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

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I think Solar Ego is the strongest of all. Nothing like rising really high up on the exalted chain to inflate ones sense of importance and infallibility.
 
[X] Use your words

If the reaction of his buddy was any indication, this should work beautifully. And if that's enough to piss him off, he'll be extra furious when Maia stabs him in the back out of nowhere.
 
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Vote closed, Interlude 6 04
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    • Scheduled vote count started by Gazetteer on Aug 25, 2024 at 10:03 AM, finished with 35 posts and 29 votes.
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    Interlude 6: Sun, Moon, and Stars 05
  • Threadmarks
    • Coordinate with Verdigris: 22

    Use your words: 4

    Knock him down: 3

    Wounded Hound's anger almost seems to radiate off of him along with his silver-white anima, supernatural in its cold intensity as he stares unblinkingly at Stinging Nettle. "I'm going to enjoy shutting you up," he says. There's barely a twitch to indicate which direction he's going to move in before he's on her again, the massive edifice of jade-clad wood in his hands smashing down on her hard enough to crater the ground where Nettle had been.

    Nettle springs aside, the phantom arms that seem to encircle her waving infuriatingly as she lands on one leg, her direlash already licking out to score a punishing wound along Hound's torso, the blade of the whip finding a gap in the moonsilver plates he wears. Blood splatters the ground.

    "Do you really think you're getting anywhere?" Hound asks. To Grace's horror, as he says this, she watches the cut she'd left on on his cheek take on a silvery shine and close itself. "I only have to hit you once to splatter you across the landscape. You can't hurt me in any way that lasts."

    "Well, what can I say?" Nettle asks. "I'm fucking perseverant. It's one of my best traits, just ask any of my lovers."

    Unseen, unheard, Grace slips out from behind her hiding place, hurls her rope dart in a wide, sweeping arc — the angle is wrong to do serious injury, but she isn't aiming to injure this time. The blade scrapes along the rippling moonsilver of Hound's backplate. At the sensation, Hound takes his attention off Nettle for just an instant, trying to find the source of the impact.

    When Nettle takes advantage of the distraction as Grace had hoped. This time, she wounds Hound more than just physically.

    Nettle's halo swells to encompass her fully in a yellow blaze, a flock of jeering mospids forming from the Mercurian Essence to fly around and through the illusory Laughing Monster limbs. The direlash hits him full in the face, corded jadesteel cutting a bloody furrow from forehead to jaw, raking an eye in the process. He barely seems to feel the pain — the thing that Nettle's attack pulls out of him when the whip coils back has drawn his attention far more than what should have been a fight-ending injury.

    Born in a burst of cruel Essence, a tiny figure blooms out of the moonlit glow of Hound's soul. It's twistedly humanoid, clad in scarlet finery, teeth too sharp, eyes too hard, tiny hands ending in red-lacquered talons, borne aloft on miniature dragon's wings sprouting from its shoulders. Through the killing rage, an expression of fear briefly flashes in Hound's eyes. He tries to swat the thing out of the air, but his tetsubo passes directly through its body as it circles around him, darting in to whisper terrible things in his ear, to pull at his hair, to dig its talons into his neck.

    Through the sordid techniques of her strange martial art, Nettle has reached into Hound's very being, and pulled free an embodiment of his terror and hatred for the Scarlet Empress. "What about this one?" Nettle asks, "Do you think this might stick with you, a little while?"

    Hound's only reply is a furious, animal howl, the wound on his face already stitching itself closed, but the cackling imp showing no sign of vanishing. However strange and distasteful her methods, Grace doesn't waste the opening provided anymore than Nettle had wasted Grace's distraction. Throwing everything she has into it, Grace kicks her rope dart in mid-spin, sending the blade hurling through the air. At precisely the right moment, the imp seizes Hound's hair painfully, wrenching his head to the side to let the dart bury itself in the side of his neck, doing even more damage when Grace yanks it free with all her strength. His enraged scream cuts off, coughing up blood to splatter on the ground, as well as onto Nettle.

    He's still standing, though. Hound doesn't waste time reacting — he throws himself backward, twisting around in midair to raise the club over his head. Letting out an undignified yelp, Grace leaps back, and Nettle slips into the space between them, forcing him to deal with her. She casually leans out of the way of his strike and hits him with the direlash again. This time, the counterattack glances off his armour, but he still feels the impact it.

    "Honestly, you seem stressed," Nettle says. "High strung. Do you need to take a breather? Have a drink of water, cry a bit? I can wait."

    "SHUT. UP."

    Nettle dodges his next blow as well, bending backward at the waist to let the club pass over her head, still grinning. "If you can make me!"

    This time, though, he's ready for the counter. Rather than trying to block the direlash with his weapon, Hound throws an arm up, letting the hot, sparking cord wrap painfully around it. He seizes the end, heedless of the whip's bladed tip biting into his hand, ignoring the whispers of the Empress imp in his ear. He hauls hard on the direlash, very nearly pulling Nettle off her feet before she can think to let go of the whip — it's too late by then.

    Wounded Hound's anima surges out and upward, the shape of a towering, silver hellboar roaring its defiance behind him, and he strikes Nettle squarely in the jaw with his tetsubo. Only the need to keep the rope dart moving stops Grace from clapping her hands over her mouth — for a moment, she expects Nettle's head to be knocked clean off at the shoulders, for her bones to be turned to dust by the resulting thunderclap shockwave.

    Instead, Nettle is picked up off her feet by the force of the blow, and hurled like a yellow comet into the nearest boulder. It shatters on impact, leaving the Harbinger to lay still amid a pile of shattered stone. "Be careful what you wish for," Hound says around the still-closing wound in his throat, a satisfied smile spreading over his face, more triumph than ever before. He steps toward Nettle's prone body, clearly intending to make certain she isn't going to get up again.

