Exalted: Out Of The Eater

Back down you go, into the black abyss of sleep. It's dreamless this time: the great canvas-spaces that stretch across the curves of your skull sit empty, the hollow world inside your head is still. What sluggish thoughts that crawl across its expanse are half-seen, barely glimpsed things; there for a second and then gone and forgotten a heartbeat later. Shapes in the dark, bleeding into shadow, into the lovely nothing until you couldn't tell they were ever there at all. Twisted paper tapers crumbling into ash, unwinding utterly and erasing themselves from existence. It's… nice.

So, of course, the moment you really process that fact is the moment you go from drifting through the abstract void, nothing and no one, to an idiot facedown on a low-slung couch. The black abyss just textured purples and reds, pressure-blooms through parchment thin lids. Your cheek against a cushion, the sumptuous fabric damp with drool.

It's seamless like that.

You just lay there for a bit. Feeling the weight of the elemental as it sits between your shoulderblades, long tail touching the tip of its bony snout, one wing extended and draped over its body like a blanket. A steady hearth-fire heat radiating out, an even ebb and flow; the rhythm matched by the minute pulse from the handcarved stone currently digging into your chest. Your sternum. The bit of bone between the razor-honed slabs of muscle that bulge across your breast. Pectorals, you're pretty sure that's what they're called, you have them now.

The thought sparks off a sudden surge of anxiety before you remember that swords shatter against your skin, and "being culled for a physique unsuited to a helot" is… so very, very far down on the list of things Alexi-


Harrower. That Harrower has to worry about.

Slowly, slowly you peel your face free. Dragging a hand across your mouth as you push yourself up; your arms shivering, limbs trembling like a newborn foal, a steel-haired elder in the cold. You claw at the back of the couch, wood creaking, cracks spreading from the points of pressure as you pull yourself forward. Hauling yourself up until you can rest your head on the padded arm of the furniture piece and look at the shadow, the shape, the Wolf-King on his throne. Nerius, so patiently waiting the ass.

Once more, with feeling.

"My name," you start, your voice a rasping croak. "Is Ale- mmm."

You stare at the wall for awhile, taking in those industrial intestinal tangles like they're the most fascinating thing you've ever seen. Admiring -a little, despite yourself- the way the dark timber's been cut. Fashioned into skeletal tree trunks, a forest at the edge of Winter, the end of Autumn and perfectly fit into the negative space between bulkheads and steel sections. "Roots" intertwined with serpentine pipes; the woods growing from the walls. Stark limbs softened by and softening the rich orange light.

It's unquestionably beautiful. You think you hate it.

"Harrower," you say at last, "my name is Harrower of the Celestial Skein."

"And who is it that you serve, Harrower of the Celestial Skein?"

A boy in purple robes and golden laurels; his skin grey and his eyes shadowed, the sockets bruised. That vast, serpentine stain dripping down the horizon, wearing the clouds like a cloak, baring viper's hollow fangs. Close your eyes, lever them open again after a second and swallow, even this is an incalculable effort.

"Steel-and-Ember Elegia," you whisper, "Deathlord and last king of Deheleshen."

And for a long, long moment there is nothing between you but the sound of the storm: the rain pinging against sloped steel walls and alloyed roofs, the rumble of thunder and the resonant shudder of the palace beneath you. Beyond glass windows the wind sobs and howls, whipping the deluge on. Curtains of water cascading, rippling through the half-burned night, falling from the coal-colored sky.

"Ah," the shadow says at last, more thoughtful than afraid, "so. The Black Congress actually got its shit together. That's rather unprecedented. Honestly, I'll confess, I didn't think that was even possible. And… I suppose this explains Medbetjagroth and this Althing I've heard so very much about."

You stare at him blankly. He catches your eye after a second and black lips slowly peel back, a long tongue all but lolling from behind those curved, canine teeth.

"But you, you Exalted all of four days ago and spent most of the time since in a coma. You have no idea what I'm talking about do you?"

You glare murder at him and that wolf-smile widens a few notches.

