[Exalted] The Last Daughter -- Dragon-Blooded Sorcery School Quest

Ascending Water, Realm Year 765,
One year, four months after the disappearance of the Scarlet Empress

You're very bad at keeping your head down, but you do try.

As the weeks and months drag on, you become increasingly aware of the many eyes that are watching you. Most aren't malicious, but there is a palpable sense that you're a strong horse who has abruptly found itself separated from the herd, and that, whether at the Heptagram or beyond, a predator is eventually going to take a snap.

You're extremely grateful to have your Hearth, and your other close friends, even if things are a little strange between you and L'nessa at times. To her great credit, she doesn't draw attention to the fact that you are now effectively in her social orbit, rather than the reverse, and it would be unworthy of you to make an issue of it yourself. The fact that she's now in a better position to ward off unkind words to Amiti and Maia than you are galls, though. You hadn't thought about how much quiet satisfaction you'd taken in that before now.

And what are you going to do for the others you hold responsibility for beyond the Heptagram, even more helpless? The thought gnaws at you in the pit of your stomach. You can't very well establish a household if you lack any status beyond your skill at arms and the love of your Hearthmates. Not everything can be defeated with strength of arms or spells or summoned spirits.

While Ragara Falik Cara herself has been avoiding you since the incident in autumn, her words on that day have lodged firmly and irritatingly in the back of your head. Will you attempt to seek shelter with one of your sisters? Your ties to House V'neef are tentative, but the overtures have been consistent on both sides over the years. You have nothing against L'nessa's house in a general sense, but the thought of prostrating yourself before V'neef and asking for her to shelter you is nearly intolerable. Your grudge against your half-sister is petty in the extreme — she hadn't asked for your mother to show her such consistent favouritism, and you would obviously not have rejected it if it had been extended to you instead — but try as you might, you haven't been able to shake it over the years.

There may be other options, though. And there's still the hope that your mother may resurface, or be found alive. In your heart, the chance of this feels increasingly remote. Even as you're increasingly acting with the possibility that she may be dead in mind, it's such a surreal thought that you haven't even begun to feel it emotionally yet. You don't know the exact form those feelings will take, but when they actually hit you, you doubt it will be pleasant.

This morning, you're in a strange mood as you contemplate the Heptagram's indifferent North-coast cooking. You industriously eat a dumpling, obscurely worried that you might actually miss Heptagram food when you're gone from it.

"You hear some very strange things about it," Amiti says.

"An army of ghosts, or something similarly unlikely?" L'nessa asks. "I know we're talking about the Threshold, but it's the Scavenger Lands. They're only barely barbarians there. Surely they don't have that much of a problem."

"All the accounts agree about the ghosts, I've been having them sent to me," Amiti says. "Also about some kind of gigantic monster, which is also undead — which sounds fascinating, frankly. And horrible." The latter is added with the air of covering for herself. It's unconvincing, but you appreciate the token effort.

"Amiti, it's a little ghoulish to take that tone when you're talking about an Immaculate city being put to sword by ravening undead," you remind her.

She shrugs a little helplessly. "Yes, I know, sorry. I'm sure it was very unpleasant to actually be there."'

"Just don't start in like this where Idelle can hear," L'nessa advises, "she's agitated by the subject at the best of times."

"Oh, well, she doesn't care for the things that I say in general, these days," Amiti says, "So I try to avoid speaking too loudly around her. It's a little frustrating."

"I think my name is being called for mail," Sola says, getting up from the table. "Good, I haven't heard anything in a while."

You nod, privately not feeling wildly optimistic about whatever she might be hearing from her family. There hasn't been actually good news from the North in well over a year, when the Tepet forces had sacked and burned Fallen Lapis. It's more than a bit worrisome, taken together with the Empress's disappearance and now the disastrous fall of Thorns. Amiti being barely able to contain an unhale interest in the exact details of the latter doesn't help your mood surrounding it — not for the first time, you wonder about just what cutting a piece of her soul out did to her, long term.