    A furious, tawny shape drops down from the sky, wings and teeth and talons flashing as Grinner throws himself between Nettle and the Lunar. Hound hits the small god with an almost casual backhand, sending him tumbling through the air to land in a heap nearby.

    Once again, Grace stands forgotten. The most cowardly part of her is already reaching for Absence, the technique that will carry her away from here, away from danger as if she'd never been there at all. Overwhelmed by a great foe they had never thought to encounter, the older and more experienced Sidereal she'd been working with bested, how many in heaven would blame her for retreating?

    Grace would. Simply running from your troubles is well and good, when you're on your own. When you have nothing to protect. She thinks of Nettle making herself the obvious target, enraging a dangerous Anathema, drawing danger toward herself and away from Grace again and again, and Grace isn't even surprised to realise that, however crass and frustrating a woman she is, and however scared Grace might feel, Stinging Nettle is someone she'll protect, when it comes down to it.

    Grace sighs, almost despairing. "I can't quit now," she whispers.

    Whirling her rope dart fully up to speed, she hurls it at Hound, hitting him in the back of the head this time, burying the weapon just enough into his skull for what she intends. Grace feels her Caste Mark form a blue halo behind her as she seizes the rope dart's fate and extends it over Hound for just a moment, turning him into an extension of the weapon she still holds. When she tugs it back, he comes with it, as though he weighs nothing at all, flying into a nearby boulder with a painful crash. The weapon finally pops free, and Grace takes a wary step back, preparing to face him.

    Hound slowly gets to his feet. In the face of him, Demure Peony as she'd been when she'd first been claimed by Venus, could not have made herself do anything but cower. He looks at her, the anger still there, mixed with a new disdain. "You present yourself as a warrior, but here you are, a little blue mouse bearing the mark of a goddess of whores," he says.

    Grace feels her resplendent destiny strain beneath the weight of his recognition, and hastily slips it off. "Among other things," Grace says. "Much better that than a blood-crazed monster who brings only pain. The fear and misery you've spread here is no part of Destiny's plan."

    "But our deaths are?" Hound stalks toward her, still mantled in roiling moonlight.

    "Deciding that isn't my Division, exactly," Grace tells him, her body still going through the motions of keeping the rope dart moving. Looking at him, every bit as terrifying as the monks had always taught her he'd be, Grace tastes copper at the back of her throat. The same calm, cold, analytical part of her from before is in control, however. She doesn't let her fear show on her face. "I doubt I'll get many objections, though."


    The Wood Aspect monk moves around the sorcerer girl like a green-wreathed blur, her movements sinuous as a bending willow. Her bow strikes a reanimated peasant man full in the head, cracking his skull and pushing him back into the mass of her fellows. A kick to the chest of a zombie that used to be an elderly woman sends it flying backward. With every blow she delivers, she bears an almost pained look, to have to see these people she'd known in such a state, to have to further damage their already desecrated bodies. Still, she does an admirable job of defending the bubble of clear air that the sorcerer's daiklave maintains, even as necromantic winds howl around them.

    The Air Aspect still chants over her sword, the weapon pulsing in time in time to her words, Heptagram-trained sorcery vying against the sacred necromancy of the Incarnadine Path.

    When Hope For Rain's darts fly for the Air Aspect, the monk throws herself into their path. One slips past the monk's guard, bouncing heavily off of the Air Aspect's steel-clad shoulder. A second is turned aside by the monk's hand. The third, though, strikes the monk square in the chest — only the monk's chainmail stops the barbed projectile from stabbing more than a quarter of its length into her flesh. Still, it lodges there, and according to its own cruel intent, begins to twist.

    The monk hisses in pain, not quite dodging in time to avoid the teeth of the zombie lunging from her blind spot as it snaps its jaws shut around her arm. She uses her bow to drive the attacker off, but not before taking a crushing injury to the limb. Taking a deep breath, the monk uses her injured arm to rapidly strike a series of her own pressure points, her venomous anima roiling out around her, vines lashing the surrounding undead as part of her wounds seem to seal themselves shut — the dart is still in her flesh, however, slowing her and harrying all her movements.

    The monk has done her job and bought the sorcerer enough time, however — the howling of the Flesh and Bone Wind dies down, becalmed by the Air Aspect's efforts, no longer building itself to hurricane force. It should stop there — the spell has already been successfully cast, it can't simply be wished out of existence by an enemy sorcerer. But the sword blazes brighter than ever, and the howling wind dies completely, the artifact apparently having some special affinity for weather magic, at least in this woman's hands. Splintered bone and bloody meat fall around the battlefield in a vile rain.

    Looking down at the girl, with her sword and her armour and her obstinately martial air, Hope finds it extremely professionally annoying. Hope pulls three more hairs from her head, forming them into more long, lethal projectiles. As she does this, the shadow she casts on the mountainside behind her begins to twitch and move of its own accord, pulling on the bonds of blood and belief that tie Hope to the red torrent that is her necromancy. "Fine," she says to the Air Aspect, "fine, Dynast — try to do away with this." Hope's own anima goes from a diaphanous silvery sheen around her to a vast, dark flame, a midnight purple field ringed by dreamlike wisps of silver. From within its depths, formed of pure glistening moonlight, a swarm of locusts seems to emerge, Hope's power vast and devouring around her.

    The Air Aspect looks past Hope's anima banner, though, eyes locked on what her shadow's doing, its limbs forming a ball of writhing, white Essence. Something like recognition passes over her face, "Flesh-Sloughing Wave. Perfect," the Air Aspect growls.

    The monk shoots her an appalled look. "It's called what?"

    The Air Aspect has already begun to shout out another counterspell, her sword blazing to desperate life again, the electric blue glow around her rushing out into a storm of wind and lightning that Hope has to struggle against with all four wings.

