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Exalted: Out Of The Eater

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[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.

I think we've had enough of red

A thousand nuances of blood and fire

Maybe some blue would be nice for a change
 
TenfoldShields said:
The heartlands of the Empire are lush and fertile, tamed forests and irrigated fields bounded by the City's sevenfold walls. The metropolis itself spanning the Yanaze and sprawling for miles in every direction. Surrounding geography riven by a secondary river network; itself the cumulative labor of generations of helots, their bleached white bones buried in the muck at the bottom. You were raised in these provinces, at times close enough to the sixth wall to kiss the sorcerer-sculpted stone. But Lookshy itself was always a shadow against the sky to you. A distant silhouette backlit by the descending sun: something impossibly ancient, something so very rare, and not for you. Never for you.

But the heartlands are ten days gone now and you're here, borne on a convoy crawling its way East. Maybe not at the frontier no but closer to that crumbling edge, that twilight border where the City's control is weaker and so many of the forts stand ungarrisoned. Where the towns and settlements are fewer, thinner, and the empty space between them yawns so very wide. The wind keening and moaning, veiled in skeins of dry, sandy soil, rising up to a scream as it howls through the desolation. Through the nothing.

The mountains to the East glow golden with the last rays of Sol Invictus as he slips down the vault of the sky, plunging towards the Western oceans. The range's snow-shrouded slopes shining, splendid, even as bruised purples and softer indigos collect in their valleys. In the space between peaks where the darkness comes early and lingers long. You don't know their names, you don't even know where you are but you...

Feel a kind of kinship with this place. It's hard and unmerciful, it does not love you but there's an honesty in that. You don't think the steppe loves anyone. A kind of equal, omnipresent disdain for master and slave alike. You can appreciate that.

You pull on your padded jacket, shivering even in the sunlight. Even in the brutal kiln of a Scavenger Lands Summer. You're still soaked to the skin, your tunic and pants damp from the exertion of the march, but you can already feel the warmth being leeched away. The wind started almost the second you left Ivory Bones proper, it hasn't stopped since. At least the coat, coarse and dusty though it is, is dry.
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Of all the weird pulls, this kind of makes me remember a shot from Heaven's Gate that got pointed out in the Cinema Snob review. It was a beautiful blue sky and vast rolling green hills and shit, contrasted by a big ol' bloodied corpse just lying right in the foreground at the bottom of the frame. That's the kind of 'beautiful nature vs human ugliness' kind of juxtaposition I feel you're getting across and it's really wonderful and by wonderful I mean awful.

Take the pick in your hands. Swing it, send it biting deep into the parched earth. Work it free in a small cloud of grit and shredded roots. A cascade of dirt streaming down the sides of the steadily widening trench, rocks the size of your thumb bouncing, carried on the current. Jason digs his shovel into the unstable ground, whorn shoe sending the blade deep. Lifting a spadeful of dirt and debris with a grunt and tossing it across the gap on the already ankle-high pile. Rinse. Repeat. The same motions mimicked up and down the lines of workers, mirrored so slightly out of synch; the ripple-walk of a centipedes legs.

A whip cracks, a voice cries out, and you all flinch as one. Eyes down, focus on the task in front of you. Metal strikes rock and chips of porous grey spray out, stinging where they hit. Your forearms ache, the tendons nestled between the bone throbbing. Molten lead slowly drips its way down your back, framing your hips. The curved, crescent scar just below your eye itches and burns. A blow from off to your left, heavy and so horribly loud, the sound of a side of meat falling with a wet smack to the floor. You don't turn to look, you just try to breathe. Every exhale a ragged, shuddering gasp. Every inhale raw and greedy and desperate.

In front of you a girl staggers and stumbles, almost falling beneath her burden. Forcing herself back up to a shambling walk along the slopes, stone the size of a full grown chicken in his arms. Nobody stops to help. Nobody gives her a second look. Just work, it's all you can do. Work until you're done. Work until it's over. Work until you fall.

Strike. Shovel. Rinse. Repeat. The only way out is through.

