Dragonblooded Tombs
In the annals of history, the decadent and lavish tombs of the Solar Exalted hold a place in infamy. However, in truth they are outnumbered by the tombs of the Dragonblooded many times over. Even during the High First Age the mightest lords of the Terrestrials received tombs that, although lesser than the Solars, showed their power and prowess.
Compared to the Solars, however, it is far more common for many Dragonblooded to share a tomb. Dragonblooded throughout history have customarily been buried with their families, in communal sites. In other cases, a sworn brotherhood have built a tomb that their remains will share for all eternity. When Dragonblooded are buried alone, it is usually a sign of an outcaste - or an outcast. Even in the cases where a Dragonblooded lord has the hubris to want a tomb just for themselves, in most cases their children and relatives will add additional graves to the complex once their ancestor is no longer around to complain.
Compared to the grand betrayal of the Great Rebellion, few Dragonblooded have needed as much placation as the Solar ghosts. Still, there were no shortages of acts of base treachery in the Shogunate that have led the victors to decide to try to avert the wrath of the fallen with grand displays. Even in the present day, when the Realm conquers a land ruled by Dragonblooded they traditionally raise a monolith praising - albeit often with faint praise - the dead, calling them honourable foes and other such things.
However, vultures looking to pick over Dragonblooded tombs find a problem - namely, that the mightiest treasures, arms and armaments belonging to Terrestrials are seldom laid to rest with the dead. Indeed, in the modern Realm to lay a daiklaive to rest with its maker is considered to 'murder' the weapon, disrespecting its spirit and leaving it to seek betrayal. Instead, the name or icon of the former wielder is added to the treasure in some way and it is given to a young Dragonblooded who is felt to resemble the deceased. A blade that has been passed down through many Terrestrial hands is felt to gain additional power and raw force from the centuries of loyal use. It is whispered by some that the Eye of the Fire Dragon began as just a simple red jadesteel dire lance, but it was wielded by Hesiesh himself and has never once been touched by one who does not know fire.
Instead, what is buried with a Dragonblood are their personal possessions. The High Realm word for 'grave goods' is also the word for 'frivolities' - they are little things. A copy of the books one has written, one's favourite pipe, perhaps even a good meal - but only perishables. This was different sometimes in the First Age, but from the mid-Shogunate onwards there was a strong cultural prohibition against 'wasting' such things. This has only solidified in modern times, to the extent that the Immaculate Faith forbids things it considers to be 'veneration' of the dead entirely. Still, despite that an old soldier might make sure his friend takes a pinch of tobacco and a pipe with him to the funeral pyre, even if it means he has to slip it into the linen wrappings.
High First Age
Only a very few tombs purely from the High First Age remain in modern Creation. The Shogunate was a living culture and few Gens were destroyed in the Great Rebellion, so their tombs remained active and still used.
A few tombs mark Gens who remained loyal to the Solars. They were exterminated to a man and their children adopted by other families, the dead hastily interred within their family tombs. The Shogunate tried to forget about these places, because they were a marker of the Great Rebellion that told a story more bloody than the one the Shoguns wished spread.
Other tombs are for great friends and beloved of Celestials. Sometimes the lords of Creation would give their friends a personal burial, grand and splendid. Yet in many cases these tombs have been empty for a very long time. The family of the Dragonblood often stole their kin's body back from the grand resting place, laying it with their own blood. Such empty tombs were almost always picked clean in the Shogunate, for with no dead to offend there was nothing stopping an intruder.
In a hollow mountain in the far North, the retainers of the Solar queen Mudara Po stand in serried ranks, dressed in full battle armour. They were to be her honour guard and a sign of the love that Gens Mudara held for their queen, who had risen from their own ranks. She built the grandest tomb for the Dragonblooded of the First Age, for it would be her own tomb as well. She planned to rest among her own kin. Alas, Mudara Po had no grave, for she was annihilated in a grand war against another Solar. Still, Gens Mudara retained the tomb and added to it, though later burials are poorer and less ornate than the first. The tomb is lost, but there is enough jadesteel and fine weapons of the High First Age down there to equip a legion. No one has breached it - though the scattered dust-dry bones in the antechambers indicate that it is not unguarded.