    Hope's next volley of darts are turned aside in the winds of the sorcerer's anima, although one of them narrowly misses the monk, as the Wood Aspect attempts to sight an arrow at Hope through the pain of the one still twisting in her chest. Sweat breaks out on the young sorcerer's forehead, straining against the fell whispers that emerge from where the shadow's mouth would have been. With a surge of triumph, Hope feels the moment when the sorcerer loses the battle of wills, gasping and lurching forward.

    "A valiant attempt," Hope says, her shadow slithering up to place the gathered necromantic power into her hands, "but you were always out of your league." She drops the white orb to the ground in front of the Dragon-Blooded, unleashing magic that can strip flesh from bone.


    When you'd been young, not even yet Exalted, your father had condescended to step into your combat training, passing on the style of swordfighting he'd carried with him from Prasad. Any time you, a mortal girl, had faced him in a sparring match, even with him obviously holding back to avoid harming you, there had been the sense of Burano Maharan Nazat as an immovable stone pillar you were throwing yourself against.

    Then you'd Exalted, and for a brief moment, you'd been convinced it would be different, that you'd be able to fight him if not as an equal, then at least as something much closer to one. You'd trained with a sword for years at that point, after all, and you'd just been lifted up by Pasiap himself, Terrestrial Essence coursing wild and barely contained through your veins.

    That first day you'd fought him, Exalted for all of a week, he'd thrown you down into the dirt with two moves, as immovable as ever, a mountain too old and too skilled for you to yet assail. Somewhere along the way, you'd forgotten that feeling, of being genuinely outclassed, of being humoured by someone who feels that you would simply die if they gave you anything closer to their best.

    You remember that feeling now. You ready your sword, standing bathed in the golden radiance of the mute Anathema's soul, and he watches you like you're here to entertain him. Like you're something that he can use to exorcise whatever mad grudge he's cultivated for your mother over the years. Just someone with a face he'd like to watch twist in pain in place of the Empress's.

    Where he errs, however, is that you're not a weak, untrained girl anymore. You're not a thirteen year old, helpless in serious combat against a mature Exalt. You're a Dragon-Blooded Prince of the Earth blossoming into the fullness of your power, trained by renowned swordmasters. You're a talented sorcerer, the daughter of the greatest Dragon-Blooded sorcerer in history, fresh from years of brutal training. You have slain a lord of Hell with the same weapon he so carelessly disregards now. Whatever unholy skill he might have, however he might outclass you sword to sword, you're not someone he can afford to not take seriously. It will be the end of him.

    Or so you tell yourself.

    You step forward, swinging the White Serpent in a descending slash that could have beheaded a draft horse. The Anathema turns it aside with ease, calmly giving ground as you refuse to let up the pressure. In the field below, where Yueh Mei had led the Frenzied away in an act of reckless bravery, the-silver white glow of a Full Moon's anima rages. Directly opposite it, on the far end of the violent press of mortals and undead, two Dragon-Blooded anima banners stand defiant against a dreamlike haze of silvery night. You can't spare as much worry for your remaining Hearthmate and your other allies as you'd like, however — you have the Anathema to focus on, and Maia with her horrible wound.

    And the snake that's slowly winding her way down your stony armour, readying herself for what comes next. Even compared to most familiars, Verdigris has always been exceptionally good at intuiting your moods and desires — you appreciate that now, even more than usual.

    He just keeps smiling at you, parrying your next blow almost lazily, apparently more sanguine than you about the safety of his own allies, if that even matters to him at this point. The smile communicates a question: He'd always wondered — did you all have any idea of why the Empress even needed to keep 'Anathema' alive in captivity?

    "She is less forthcoming with her secrets than you seem to be imagining," you say, trying to press your advantage in strength and reach as your swords lock together.

    He actually chuckles at that, something about your phrasing striking him as obscurely funny. You mean she was less forthcoming.

    Despite yourself, you blink in unfeigned surprise. "What?"

    His sword disentangles with yours, stabbing straight for your throat. You manage to catch the sunfire daiklave on the edge of your own, sending a thin trail of Fire through the blade. Sparks fly off of it at the point of impact, arcing cruelly into the Anathema's eyes. Verdigris picks this moment to make her move — launching herself fully out of your summoned armour, fangs extended, she bites the Anathema on the side, pumping him full of petrifying venom. He screams, his dagger lashing out sightlessly.

    With a plaintive hiss, Verdigris lets go of him, a deep slash in her bronze scales, blue blood already welling up from the wound. She hits the ground at your feet, and sinks into it, fleeing. Filled with a panicked rage, you step to the side, his sword shrieking off yours, and drive the pommel of the White Serpent hard into his chest, just below his sternum. Your anima hisses up around you, a storm of quartz in the shape of a rearing serpent, biting into his unarmoured flesh.

    It's at this point that Maia makes her move. As injured as she is, one hand still clapped over her throat, she's been carefully watching the exchange of blows between the two of you, slowly moving into position, timing her next move precisely, as if she doesn't expect to get a second chance at it. Now, with the Anathema poisoned, blinded, and doubled over in pain, she takes her hand from her throat, grips her blood lash in both hands, and whirls it savagely through the air. You see now that the blood dripping between her fingers had flowed down her arm, feeding into the sorcerous weapon, making it grow longer and more lethal. In midair, its barbed tip splits wide into a yawning, needle-toothed maw, and it clamps down mercilessly on the side of the Anathema's throat.

    He locks up in pain and shock, and you can actually see the pulse of his blood being siphoned away up the entire length of the blood lash, flowing to Maia, healing the worst of her injuries. The wound on her throat closes, leaving behind only an angry red line over her jugular.

