Miraidon - Paldea
And I saw the Lord of the Dead Earth floating above the barren ground. "What must we do to stop this?" I asked.
When the Iron Serpent turned and beheld me I was transfixed in sadness. "Can you outrun the land? Can the fish outswim the sea? The birds outfly the heavens? No. No more can you leave time."
-Iter Aevum
Overview
Miraidon, The Iron Serpent, Automaton King, The End of All, was an ancient deity sporadically worshipped in the Paldean Empire. They were supposedly encountered in the Gran Caldera of Paldea during ritual pilgrimages. He and his brother, Koraidon, were the primary gods of the early empire, before being supplanted by The Levantine God in its later years. The details of both faiths were mostly lost to history with the rise of the Kalosian Empire and the Church of Life.
Books about the Caldera faith made their way to libraries in India and China, and a few eventually made their way back to Europe. Renaissance art sometimes depicted Miraidon or Koraidon. A handful of stories featuring the dragons would enter into the pop culture before gradually falling out of favor. Their popularity was revived once more following a nineteenth century expedition that purported to see Miraidon in the Gran Caldera.
Miraidon lies somewhere between the realm of a god and a cryptid. He has no active church, although he once did, and his existence is disputed. Whether he truly is a forgotten god, a sighting of Rayquaza, an extraordinarily rare and powerful pokémon, or just a hallucination given life by the public's imagination may never be known.
Appearance
Miraidon was described in antiquity as a floating dragon. Iter Aevum, the main surviving text on Miraidon, describes him as having 'royal' scales, which likely meant purple, and being about ten feet in length. On his neck was a translucent pouch with a storm cloud inside. Lightning flowed from his head and body, striking anything that came close. His claws and tail were metallic. His eyes were like a sheet of metal with irises made of glowing ink. The irises appeared to be move around like ink flowing on a page or oil moving on top of water, forming new patterns as the creature emoted. His body apparently bore some resemblance to cyclizar.
Most depictions of Miraidon are based off of that in the Iter Aevum. In more rural areas the drawings that still remain, mostly on account of being drawn on cave walls too deep beneath the surface for priests of Xerneas to find them, vary a little more. Some are yellow and appear to be over one hundred feet long. Others walk on the ground. This is to be expected: Miraidon allegedly never left the Gran Caldera, and in rural areas where literacy was low the official accounts were bound to become distorted.
Renaissance art depictions, and most subsequent drawings, were heavily based on the Iter Aevum description.
In Paldean Mythology
The Gran Caldera of Paldea is constantly mired in storm clouds and only accessible through a handful of tunnels and narrow passes. In pre-imperial times it was regarded as either a cursed or holy place and avoided.
The Paldean emperors decided to send exploratory teams inside to see what was there. Different teams recorded drastically different visions of the local wildlife, their rulers, and even the lay of the land. Some reported that it was filled with monstrous creatures that resembled normal pokémon, just larger and more vicious. Their leader was Koraidon, The Winged King. Sometimes explorers would encounter a world that seemed to be made of automatons resembling normal pokémon. Their leader was Miraidon, The Iron Serpent.
Over time the legends were codified and a proper religious framework developed around them. At the center of Paldea was a portal to another world, the world of gods, spirits, and monsters. That world was constantly at war between the Winged King's beasts and the Iron Serpent's automatons. Time also moved differently so that every year outside could be centuries on the inside. Every time explorers entered the area under the Caldera the battle lines could have changed so that another faction ruled.
Neither dragon was viewed as good or evil. They were simply forces beyond human understanding or control. Both were sacrificed to in order to avoid their wrath as much as to court their blessings.
The main text on Miraidon, Iter Aevum, is the account of a priest who entered into the Gran Caldera and had a series of increasingly strange visions, culminating in seeing Miraidon and the end of the world.
Miraidon, in this account, comes from a world where humans cut down the forests, poisoned the waters, and made the land burn like a volcanic landscape. The remaining pokémon banded together to save the natural world from collapse at human hands. In retaliation the humans deployed their strongest spells and annihilated almost all of the world's pokémon. Miraidon then called down a lightning storm that lasted seventy days and only ended when everything on the planet was dead. Miraidon then rebuilt the pokémon in the form of automatons.
The unnamed author of Iter Aevum believed that the Gran Caldera was a vast world where everything that had, is, could, and will occur was happening simultaneously. Time and causality had no meaning. The universe ebbed and flowed like the sea.
Koraidon rose from nothing and fell. Humans rose and fell. Eventually Miraidon, too, would fall and leave behind a barren earth. Koraidon and Miraidon ruled at the high and low tides of time, the ends of the universe. Whichever way time flowed, one would be the beginning of the world and the other it's end.
Scholars are divided on what the meaning of the Iter Aevum means. It may have been a criticism of imperial ambition and a call for a more naturalistic lifestyle. The purple scales and iron hide of Miraidon may have been a metaphor for the emperors with their purple capes and steel armor. However, Miraidon is not the destroyer of the pokémon in the story. Some scholars have argued that Iter Aevum is fundamentally a conservative tale praising the need of a strong emperor to keep the masses in check, enforce divine law and prevent the world from coming to ruin. His war with Miraidon was really about the ongoing fight with nomadic tribes that relied on their raw strength and bonds with local pokémon to fight the Paldeans superior tactics and technology.
The book may have simply been the visions of a man losing his sanity in a place that was hostile to human life. Later explorers would describe similar experiences of creeping madness.