They don't let you sing, they don't let you talk, and that makes it so, so easy to get lost in your own head. To slip into a kind of trance to the tune of hundreds of men and women digging. Your body just a machine of twisted sinew and striated muscle, stretched on a rack of bone and swathed in skin; running through rote motions. Paying just enough dull attention to keep from hitting anyone. Hurting anyone. It's still hard to think as such: the pain distracts, every impact rattles your head and disorders your thoughts. Your own breath rasps in your ears, a constant, harsh, scrape on already sensitive nerves. But you're experienced enough to let the fog take you without a struggle, to let the half-remembered stories swirl and slosh in your brain.
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Form up in orderly lines, you the walking dead, the hollow-eyed and the gaunt. Set your tools in a pile while the guards scan the crowd, while they count each and every piece. It's a punchline in search of set up, because what would a half-starved slave do with a pick they couldn't hide, could barely stand to swing? What is a helot going to do with a shovel besides dig their own grave? But you know and everyone knows that if they're missing one they'll keep you out here longer. You know that if they're missing one they'll turn and tear into you, rip into you, and come away with chunks of your flesh between their teeth, with your blood on those leather lashes and your bone exposed to the air. Each and every instrument finds its way back.
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It also helps that they do a bit of preventative culling of any slaves that look too much like an A-list actor! If you think you see Kirk Douglas on the pickaxe line, just stab him on the spot, you'll save yourself a lot of time in the long run.

There's a sound behind you, you turn your head. Watching as the thaumaturges and their elementals even out the rougher sides and square out the bottom. As they compact the vast mound of loose soil above into a solid rampart. A pause, a single, perfectly drilled motion; the men and women in long coats and chain shirts beckoning as one. With a noise like a sharpening knife razored shards of stone burst out from beneath the grass. Spearing out from the flanks of the channel, a thicket of swords.

One small portion of the vast arc slowly taking shape, curving around the mining town.
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"I mean we probably could've had the Pokemon Trainers do the entire thing and saved an assload of time and manpower but tbh we just wanted to fuck with the helots a little."

She made them up to look like battle standards, long lances bearing the weight of helot "heraldry". The bodies stripped, arms outstretched, spearhead and haft piercing their chests from the back. Steel slick, crusted with long dried gore. Flies wreathing the nude corpses like tendrils of fine smoke even as that sickly sweet smell, human waste and human fear and ruptured human viscera, slithers up your nose and squirms down your throat.
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I see Vlad the Impaler had a quick guest-starring credit. Past a certain point he's really got to admit to himself that the skewering is more for himself than any hard-man necessity.

"(Come on)," Jason murmurs to you, one hand on the back of your head, fingers in your hair as he gently but firmly turns your face away, "(let's find a place to sleep.)"

In the end it's easier said than done. The barracks sit by the governor's manor, surrounded by broad boulevards, separated by physical space and tangible status. Resting on a small hillock, overlooking the identical row houses for the helotry. The bunks originally made to hold a fraction of the population, each one now packed full to bursting. You can see doors wedged open, people curled up just outside the thresholds, along the foundations, beside the gutters cut in the ground for flash floods. A layer of exhausted men and women, packed in tight.

It takes you a bit but you and he find your way back to that ledge you ate your supper on. It's not much but the lip offers you something like shelter from the prevailing wind and when the two of you huddle in close it's almost, almost comfortable. Your cheek to his chest, his hands on the small of your back.

The twisted faces of the dead, jaws slack and heads lolling, watching you with filmy eyes as you bed down as best you can.

For once your dreams are almost lucid.
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Jeez, if that isn't ever a powerful fucking image. Even this small escape of intimacy with Jason has to be watched over by the displayed dead. There is literally not one single thing in his life that doesn't somehow remind him that he's worth less that shit.

in which case


[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.

let's dream about something fuckin' nasty o_o

TenfoldShields said:
Apologies for the delay, my laptop died last night and I didn't get my hands on a temporary replacement until today.
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oh no how tragic we had to wait for our free content like... what was it, an extra day? how will we ever go on
 
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.
 
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.
 
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.
 
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.
 
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.
 
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.

Only in dreams is there peace. There we float in a blue oblivion, weightless, motionless, as near to a corpse as a man can be while still living. Water is freedom is death; after all, the underworld is tied together by rivers.
 
Why does this sound like such a guiding motivation?
Love, Freedom and Revenge.

