, current or modern. In all likelihood, champions could be made with entirely different methods from the previous awakenings, as dragons are likely to learn from mistakes (i.e. a minion that can turn against its master) There are certainly a lot of differences just between Glint and the Shatterer.
(sorry if my post seems kind of all over the place. I’m at work)

I think the question on Glint, specifically, comes down to one thing- in GW1 the baby had the same fleshy (well, scaly) bits as her, but in GW2 Glint is talked about (and depicted in concept art) and if she had nothing organic left of her form at all. If there are organic parts to the baby, it would follow that Glint would have needed to have undergone some biological process. If ANet has decided to retconn it to sat Glint, and by extension the baby, is all crystal, the simplest answer would probably be that she generated the eggs, likely in similar fashion to all the crystal elementals she had in her lair.

The wording in Arah explorable certainly suggests Glint was a corrputed creature- you can’t “return” free will to something that has never had it. As for why Kralkatorrik picked her? We have no idea.

Fun fact though- all those dragons flying about in Orr are Teq’s size. You have to break out of the map to see it, but the three you shoot down measure up to the same scale.

Squee.7829:

As for things reproducing, I don’t know if the how of it is all that important. Can Glint do it naturally as a champion of a dragon? Irrelevant. She’s not a champion. She hasn’t been since she was freed from its influence. That may have made some physiological changes overtime to make her less of a mindless killing machine and more of a living organic possibly child bearing creature. Or maybe not.

I disagree. The Arah path explicitly states that all the ritual did was give Glint free will. It explicitly states that her body was still in its corrupted, crystalline, form.

And in GW1 in her lair, we see her being defended by crystalline constructs – Crystal Spiders and Crystal Guardians.

Furthermore, as per The Trek of the Zephyrites short story, Glint – like the Elder Dragons and their champions – consumed and stored magic up until her death.

She remained in her corrupted form, she consumed and stored magic, she had Branded-like minions. I’d say she still counted as a dragon champion, at least in terms of capabilities, just no longer with a Elder Dragon master.

Hrrrmn. I don’t recall the specifics regarding egg events in Orr – I’ll have to keep an eye out for them in the future (unfortunately, they’ve been made substantially more difficult to solo than they used to be). However, if they say ‘thus far’, then that’s them essentially admitting that no it’s not ACTUALLY proven, it’s just that they haven’t seen it ‘thus far’. As Aaron says, it does seem that only egglayers (and some specialised examples such as the fish) can reproduce among dragon minions – it’s likely that placental minions can’t reproduce because for the dragon, it’s not worth having an adult minions out of action for the length of a pregnancy. Eggs are relatively low-investment, though, and thus can serve as a means of gaining new minions.

Regarding the Prophecies: It’s possible that she was able to detect the trends well enough in advance for us to think of it as seeing the future, when it really is just extrapolation. The rivalry between the Tyrian nations that led to the Guild Wars has probably set in well before the Prophecies were formulated, and likewise, the tensions that led to the dwarven civil war were probably established back then as well. She would certainly have known that the charr hadn’t given up and were looking for a counter to human magic, and probably also that Abaddon might start breaking out of his prison at some stage and give them that counter. Orrian viziers may even have started growing curious about Abaddon and the Lost Scrolls at this stage, so she might have foreseen that if a charr invasion was to occur, a Cataclysm would be the likely result.

Overall, though, to my mind, the Flameseeker Prophecies were a trap. She probably figured that at some stage somebody would try to open the Door of Komalie – the Flameseeker Prophecies, however, ensured three things:

1) That anyone going for the Door would follow a roadmap she laid out, one that would ultimately end in their downfall.

2) That nobody would go for the Door unless a certain series of events came to pass. (And while we only get snippets of the Prophecies, some of them are pretty generic – for instance, the Shiverpeaks being covered in blood could be the dwarf civil war, or it could have been that Glint predicted that if the dwarfs weren’t busy with a civil war, they’d honour the old alliances and intervene in Ascalon, provoking a charr invasion of Delrimor. More than one route to satisfy the condition.)

3) That, because of the conditions, she would know when someone was likely to go for the Door, because she’d be able to see that the conditions had been fulfilled before the would-be Flameseeker did.

Now, of course, it’s possible that she does actually have the power of prophecy. However, it’s also possible that the Flameseeker Prophecies only represented one possible future, maybe one that Glint hoped not to see – but if things did go down that path, then the Prophecies represented a means to minimise the damage. If history had gone down another path, it would just be another unfulfilled prophecy.

