Last time, sues and people making the world’s suffering all about them.

Today, it’s back to Sijan and Ratcatcher, where he observes the docks are surprisingly poorly defended given this is the obvious direction for someone who doesn’t breathe. There are some guards with halberds and hand-axes so already they seem unwilling to properly commit to the idea that you should keep them at range.

It was an open secret that Sijan dealt in necromancy, and that a great many of the dead who came into the city left it under their own power. The difference was that in most cases, the various flavors of walking dead who were reborn here had either paid for the privilege (and so were treated as honored guests) or were brought back from the grave under tightly controlled conditions, and were thus immediately clapped into servitude before they could cause any trouble.

Definitely a D&D version here. No mention at all of the two souls aspect, and there being different types of undead you need a necromancer to create. In Exalted, the different types of undead are more a function of what the necrosurgeons can stitch together, and ghost usually come back on their own if they’re going to do it at all.

Sijan’s sins are a different sort – they’re ruled by their own dead, giving tribute to the deathlords and generally furthering the cult of death. Whether or not that last one matters is hard to say, but with the underworld expanding, anything that feeds ghosts is a bit dubious. They’re behind a lot of powerful grave goods and ghost cults, which are all resources the deathlords can exploit.

he looked out at the river, whose waters seemed a dirty, greasy gray to his tainted eyes.

Hello terrible description! So, what color are the waters? Are they actually a different color? Is he seeing something special here or does tainted eyes just mean they’ve begun to rot and mess with his vision? Who knows.

There were fifty yards of open stone between him and the barges. If he crossed that without incident, there was still no way to get onto a ship

And we see the general incompetence of our characters continues! While Ratcatcher has noted in a previous chapter that hey, seems he doesn’t need to breathe, he has yet to come to the obvious conclusion.

“Hoy!”
The shout came from a rather stout woman on the nearest of the barges, whose ornate robes led Ratcatcher to believe she was the ship’s captain.

But the book is really doing rather well at incidental representation this time around! I particularly appreciate this because one of the fuckups of Exalted canon is shooting the idea of women sailors in the foot, because it’s obviously the height of cleverness to take real-world prejudices and then make up a fantastic reason for it to be enforced and make it basically impossible to change.

Captain Lady is sick of the delay Ratcatcher’s escape caused, because ferrying the dead puts you on a tight schedule, and says her boat is just going to leave. Deal with it. And the boat heads for the river.

Ratcatcher tries to bluff his way forward, fails immediately, then just runs.

He looked back over his shoulder at the panicked looks on the faces of the guards and laughed. Then, arms spread wide, he turned to face his pursuers. “Come get me!” The lead guard, a tall woman with a figure like a badly sawed plank, took the challenge and lunged forward with a shout. Her halberd caught Ratcatcher square in the sternum, despite his attempts to catch it and soften the blow.

Yay, another woman! Second in the row to get a negative description. I think what may really be going on here is just that women’s appearance tends to get described more, and the author is going for gritty so most people shouldn’t be gorgeous.

Anyway, what looks like a fuckup is actually Ratcatcher’s plan, which is to fall into the water with a scream like they’ve defeated him…despite the fact they were looking for a corpse who can’t drown. Anyway, idiot ball successfully passed, he’s escaped.

He’d been sent back for a reason, he knew that. Nemissaries always were, though often the reason in question was a nothing more than a formless urge to wreak havoc.

This again seems like a misunderstanding based on the word deathlord meaning they’re the guys in charge of how death works. (Also nemissaries are special ghosts to be able to possess any corpse, usually it has to be your own.) Come to think of it, that actually makes this version of Creation even more doomed. The neverborn are already the worst threat to Creation when all they’re doing is screaming in a pit as the void slowly eats away at everything. If they could actually just spam insane zombie anytime someone died, Creation would be fucked. Within hours, everywhere would be a shadowland – hell, even if the insane zombie spam only works in shadowlands, that’d just change it to a timeframe more like an actual zombie apocalypse. Instead of the zombies spreading by bite, the dead would rise in waves as the slaughter brought new areas into the underworld, then the neverborn resurrect the corpses to continue the process.