"I didn't think so."

The Wolf-King stands from his highbacked throne, rising from the root-wreathed, duct-framed thing and stretching. A faint grunt, a catch in his breath as vertebrae pop and joints click. Claws splayed as he draws his hands apart, works his back into a bow. You watch, both because pulling your head away is too much effort and because you can't not. Because even after everything, everything they did, everything you became, you are only human, only a man. And as utterly exhausted and emotionally drained as you are the base parts of your brain still know exactly what they like.

He towers over you. Even you were standing he would still tower over you. He's nearly three meters tall and you? You would barely come up to his collarbone. Thick cables of brawn frame broad shoulders and a wide back, his deeply muscled chest and bared stomach all black marble slabs. He's like a statue: smooth, glossy stone carved into an athlete's physique; a predator's anatomy wrapped up in pelt that's more a living oil-slick than anything mundane, anything normal, anything human.

Backbent legs, powerful arms, the long limbs strung with cabled strength. Fingers and toes tipped in gutting claws, a killer's smile. He wears little but a waistwrap, sapphire cloth trimmed in silver thread. Rich, cerulean blue cascading down to just above his knee, the knot hung with inscribed argent slats. Metal plates, crowned in an etched relief of a raven's skull.

A circlet sits between two knife-like ears, less laurel leaves and more thorns and hand-length blades woven into something almost delicate.

Yellow irises and black sclera meet your gaze, catch your eye, and that grin crawls a little farther up the sides of his face. You look away first, focusing on small details, minor things instead as he moves out of sight. The threads of your blanket, the metal grille beneath the wooden leg of your lounge, the lavender tinge to your arm, your skin. You see as his shadow falls over you, hear the pop of a bottle being unstoppered, something pungent and copper-tinged being poured into a cup.

Nerius reaches around the back of the lounge, goblet cradled carefully in his hand. The liquid within thick and vermillion dark. You sniff, even as your stomach growls. Trying to cling to at least a few scraps of that power, that authority and poise and self control. Those memories of you, walking over a scarlet-soaked battlefield, the reaper dressed in red. Those memories of you and that dragon Sidonia Aikaterine Tetradia on the battlements. Fragments from the time you murdered a living god.

You're not a helot anymore Harrower. You don't have to beg and grovel and be invisible anymore. You can exist now. You can do what you like. You're free and-

You're free. That's all. That's it. That's everything.

Everything.

"...Why does it smell like blood?" you ask.

"Because it is," he tips it back and forth, waggling it a little in front of your nose, "some of mine actually, among other things: compounds distilled from plasmics, a certain kind of grave mold. The Dead are fond of it -I think they find it healthsome- and you're Dead-enough aren't you? Can you hold it?"

A pause, you tilt, half-turn your head and look over a bony shoulder at the elemental curled up placidly on your spine. A little nest worried into the rumpled blankets, body twisted into a corkscrew; the ruff around its throat, its chest, sticking up in small spikes. With every inhale the glow within it surges a little brighter; with every exhale it flickers and gutters low. The thing's velvet hide blurring at the edges, fur turning indistinct as it shifts to tar-dark smoke. The elemental chirps a little in its sleep, you haven't even disturbed it at all.

You give up and let your cheek fall against the arm of the lounge. You shake your head and try not to sulk too much as he carefully raises it to your mouth, slowly pouring it down your throat. You drink and try not to think about how much like candy it tastes, how warm it is on your tongue, how you can feel the heat collecting in your guts, a bonfire in your belly. Soaking into your bones, suffusing the rest of your body. Try not to think about how you all but lick the insides clean and twitch towards it even as he pulls it away, a disappointed noise already on your lips. You can feel him waiting, just out of the corner of your eye, just out of the line of sight.

"I'm in Xauma, aren't I?" A mostly-rhetorical question, you doubt the Wolf-King's palace would be anywhere else.

"Mhm."

"...What's it like?" You ask quietly. "I've never been so far away from the City before. This used to be an Exarchate, didn't it?"

