The fifteenth chapter is an Unforgiven Blossom one, which again reminds us right from the first sentence of how nonexistent her motivation is.

The problem with the lands west of the forest and south of the ice, Unforgiven Blossom had long since decided, was that they were too damnably large.

Yup, a person currently trying to shake pursuer(s) is complaining there’s just so much land to hide in.

This is also hilariously backward. West of the forest and south of the ice is the livable chunk of creation. It’s the area toward the poles that expands to ridiculous, perhaps impossible lengths, followed by infinite roiling chaos.

She then goes on to claim the dagger is cursed.

It seemed to find trouble, and to enjoy bloodshed. Where it went, ill luck had followed. Wren, Ratcatcher, the prince-all of them had suffered reversals after taking it into their possession. The Guild merchant who’d shown it to Wren? Dead as well, and sources told her that the factor who’d bought it from the boy (Wren had been most garrulous about its history in the moments before Ratcatcher interrupted their tea, long ago and far away) had met some misfortune, too.

So far, two of four mortals who encountered it turned into solar exalted, so, you know. And Ratcatcher’s fortunes were shitty enough I’d say his post-dagger life has been a nonstop improvement. Meanwhile, nothing has happened with the Prince’s fortunes besides that Unforgiven Blossom stole the damn dagger again, so it’s not like he actually lost anything.

Really, that people are dying over a fight over a super valuable item isn’t noteworthy. If anything, it’s weird how few died.

Yushuv is doing just great, as mentioned.
The guy he sold it to had a super valuable item people are willing to kill for, so if he got killed, not a surprise.
The guy he sold it to got between Wren the Super Monk and Ratcatcher in a fight over that very dagger. He’s lucky he’s just dead and not soulsteel.
Wren, as mentioned, is doing just great. He even cheated his way into a free endowment on top of being the strongest exalt.
Ratcatcher did die in a cheap and ridiculous way, but he obviously got to rebuild his character sheet because he was way more effective as a nemissary thing than he’d been as a semibyssal. He then got to cheat death a second time and rebuild his sheet again, and get new awesome loot.
The Prince is also doing just fine and, in fact, just made a freaky fae/god/whatever dog friend.
Unforgiven Blossom has been chugging along being ridiculously overpowered ever since the dagger got near her. She even got to kill Ratcatcher a second time.
Holok had nothing much happen to him during his dagger tenure. He was worse off when he ran into Yushuv (and Yushuv’s other, more creepy dagger actually broke off in him and almost made him bleed out). The hamstringing sounds bad but it’s not actually a meaningful wound for an exalt.

Moreover, we’re still on her having no motivation. She doesn’t even say she doesn’t want to get rid of it because most of the bad stuff happened after it changed hands – Yushuv’s attacked and his not-so-beloved peasant village gets burned down. The guy he sold it too apparently dies after selling it. Ratcatcher dies after bringing it to the Prince. It’s not really a clear pattern and there’s been as much or more bad stuff happening to people who weren’t connected to the dagger, but at least it’s more coherent than claiming everyone at all related to the thing suffers.

Anyway, she travels for a bit, then decides she’s reached a nice, quiet spot for a good bit of meditation.

The horse she tethered some distance away, giving it some potent herbs to keep it quiet. She’d need all her concentration for what lay ahead, and being distracted by a nervous horse’s hallucinations would not help matters in the slightest. It looked at her with woozy eyes, then sank onto its haunches in order to best contemplate the dried grass before it.

For all the book’s many sins, it does seem to really get horses.

Horse successful drugged into not hallucinating, it’s time for her to try some thaumatology. She throws herbs onthe fire and the smoke starts crawling along the ground.

She’d have to accomplish it while the fire still burned, and without adding fuel to buy herself more time. That left her, by her experienced estimate, somewhere just over an hour. Damning the paucity of firewood available

And I really do like thaumatology in the games! It’s a shame it’s generally not worth getting, because a lot of the minor spells are just fun. Here we have something of moderate usefulness with a clear limitation – that’s a great thing to have in your toolkit.

She goes and hunts some birds, then rushes back to where the fire is still just barely going. Time to read guts! She throws some livers into the fire, there’s some good dramatic smokemonster stuff, and finally the smoke picks a particular direction. That’s all she knows, though, and it’s the end of the day, so she’ll have to wait before setting out.

The horse, she had noted before allowing herself to sleep, was still quiet. This was a pleasant surprise. She’d not named the animal under the assumption that she would soon have to either sell or kill it, and the constant noise it had made over the first week of travel had inclined her toward the latter.

The next day, of course, somebody stole her horse and she didn’t wake up because she’d drugged it to be quiet.

“It was a good horse,” she said to no one in particular

But you just said it wasn’t!