You watch Sola receive a sealed letter on the far side of the room, breaking it open after only a cursory glance at who had sent it. As she begins to read, her eager expression freezes on her face. Then she rapidly scans all the way down the letter, before starting over and reading it again several times. Each time, something a little like panic seems to flicker across Sola's face.

"That looks bad," Maia says, half raising from her seat. She doesn't have time to go to your Hearthmate, however.

Clutching the letter, Sola storms past your table, barely even looking in your direction. "Sola, what's wrong?" you ask.

"Not now," Sola says. You see where she's going in a moment, headed to where Tepet Lapan sits at a table with several of his school friends, including Cara. Sola doesn't have eyes for anyone other than her cousin, though. She seizes him roughly by the shoulder, turning him to look up at her. The entire table goes quiet, taking in her expression.

"Cousin?" Lapan asks.

Sola scans around the room. "Where's Meresen?" she says, naming a Tepet boy in his fourth year.

"The library, I think? He had to work on something." Lapan frowns at her, looking meaningfully at the letter.

"Go get him. Breakfast can wait," Sola says, her voice low and intense. "Meet me out on the grounds. I'll get Surita."

"Why?" Lapan asks again.

Sola seems to reach a breaking point. "Now, Lapan!" she shouts, giving him a hard shake for emphasis.

Everyone in the room is watching them now, utterly silent. Lapan lurches to his feet, something in her eyes sending him out of the room at a run, presumably in the direction of the library. As you watch, Sola briskly makes her way to the table where the few second years who hadn't dropped out after last year's Calibration sit. Tepet Surita is a very young looking girl who you hadn't expected to make it past her first year, and the last of the four Tepets attending the Heptagram at the moment. Unlike Lapan, she gets to her feet immediately when Sola approaches, letting herself be led away and toward the exit. Surita looks more than a little terrified, stealing glances at the letter in Sola's hand like it might burst into flames and consume them both at any moment.

As the two of them leave, Sola catches your eye, shaking her head savagely. She simply mouths "later," and then she and Surita are gone.

With the meal hall now completely devoid of Tepets, there's a further moment of stunned silence as everyone stares at the exit that the two of them just used. As if on cue, you all start talking at once.

It isn't difficult to guess at the gist of what news could be so grave as to push Sola to react this way. Speculation as to the specific nature of the presumed disaster still runs rampant — how many legions Tepet had lost, what unforgivable sacrifice they've made, how many soldiers and officers had been sent to their deaths all receive attention, each suggestion as sensationalist as the last.

"She wouldn't have acted like that if it were just a legion lost," L'nessa says, frowning. A whole legion being destroyed by a barbarian horde is almost unheard of, but she's right. Sola would have reacted badly to her sister's legion being routed, but she wouldn't have taken all three of the others. All four of Tepet's house legions were deployed to the North, however, and it would be a strange coincidence if all the students currently at the Heptagram have close family in just one of them.

"Is she going to be alright?" Amiti asks.

"That depends on a few things," Maia says, still staring out the entrance, expression deeply troubled. "She took her mother's death hard, but she didn't look like that."

You have to agree. She'd turned inward after the news about Usala broke. Not anything like this.

"Shouldn't you go after her?" L'nessa asks.

"Not immediately," you say. She'd hate that, after she'd more or less asked you to wait. "She's dealing with house business, whatever it is. We'll speak to her in private afterward." You would expect Sola to be the type to take duty to her informal position as the eldest Tepet present and the daughter of the late matriarch deadly seriously in a crisis.

Maia nods, seeming to agree with the basic course of action, but still not quite looking happy. You can't help but echo her sentiments, internally. You wouldn't have been pleased to see a close friend so distraught in any case, but the feeling is dramatically worse when it's a Hearthmate.

Before most of the others in the room, the four of you fall silent. You all try, with mixed success, to simply finish your breakfasts and abstain from further speculation.

---

No one's quite sure where the news finally leaks out from — whether the source was one of the younger Tepets, an instructor relaying a correspondence, or another student with an unusually privileged source of information. In the end, it's worse than anyone had guessed at breakfast.

