Exalted: Out Of The Eater

Peel back the flesh, skin the senses, leave every nerve raw and flayed. The channels of your brain blazing, burning, pulsing red like straw choked streets seething with flame. A town put to the torch. A pyre in your skull. Your mind is a labyrinth, a slick knot of confused perception and insane elements: thoughts stumbling, smoldering through a world of freezing fog, the wind stained filthy with smoke and prayer-ash. Through a world of blood and bone and black mud. You feel them as they flare bright, there in the darkness. Surging, shedding embers; guttering low, going out.

You're still changing, becoming...something: power crawling through reanimated muscle, veins bulging and squirming beneath lavender skin like so many worms, the roots of an obscene tree. Your head is a horizon of teeth, a hole in the sky.

But is this really so alien a feeling? To be a helot is to be inhuman. A beast that stands so treacherously on two legs and mumbles so impiously along to Listener-lead prayers and Lamentation; what an atrocious display. A mockery of noble citizenry, a crude caricature of a person and yet- and yet you are everything you were made to be, everything you were intended to be. The vision made flesh, the grand design realized: be proud, you are everything she ever wanted.

Lookshy's blades are legion, her sword is the state; she is the Second City of Heaven and you? You are the culmination of all her energies, all her efforts. A man without kin, without family or friends, without those ties that bind brother to brother and father to son. Those cords that join the hands of dear companions and precious lovers. She cut away your history, she murdered your future, paring them free with slow slices and hurling them far, far from you. The carcass of centuries left to rot, forgotten in sun-drenched fields; bleak white bones gleaming in the shadow of Shogunate walls. You've lived all your life within her dominion.

You are Hers.

Raise your voice in defiance, your own words betray you. Work your throat, taste the syllables that fall from your lips. They aren't even yours are they? She reached into your mouth and tore out your tongue with her talons. Prying open your bloody jaws to pour the words of conquerors down you throat.

Your mutilation is magnificent and all-consuming.

This is what it is to be you. This is what it is to be a helot. You are the greatest work of the City, the final genius of Lookshy made manifest: man annihilated.

So in the end, did you really have so far to fall? You were born dead. Harrower was always here, lurking within Alexius like the secret history, the long-buried truth beneath the skin of the world. So in the end, is it really any surprise that when you reach out into the darkness, the darkness answers? That what comes swimming out of that softly-falling night is those sleek, slick machines? Those ivory raptors that hang among the swirling clouds: flakes of snow, drops of oil, sapphire chips between billowing mountains of citrusy orange and grapefruit pink. They're so beautiful it hurts to look at them and isn't that strange? That something could be so lovely that it aches just to see it. Something like blistered sores opening up between your ribs, beneath your sternum, as you see those things, folded paper hulls and machine-sinews, scream through the air. Hanging weightless, untethered from the ground miles below.

It hurts because you've never made anything like that, because you've never been able to make anyone feel the way you feel right now. Could you even describe it? That sharp-sweet pain? Could you ever articulate it in a way that would make sense, that would survive the waking hours and harsh, hot glare of daylight. Every dream you've ever had has been stillborn. You don't want this to die too.

So you take it, despite the hurt, despite the pain, you clasp it close and press it to your chest, to your heart. Shattered shards of porcelain, a sharpnel spray of sensation and impression, it cuts you but you don't let go. You can't. You won't. Not now, not after everything.

And so you wrap your dream in things you understand. In visions of sea serpents that are Shogunate kings and shades of tangerine and a hundred grasping, clawed hands. Paper into parchment thin flesh, sapphire into shades of ocher and burned amber and stained-glass fractures. It beats against the cage of your fingers with moth-wings. Squirming, stropping its talons, trying to wriggle its way through; already eager to be born. It gnaws at you affectionately with needle teeth, and you feel skeins of ash flowing over you, borne on pyre-fed currents. You feel a skeletal orchard pushing through the patchwork hide, riddling the construction with spurs and spikes. Gory red drips down your wrists. Your hands are filthy with pitch-dark mud.

Tilt your palms, cup it, cradle the fragile thing as it mewls, soft cries rising up to a small piping shriek as it shakes itself dry.

What will they say, you wonder, when they see the things you'll make of them? What will she think, you wonder, when she sees the monsters you'll hew from the City's living bones?


Awareness crashes into you like a wave, the freezing surf smashing into you, dragging you free of sleep. Leaving you coughing, hacking, gagging on the shores of the waking world. You twist, trying to scramble free as it rushes out, rushes over you. Your limbs are bound, silken ropes wound around your arms, your legs. There's a weight on your chest, heavy as brick and radiating heat, bearing you down against the leaf litter, the soft and sodden ground. You're naked (why are you naked) and you reflexively reach for the power, for that force you felt in Ivory Bones and-

The whole world goes grey. Every muscle turns molten. You slump back, panting, teeth gritted and groaning as your body protests; loudly and at length.

The weight hisses at you, sinking its claws into your bare breast. You blearily crack open your eyes, and just...stare at it.

The creature, the elemental is built long, lean. A sinuous, serpentine tail tipped in serrated spines. A thick ruff of fur wrapping around narrow shoulders, spilling down its chest. A narrow, fox-like snout filled with black-glass teeth. It's face is a kind of mask, all rigid, armored bone curving down in fangs; sweeping back in spikes. Outsized easily by the leaf shaped ears, the flesh turned half-translucent by its thinness.