From 1500 CE to 1650 CE Miraidon featured in a number of chivalric romances. In these accounts he was simply a strange and powerful dragon guarding the realm of the fairies under the Gran Caldera. Knights wishing to gain the favor of the fairy courts or even take one as a wife would have to defeat the iron dragon. This made a measure of sense as a dragon made of cold iron could realistically oppress an entire kingdom of fairies and would be a worthy foe for a legendary hero. In most versions of the tale the dragon was insurmountable by strength alone and required trickery to down. The victorious knight would pretend to surrender and give Miraidon an offering of food. The food was either poisoned or contained a sharp spike that killed the dragon when eaten.
Worship
Both dragons were regularly sacrificed to through offerings of livestock and precious gems. Koraidon's offerings were metal and were collected by the empire from across the land to be taken to the Gran Caldera. There history of emperors skimming from these offerings as old as the offerings themselves.
It was believed that savage Koraidon could bring strength in the hunt and war while clever Miraidon could help smiths and mages. Miraidon, because of his domains and coloration, became associated with the wealthy and the nobility. Koraidon was associated with the commoners and military. The choice of red or blue robes became political in the Imperial Court, as populists and generals would set themselves apart from the old, often corrupt noble families through their attire. On at least three occasions slave revolts or popular uprisings ended in the Temple of Miraidon being looted or burned.
The Temple of Miraidon was destroyed for the final time in 214 AD when a devout follower of the Levantine God ascended to the throne and ordered all remaining pagan structures destroyed. A new temple dedicated to the Levantine God was erected on the site. It, too, would be destroyed when the Kalosians arrived and destroyed all monuments that offended their faith.
While many of the grand temples of the day were made of marble, The Temple of Miraidon was made of gilded concrete. The largest building in the complex was filled with fountains and eternally burning torches. The engineering methods used for both have been lost to time. This was the public temple where nobility came to pay their respects to the god. Commoners were usually banned from the temple under the belief that only Miraidon's chosen could enter his sanctum.
At the back of the site were more functional structures, a hearth and forge. The empire's greatest mages, mathematicians, and smiths lived and worked at the site to create new spells, inventions, and weapons. They had a second gate so that they would never be seen by the nobility. Practitioners of the arts sacred to Miraidon would often offer their own offerings of wine, coal, or food directly into the flames of hearths or forges.
Origins
The Gran Caldera has long been a source of mystery. It is extremely difficult to access and many expeditions into it never return. Those that do return are often insane. It should not be surprising that legends about the caldera would take hold.
Depictions of Miraidon are somewhat consistent, but this is not proof of their existence. Explorers would be aware of the reports of those who came before them. In the throes of insanity they may have hallucinated about what they expected to see. Indeed, almost all of those who claimed to have met Miraidon emphasized they did so in visions and not face-to-face.
Some scholars have suggested that Miraidon was inspired by Rayquaza. The Sky Dragon is often associated with weather and is a serpentine, flying creature. Miraidon's original description as having 'royal' scales could have referred more to Rayquaza's presence than their color. Several ancient civilizations regarded Rayquaza as a sky god at the heart of their pantheon. The only particularly unusual attributes that separate Miraidon from Rayquaza are the size and description of the eyes. Rayquaza is far larger than Miraidon has been described as. They also possess fairly normal eyes. These discrepancies could still be attributed to a hallucinating writer. Perhaps the first explorer's 'vision' was inspired by Rayquaza and later descriptions were inspired by the ones who came before, each slightly embellishing or altering the story until a distinct creature emerged.
Some theorists have speculated that Miraidon is from another dimension. Some places that were held in ancient myths to be gateways to other worlds have since been discovered to contain portals to Ultra Space. The Lake of the Sunne and Altar of the Moone are sacred places in Alola where the dimensional veil is particularly thin. The strange pokémon sometimes described could be Ultra Beasts. If so they would be far more similar to terrestrial life than most ultra beasts are, simply being larger or mechanical versions of existing pokémon.
Today
In 1870 a government-sponsored expedition entered the Gran Caldera for the first time in centuries. The Church of Life had long forbidden entry as it was a potential resting place of Yveltal, or at least a place warped by her. More cynical historians have suggested that Church leadership was aware of the legends of Koraidon and Miraidon and did not want to risk explorers bringing back their own tales of other gods.
The weakening of the Church's power and the closure of all other colonial frontiers led to a change in policy. The Paldeans hoped to discover new worlds to conquer, or at least resources to harvest, in order to facilitate a new golden age. Instead the research team came back describing a misty hollow filled with aggressive mineral pokémon that resembled extant species. One explorer even drew a sketch of Miraidon and a fragmented account of a conversation, although he could not remember doing so the next day.
The Violet Book, as the expedition's preliminarily report came to be known, became a best seller and helped inspire the science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. The Paldean government was disappointed there were no human inhabitants or apparent mineral wealth to be found. Whatever was in the caldera was guarded by exceptionally strong pokémon. Formal expeditions were discontinued, although a number of explorers would attempt to enter themselves. They usually did not return.
The Gran Caldera remains a popular subject among conspiracy theorists, cryptid hunters, and tabloid writers. The rampant, and often entirely unfounded, speculation has intensified following a series of preliminary investigations into the site in 2002 by the Naranja School for Girls and Uva School For Boys that led to the discovery of terrastalization. However, mounting deaths and mental breakdowns among the researchers led to the discontinuation of the exploratory missions in 2005.
Whether Miraidon truly exists remains unknown. The Naranja-Uva explorers never mentioned seeing either Koraidon or Miraidon, just strong and unfamiliar organic, spectral and mineral pokémon. No living specimens were ever retrieved.