Their supply lines stretched to the breaking point, whittled down by years of cowardly raiding by human and spirit enemies alike, House Tepet had finally forced a confrontation in a faraway place called the Valley of Shards. They had butchered Icewalkers in the thousands and smashed the greater part of the Bull of the North's army. Of the six Solar Anathema that had been arrayed against them — a horrifying, unheard of number — two had been killed outright, another two seriously maimed, including the Bull himself. In return, however, every single one of the Tepet legions had been shattered, with no firm accounting yet of how many had survived the ruinous battle, or if even one of them can be reformed from what is left.

Untold numbers of Dragon-Blooded, mortal officers, and mortal rank and file are dead. The name "Futile Blood" has not yet been applied to the ruinous battle, but it won't take long for the Dynasty as a whole to adopt it.

As the day crawls on and you wait for Sola to reappear, you don't know quite what you're going to say to her. As nighttime nears, brought on early by bands of cold spring rain, you start to worry about more than just her emotional state.

"The other three are back," Maia tells you. She crosses her arms over her chest, leaning against the frame of your dorm's open door. "Hours ago, it looks like."

"She's still not?" L'nessa asks. She sits cross legged on her bed, a particularly weighty text open in her lap.

"No," you and Maia say, nearly at once. You both know exactly where she is, your Hearth sense giving you her precise direction and distance. With a sigh, you pick your sheathed daiklave up from its place atop your small desk, and begin to fasten it around your waist.

"I think she wanted space," Maia says, pensive. "Wouldn't she come find us if she were ready to talk?"

"No," you say, "She'll come find us when she's gotten herself together enough that she won't show us weakness or be tempted to ask for help, whatever it is she actually needs."

"And if that's what she wants?" Maia asks.

L'nessa carefully marks her place with a silk bookmark, closing the book firming and setting it aside. She gets to her feet. "I think," she says, "that I will go collect that brush I lent to Amiti a few days ago. Before I forget again." With that , she slips out of the room, movements swift but casual as she walks down the hall.

Her tactics for giving you and Maia privacy to discuss Hearth related matters is very similar to the way she'll find to leave a room when you and Maia are having some sort of lover's spat. She really is a very good roommate, altogether.

Maia shuts the door behind her, crossing over to her own bed, which she perches on the edge of. "It would be a little too much for me to start expecting her to open up more than she wants to, even at the best of times. Especially where family is involved. I'm just trying to be fair about this."

"Part of what being Sworn Kin means is that she can rely on us even when she hasn't asked," you say. "She's out there in the rain — I know the place she's been for the past two hours. I think she's waiting for us."

Maia tilts her head for a moment, as if considering the distance and trajectory from here to where Sola is, and comparing that against her knowledge of the island's geography. "Oh, there," she says. "I can see why you'd think that."

"Well, then?" you ask.

Maia sighs. "Well, if you go out there on your own, I'll have to come too. It would serve you right if, after seven years of this kind of nonsense, this were finally the time that something really bad happened to you." The joke delivered, Maia adds: "And whatever we do, I don't want her to think I'm willing to do less for her than you are."

"You are a good Hearthmate," you tell her, despite still being both distracted and deeply unhappy.

Maia is quiet for several frowning seconds, before saying, almost too quiet for you to hear: "I really hope that ends up being true."

Outside, the rain continues to patter against the glass of your dorm's small window.

Article:

While it isn't nighttime yet, it will be relatively soon, if Sola stays out in the grounds any longer than this in such miserable weather. Even for a martially-accomplished seventh year student, it isn't safe to be out on the Isle of Voices by one's self after dark — long experience of the place has proved that to you all. She has been dealt a heavy emotional blow, and as with the loss of her mother, she very likely doesn't want to show unladylike weakness or vulnerability to her peers.

You aren't exactly letting on about your increasing confusion and panic about your own mother's continued absence, but you have yet to receive news this definitive or crushing. You've never had a house to lose in the first place.

What do you do for Sola?

[ ] Go to her

You and Maia have sworn to share in her burdens and pain, at need. You and Maia are the only ones who can do this for her.

[ ] Leave her until she comes to you

Maia has a point — letting Sola take the time to compose herself might be more in line with her wishes.