I’m pretty sure there are no Shadowlands on the Blessed Isle, so humanity might be able to hold them off there if the dragonblood fall back fast enough. If saltwater is a problem to the dead in the same way salt is (which seems unlikely) it might even be pretty safe.

Wouldn’t that be an interesting setting – the last continent, beyond which there’s nothing but blighted land covered by masses of seething undead?

Back to this setting, apparently people are always sent back for a reason but it can be hard to figure out what. In this case, Ratcatcher thinks murder is fun but he’s not sure he’d really call it his reason for being, you know?

Anyway, he grabs onto the bottom of the boat and chills.

Next chapter………it’s back to Yuyu already damn.

Dace falls into a burrow lok’s cave. Burrow loks are giant badgers and like all badgers, they are hate given fur.

One moment he was expounding on the ancient wars against the Fair Folk at the time of the Contagion, back before the dawn of the Scarlet Empire

I think part of what makes this book fun is it’s not that it’s totally ignoring the setting, it’s just got a very poor grasp of it. The areas where there was no information at the time and the author just had to make it up are nowhere near as great as stuff like this.

See, there were no “wars” at the time of the Contagion. There was just the Balorian Crusade, where the Fair Folk surged forward and tore Creation apart now that everyone was too sick or dead to stop them. You can’t even say he’s referring to scattered wars from the human side, because by that point it was a few stands of the Shogunate’s dragonblooded, who were technically on the same side and any who fought were too thoroughly massacred to tell the tale, and attacks by individual high-essence lunars who’d weathered the infections – any mortal armies they had were long gone by then.

Wars, ironically, makes it sound entirely too positive! It was one enormous, unstoppable force that steamrolled over Creation until the Scarlet Empress singlehandedly scourged them from the land.

Back to this, Yuyu also doesn’t know what a burrow lok is. Dammit book! There are other ways of expositing. Yuyu could express horror without being prompted when he’s told it’s a burrow lok, and then we’d know it was something dangerous. Plus, the burrow lok promptly shows up because the author decided to answer the question that way! The whole “Gee, Sam, what’s that?” of expository dialogue is because humans don’t usually explain random bits of their surroundings without being asked. If the surroundings are going to explain themselves, you don’t need it.
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Anyway, supposedly this is a big deal and Dace is all “oh no!” despite the fact it’s just a big badger, seriously. This is heroic mortal territory. And yet to win Dace has to flare essence to the point the burrow lok is blinded (?) and only then does he manage to kill it.

Burrow loks, it had been theorized by some brave and foolhardy naturalists whose works he had read, dug not one burrow, but rather intricate networks of tunnels, with many pits near the surface for trapping prey. If that were the case, then it might make very good sense for he and Yushuv to travel via this route, rather than through the forest.

This, though, is some solid monster ecology.

We then jump back in time for Yuyu to recount the trip between the wolf spiders and now. Sloppy. Anyway, so he’s been seeing faces in the leaves for a while and other weird stuff. He explains he apparently doesn’t even know what the brain eating chaos fairies are, despite them being probably the most common supernatural threats. (Gods are more common but not always malicious.)

So Dace gives a boring cliff notes on them:

they were born of the formless chaos outside all Creation. While those who’d chosen to dwell within Creation’s borders had bound themselves to shapes, Dace had said, they still served chaos, and could call upon its powers when they chose.

Which is missing the fun part about how they’re not really born from, they just are a chunk of, and also the part where they don’t serve anything. They’re so much weirder than this, Dace! They’re driven to act out narratives even though they don’t actually care about any of the events! THEY ARE ROLEPLAYERS.

Dace adds that also, they really hate Creation having order, which yes, they want it gone, mostly.

Dace, Yushuv decided, knew far more than anyone who wasn’t a priest had a right to.

