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The Last Daughter -- Dragon-Blooded Sorcery School Quest

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Honestly I'm stumped. On one hand mothers may serve as a special and heartwarming bonding moment. On the other hand, one of the childhood stories we already know is Ambraea walking into a pillar while too distracted by a pretty girl laughing. What other stories are there?
Kymme said:
This moment conjured a very vivid mental image for me and I just had to draw it:
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My exalted lore is a bit shoddy but am I reading it right that Hope's group essentially a cult?

Becoming solar/Lunar means you cut ties and are inducted into a group where they talk about how you've been chosen for a great destiny, but the nature of it means you're kind of at your elders beck and call. Doubly so since they're the ones with the tools and knowledge to actually survive being hunted.

Hope was essentially sent out to prove herself then got her escort sidetracked by bloody minded vengeance. So she committed knowing the alternative was suffering the stigma of abandonment (woth whatever consequences that would follow).

It's less obvious or direct a motive. But it is a very understandable motive.
 
Dream Logic said:
My exalted lore is a bit shoddy but am I reading it right that Hope's group essentially a cult?

Becoming solar/Lunar means you cut ties and are inducted into a group where they talk about how you've been chosen for a great destiny, but the nature of it means you're kind of at your elders beck and call. Doubly so since they're the ones with the tools and knowledge to actually survive being hunted.

Hope was essentially sent out to prove herself then got her escort sidetracked by bloody minded vengeance. So she committed knowing the alternative was suffering the stigma of abandonment (woth whatever consequences that would follow).

It's less obvious or direct a motive. But it is a very understandable motive.
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Not at all, it's more of a mutual aid society kind of thing, where there's no real obligation to bend over backwards. She was told to go bail Hound out if she could, because he was going to be cornered, and Hound refused to leave without Beacon, who would refuse to leave without getting his pound of flesh. Rather than write it off as a bad investment and just go back and go "Yeah, he refused to come back because he was more interested in vengeance than survival", which would have just gotten some shrugs and shaken heads and "Damn fool younglings", she decided that she wanted to triple down and help him out, because she wanted to look cool and important to other people so she'd be more popular, even though there was no requirement for her to succeed on this because any trip to the Blessed Isle is courting death--and getting in the path of a Wyld Hunt just asking for trouble, and just going there, doing her best, and coming back alive would have been all that was required. Now there are two dead Lunars when only one was at risk.

And so even though she had a way out, she got stuck in a fight to the death, and didn't consider retreat--or that the mortals were a threat at all when left with the freedom to organize--until it was too late. What's worse is that she enabled Beacon and Hound rather than stand her ground, which gave them the confidence to try and attack instead of continue to retreat, or even try to do something fancy to shake their tail or split the attention of their pursuers enough to have a chance at winning a reversal. She had the bargaining power there, not them, but she forgot that because she wanted to suck up to Hound and go for a Perfect Win instead of focus on actually living.

So no, her cardinal sin was getting stuck in on a doomed last stand that she had no obligation to get into, and then dismissing the threat of the people she already wrote off as meaningless trash, so she took a bad hit when she broke to escape, and from there it was curtains because she had no way of recovering from getting surrounded by a horde of mortals and stabbed until she died.

All because she wanted to be more popular, and didn't take the other side seriously because they were Beneath Her.
 
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Dream Logic said:
My exalted lore is a bit shoddy but am I reading it right that Hope's group essentially a cult?

Becoming solar/Lunar means you cut ties and are inducted into a group where they talk about how you've been chosen for a great destiny, but the nature of it means you're kind of at your elders beck and call. Doubly so since they're the ones with the tools and knowledge to actually survive being hunted.

Hope was essentially sent out to prove herself then got her escort sidetracked by bloody minded vengeance. So she committed knowing the alternative was suffering the stigma of abandonment (woth whatever consequences that would follow).

It's less obvious or direct a motive. But it is a very understandable motive.
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Lunars are dramatically less regimented than the Sidereal Host in practice. The Silver Pact, which most Lunars belong to, is basically a mutual aid society with a very loose structure and some overarching goals. It exists primarily to oppose and slowly whittle away at the Realm and other Shogunate successor states (like Lookshy), to teach and guide young Lunars, and to protect each other from Wyld Hunts and other significant threats.

