Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

18th of November 2006 A.D.

As the world shifts you reflexively reach out not with hands nor even with thoughts made real, but with your soul. In basalt and brass you are now garbed, girdled with old script just on the edge of knowing, upon your head a helm, a crown as on the eve of battle. But there is no battle to be seen. Instead you seem to be floating above a basalt floor threaded with silver wire in the shape of a spider's web which flows into walls of the same make make set with lanterns that burn with cold green flame, nuclear flame, you know behind behind leaded glass. Five lines of columns spiral inwards along the points of the silver web, jointed in gleaming brass and wrought of smooth obsidian, in a way that looks almost organic, or cybernetic maybe with the way the metal clamps tight around it.

"What... what is this place?" you have never heard Harry stutter before, though maybe that says more about your lack of observation than anything given the thing he is motioning at looks like one of those half-egg couches, if the shape was then filled in by a forcefield humming merily along.

That is just a dust cover, this place isn't used that often.

If circumstances were less weird you would wonder how you know that, or for that matter how you know which button to tap to turn off the static cover and rearrange it into a more open configuration to set Izzy on and then the next one for Alec.

Audience seating, for those favoured by the Throne

The thought directs your gaze inwards to the heart of the room for the first time, now that your friends are comfortable, safe. Beyond Harry poking at one of the couches like it's a live bomb, beyond your dad looking at the celling where gleaming red mechanical eyes on slender spider like limbs unfold to look down upon the scene....

Palace Security SUTRA performing an emergency scan of the chamber after unexpected spike in thaumic readings

You see it, base rising out of the floor like a black wave of basalt cresting before the shore, it flares into arm-rests of brass and of brass is wrought the throne's backrest sculpted like leaves, like flames, like great wings unfurling, studded with gemstones that glitter like ice, Upon that throne in script far older than is found anywhere else in the chamber, though not as old as some you have seen and written is spelled out a title, no a name:

Radiant Pearl of Sorcery Pure and Impure, Exalted Mistress of Mystical Arts, Boundaries, Crossroads and Transitions, Shaper and Builder, Beloved of All

When you were in eight grade your English Teacher had given out an assignment to look into the origin of your names. So of course you had, unsurprised to find the origins of Margret and Amanda, pearl and beloved of all, though very much surprised at one of the suspected roots of Katherine being the Goddess of Witches and Crossroads

Margret Katherine Amanda Carpenter.

That is my throne, the thought comes unbidden and unchallenged. Just as the armor you bear, just as the helm, the crown on your brow, in this place made enduring, this throne, this hall, this realm... are yours. Without conscious thought you head towards the chamber's heart, steps loud and echoing off the polished flood, by chance, if chance it be, right up a thread of silver bright.

As you reach the foot of the throne though you turn to look at Harry and at your father, only now noticing the absence of the sword at his side: "Dad where's...?"

"It... he, told me he could not follow where I was going, but that he would be watched," comes the reply, clearly more worried about you than Amoracchius at the moment. "Molly, what is this place?"

"It is the Palace of Soaring Majesty," a voice both familiar and impossible speaks as soft steps accroach from behind a pillar, familiar because you have heard it every day of your life for the past six months, impossible because you have not heard it aloud since that terrible wonderous moment in the depths of Arctis Tor. Usum looks much as when you had last seen him, androgynous, beautiful, thoughtlessly graceful in every movement. The smile he wears though, that smile is trouble. It's an 'I told you so smile' if ever you saw one.

"Set between the jaws of the Dragon of Night and the Dragon of Light in the realm which knows neither night nor day as the people of Earth know it, only the passage of its moon. To most of its inhabitants it is simply Creation, for they know of no other world but this. To the bureaucrats of the City of Swords it is the Fivefold Courts of Fate, forged as one in the Wars of Unity, governed by laws as perfect and imperishable as the Turning of the Wheel, to the Scholars of the City of Scrolls it is Sanctuary, though even they know not what calamity it warded the people from, to the tocatli mystics who contemplate the fate of all things it is the Web-in-Being, to those gurvel tribes that still dwell in the wastes beyond the life-giving light of the ring of flame it is the Anchor, the Pivot, the Fulcrum and variations uncounted in dialects almost as numerous. To the Machine Spirits of the Noosphere it is the Prime Root."

He pauses as if to take breath, though you know him enough to tell he is just trying to be dramatic. "To the faithful of the Covenant of the Empress-to-Be, five billion souls just about, human, tocatli, gurvel and seta, organic and synthetic and all heritages and states between it is the Realm in Waiting."

No, no, no, no... It feels like you are denying that the sun is hot that ice is cold or the sky is blue. Every word he is saying has the ring of not just truth, but common knowledge, something you know just as you knew how to operate the couches or what the camera eye is.

"Awaiting the return of their Creator, She in Whose Soul they are Cradled, though that last piece of the puzzle is known only to certain esoteric sects in the City of Fountains, Monastery of the World-Song. The Throne becomes you Majesty and you are Becoming."

Daring to glance back at the others you see Harry listening intently to something, someone, only he can hear and as for your dad... well you have never seen dad speechless before.

How does Molly react?

[] Ascend the Throne, he's right you can handle the rest of this later, but if people are waiting, if people are watching they should see a ruler, not a confused girl

[] Roll down some screens -you know how to do that somehow- figure out what is going on from a non-Usum perspective

[] First thing's first, get Izzy and Alec to some kind of medical facility, you can deal with the rest of this later.

[] Write in

OOC: With thanks to @Yog and @myrix for designing a rich world and its history, a great foundation to build on. Also I am not even going to make Molly roll Perception+Empathy, Usum is transcendentally smug.