I can’t emphasize enough that these are children’s tales. This is the opening lesson of Surviving Childhood 101. Kids who don’t know about this see the impossibly beautiful fairy and say sure, they’d love to go with them to the land of Sugar and Gumdrops, and oh, open the gates first? Absolutely, pretty lady.

Yuyu says that indeed, it’s a network of tunnels down there, and Dace seems to be picking at random or based on where won’t leave footprints. The plan is to pop up when they find another surface opening.

“We keep going down,” Yushuv had said.
“I know,” had been Dace’s reply

Dace’s incompetence continues. The most likely setup of the tunnels is not that they go up and down randomly and you’ll always find an exit if you travel long enough. It’s that there’s a bunch of near the surface tunnels that have exit holes and some deeper den for the animal. The den does not have to have multiple exits! If you head down, what you’re most likely to find is a dead end, possibly with other burrow loks in it. Not only is that a waste of your time, but supposedly not getting found by the brain eating chaos fairies is a big deal, and backtracking down a long corridor is really not going to help there.

There are two options: one, Dace has a good sense of direction. He isn’t picking based on how hard the dirt is, he’s picking the tunnels that go the way they need to. This is still dubious because the backtracking threat remains. Two, say earth repels the brain eating chaos fairies, since the element of earth is the element of stability, so what they’re really doing is heading deeper in the hopes it’ll make their pursuers give up. In that case there’s no concern about backtracking – they’ll get as deep as they can go, hope they’re well out of range, then head back up and try to make their escape.

Anyway. They head down and start to notice a breeze, which omg it’s deep why breeze? Because caves, stupid. Plus the burrow lok would’ve deliberately built its burrow to have a breeze if that was an option.

They come to a stone floor with the usual set together so tightly that Yushuv couldn’t wedge his dagger blade between two of them. Incidentally, bullshit. That kind of thing works when it’s the pyramids because the pyramids are not set in damp dirt with damp dirt on top of them in a temperate area that freezes in the winter and then used as a road. And that’s before getting into the fact they’re in the east, which is defined by the pole of wood meaning roots growing everywhere.

Pillars supporting the tunnel’s roof, carved with strange, serpentine motifs, emerged from the darkness, and the dirt covering of the paving stones grew thinner and thinner until it was hardly there at all. Mosaics now lined the passage, intricate patterns in whorls, circles and coils that had been inlaid with the same cunning as the road itself. All, however, were done entirely in shades of gray, a condition that Yushuv at first blamed on the poor quality of the light. But when Dace called a rest and he went to examine the work, the evidence stood there in stark relief: all gray, no color.

(I am not sure if that’s meant to be a pun.)

But yeah, old-school lovecraftian ancient hidden city! Bring on the shoggoths!

Yuyu shares my enthusiasm, but Dace is boring and does not.

Dace rolled his eyes and returned his attention to the detailed process of extracting the pebble from his boot. Somehow it had gotten wedged in quite thoroughly, and had done a remarkable job of rubbing his big toe raw.

NOPE.

This is generally a good idea in writing – remember the details, the mundane hardships, etc. But Exalted does this in an odd way. It’s not that this kind of thing doesn’t happen, or bleeding out doesn’t happen, or infection doesn’t happen. It does. It does constantly. It just doesn’t to you, so it’s easy to forget. In Exalted, you’re supposed to be able to walk for three days without so much as your feet hurting, until you don’t even remember that’s a thing, then your mortal followers drop dead.

Come to think of it, this whole section works so much better if instead of Dace, it’s a heroic mortal. A highly experienced heroic mortal would have plenty to teach Yuyu, but it wouldn’t seem so ridiculous for him to keep going on about how amazing Yuyu is and how fast he learns. It’d also have made his rantings about one failure and you’re dead make sense, that’s actually true for him and he doesn’t know solars are more awesomer than thou. We’d be subtly highlighting the contrast between the two now, as heroic mortal guy sits to pull a pebble from his shoe after the long march while Yuyu excitedly flits off to get a better look at the underground castle. Instead Solar A grumbles about a pebble while Solar B runs around, adding nothing.