There were those among the Gens that participated in the Great Rebellion who could not bring themselves to join with their kin. Torn between their loyalty to their Solar lords and their kin, they chose to die by their own hand than break either oath - or else deliberately sought death in battle. Those Terrestrials occupied a strange place in Dragonblooded culture, for on one hand they were traitors who refused to side with their kin - and yet they were model loyal soldiers who could not bring themselves to betray their oaths which was the mark of a perfect soldier. In the aftermath of the Great Rebellion, many of these dead Dragonblooded were taken from their family tombs and buried with full honours - but alone. Whether this was a mark of shame or respect, even the Gens could not say.
On the slopes of the Imperial Mountain, these is a lonely grave site. The name on the green jade slab has been worn away by the passage of years. Still, roses bloom here throughout the year in every colour known to man. A peach tree grows at the head of the grave, always bearing fruit. The tree is a clipping from one of the celestial fruit trees which grow the Peaches of Immortality, and though the fruit does not have the power of its progenitor it still imparts blessings on those who find it. The Immaculate Order says that this was where the beloved of Sextes Jylis lies. The files of Jupiter know this to be not entirely true - but not entirely false, either. Some scholars in the Heptagram whisper that this may be where one of the first Dragonblooded rests - and rests is the right word. They say the person in the grave is not dead. But this is surely nonsense, of course. No one could endure five thousand years and more.
Shogunate Era
The majority of the grand Dragonblooded tombs in Creation date back to the Shogunate. The Gens ruled Creation and the Gens warred over Creation. The former gave them the wealth to build themselves magnificent resting grounds; the latter meant they needed such tombs.
Early Shogunate tomb complexes show much more cultural continuity with the High First Age than later ones. As Dragonblooded culture innovated and shifted, the lavish tombs become much less common. Indeed, anti-iconographic religious fervour can be dated by the shifting nature of graves and the way that statues of the deceased cease to decorate burial grounds. Instead, bleak and almost fortified tombs replace the fripperies of earlier times. Giant marble pagodas that loom over remote mountains and complexes built in the shape of the Gens icon show the contradictory urges of the Shogunate. They wished to deny death, pushing it away from their cities - yet they put great effort into building fortress-tombs for the dead as an expression of the power and wealth of the Gens.
The end of the Shogunate is clear for all to see. At first, those who died to the Contagion were buried like their kin, in the grand tombs. Then the tombs became places of death and disease, corpses thrown inside as the tombs became containment sites for the plague. The sick were herded into these places and sealed inside to die - and die they did. In the end, there were no more burials in the grand tombs. Bodies were simply destroyed - burned in vast pits or coated in quicklime. And so died the Shogunate - and most of its citizens along with it.
In the far Eastern jungles lies the Cenote of Imotothique. The water in that place is said to be bottomless by the natives. In truth, a black jade tomb lies in the depths, enchanted with sorcery that means that intruders who do not know the secret words are repulsed by the magic. The dead of a secret assassin society of Yozi-worshipping Dragonblooded lie in that hidden place - for it was both their tomb and their training grounds. There are jade tablets that would teach their fighting arts and tools of the demon realm that could call upon Lucien hidden in there, waiting for someone to find them and take up the blades of Imotothique once more.
Submerged in the Inner Sea rests the sunken isle of Bava. The fifth Shogun, Alibira of Gens Ragara was born on this isle, and he was laid to rest here in a magnificent tomb of white stone along with his personal library. Bava sunk in the Balorian Crusade and now his tomb is twisted by the taint of the Wyld. The books spell out hidden truths about the chaos outside the world and the stone dragon-guardians are mad and have taken on the soul-hunger of the chaos princes. Ships that go near Bava sometimes vanish and are never seen again.