    With a wordless, incoherent cry, the Anathema shoves away from you, slashing wildly at the lash anchored to his neck. He cuts it off near the tip, leaving the rest to retract back into Maia's hand. He blinks hard against the temporary blindness. Then almost faster than you can react, he turns on his heel, and throws himself at Maia, blade first.


    When the tetsubo comes down, Grace simply isn't there, sidestepping the grand goremaul by a hair's breadth. The shock of the impact sends panic squirming through her gut that she struggles to avoid showing.

    Backpedalling, she sends her rope dart sailing at Hound, but it deflects off his moonsilver armour, and he enjoys a moment of laughter at Grace's expense as she's forced to wheel the weapon back in. The laughter dies as Nettle's hideous Empress imp flits back into view, claws cupping Hound's jaw with inhuman glee — he freezes up for just a moment, and Grace's next throw connects with the gap in the interior of his elbow.

    Using the inverse of the trick from before, Grace makes his body share the rope dart's fate — he sails through the air weightlessly, and crashes bodily into another rocky outcropping. All brutal mirth gone, the Lunar lets out a bellow that sounds all too like the hellboar that is his spirit shape. "How are you doing that?" he demands, picking himself up and stalking forward toward Grace.

    As Grace backs away from him, she suddenly finds herself moving faster than she should, guided by a trail of yellow stardust at the edge of her vision. So she's less surprised than Hound is when a slender form slams into him from behind, one leg hooking around his, wiry arms locking around his throat.

    "Whole fucking thing with a maiden and a shadow, don't worry about it," Nettle manages, her words slurred through what looks horribly like a dislocated jaw. As she finishes, she spits blood into Hound's face.

    Watching the furious Lunar struggle against Nettle's hold, Grace understands that he will get himself free, that he will overpower her. It isn't anything as superficial as their relative sizes — she's been warned about how dangerous trying to grapple with a Lunar can be, even for an expert Sidereal. And Nettle, for all her skill, is not an expert. Grace kicks the rope dart toward Hound, meaning to forestall the inevitable. Once again, the blade glances hard off of rippling moonsilver, doing nothing but bruise.

    "You're like a cockroach!" Hound shouts around Nettle's chokehold, "Just. DIE." He doesn't bother reaching for her with the last — instead, he launches himself backward into the same outcropping that Grace had lately thrown him into, slamming Nettle bodily against it with all his weight. There's a horrible snap of bone, and Nettle screams, but doesn't let go.

    Her vision receding to Hound and Nettle and nothing beyond them, Grace catches the returning rope dart by letting it wrap around her neck, unspooling it again to wind up for another throw. She fumbles for a technique she's never quite managed, even in training. She's horribly sure that by the time she acts, Nettle will already be dead.

    Fortunately, help comes from an unlooked for direction. A short distance away from the wrestling Exalts, a lean, fast-moving figure materialises out of thin air — a woman wearing feather-adorned robes, her eyes a hard amber, her feet and hands ending in vicious talons like a flightless bird. The strange bird god leaps for Hound, claws extended in one talon-hand, a knife in the other. With a grunt of displeasure, Hound reaches up and seizes her by the throat, squeezing painfully as she tries uselessly to claw at his arm.

    Grace watches, dismayed, only staving off the shaking in her hands through sheer force of will, focusing on the path the rope dart needs to take, the journey it needs to go on, in its purest form.

    The bird god lets the knife fall from a slackening grip — no, she tosses it. Nettle manages to catch it by the hilt, and without missing a beat, she plunges the blade up through the bottom of Hound's jaw, piercing up toward the roof of his mouth with all of her remaining strength. He reels back, hurling the bird god aside, clawing at the knife while the cackling imp flies at his hands, swatting away his questing fingers.

    Grace will have no better moment. "Nettle, move!" Grace shouts, falling back on Old Realm. Nettle meets her eyes from across the distance, and lets go, hitting the ground painfully. Grace launches the rope dart with everything she has, the blade carried by the inexorable nature of its fate to fly through the air with lethal intent. For just an instant, it wholly becomes that fate, stretching and thinning out, becoming nothing but a strand of yellow Essence. The moonsilver armour means nothing to it, the reinforced flesh and bone of the Lunar's body even less. For the tiniest fraction of an instant, Wounded Hound is in a battle of wills with the most fundamental nature of a thrown weapon in flight, his raw desire to live all that might fend it off.

    The streak of yellow light passes through Hound's armoured chest as though it were nothing at all, a needle to pierce the shadows themselves, stabbing straight into and through his heart. It's executed perfectly, until Grace tries to pull it back — the rope dart goes abruptly solid while it's still halfway through his chest. The barbed head lodges directly in his heart.

    Hound drops the tetsubo, the ground shaking as it lands beside him, nearly crushing Nettle in the process. Both hands claw at the rope dart even as his accelerated healing closes the wound around the rope. Gripping it in both hands, he pulls with all his might. But the dart snags on the inside of his ribcage, and he only succeeds in tearing the rope free from the dart in a burst of blood. With a weak, mortally injured moan, the Lunar's legs buckle, the hurt too grievous even for his driving rage to keep him on his feet.

    Grace is running for him full tilt before she even thinks, wrapping both hands around the knife that still sticks out of his chin, throwing all her weight into driving it further upward.

    For an instant, Grace stands there, staring directly into Hound's eyes, and he stares back at her, hate burning out of them until the last. Then his eyes cloud over, and his anima gutters out, and Grace is looking at a corpse. The Laughing Monster imp waves, and then blows away in the wind as a trail of silvery dust. Grace lets go of the knife, takes a step back, and her legs go out from under her like an unsteady foal.