At least Yuyu’s found something useful:

They stood underneath an archway carved from gray stone, and looked out on the ruins of what once been a city to rival any on the Blessed Isle. It sat in a titanic crater, its spires crumbling and buildings ruined. No motion disturbed its avenues; no birds flew here or beasts roamed the streets. There was only gray stone and green vines devouring it.
Once the initial rush of awe wore off some, Dace noted that the city had been laid out in an intricate spiral pattern. Roads circled inward from the city’s edge, intersected by smaller avenues that radiated out from the massive courtyard at the city’s center. Dominating the skyline was a massive step-pyramid, its sides unmarred by even the boldest vines, which echoed the city architect’s fascination with circles.

There’s just something ominous about spirals…

Anyway, Dace immediately starts going on about how this lost city made Rathess look like a collection of mud huts on a flood plain, Rathess being the canonical OMG LOST CITY OF ANCIENT WONDERS OMG. Just as Yuyu has to be a better solar than any canon solars, so this place has to be a better lost city than the canon one. Rathess is merely the single enormous city of a super advanced prehuman civilization of giant dinosaur people specializing in biological constructions now fallen into ruin and madness. (They worshipped the Unconquered Sun by tearing out people’s still-pulsing hearts.)

The shocking reveal is this is also a dinosaur people place. But we can’t just have Dace say that wow this place looks a fuckton like the mysterious ruins of Rathess, because why focus on fitting something into the setting when we could hear about how much better this piece of the setting is?

The wall, Dace saw, had been breached in a dozen places with what looked to his eye like some sort of unholy fire; in places the stone looked as if it had melted and flowed out of the nameless invaders’ way.

Whereas if it had been breached by holy fire? Maybe the the stone would look more crumbly because holy fire vaporizes rather than melts or something. Clearly Dace knows how to tell holy and unholy fire marks apart at a glance.

Yuyu is still YAY RUINED CITY THIS IS SO AWESOME and Dace is set on being a killjoy so he starts saying that who knows the stones of the roads might be in such bad condition they do that cartoon flip thing where suddenly you’re on the bottom, because that’s totally a thing.

Then Yuyu’s mood is ruined by realizing the city’s builders were like seven feet tall, which is super unsettling because it’s not like that’s within natural human variation alone in Exalted. Oh no, the people who are all dead anyway may have been a marginally different type of human! SPOOKY.

They find footprints in the melted stone.

The prints themselves were puzzling.

Especially the left in melted stone part! Also they are a very mismatched bunch. One might say chaotic. Dace is just baffled.

For some reason there’s water with sulfur. They don’t find any bodies, which starts to worry Dace because he can’t see why it’d be cleaned up.

Vines and creepers tugged at stone blocks everywhere, making the first footholds in what must have been a centuries-long assault on the ruins’ construction. But even under the verdant greenery, the outline of simple gardens could be seen, and massive trees bloomed in what once might have been carefully tended rows along the avenues.

Someone’s overestimating trees. Ornamentals tend to grow fast and die fast, even before getting into the issue of fitness compared to the wild type. Even in perfect conditions fruit trees seem to max out around two hundred. If you can still see the remnants of gardens, that puts an upper limit on how long ago it is. Even assuming supertrees, this is a setting where people regularly live hundreds of years. If it’s four hundred years ago, which is around the limit, then even putting aside the Scarlet Empress, one of the Empress’ kids is two hundred years older than that.

As they approach the center, they see What appeared to be massive stone chains seemed to bind the pyramid at all four compass points. Ah, mysterious chains, always a bad sign. Also, stone chains are a stupid, stupid idea.

Yuyu estimates the pyramid’s bigger than his village+temple, and Dace is all Yuyu-chan is telling me about his mysterious past *_*

“We had a temple. A big one. Everyone in it is dead now. So’s the rest of the village. The man from the catacombs killed them, after he caught me.”

