In a time yet to come, where Creation is but the
Shattered Annex, The Broken-Winged Crane will be
written. The future has not yet come to pass, though The
Broken-Winged Crane works tirelessly to bring it forth, a
living, malignant atemporal entity riding the currents of
destiny and Fate like a knife scraping a fresh scabbard.
Every existing tome in Creation is merely an imperfect
copy of the final book written in the future. Possession of
a copy means certain death in the Realm and much of the
Threshold, and mere rumor of the book's possession can
doom a sorcerer to inescapable disgrace. Yet the power the
book offers—so much more than mere demonic lore—can
tempt even the most indomitable of souls.
In what manner may the history of the Shattered
Annex manifest, reaching backwards through time and
space into distorted copies? Often merely as books covered
in glowing runic scrawl of Old Realm, but also as a
precocious green-eyed boy, dying of acute leukemia, who
recites the text from memory without comprehending
it; or a music box that plays each listener's ideal song—
slightly off-key. Virtually any medium, scribed by pain
and tainted by madness, may hold the wisdom of the
Crane. The Yozis claim the copies as their own work
and consider the tome a herald of the Reclamation's
victory, but this is a lie.
The book always describes—in past tense—the final,
crippled freedom of the Yozis: an elopement with dire
consequences, how the broken nature of the Exalted
and the broken nature of the Yozis birth a new horror
upon the world, the dawn of a green sun over Creation—
these things the tome speaks of. The book is not written
as a prophecy, but as a history from the perspective of
the victors in the post-apocalypse. Commentaries from
the First Age tell of the Crane recording significantly
different events than modern copies, a fact that baffles
contemporary savants. In the earliest appearances of
the tome in the moments after the Primordial War, the
contents of the Crane were laughably inaccurate. Most
of the Exalted interpreted the tome as a final sign that
the Primordials had lost their minds.
And yet, as the time the Crane recorded inevitably
crawled towards realization, the copies altered themselves,
and grew in both might and accuracy. New copies that
appeared began to reflect events that did, in fact, come
to pass. In this way, the Crane is an occult tutor of incalculable
potency and a dire portent of things to come.