Close to Chiaroscuro rests the burial grounds of Gens Atana. It is a cursed place, a shadowland hemmed in with walls of salt and swift-flowing water. The sick of Chiaroscuro were herded in here, and sealed in. Most died. Some instead turned to cannibalism, eating the flesh of the plague-dead. Such terrible succour twisted them beyond belief, until they were the dead and yet were still alive - wretched, only able to eat rotting meat, only able to drink stagnant water, only able to sleep when buried like the living corpses they are. These ghouls have crept back into Chiaroscuro over the years, looking for victims who they slay and then hang up to rot. Strange powers of the Dead seem to come easily to them and they have become figures of myth and terror among the desert tribes.
Realm Era
With the advent of the Immaculate Faith, few tomb complexes to rival the Shogunate have been built. The cultural trauma from the Great Contagion meant that the old taboos against destroying a body were replaced with new ones about leaving a body intact. To leave it in its old form risks death and disease for the living. The Faith holds that a soul, once passed from its mortal shell, should not care for its former dwelling place. To remove the temptation of a weak soul to linger, therefore, the body should be passed to the elements by one way or another. With its attachments cut, the soul will pass swiftly onto its new life.
For a life lived following the path of fire, the body should be cremated. For one whose nature was that of wood, the body should be buried wrapped in fabric and plants grown on the grave, so that they might nourish new life. For those who flow like water, the body should be cut into many places and given to the ocean or a great river. For the children of the air, the corpse should be left in a high place to be picked clean by sky-dwellers such as vultures and other such birds. And for those akin to earth, the flesh should be stripped from their bones and the bones separated so that the spirit is not tempted to linger.
However, the ties of family still hold the Dragonblooded close. As a result, it is considered acceptable to gather the remains once they have lost the seeming of their former selves. On the Blessed Isles, many of the Houses maintain their own collective sites that are more akin to memorials than cemeteries.
House Cathak maintains a great manse at the base of Meru where scarlet fires eternally burn within a great grove of carved marble trees. The ashes of family members are scattered in the flames, and their name added to the jade slabs that record the members of the house. Many elderly veterans of House Cathak make frequent trips to the House of Cinders, to remember lost comrades and mourn them. Cathak Cainan himself makes sure to visit this place at least once a year, and it is rumoured he believes he is destined to die there - something some who might send assassins have made note of.
House Ragara keeps a grand ossuary house. The bones of the dead are lovingly cleaned, and choice verses from the Immaculate Texts are carven into them. Often House members will spend their final years considering what they wish engraved, because it is rumoured to help the Immaculate Dragons decide what life one will be reborn into. However, there is a heretical sect among the family branch who maintain the ossuary that has begun to reassemble the dead, putting the bones back together. They listen to the voice of their great-grandmother, Ragara Cela, who whispers to them of the great screaming void that lies in the lands of the Dead beneath the Imperial Mountain - and who pleads with them to use the heretical rituals she teaches them to bind the ghosts of the lost to their corpses, to avoid the dread fate that awaits.
Beyond the Blessed Isle, the ruling family of the nation of Lodraca bears Terrestrial blood, and in their grand family of lords they have a dragonblooded member most generations. They reject the Immaculate Faith utterly, instead practising a peculiar ancestor cult that states that the Dragonblooded cannot truly die and that the dragons within them will rise at the ending of the world to fight the forces of Hell when they break from their eternal jail. To this end, members of the bloodline who show the gift of the Dragons are prepared for that eternal war. They are embalmed and buried in full armour - steel, sadly, for they cannot waste jadesteel like that - but to make up for that jade dust is rubbed into their skins and jade orbs are placed into their empty eye sockets. In the catacombs of Lodraca tens of dead dragons wait, gleaming in the dim light, their jade eyes ever watchful. It is said that at Calibration they rise and practice so that they may remain in shape for the end times, though the doors to that place seal at the year's end and do not open until the new year. One child thought to test the veracity of that rumour - and was found dead at the threshold, missing her eyes.