    The bird god has gone to Nettle, dropping to one knee and seizing the Harbinger by the shoulders, propping her up beside Hound. Razor sharp annoyance wars with grudging concern in the god's bearing. "Are you going to die?" she demands. It's a valid question — Nettle looks frightful. In addition to her jaw, the side of her head is caked with blood, one of the tetsubo's spikes having punched through her cheek. Her breathing is laboured, presumably an injury taken when Hound tried to crush her against the rock she's now leaning against.

    Nettle takes a deep breath, and lets it out. Then another, as she slowly raises her hands to her jaw. Gripping it in both hands, she wrenches it back into place, giving an earnestly agonised scream as she does so. "Fuck! Fuck! That's so much worse than an arm!" she manages. Then she spits out another mouthful of blood onto the ground.

    The bird guard nods, letting go. "I'll take that as a no. Good."

    "Was worried about you too, Bolt," Nettle croaks, naming the woman as her austrech familiar. "Grinner?"

    As Nettle asks the question, Grace sees the mospid pick himself up in the near distance, obviously unsteady on his feet and ruffled in his feathers, but not seriously hurt. Despite Grinner being a god at this point, and presumably being able to reform, a brief but visible wave of relief passes through Nettle's entire body. Her head rolls to the side, eyes settling on Grace. "You hurt?" she asks, after a moment to collect herself.

    Grace is staring at Nettle, at her jaw, at the Lunar corpse still kneeling beside them both. Grace's Essence reserves are as low as she's ever felt them, and her stomach is roiling unpleasantly. Slowly, she nods. "Better than you," she whispers, faintly. As the stolen vitality finally flees her body, she can feel the blood rapidly draining from her face.

    "I probably wasn't using those ribs for much in particular," Nettle manages. Then she gives a shuddering, hacking cough, blood spraying out onto the grass. "Well, that was fucking scary. Complete shitshow. Not you — you did good. Good job."

    The air has a thick, coppery scent on it. Grace's palms have been rubbed raw with rope burn, even if the blood on them isn't hers. "Thank you," Grace says, voice even fainter. A moment later, she turns her head, bending over to be sick onto the blood-slick grass.


    Hope would have liked to drop the spell a little closer to the legionnaires, but she makes due with the Dragon-Blooded. The spell hits the ground, and explodes outward in a wave of writhing, shrieking light, hungrily grabbing for any living flesh it can get.

    The monk stands stock still, closes her eyes, gathers the power of Wood and vitality into herself, thinking she can simply endure the spell. The Air Aspect, frustratingly, simply leaps into the air over it, buoyed up on a burst of stormwind.

    The wave crashes fully into the Wood Aspect, only grazing one leg of the Air Aspect. As the light passes away, the monk falls to her knees, forcing herself not to scream, flesh eaten away in a gruesome spot on one arm, bloody patches of red erratically dotting her face and neck, more blood seeping through her robes. She shudders with the effort of keeping her flesh anchored to her bones.

    The Air Aspect lands with a hiss of pain, blood flowing out from beneath one steel greave. Her anima still rages around her, lightning arcing through the zombies all around her and the monk, thinning their back ranks considerably.

    "You can't match me as a sorcerer," Hope explains, because she wants the girl to really understand it, "not really. You lack the power, you lack the versatility, and you lack the potential. You just aren't made for it."

    The Air Aspect looks up at her, eyes crackling with the same lightning that pulses around her. "Yeah, maybe," she says, agreeing.

    Hope can't tell exactly what's happened for a confused, lagging moment. She was looking down at the Dragon-Blooded one instant, then the next the Air Aspect was gone in a burst of lightning, and Hope had a stinging pain in her chest. Too late, Hope whirs up and away on her wings. She touches her torso, and finds a bloody rent cut into her exoskeleton, deep into the human flesh beneath.

    The Air Aspect lands in a crouch beside the ailing monk again, still guarding her against storm or injury, even as the older woman still fights the influence of the Flesh-Sloughing Wave. The daiklave is wet with Hope's blood.

    From her new height, Hope looks out across the strange little battlefield. The towering brilliance that is Beacon of Truth's anima shines at the edge of the cliff, intertwined with the black and white light that is the other two Dragon-Blooded. Beyond them, the silver-white flame that marks where Wounded Hound is roils angrily... and then winks out.

    Because he's dead.

    Hope's fear comes to the forefront, her understanding of what a terrible, terrible idea any of this is. Her understanding that she no longer has any reason to be here, that she gains nothing from this fight but the satisfaction of killing a few Dynasts and a single monk, along with their mortal chaff. That, she remembers with sudden alarm, there are two Sidereals to worry about, and she doesn't know where they are.

    Hope isn't going to die here. She's meant for better than this. Beacon of Truth is on his own, he was never really her concern to begin with. In a flash of silver light, she abandons her locust-woman shape, becoming a bird that wings up and away over the crowd of soldiers. She's going to fly and fly and fly until she sees the shoreline, then she's going to swim across the Inland Sea and never set foot on the Blessed Isle again.

    Hope is so focused on this thought that she doesn't even consider that there might be a danger until the first stone strikes her. It whistles through the air, clipping her side painfully. She lets out an undignified squawk, looking frantically around. Too late, she sees the soldiers standing near the back of the formation — panicky, poorly equipped, and holding slings that hurl stones at her with deadly accuracy. She shrouds herself in the blackness of her anima, obscuring where, exactly she is, but this doesn't stop the stones already in flight. One smashes into her head, a second snaps the delicate bones of one bird wing like a bundle of twigs. With a caw of anger and fear, she plummets, spiraling back down to the village below.

    She lands hard amid the soldiers, who reel back away from her. Even in bird shape, she's still enrobed in silver and night, still aglow with moonsilver tattoos in the shape of profane runes that burn through her feathers. On instinct, she abandons the bird shape, becoming her true self, kneeling in the bloody dirt with one arm hanging painfully fractured at her side, blood flowing sluggishly from the sword wound on her chest. The mortals stare down at her in obvious fear.

