A white cat with black sword-fangs, whose roar drove warmth from the world and created an ice age. The legend of Chien-Pao is not only known in Paldea, the location of its shrine. Johtonians who have been far north enough, or lived through unseasonably snowy winters, swear that it is the fourth of the region's legendary cats; Galar has a story about a swordfight with Zacian. Only in Paldea, however, is it associated with any sort of collapse or ruin – perhaps, if one accepts the legend, because only in one place did this pokemon topple a civilization.
Sources agree that Chien-Pao was at one point kept in the imperial menagerie – but did it rebel as an avatar of imperial greed, or out of sympathy for those destroyed by swords so much like its own fangs, or those taken prisoner in the empire's wars? Or was it simply nature's wrath, revenge for the Pyroar and Luxray so much more common in the Paldean Pleistocene? Or was the whole thing a coincidence, and it escaped on a cold, snowy day, many years before everything froze?
Modern Paldea is too warm for hail to form, and it took some time to correlate the late antique accounts of falling ice swords and white, hard furballs, which came with the sound of a felid roar, with the weather phenomenon well known to be produced by many a modern ice pokemon. Modern hail, of course, is not nearly so destructive – but even minor winter storms still devastate parts of the world which do not ordinarily experience them, and weather produced by legendary pokemon is always known for its intensity. And perhaps the snow and hail was but a diversion – camouflage for an expert assassin who moves silently and carries two swords in its mouth!