Ahem. “See, when he caught me I told him the way out, then told him to be on his guard because it was an Immaculate temple, and then he killed everybody. Well, almost everybody, there was this one guy who was still alive, and he begged me for water so I grudgingly got some and dropped it near him for him to crawl to, and then I was all ‘I’m an evil anathema, sucker!’ and made him crawl away from me in horror. Lotta good crawling from that one. Point is, tragic backstory.”

Dace is duly saddened by the fact Yuyu’s beloved peasant village was destroyed, so he decides they should talk about the fact there’s only abstract art here. Which is weird because the Immaculate Order wait no they hate iconography so much Yuyu should barely understand the concept and Dace wouldn’t find it unusual because it’s still the hallmark of the dominant religion in Creation.

“I suppose they must have been rich, too. Otherwise, why come all the way out here with an army?”

Yuyu you live in a land full of slavery, there are other reasons to sack places! Especially places that have weird looking people you can sell for a premium. Plus, “all the way out here”? It’s an ancient civilization, it could’ve been the equally extinct civilization over the next hill that did it for all you know! Dace, tell him he’s stupid.

Dace nodded. “No easy way to supply it, no other targets anywhere near-they must have been fabulously wealthy. Unless.. .” His voice trailed off to silence.
“Unless what?” Yushuv prodded.
“Unless they were simply in the way.”

Oh fuck you Dace.

See, Dace has seen a handprint.

The hand that made the mark was human-shaped, at least roughly. It had four fingers and a thumb, all in the right places and with the right number of joints. But few human hands had ever been that long or that slender, and no human hand could ever have sunk an inch into the stone to leave its mark.

Unless they were a dragonblooded. Or godblooded. Or wyld mutant.

“Fair Folk,” the older man said dully.

Or some nonhuman but humanoid race like the Lintha but connected to fire or stone instead of water. In fact, Lintha match the scaling of this place too. Could also be a god or elemental or demon.

It’s sort of like there’s a hell of a lot of stuff in Creation. Also, it’s stupid to try to ID the shapeshifting chunks of chaos based on a handprint. Juuuuuuuuuuust saying.

Dace explains that this is from the Balorian Crusade and again he goes on about how it wasn’t conquest or revenge but them being in the way, which is kind of misunderstanding everything about the Balorian Crusade. They weren’t streaming into reality to conquer the center and just killing stuff that slowed them down. They were chewing up Creation itself, in an attempt revenge themselves upon it and then conquer it for forever chaos. That’s why you really don’t see lots of perfectly stable areas that show signs of the war. The war’s mark is left in the pockets of wyld dotting Creation’s landscape.

(Furthermore, at a mere eight hundred years ago, this place is within living memory of the Scarlet Empress and there should have been plenty of dragonblooded who knew of it then and had hundreds more years to record it before they died. It’s no longer a mysterious ancient civilization, it’s now a bunch of tall people who hid from the Shogunate for some reason until something else wiped them out.

‘You know what that means, then,” Yushuv said quietly.
“What does that mean? Can you imagine the sheer power arrayed against this place? It wouldn’t have mattered who lived here, or what. They didn’t stand a chance.”
“It means,” Yushuv said quietly, “that the Fair Folk know exactly where this place is.”

Which one of them sounds more like the grizzled mercenary captain?

Also no, you idiots, the fact a couple dead brain eating chaos fairies from eight hundred years ago encountered this place and failed to even destroy it properly does not mean the current patch of brain eating chaos fairies has any idea about it. They’re not a hive mind. They don’t even reincarnate as far as anyone knows, and there was a First Age solar super dedicated to that subject so it’s really, really unlikely. That means that unlike, say, solar shards carrying some memories of the last guy, there isn’t even a hypothetical chance one of the current chaos fairies could get a memory flash of anything dead ones knew about.