    Hope can still salvage this — the Dragon-Blooded can't follow her without killing their own troops with their anima. She can get up, run through them, and go over the cliff in the shape of something that can climb while down a limb. She can still get away. She pushes up to her feet, and comes face to face with a short woman in finer armour than the ordinary soldiers, the mon of a Sesus Dynastic household painted on her breastplate alongside the one for her house. Hope has the time to note that she's very young for an officer.

    Before Hope can move, before she can speak to frighten the mortal girl away and make her escape, the woman pulls back her gore-streaked sword, and plunges it at Hope's chest with a shout of "Sesus and the Empress!"

    Hope reels back, seizes the woman's wrist in her unbroken hand, keeping the blade from doing more but cutting shallowly her. "No," Hope says, "no, that was stupid of you." Her broken bones shrieking in pain, Hope lashes out at the officer's head with a palm strike, striking her full in the nose, feeling the crunch of cartilage. The officer falls back, caught by the woman behind her.

    Before Hope can take another step, though, a blade plunges into her back. Then another into her side. She lashes out with hands and feet, fighting wildly, breaking bone and tearing at flesh, but the steel-reinforced edge of a shield smashes into her temple, and Hope falls to the ground. The weight of mortal flesh and metal presses her down, not letting her escape. Her mind flies through all the shapes she can think of to save herself, reaching for a mouse, a snake, even her locust spirit shape to squeeze between the crush of bodies, but she has nothing. Hope is tired, and spent, and abruptly too wounded.

    This isn't how she dies. She's better than this. She was chosen by Luna themself, she's meant to live a thousand years and drink deep of the secrets of the world, not die to rank and file trash. In the end, though, much like her namesake, Hope has her limits.


    The Anathema tries to throw himself at Maia, but you don't allow it. Caught in the raging crystalline sandstorm of your anima, you only have to exert a bit of effort to make the ground beneath his feet heave upward, hurling him back. He manages to land on his feet, but his offhand dagger slips out of his grip, tumbling over the edge of the cliff.

    He stares at you, eyes wide and frantic now, movement slowed from his wounds and Verdigris' poison, skin being steadily flayed from his body by your anima. He doesn't seem so confident in his eventual victory anymore.

    "You could have killed me at least three times," you say. "Your mad whims have doomed yourself as much as all the people you've murdered today."

    He scoffs. Sanctimony from the daughter of history's worst tyrant.

    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're more than a little surprised by this development yourself — the woman being carried on the mospid has already entirely fully fled your memory, after all. All you recall is Yueh Mei leaping down the mountainside, leading the Full Moon away, presumably to bait it into enough of a chase to give the rest of you a fighting chance of defeating the other two. You don't spare the time to think critically about this, however, anymore than you're kind enough to give the Anathema the time to come to terms with the situation.

    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.

    A knife sails through the air, barely nicking his forehead, but drawing a line of blood that runs down into his eyes almost immediately. You batter aside his daiklave, and with a quick downward slash, you take his sword arm off at the elbow. The arm and the summoned blade go over the edge of the cliff like the knife before it. He stares at you, too stunned even to send another silent message. This lets Maia's blood lash take him fully in the back.

    The weapon parts flesh and muscle, slicing into bone. Into his spine. With a choked gasp, he topples forward to land bonelessly at your feet, bleeding from his countless wounds. He's obviously finished, but your heart is still thundering in your veins, your head swimming with fear and anger and more than a little bloodlust. You raise one stone-clad foot, meeting the Anathema's fearful gaze for just a second. Then you stomp down with everything you can bring to bear, feeling bone give way underfoot. The golden anima finally winks out, just as surely as the others had.

    You stand stock still for a moment, breath coming hard and ragged, wounds from that burning sword still stinging on your face and neck and in your side. You don't yet have the capacity for complex thought, for taking stock of the dead and the injured, or to truly glory in what was by any decent estimation a great victory.

    Maia lets her blood lash melt back into blood. She looks worse than you feel, for all that the direst of her wounds were healed by her sorcery. She takes a step closer to you, flinging out a blood-slick hand to steady herself against your breastplate. You look down at her, her dark hair plastered to her face with sweat and blood, her face pale with exertion, the blue-black miasma of her anima still clinging to her.

    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.

    You don't know how long that goes on, but after a time, a familiar voice makes you jerk apart. "I have no idea how L'nessa didn't go insane, sharing a room with you both for six years." Sola stands there, bloodied, tired, her sword covered in the blood of Anathema and undead, but otherwise fine. You see that the survivors of Third Talon have moved aside, presumably to avoid being in the path of any of the Dragon-Blooded anima while they tend to the wounded.

    You look out at the scene of carnage before you, the twice-dead villagers, the fallen soldiers, the detritus of the clash of sorcery and necromancy that had occurred while you fought the Blasphemous. The sight of it all, and the reminder of the villagers' sad end puts a slight damper on your relief. "Sister Briar?" you ask.

    "Not dead," Sola says, face twisting in concern, "barely. The Ogre used that same spell Amiti has for 'cleaning bones' on her. Which is a problem, since she's the best healer we have."

    "Talonlord Vahelo?" you ask, glancing over to the soldiers, not immediately seeing her.

    "A zombie got its claws in her," Sola says, an approving note coming into her voice, "and the witch broke her nose. Otherwise, she's quite well, for a mortal who looked an Anathema in the eye and stabbed it instead of getting out of the way. The legionnaires got that one in the end — I can't even be disappointed that I didn't get the kill. Sesus troops or not, it was very satisfying to watch."

    "The Yueh woman?" Maia asks, glancing out over the cliff. There are figures down below, but they're motionless.

    "No idea," Sola says. "Nothing since the Frenzied went down. I thought that she was just being brave and self-sacrificing when she drew it off of the rest of us. I never expected her to kill it on her own."