And that’s it for this chapter. Now she’s slower going wherever she’s going, which she’s doing for no reason she’s explained, with no sign of a timeline, while she still has no actual motive for any of it.

It’s a shame, because the actual content of this one, with the herbs and the magic and the horse, is really solid. It’s just there’s no actual story connected to it.

So, let’s continue to the sixteenth chapter.

We open with someone watching a Wyld Hunt assemble.

Banners of all of the Great Houses snapped and cracked in the breeze, while the smaller, more humble pennons of less reputable bloodlines whipped madly alongside them. Dragon-Blooded warriors stood resplendent in their armor, surrounded by servants, family members and slaves. Baggage was hauled onto a full dozen ships with alacrity, teamsters and house servants working together with a will. Here and there someone’s anima flared into life and then sank away to nothingness, while around them other Dragon-Blooded sniggered at the breach of protocol. Swords and axes were taken from scabbards and tested against one another-in friendly fashion, of course. Steeds snorted and whinnied and stamped their feet against the flagstones of the harbor, as grooms led them one by one onto the waiting ships.

It’s remembering anima is a thing, at least, although not the part where their animas in particular destroy everything around and that’s why they’re not big on riding horses.

Dear Ketchup is watching them and thinking bitterly that The crowd outside on the quay wasn’t a collection of second sons and rebellious daughters; it was bastards and by-blows, hell-raisers and failures sent off on the Wyld Hunt by parents who frankly wished to be rid of them. A daughter who’d been ejected from the House of Bells for cowardice was a liability; that same daughter dead to an Anathema was a hero

The setup of this as kids only misses that the dragonblooded have the blood of the elemental dragons rather than being puny mortals. The adults are terrifyingly powerful and get ever more powerful until they keel over of old age. There should be a whole range of people here – even if it’s collecting failures, there are going to be middle-aged ones who’ve been somehow shamed, old ones who want to go out in battle, etc. And it’s really hard to believe that someone who couldn’t even keep it together in training school could possibly do any better thrown up against the most terrifying monsters in their culture (and you absolutely don’t want someone weak-willed going up against the supernaturally charismatic people – they’re going to shout “join my army-cult or die screaming!” and she’ll hack off her friend’s head and try to use it as a marriage gift).

He goes on to say that

Officially, this was a Wyld Hunt called to scour certain lands of the Threshold whose princes and satraps had been afflicted with Anathema of late. The host’s presence had been requested by those noble potentates, the plea for assistance forwarded to the Mouth of Peace herself. She had issued the call, not Kejak, and the gathering outside was here at her command. The fact that those satrapies that had called for help were all blessed with advisers who owed their allegiance-and positions-to Kejak was surely a coincidence. To any observer, his hands were clean.

And jesus christ could you be worse at this? The fact it’s all people connected to you is already enough to confirm you did it.

Arrrrrrrrgh. So much fantasy has such shitty, obvious politicking. No one should know he’s connected to any of those advisers! No one should even know any of them have anything in common whatsoever! The only time you do something like this, it’s either because you don’t give a fuck people know or you’re deliberately sending a message that everybody else better start ponying up those bribes and favors.

He’s now in is ultra backup apartment.

It was Spartan, as befitted a monk

Ouch. Look, the fact there’s that capital letter there means you’re explicitly saying this word is derived from Sparta-the-place-and-people. A lowercased spartan might’ve been acceptable because so many words are derived from particular things in our world that it’s really hard to remove them all, but you can’t say there was literally a Sparta here that was known for its harshness. Furthermore, the direct connection just makes the description seem bad – Sparta really wasn’t designed for kung-fu monks! The nebulously Asian monastic lifestyle the Immaculate Order is based around is not “Spartan”.

Anyway he’s sulking there because his main chambers with the fancy starmap has become so fucked up that it’s expanded beyond the room itself.

Several acolytes in the temple had reported seeing either large rats or serpents in the corridors, and while the claims were patently ridiculous, they had set tempers among the postulates on edge.

This too is annoying – snakes should be viewed positively by the dragonblooded, and we’ve also got one character getting tied to rats while none to snakes – you can’t say mentions of rats foreshadows Ratcatcher’s fate sometimes but other times equally portentous rats are totally unrelated, but evidently that’s what’s going on here.

Then a priest comes by.

garbed in the robes and insignia that indicated that she was a Most Revered Pursuer of the Ancient Enemy, a monk of the Fifth and highest coil. Her skin was tinged blue, and she carried with her the smell of fresh water running through farmland. It cut through the salt tang of the sea like a surgeon’s knife

Ooh, it’s one of those fun details about dragonblooded that practically no one remembers! Pump up essence high enough and you stop getting mistaken for human.