[X] You dream of something between lust and love. Arms around your waist, the hands on your hips changing from one heartbeat to the next; from things of ash and smoldering ember to Jason's, just as calloused and worn as yours.

Yay, for (un)heroic motivations!
 
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.

Love and freedom just don't seem... appropriate in the current context.

On the other hand impaling Dragonblooded looks like a good thing to dream about.
 
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.
 
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.

We are what you made us.
 
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.

The Wyld is true freedom.
 
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.
 
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.

That seems like it'd be a real welcome experience after some unending backbreaking labor.
 
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.
 
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.

Fuck all these assholes tbh.
 
ctulhuslp said:
[X] You dream of something furious and forbidden. Armored bodies mounted on polearms, wrists and ankles bound; a Dragonblooded of Sextes Jylis, spitted and still twitching in the very center. Sacred blood slowly dripping down.

Fuck all these assholes tbh.
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Ok.

You know what?

If we are to ever get exalted as a Solar, I'm joining Lyta. Or that guy made by homebrew, that got turned into a cecylene infernal after his sons were slaughtered and his entire village enslaved by Lookshy.
 
[X] You dream of something that could be called "freedom". You've only been swimming a few times in your life but you imagine it's something like that. Floating, drifting weightless. Suspended in the blue above everything else.

I think our protagonist has had quite a good fill of death and blood. More appropriate to dream of something completely unknown to him.
 
Accelerator said:
Argh.

I can now understand why Leviathan and others go 'fuck the dragonblooded'.
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It's not like mortal rulers are any better, to be honest. The dragonblooded just have larger reach than most mortals, but which bronze age king didn't employ slavery even in real life? Some of them were even worse than the Dragon-blooded, performing even crueler practices like FGM or such.

True emancipation will probably only come when everyone has enough privileges and luxuries that they no longer need to have slaves / whatever, and that's probably more likely under redeemed Abyssal rule than anything else.

Maybe we could engineer a God of Anti-Slavery if we made a humongous cult and made lots of deals for Investitures to get a Spirit of our choice (which may be us; we can have a Sidereal make us a God) to Essence 8-9, and bind it beforehand with a geas to always work for freedom?

We did choose the Divine Path, and this would be an appropriate endgame for a dedicated and powerful Exalt. It'd also probably be the most relevant change we could do, since this Spirit would have access to Yu-Shan, and so could work with / coerce other important Spirits to end the circumstances leading to slavery.
 
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RedV said:
It's not like mortal rulers are any better, to be honest. The dragonblooded just have larger reach than most mortals, but which bronze age king didn't employ slavery even in real life? Some of them were even worse than the Dragon-blooded, performing even crueler practices like FGM or such.

True emancipation will probably only come when everyone has enough privileges and luxuries that they no longer need to have slaves / whatever, and that's probably more likely under redeemed Abyssal rule than anything else.

Maybe we could engineer a God of Anti-Slavery if we made a humongous cult and made lots of deals for Investitures to get a Spirit of our choice (which may be us; we can have a Sidereal make us a God) to Essence 8-9, and bind it with a geas to always work for freedom?
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Uh oh.

Then that god will be out of a job.

Anyway... but there are many types of slavery. And way of treatment.

This is rather cruel, even by the standards of the bronze age.
 
Accelerator said:
Uh oh.

Then that god will be out of a job.

Anyway... but there are many types of slavery. And way of treatment.

This is rather cruel, even by the standards of the bronze age.
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It's not necessary that every good work is stalled in Yu-Shan. It's just that nobody actually cares enough. If we can find a weak God, befriend them and then slowly raise their Essence through Cult-building / Sorcery / Investitures we should be able to have a friendly God who'll care enough to support us from above (we can do the groundwork like creating a breakaway state that shelters slaves).

Plus, if we boost their power enough, most Spirits will simply yield to the Spirit we've raised because most low Essence Spirits probably don't want to anger a high Essence one. Peer level Spirits could be hard to convince without serious bribery / Exalted Social Skills, but it'd still affect serious change.

This would be more feasible as Anathema, but even a dedicated Dragonblooded Circle should be able to raise a Spirit to E5 or E6 if they don't mind going against the Immaculate Order. Our character already doesn't care about the Order much, so it's even IC for him!
 
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