    You turn away from the cliff's edge. "I suppose we'll find out soon enough, one way or another."

    A shape moves inhumanly fast in the corner of your vision. Alarm spiking, you whirl, sword raised, to see Maia's summoned oldrasek land, spinning, at her feet. Fortunately for it, just enough time has passed for your collective animas not to do it any meaningful harm.

    Having apparently scaled the cliff at tremendous speed, the demon wastes no time in saying, in perfect High Realm: "Carrying a reply from one Winglord Sesus Oregano of the Terrestrial Exalted, commander of First Wing, Fourth, Dragon, Second Sesus House Legion, addressed to Erona Maia, also of the Terrestrial Exalted, with a further message to be relayed to Acting Talonlord Seus Vahelo, commander of Third Talon, First Wing, Fourth Dragon, Second Sesus House Legion."

    You all stare at it for a stunned moment. As Maia sighs, accepting the message, you suppress a powerful and inappropriate urge to laugh. You're rescued by the familiar sight of a snake climbing your leg, although less nimbly than normal. Now that the assembled Dragon-Blooded anima has grown less lethal to her, she's reemerged from the rock underfoot.

    You kneel down, gathering Verdigris' wounded coils up in your arms. With a groan, you let the stone armour dissipate, and it crumbles away into dust, letting her nestle herself up against your chest.

    "You gave me a scare for a moment," you tell her. She coils tighter against you in reply.

    Later, you'll consider some of what the Anathema told you in a more serious right. At the moment, you simply do not have the energy.


    When Grace feels steady enough on her legs to stand, she looks up the cliff to the mountain village, bone tired, sick at heart, and wracked with a sudden, intense worry. "What do you think happened with the others?" she asks.

    "Well, they killed the other two, looks like," Nettle manages. She's still in bad shape, currently leaning into the oddly gentle, taloned grip of Bolt, while Grinner helps to apply bandages over Nettle's ribs. He's not exactly an expert at it. "Four Dragon-Blooded and some mortals against two Anathema — not odds you want to stake your life on if you can help it, but we'd already fucked the other two over by leading the Full Moon away. It was always going to go one way or the other."

    Grace feels a chill go through her. It hadn't been her and Nettle's lives staked on those odds. "You think some of them might be... hurt?" Even after two years in heaven, living and working among gods and great Exalts who treat Grace as a junior peer, there's a part of Grace who can't really imagine Ambraea as killable. She had spent too many years in Ambraea's shadow, the mortal servant to the powerful Exalt.

    "Sure, or dead," Nettle says. "I'll be fucking impressed if none of them are. But, you can't guide a Wyld Hunt without breaking a few eggs."

    "That's a horrible thing to say," Grace says, trying to keep a lid on her emotions. All of her frustrations with Stinging Nettle are beginning to boil up inside her, now that the immediate danger is done. "We've been traveling with them all this time. I saw you with some of the soldiers, sometimes."

    Nettle shrugs, the gesture drawing a wince of pain from her. "Right, sorry," she says. "I know I'm being flippant. I'm just... too fucked up to pretend to give a shit right now, you know?"

    Grace feels her fist clench. She tries to fall back on a calming breathing exercise, tries to pack away the inconvenient emotions for later. But the irritation of days on the road with Nettle, and the stark terror of the fight, and Nettle almost dying, and the suggestion that Ambraea might be dead is too much. She opens her mouth, and words fall out, furious and rapid:

    "How can you be like this? You protected me. You almost died protecting me! I watched you! I'd be dead if you didn't keep drawing him back to you! So how can you do that and then talk about the others like they don't matter? How can you be this selfless and this selfish at the same time?" She's breathing hard by the end of it, feeling lightheaded all over again, glaring hard at Nettle.

    Nettle, along with her two familiars, stare at Grace for a long, uncertain moment. None of them have ever seen her yell before, let alone explode at someone. Nettle groans, closing her eyes, as if Grace is being exhausting to even listen to. She seems to be trying to decide if she even wants to respond. After several silent seconds, she does her best, but the longer she talks, the more agitated she gets:

    "Do you know what we are?" Nettle asks. "To those little rich girls you're worrying about? To anyone on Creation? Were're fucking shadows. We're nothing. If you'd stayed up there, if you'd died in front of one of them, if you'd died for them, they wouldn't even remember your face a few hours later. Do you understand that? I'd have to fucking remember though! I'd have to remember the time that that serene old bastard trusted me to keep a stupid kid safe, and I got her killed!" Nettle gasps and clutches at her chest, apparently having let herself get a little too animated for her recently punctured lung. She mutters something furiously in highly colloquial Flametongue, invoking strange gods and her ancestors both, before she masters herself.

    "Look," Nettle says, sounding tired enough that Grace feels a stab of guilt all over again. "We're all we have out here. You, me, Grinner and Bolt. That's it. So, I'm sorry if whether you live or die matters more to me than some haughty little Dynast bitch who the Empress threw you to like a bauble."

    Grace stares at her for a long moment, feeling herself deflate. It's a horrifying way to view the world — all the worse because, even after so little time as a Sidereal Exalt, part of Grace can see the appeal. To just stop caring about people who don't have the capacity to care for her. To focus entirely on building a new life for herself in heaven. Maybe even finding or making a new family.

    "I'd been acting strangely for weeks," Grace says, not sure why she's telling Nettle this, but unable to stop once she starts. "Right before I Exalted. Strange, recurring dreams of being in the Cerulean Lute, of this haunting music. It started following me while I was awake. My Lady was... Ambraea, she was worried. She tried to give me an amulet to guard my dreams, had a monk look at me. But nothing worked, and I broke this huge vase in the Imperial residence in Chanos. Priceless, or close to it. A masterwork. And I just kept apologising to her, because I was terrified of how much it cost, and how much trouble I was being, and just... worrying about the point where lingering childhood affection stops being enough to justify keeping me around. And then I'd just be the daughter of a palace slave, with nothing and nowhere to go. Even though she was trying to be kind, she just didn't understand. She never understood that part." Grace takes in a deep breath, letting it out, trying to calm herself, before continuing.