Hope was the adherent of Amatha Kinslayer, a Silver Pact Shahan-ya. Amatha took Hope in when she was newly Exalted, taught her about her powers and how she can use them and the threats that a Lunar faces, and more or less engaged in a series of favour trading. Hope wants someone to help teach her necromancy? Well, Amatha can't do that personally, but she knows someone, and she can make that happen -- in return, Hope will do something to further Amatha's goals. Shahan-yas are usually trying to cultivate young Lunars as assets and members of the Pact, so they tend to give them much better value than they receive at first. Hope appears to have owed her for something big enough that Amatha felt comfortable asking her to go on a covert mission to the Blessed Isle to try and find Hound, though.

Lunars are free to refuse to have anything to do with the Pact or not learn under a Shahan-ya if they like, but the benefits are worth the drawbacks, generally. Wyld Hunts are extremely dangerous, as this arc demonstrates, and the knowledge and connections even a relatively young Shahan-ya like Amatha has is invaluable.

(Fun fact, Amatha Kinslayer is yet another one of Ambraea's nieces, and was born Cynis Amatha. She's the sister of House Cynis's current ruling triumvirate. One of my favourite lines from Fangs at the Gate is about her motivations:

In time, she aims to bring the Realm's economy to ruin, see House Cynis toppled first and the rest of the Dynasty soon after, and lounge on the Scarlet Throne with a glass of wine and a wicked smile.

We must stan an Anathema with a sense of style)
 
[X] Childhood memories, and how two people can view them very differently

Perspectives, perspectives, we just love'em.
 
Indeed. The sensible thing to do was to refuse there mad scheme, and have hound and beacon stall for time while hope used her sorcery to prep the next dozen kilometers of mountain passes to be brought down and rendered impassible to mortals, and make good on their escape while the sorcerer's exhausted themselves clearing a way.

At that point they can high tail it for the coast and count on the coming turmoil to require the sidereal exalts to be recalled for other tasks once there far enough away from anyone, preferably on some uninhabited island, to not leave an obvious trail of disturbed destinies.
 
The single biggest problem with escaping the Blessed Isle with Beacon is that, as Hope said to Hound at the time, Beacon cannot shapeshift. Without him, the Lunars could have become birds and been gone in a way that would be very hard to track.

There was not an easy way to get him out of the mountains or off the Blessed Isle, and while they inconveniently kept forgetting that this was specifically why they made this plan, they'd figured out that they had a Sidereal tracker after them, guiding one of the hunt groups, and reasonably needed her dead to actually make an escape plan involving Beacon viable at all.

These things aren't like, fake, they were legitimate problems. Were there solutions that didn't involve zombifying an entire village of one the Blessed Isle's oppressed minority populations? Probably, although it isn't likely to have been dramatically safer than this, in the long run.
 
Gazetteer said:
A thin cheer goes up from the legionnaires — the witch's light has been smothered. The Anathema isn't looking in that direction, though. His attention is suddenly fixed on the grassy hill below. On the complete lack of the Frenzied's moonfire anima. He stares out at the field, as if trying and failing to process what's going on.

[...]

You swing at him with all your strength. This time, he's very nearly too slow to block it. When he turns back to you, the tears glistening in his eyes aren't just from the jagged grit turned up by your anima. You don't let up for an instant, bearing down on him with all your superior strength and height. He's slowed or distracted enough now that he can't simply slip out of it and put you on the backfoot.

[...]

You snatch her up and pull her into a desperate kiss, for once not stopping to consider whether anyone might see. Maia melts into your rough embrace, arms unsteady as she hooks them around your neck. Her kisses are shaky, inexpert, her lip split and tasting of blood, her anima cold against your skin. Not a single part of you cares.
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Gazetteer, you've made me some how root and sympathize for both sides. This contradiction is has ripped me in two and now my doppelganger has stolen my identity while ranting about how the anathema should've won and how evil the realm is.

This always happens when I encounter an excellent writer.

Now then...
- The depth and limits of the bond that can be shared between a lady and a servant
This choice might elucidate somethings that aren't exactly clear (to my snow brain at least) about the full nature of Ambraea and Grace's relationship.

- Mothers
I feel like this would just be a bonding session about Lohna, since the Empress has barely been a mom to Ambraea.

However...

[X] Childhood memories, and how two people can view them very differently
I think this would tell the most about how Ambraea and Grace saw each other before Grace exalted.
 
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Gazetteer said:
The single biggest problem with escaping the Blessed Isle with Beacon is that, as Hope said to Hound at the time, Beacon cannot shapeshift. Without him, the Lunars could have become birds and been gone in a way that would be very hard to track.

