Memento Mori (Exalted/40k)

It is the 42nd Millennium.

For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth, a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium, for whom a thousand souls die every day, for whom blood is drunk and flesh eaten. Human flesh and Human blood - the stuff of which the Imperium is made.

It is not enough. The Emperor dies by inches, wounds sustained millennia before pushing him closer to oblivion with every passing day. As above, so below - the Imperium will not outlive its founder. Already it thrashes like a mindless beast, mortally wounded by the dark sword of the Cicatrix Maledictum, a hundred thousand worlds dragged screaming into oblivion. Mankind teeters on the brink of extinction, and from every shadow and darkened corner its enemies emerge to begin the feast.

And what of it?

All men die, all empires fall, all legends are worn away to dust by the endless march of time. The Emperor has been dying for ten thousand years, and against the backdrop of that slow decline uncounted trillions have lived and loved and wrought stories worthy of telling. Perhaps his visions are lies and the omens nothing more than the mindless twitching of a celestial corpse, but in their pursuit have saints arisen and heroes found their courage. Perhaps the Imperium is too wretched a beast to survive, too bloated with the blood of innocents to outrun this latest trial, but it has fallen and been divided and risen up again more than once. If one Age has come to an end, then another is about to begin, and for that future even the dead might raise their hands with purpose.

On distant Terra, the Emperor is dying, his sacred flesh decaying, his mighty soul splintering into fragments. Shattered pieces of divinity scatter across the galaxy, born on the wave of a death-scream ten millennia in the making, and where they come to rest heroes bloom like flowers, new legends feeding upon the ashen embers of the old. The Avenging Son is one, a relic out of history returned to set humanity back upon a brighter path, but he is not the only heir to his father's legacy.

In darkest Calixis, where the chalice runs over with filth and paranoid tyrants gather ever greater power to their banner in the face of encroaching night, a spark of the Emperor's celestial spirit comes to rest. Perhaps guided by a flicker of His prescient will, perhaps merely flotsam adrift on cosmic tides, it finds itself drawn to a soul. A dying hero, raging against the coming night. A legend cut down by cruel fate before their story could unfold. A child of this Dark Imperium.

And there, amid the darkness of a dying world, a champion is Exalted.

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[ ] The Vengeful Commissar
She kills her own for the sake of victory, and clings to dogma in the night when sleep is hidden behind memories of dying friends. Her loyalty brings her nothing. She dies with her regiment, salving a nobleman's pride with the blood of a thousand heroes, and lifts undying eyes to the spires above. Are they not guilty in their kind? Do they not deserve her judgement? (Dusk)

[ ] The Penitent Gunslinger
He has nothing but death to offer, gleaming pistols and a heavy grox-leather coat. Hive scum they call him, duellist and killer, born into poverty and unknown to the sun. For the sake of an innocent he gives his life, and for a child's dream of justice he stands up once more. When they are safe, only then can he rest. (Dusk)

[ ] The Martyred Pilgrim
In dusty robes and well-worn boots he travelled the galaxy, paying homage at the shrines and sharing stories with his neighbours. At the gates of the Grand Basilica he died, crushed with ten thousand others to make way for a Cardinal's motorcade. Alone among the crowd he rises again, to remind the holy of what they have so clearly forgotten - the Emperor protects the virtuous, and they no longer qualify. (Midnight)

[ ] The Deathless Crusader
They trained her to hunt daemons, to wield her faith like a blade against all the monsters of the dark. When at last she faltered, body broken and spirit stained by war without end, they disposed of her and chose another. God saved her life and took her zeal, allowing her to see the truth of her masters, and her fury at their betrayal is unmatched. Squall though they might, she knows a monster when she sees one. (Midnight)

[ ] The Forsaken Templar
Born with the psyker's gift, she was taken to Terra and leashed to the Throne, despised by those she was called upon to serve. Ignorance killed her, burned alive by zealots uncaring of all she had sacrificed in desperate loyalty, and the flames that seared her flesh took with them the last of the limitations she would accept. She will make it right. She will save mankind. (Daybreak)

[ ] The Sacrifice Reclaimed
The red priests do not know him. They have never been forced to live in the dirt, to scavenge and improvise in the name of keeping a child fed, but he has. It takes him years to die, starving by inches in the shadow of golden spires, and his last thought is of those forsaken who depend on him. To rise again is a surprise, but the chance it offers is welcome. No longer will he feed a village and call himself content, not while billions starve and suffer on worlds without number. What use is knowledge, if it does not make the world a better place? (Daybreak)

[ ] The Bitter Vigilante
He serves the law as its mailed fist for decades, growing slowly bitter as the truth becomes increasingly undeniable - The law binds, but it does not protect. He turns upon his masters; cruel nobles, corrupt magnates and monstrous lords all fall before his crusade, before at last it ends where he knew it would. An arrest, a trial, and then an execution. Waking in the mortuary with his flesh whole once more, he knows he has been spared for a purpose. Justice will have what it is owed. (Day)