    "But, as I was trying to apologise over and over again, she just... took me by the shoulders, and she asked: 'Am I not allowed to be concerned for your welfare?' And it was terrifying, obviously, because she hadn't raised her voice to me in years, but the circumstances weren't exactly her fault. And that was... more or less the last thing she ever really said to me. Before."

    A lengthy stretch of silence passes between them. Nettle fully opens her eyes again, looking at Grace's face, and something she sees there makes her voice soften, just a little. "Right. Yeah. She's your haughty little Dynast bitch. Sorry."

    It's a mark of having travelled with Stinging Nettle for too long that Grace immediately parses this as a sincere apology. "Not how I'd phrase it," she says, but there's a sense of her relenting as well. She looks back up to the hill, crossing her arms over her chest.

    "I could check on things," Grinner offers. He finishes clumsily bandaging Nettle's wounds, and becomes a mospid again, idly preening a few loose feathers.

    "Thank you," Grace says, still a ball of nerves.

    "Might as well," Nettle tells him. "You're fucking lucky he didn't break anything when he hit you — I told you to stay out of that."

    With a strangely prissy little sniff, Grinner takes off in a flurry of wings, not offering a further word as he lifts up and away.

    Article:
    It will be a number of years before you and Singular Grace are able to really talk about your intertwined pasts and uncertain futures. The cruel realities of Arcane Fate and the chaotic direction the world is heading in will see to that. Before that can happen, she will hurt you as badly as you've hurt her, although it will not be her intent anymore than it was yours.

    But that is all still in the future. Before you part ways again here and now, you do have one exchange that gets at something real. What do you talk about?

    [ ] The depth and limits of the bond that can be shared between a lady and a servant

    [ ] Childhood memories, and how two people can view them very differently

    [ ] Mothers
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Ah, you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes Hope, how appropriate that the one who enables an atrocity for a battle she had little to no interest in because she doesn't have the spine to push back against one of her In-Group dies at the hands of the people she wrote-off as trash who's only use was to die for their betters.

    The other two at least had massive trauma going for them to push them into making bad decisions, what's your excuse?
     
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    [X] Mothers

    I'd like to see Ambraea and Grace sit down and work through their earlier relationship, but obviously that's impossible at this point. Digging into Ambraea's feelings about her mother would also be interesting, and a lot more immediately relevant. Hard to go wrong with those options.
     
    [X] Mothers
    Alectai said:
    The other two at least had massive trauma going for them to push them into making bad decisions, what's your excuse?
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    While it may be less traumatic than whatever the fuck the Empress was doing in her torture dungeon, but initiation into necromancy is more than a bit of a process.
     
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    [X] Mothers

    Harold, they're sisters.

    All due respect to her bloody majesty and what do you mean I'm not a god dad, but we know who truly raised Ambraea and it's not Mr. And Ms. see you maybe once a month.
     
    Ganurath said:
    [X] Mothers

    While it may be less traumatic than whatever the fuck the Empress was doing in her torture dungeon, but initiation into necromancy is more than a bit of a process.
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    Article:
    Blood-Soaked Pilgrim

    The necromancer has gained initiation through ritual sojourns along the primal River of Blood and its forty-four daughter-streams which drain into shadowlands across Creation. These holy waterways are guarded by saints who instruct postulants in the mysteries of blood as nourishment and sacrament. This order counts many exiled gondoliers among its number, shepherding the dead towards wisdom and sacrifice. Necromancers who walk this path find themselves marked as holy personages by the faithful of the Incarnadine Path (p. XX).

    [...]

    Incarnadine Omen Anointment: While the necromancer proudly presents herself in bloodied clothes and smeared markings, she gains one necromantic mote at the start of each scene. She gains another for a successful instill or inspire roll against a crowd or significant character which convinces them to explore her spiritual and philosophical beliefs. She may bank up to (Charisma + Occult) such motes at a time.

    [...]

    Red Draught Delight (•••): Once per session, the necromancer may consume enough blood to count as a minor sacrifice (p. XX) to heal her (Essence/2, rounded up) non-aggravated levels of damage, or grant herself (Essence) dice on a roll to overcome poison or disease.
    Source: Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave Backer Manuscript pg.473-474



    I don't know, seems extremely normal to me!
     
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    Ganurath said:
    Yeah, third edition really toned some things down.
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    As with sorcery, it's more that it doesn't have one single route to initiation. Necromancers are weirder then sorcerers, and sorcerers are already pretty weird -- even the tamer initiations like this one (and "I ritually consume or sacrifice or paint myself with large quantities of blood in honour of a primal afterlife themed around flowing rivers of gore" only seems as tame as it does because Lunars are already encouraged to do that kind of shit to take faces anyway) do tend to fuck you up more than sorcery initiation does.

    Like, Amiti's soul-forging one doesn't have a full 3e treatment at this time, but like, she cut out a piece of one of her souls, forged it into soulsteel, and uses the resulting spiritual scar to gather necromantic power in herself. She was always going to be weird, but that's the kind of thing that does shit to someone. There's another initiation in Sworn to the Grave, Embodiment of the Maw, which is powered by a form of Void worship where you conceive of oblivion as a great and final devourer that must someday consume all existence, and you like... Cultivate that principle in yourself, taking it into your very being.

    Necromancy control effects also do very weird things to you. Like how corpses just twitch and moan if Amiti gets too close to them. I'm a big fan, generally.
     
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