Its hands are three-fingered, the joints slender, the razored claws currently pressing into dense muscle almost delicate. But you watch as it flares and refolds its wings and you see the way the fourth extends. Arcing out, bounding the expanse of membrane, framing a pair of smaller spars, spear-like fins on either side.

A monster done in sleek, glossy blacks, in cherry reds and white-hot char. The mask and fur about its throat ashen grey. The body beneath is solid, dense for all that you swear it goes hazy and instinct, movements trailing tendrils of matter like so many tongues of smoke. Small, fine scales mixed in with the short pelt, gleaming like volcanic mirrors. It stares back with eyes the color of cinders, of caught coal, and ripe orange fruit; politely outraged. Its level blistering scorn fairly fucking impressive for something that you're fairly sure you could cradle in your arms. It gives you a moment, a minute, time to decide that you're not going to keep being ridiculous before it stretches back out, draping itself over you. Half-curling its body around the red stone pendant that sits against your sternum.

Work a hand free of the blankets (oh so they were blankets then) and lean back against the cushion (so it was a cushion), hesitantly scratching the elemental just behind the jaw. It tilts its head, deigning to allow the contact; effect somewhat undermined by the way it chirps, it squeaks. A bonfire glow glimpsed for a moment in the back of its throat.

Somewhere rain is falling, a downpour, a deluge that hammers on the distant metal roof. That walks fingers up and down your back, a cool touch caressing the inside of your skull, turning the inferno into a column of hissing steam and dense smoke. The world beyond your bed flickers blue, thunder rumbling through your bones a second later. The immense sound muted somehow, dimmed.

Blink away the sleep, grind the heel of your free hand into your eyesocket, trying to force it out a little faster. Details swim out of the gloom around you: a high vaulted, cavernous room. The walls canted in at harsh angles like-


A tunnel. But the walls are tangles of steel piping and wrist-thick ducts. Warm air seeping through slatted vents, banishing the clammy chill and dark timber slats set into the floor. Fit into gaps and negative space between coils of tubes. Above your head droplets bead against angled window panes, glass -real glass- wet from the storm. The sky outside still that hazy, half-lit murk of a Calibration night. The room within amber-tinged, more tubes set into the walls shedding a steady, even glow.

There are Lookshyan battle standards on those walls. Shattered, torn and tattered, rich scarlet cloth clotted a few shades darker with something that you know, unmistakably and unshakably, is blood.

At the far end of the hall a shape shifts, a shadow seated on its throne uncrossing a leg, "You know, when this thing was operational this was the troop-"

You roll off the lounge with a shout, a scream that mostly just comes out as a hoarse squawk. The elemental making an almost identical noise as it frantically beats its wings, half-leaping, half-scrabbling up your shoulder. You're on all fours, the blankets draped over your waist, sliding off your back, part of one caught under your knee.

"-transport bay." There's a second of silence, the shadow leans forward, "Do you need help?"

"(M'fine)," you hiss, not really moving. Glaring daggers at your arm, willing it to not tremble. Watching in mute frustration as it starts to shake, to bend anyway. "(Fuck just- don't you move, stay where I can see you)."

The shadow waits patiently as you reach up and drag yourself back up onto the low-slung couch. Panting, as if you just sprinted a mile and scaled a fortress wall at the end. You see the flash of teeth, too-many and too-sharp, a razor crescent worked into something like a smile.

"...You know," it- he continues, the voice is deep, the syllables tinged with a kind of roughness, the start of a snarl "we actually weren't sure when you'd wake up. You slept the entire flight here and then the whole day after. I had this whole idea about our first, proper introduction; about you seeing first my trophies then my generals, my honor guard. And finally me, of course. I had it all set up then, arranged for maximum effect. But-"

Another pause, the impression of a head tilting.

"-Well you didn't seem as if you were going to wake up then either. So we just had war council meetings over your body. They just left, actually. I considered calling them back in to get them all arranged but by the time I made up my mind you were already hacking your lungs out."

You slur the start of a reflexive apology before remembering you're now a bloodsoaked Anathema and walking sin-against-the-Dragons and choke it out. It's fine, you're not sure it was intelligible anyway. Take your time, start again, properly enunciate the words. The faint pain of the elemental steadying it's grip a point of focus.

"Who...are you?"

"My name," says the black furred wolfman and you belatedly realize that no, no he wasn't actually that far away he's just massive, "is Nerius Canes Aventinus Rex. King of Xauma."

"Oh," you say faintly, "I'm Alexius."

And then the sizzle-crack of necrotic energies lashes through your body and knocks you unconscious again.

When you wake up you are going to have such questions. But one stands out above all others.
[ ] The Listeners said that Xauma was an abode of beasts, a place of filth and hunger and depredation. So much of what you've heard is rumors. Forgotten scraps of maybe-truth and whispered propaganda. Ask the man himself: what is Xauma?
[ ] There's a war going on. And you- you remember now, Xauma holds ports on both banks of the Yanaze now. And the fighting that night! They pushed the Lookshyan army itself back on its fortifications. Are they winning? Can they win?
[ ] They spared you. During the battle they were helping you! Even as they saw what you were, what you really were. The truth in its fullness. What do they want with you? Is it just to wield you as a weapon? Are you an ally or a necessary evil?