[ ] The Unclean Champion
Born with twisted flesh, she lived her life under perpetual sentence of execution, a filthy wretch who betrayed the Emperor by her mere existence. Swiftly she learned to hide, for in anonymity was survival for her and her community both, until one day the powers that be grew tired of mere rhetoric and burned her ghetto to the ground. She pulled herself from the ash with nothing but a list of names that none other would remember, and she will not rest until they are honoured as martyrs in every church. (Day)

[ ] The Turncoat Prince
Born to the highest nobility, he lived his life amid unimaginable luxury, excelling among his peers in games of wit and blade and never dreaming of anything better. Then he ventured beyond the gilded walls and saw firsthand the misery that afflicted mankind. Resolved to change it he returned home, and for his heresy choked on poison at the family meal. Saved by darkest miracle, now he returns to play those childhood games anew, for the greatest of all possible stakes (Moonshadow)

[ ] The Contemptuous Scribe
The tithe must be paid, but it need not be ruinous. That is what her heart whispered as she worked, exercising her best judgement for the common good, dreaming of fortunes shared and prosperity for all. For her weakness she burned atop a pyre of her own falsified reports, and from the ashes she rose anew, harsh wisdom in her heart. The universe is neither fair nor just, and so it falls to her to make it better, one letter and one corpse at a time. (Moonshadow)

Article:

This is an APPROVAL VOTE. Vote for as many of the options as seem appealing to you. The top three will go to a traditional run-off vote, with a bit more detail provided on the mechanical framework and story implications of each option.

[ ] Approval Vote

This quest is being run with the Exalted: Essence rules, a simplified and streamlined version that I have updated to more properly represent the nature of this crossover. Thematically similar to Deus Pater, Memento Mori is the story of one of the Abyssal Exalted. There is no shining golden exemplar this time, no champion chosen from on-high to lead mankind back to the righteous path; You are a dead man, a walking corpse held together by spite and devotion and the half-cannibalised soul of god.

You are also a hero.

There will be a character sheet, but to avoid needless confusion it will be kept in a secondary document with a link provided for the curious. The key points that you need to be aware of are as follows:

• You are Deathless. You cannot starve or drown or be poisoned, and even the most catastrophic violence cannot kill you - burned to ash or torn limb from limb, you will rise anew whole and complete. Only when you no longer have anything to live for will the grave hold you for more than a day and a night.
• You are Mighty. Your powers manifest themselves through Charms, individual expressions of peerless skill and deathly power. Study swordplay to conjure the reaper's scythe, pursue diplomacy to curse oathbreakers with broken hearts, master war to summon the dead in great armies to your side.
• You are a Monster. The God-Emperor had a name once, but he cast it aside, and so too is the human you once were lost to you. Attempts to reclaim your name or live among the living as one of them will bring you only madness and misfortune, and those who stand at your side will inevitably give their lives for your greater good.

The setting for the quest is the Calixis Sector, detailed in numerous expansions for the Dark Heresy rpg. The default setting for Calixis is M41 - changes brought about by the Fall of Cadia and the birth of the 42nd Millennium will be revealed in-quest.

XP and Advancement
Exalted: Essence handles character progression on a milestone system. Most of these are plot related rewards and will be explained as and when they are earned, but Personal Milestones can be earned by readers and thread participants. Any time you produce fanwork, make a significant 'effort post', or elaborate usefully on a relevant section of the lore for the benefit of your fellow voters, you will earn a Personal Milestone for the protagonist.

Personal milestones can be cashed in by the thread user who earned them to achieve one of the following rewards:

• Repurchase an applicable charm (will be listed on the character sheet)
• Add a unique 'mode' to an existing charm, tailoring or upgrading it in some fashion. Perhaps a charm that allows you to levy curses upon a target could be upgraded to also make it supernaturally obvious to all onlookers what they did to deserve it, for example.
• Unlock the first dot of an ability currently rated at 0
• Add an 'intimacy', defining how our protagonist feels about something or someone that has not previously been established by the narrative, either current or in the backstory.
• Add a 'tertiary' merit, such as an old friend who can be called on (ally merit) or a group of mortal supporters (followers merit) or a cache of currency or other wealth (resources merit).

Stunts
Whenever you cast a vote in this quest, you may also append a 'stunt' as a sub-vote. Valid stunts are a sentence or two (at very most a short paragraph) of descriptive text that adds a dramatic element to the chosen action. If at least half of the people who vote for the winning option include the stunt as a sub-vote, I will write it into the next update. This will allow you to shape the exact shape of the narrative and also what our protagonist thinks, feels and does.

Votes that have stunts attached will also generate an additional two dice on the most critical roll of the following scene.

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With all that established, let's get ourselves underway!