A short, sharp, bark of laughter, "On the map maybe," he says, "but this was never like Port Calin or Eightfold Banners. The Archons always thought of us as wreckage washed up on their shores, a burned out hulk of something that used to be interesting about eight hundred years ago. Storm-wracked and full of wolves, what was there to even want?"

"What's it like?" You ask again, stronger this time, a faint note of urgency creeping into your voice. A kind of slow, creeping panic. A sluggish anxiety worming its way through the still-sleepy parts of your brain. "I don't- I don't know what it- I've never been this far outside the walls, across the river what's it-"

There's an irritated squeak on your back and you realize you were trying to struggle up; you subside, sink back down. You can feel Nerius's attention on you, his curiosity. Clink goes the bottle's base on the hidden stand. He crosses back into your field of view and- hah he has a tail. You were wondering about that, albeit dimly, vaguely. He squats down by your bedside, haunches bulging as he rests an elbow on his knee, his lean jaw on one black-padded palm. You want to tell him that that isn't particularly kingly but that seems like an exceptional amount of effort and the crackling flame in your stomach is kissing the familiar-warmth and the cushions all around you are so soft and it's- nice you decide. It's not quite that void, that endless unreality, but it's pleasant enough in its own way.

"We were born in their shadow, descendents of the city Deheleshen burned; tribes scattered for decades in the wake of the Contagion, the Crusade, taking shelter in the rain-gutted ruins. Carving it up between us, banding together when the City sent forth its raiders, it's armies, striving against each other in times of peace. 'Peace'." He cocks his head, the motion canid, utterly unselfconscious,"We were born hungry in a way. Living among the dead, the shattered skeleton of the Shogunate. The walls of Lookshy stretching across the sky, sealing off the horizon. They were always content to leave us kenneled up, caged. We were never supposed to be a threat to them."

He leans in, his breath hot against your face, his fur smelling of sandalwood, touches of incense. Some kind of faint perfume, smoky and sweet all at once.

"You understand that don't you? You live with a boot on your back all your life, ripping off the leg and beating the man to death with it is its own kind of reward. And Lookshy? Lookshy had its chance. Lookshy had its time. Lookshy had its Golden Age and it's been gone for centuries now. All that's left is a wicked old woman with a broken back, who still thinks the gates can hold against the things outside, the beast at the door. But we know better, don't we Harrower? In the end all walls fall. In the end all gates are laid open and all wounds laid bare. In the end we're going to eat her alive, tear her apart from the inside out, and build something new from her bones."

Your mouth is dry, you lick your lips. "(We?)"

Nerius taps his thumb to your brow, to the space just between and above your eyes, the spot where the brand burned that night.

"We. Us Anathema owe it to each other don't we? And I'm not so heartless or so stupid that I'd toss you back out into the cold," that smile's still there, still in place, a silvery-white crescent moon, "I saw your shackle-scars, I saw cuts across your back. You were a helot weren't you?"

You nod numbly, a hesitant jerk of the chin.

"I'd strike the chains off of every chattel-slave in the City, I'd cast down every archon and sack every cathedral. Wisdom's March to Victory would burn in Luna's light" he says, his voice a resonant rumble, so deep it buzzes in your bones, echoes in your chest, tinged raw and ragged and rasping by lupine features, a wolf's palate, "I saw you at Ivory Bones. I found you almost untouched, the ground around you thick with Lookshyan dead. The first thing you did when the spark came for you was lash out, fight back. Harrower: I admire that."

"I-"

"What is it you want? Fight with me, help me and I'll gladly make it yours. Anything you want."

Anything you want, anything at all. The thought alone makes you dizzy, the suggestion by itself makes you happy you're already laying down.

He'd give you all of them. Will give you all of them. But what's most important to you?
[ ] Wealth. Comfort. Luxuries. All those beautiful things you never had.
[ ] Command. Authority. An army. All that power and control you never had.
[ ] Tools. Materials. Foundries. All that freedom to create you never had.
[ ] Company. Friends. Belonging. All those connections you never had.