Then that gets rid of the “can she reproduce as a champion?” question. Apparently, the answer is yes. Because she did it. Still leaves the mystery of the method of her reproduction though. Did she reproduce naturally? Did she make a special form of construct? It may help if we could see the infant because, as Aaron pointed out, it may have been retconned to look completely different from its GW1 variant. If it’s still organic, it was likely (but not definitely) an organic birth. If it is all crystaline or crystal/energy like The Shatterer, it’s likely (but not definitely) a construct. We know, from what what Konig pointed out, that she CAN make constructs. Even without Kralk’s influence. And an organic birth probably wouldn’t require one to store magic energy as it was described above. If Glint was described as “getting fat, lazy and moodily aggressive” I’d be more into the organic birth theory.

But if the Arah mission said she was only free’d but still in Crystal form, does that mean that the Glint we saw in GW1 may as well be completely ignored as far as appearance? (Due to retcon) Or that she, for no discernible reason, became fleshy in time for our GW1 heroes to find her, and then turn crystalline again before her death, as the zephyrites described her?

Also, as for the zhaitan minions being as big as Tequatl; that’s pretty neat! I always assumed they were smaller because I guess size/distance ratio is a little harder for me to discern in games.

Squee.7829:

Then that gets rid of the “can she reproduce as a champion?” question. Apparently, the answer is yes. Because she did it. Still leaves the mystery of the method of her reproduction though. Did she reproduce naturally? Did she make a special form of construct?

The question has never been “can she make minions” – it has always been “is the baby dragon a minion-like creation, or actual reproduction” which can be paraphrased as “did Glint reproduce?”

Creation of minions != reproduction

Squee.7829:

It may help if we could see the infant because, as Aaron pointed out, it may have been retconned to look completely different from its GW1 variant. If it’s still organic, it was likely (but not definitely) an organic birth. If it is all crystaline or crystal/energy like The Shatterer, it’s likely (but not definitely) a construct.

There’s a fine difference between something like the Shatterer, and something that was living-then-corrupted, and that would be what Glint – and likely her child – would be in such a scenario. Unlike Aaron, I wouldn’t really say that Glint was organic looking in GW1. Not completely. If you observe most Branded, they retain most of their skin, and the glow of crystal is in fact beneath said skin. Their skin grays – much like the risen’s.

Glint very much had crystalline scales, though she and her defenders were blue rather than purple (sans Facets, if you can count those, and Glint herself looked gray due to the lighting of her room).

The Shatterer, unlike all “former-living-Branded”, is hollow, with what isn’t being black and having rock-like textures to it, far different than any other Branded in the game, which are not hollow and hold skin.

Squee.7829:

But if the Arah mission said she was only free’d but still in Crystal form, does that mean that the Glint we saw in GW1 may as well be completely ignored as far as appearance? (Due to retcon) Or that she, for no discernible reason, became fleshy in time for our GW1 heroes to find her, and then turn crystalline again before her death, as the zephyrites described her?

Depending on how you take the appearance. She certainly had crystalline aspects to her appearance, though she had scales as well. See attachments for GW1 image, and GW2 concept art used. Decide for yourself.

First attachment: Glint in-game screenshot
Second attachment: Baby Dragon’s model pulled out of game (model is same as Glint’s)
Third attachment: Glint concept art as seen in Sorrow’s Furnace story
Fourth attachment: Another Glint concept art as seen in Sorrow’s Furnace story

I doubt she was ever “fleshy” in GW1 – whether you consider it a retcon or not is up to you. But what’s certain is that Glint did have crystals jutting out from beneath her skin. And if you ask me, those wings look a little too sparkly to be skin/scale.

draxynnic.3719:

On 1), I should note that this is something we disagree on. The statement that ‘dragon minions cannot reproduce’ and the idea that the hive queen in the skritt storyline comes from the order mentors, and being a franchise with unreliable narrators, a better way of reading this may be ‘we have never known dragon minions to reproduce’.

Was going to point out the skritt story line as well. The Orr events though specifically state that minions were pregnant at corruption. Destroyers though are interesting type of minion since they’re not technically corrupted (they’re constructs), so I guess they could be constructed specifically to be able to reproduce, or simulate something close enough.

As for the Flameseeker Prophecies….. “Shiverpeaks will be covered with blood” sounds way to similar to the Depths of Madness in Nightfall….

Are we even sure that all the prophecies will be fufilled at the same time!?!

The release of the Titans would of course inadvertantly cause Nightfall to happen to the Shiverpeaks if they weren’t stopped so did we just avert the last part of the Flameseeker Prophecies or are Dhuum, Menzies and the remainder of Abaddon’s armies destined to turn the Shiverpeaks into blood stained mountains of Madness!?!

Or was that part of the prophecy talking about Nightfall?…. According to quests and lore Abaddon’s realm was already merging with Tyria by the time we killed him…. Could the Shiverpeaks have merged with the Depths of Madness at this time?….