There was not an easy way to get him out of the mountains or off the Blessed Isle, and while they inconveniently kept forgetting that this was specifically why they made this plan, they'd figured out that they had a Sidereal tracker after them, guiding one of the hunt groups, and reasonably needed her dead to actually make an escape plan involving Beacon viable at all.

These things aren't like, fake, they were legitimate problems. Were there solutions that didn't involve zombifying an entire village of one the Blessed Isle's oppressed minority populations? Probably, although it isn't likely to have been dramatically safer than this, in the long run.
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There are a several excellent rapid transportation spells in Terrestrial and Celestial Sorcery. Summon First Circle Demon alone (a most have spell for all but the most fanatical hater of demons) gives many long-lasting air and sea travel options. The transport would also only need to carry one person as the Lunars could take on small animal shapes. It may be easier to track these methods (flying clouds, a human size tornado, giant ridable wasps, ETC) than two birds but it would still be tremendously difficult and likely require Sidereal support. They would also be traveling fast enough that they could quite likely escape the Blessed Isle before the Realm can muster a Wild Hunt and have it reach them.

Was Hope only a Necromancer and thus unable to take advantage of these options? I may be missing something in the text as I am not sure if Hope ever uses magic that can't fit in the Necromancer paradigm.
 
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< . < > . >

Damn, Wyld Hunts are crazy, y'all. I thought that all three fights were really spectacular, and did a great job of capturing both the overwhelming power of the Anathema, and also their flaws. I always like it when people's character flaws are the key to their defeats. I can see how Beacon, Hound, and Hope were brought to this point, and their defeat here feels natural. I also love how Hope's death in particular was foreshadowed with the conversation with Sister Briar earlier in this arc, where she points out (1) that the Ventus are *excellent* slingers and (2) the Ventus are unfairly policed so that they can be conscripted as soldiers. All the pieces were there, and it was satisfying to see them fall.

Though, also (and you can chalk it up to me being a Celestial Exalted fanboy) this sequence was really emotionally affecting for me. I can easily picture Hound or Beacon being a PC of mine, caught behind enemy lines, with their stories of finding love and liberation after potentially decades of torture and imprisonment brought to tragic and ignominious ends. Exalted isn't a setting where you can write off either side of a typical Wyld Hunt scenario as evil and the other as good - like, if by Zenith Caste magic and circumstance this mountain village had decided to harbor the three Anathema then Ambraea, Maia, Sola, Grace, and the rest would have gotten first hand experience in the very sort of village-slaughtering that Nettle described so brutally in the last update. So it's like. It's very well written. Gaz does pathos very well.

Got me sitting at my computer like.

 
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Gazetteer said:
The single biggest problem with escaping the Blessed Isle with Beacon is that, as Hope said to Hound at the time, Beacon cannot shapeshift. Without him, the Lunars could have become birds and been gone in a way that would be very hard to track.
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Well, if beacon cannot shapeshift, could he be cursed to assume a form not his own? I know there is no wabbajack in the realm they can just use to turn him into something else, but like, threatening to toad people is half the fun of being a scary practitioner of sorcery.
 
There is a Lunar charm that can do that, as well as useful travel spells, but whether or not a specific Exalt or sorcerer knows how to do these things is not guaranteed. Let us assume that if there actually were a really simple easy solution to the problem that Hope laid out that it was within her power, she would have taken it.
 
[X] Childhood memories, and how two people can view them very differently

Mothers might involve Ambraea starting to accept the Empress is dead and I want her to cling to that denial of a loose comment of a Solar for a few more updates yet.
 
IIRC it's not actually canon that Big Red is dead. Beacon wants her to be dead, but has no way of knowing for sure.
 
Andrensath said:
IIRC it's not actually canon that Big Red is dead. Beacon wants her to be dead, but has no way of knowing for sure.
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The Realm will soon act like she's dead, although with the outside possibility of coming back. Whether the Scarlet Empress is actually dead is less important than the Blessed Isle and Great Houses acting like it, since that's the enviroment Ambraea is in.
 
[x] Childhood memories, and how two people can view them very differently

Andrensath said:
IIRC it's not actually canon that Big Red is dead. Beacon wants her to be dead, but has no way of knowing for sure.
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The default answer in the current edition: she has disappeared. The why is either undefined or something you get to make a call on for your own game. Beacon might have seen something that's convinced him that she's dead. He might even be right. But he didn't share his reasons for thinking that, and now he's dead and can't explain himself.
 
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