…shame it’s a bit off – “water” element, in Exalted, is salt water, so I’m dubious being stuffed to the gills with it would let you smell like fresh water instead. Then again, maybe having a touch of wood element is just enough to alter the expression a bit, which would make for a fun way to differentiate the exalts and play with the fact the bloodlines are completely mingled at this point.

Not that she’s really a dragonblooded. What, just because they’re the most numerous exalt, the current rulers of Creation, AND the book is named after them you expected they’d get to do anything. No, they’re scum who exist only to get kicked around by real exalts like Yushuv and the rest of the player characters. This woman is really a sidereal, who complains about the fact she’s apparently been in deep cover playing nothing but this one dragonblooded this whole time. That is indeed a colossal waste of her ability, Ketchup.

And yes, your labors are important. Sometimes a subtler guidance is necessary. They must think they are self-led, and we cannot allow them the luxury of straying from the path we have set. That way lies schism, and then tolerance of the foulest evils imaginable. We know what lies beyond that; the auguries have shown us as much. Destruction. Chaos. Oblivion.

“…Also, I should probably mention here that I kinda fucked up and Mnemon, oldest of the Empress’ non-retired kids and by far the strongest, you know the one, she’s constantly surrounded by a million invisible demons because she’s got that artifact that lets her summon second circles on a sidereal level like us, anyway she totally knows we exist in general and I exist in specific and that this entire organization is our puppet and her support is only to get her claws deeper into it. So, yeah, when she murders her way onto the throne next year all your work’s going to be for nothing. But until then, great job!”

He goes on to say he’s actually raised this hunt for one person – Yushuv.

a little sun-boy who whipped Holok and butchered the Hunt he led.” He paused, and gauged her reaction.”“Does that surprise you?”
“Frankly, yes.” She stepped away from the window, shaking her head.”“Holok‘s not an easy man to whip.

“Of course the fact all the dragonblooded went down like chumps is totally unsurprising. By the way, I know there’s a lot going on so are we still on for that Bronze tea where we just spend half a day talking about how much better we are than them?”
“Oh my me of course we are, there is nothing more important than our twice-weekly tea to talk about how they aren’t really exalts and are basically just mortals who you can teach some tricks to.”

Which is, of course, why Ketchup wants this all secret – he says that if they mention the boy wiped out an actually trained Wyld Hunt, these newbies, who are made of failures and disappointments and cowards whose parents are super obviously trying to get them killed, will charge right at him and get slaughtered. You see, it’s not that the sidereals are arrogant control freaks or anything, it’s just that the poor dears, they need to be lied to because their inferior brains won’t be able to make the right choices if they knew the truth.

“The ones you trust-and I expect they’ll be few and far between-you can tell that you’re meeting up with an advance scout, namely, Holok. They may not believe you, but they’ll at least be on the lookout for him, and won’t do something foolish like play ride down the Itinerant.’ Some of them have a less than respectful attitude toward the Immaculate order, you know.”

This is seriously a concern he has. He seriously worries that the absolute cream of the crop, all like three or four of them, are still such incompetent children at the first thing they’ll do upon seeing a member of kung-fu murder monks is to be all “he doesn’t have a weapon let’s murder him for funzies!!!”

I’d hate for any of them to pick a fight with Holok, thinking he was another district priest they could bat around at will.

Good god Ketchup how shitty are you at running your religion if this is standard behavior?

Anyway then they have tea, seriously, with him making a point about how this is the finest tea available in civilization and all.

“I seem to recall, though, that Holok never liked the stuff. It was part of his adoption of the Immaculate creed, never mind his hand in its origins

Also apparently in this universe the creed isn’t the sidereals painstakingly trying to figure out a way to optimize the dragonblooded’s essence so they can learn celestial martial arts without accidentally inverting their souls but just them fucking with people because haha now they have to drink boiled acorns and shit.

She jokingly mentions that maybe Holok just fucked off to drink acorns and how “It’s a pity I may have to drag him back to civilization.” and Ketchup flips out about how NO ONE LEAVES.

And don’t philosophize over whether Holok‘s earned the right to squat in a hovel on the shore of the River of Tears eating tubers and brewing nettles. Am I understood?”
Her face was a frozen mask of duty. “Yes,” she said softly. “I know. I understand.”
“Good,” Kejak said, his voice quiet but his eyes full of menace. A footfall thudded out from the stair. He smiled, then, but the smile did not reach his eyes.

Fantasy, especially the politicking parts, is so full of people being vicious assholes that I’m not totally sure if we’re to read more into this, but it really does seem like mentioning quitting triggers Kejak. She was saying this in the context of what was a joking conversation about how dumb Holok’s preferences were and how great civilization was, so the obvious read is that she’s not actually at all sorry to drag him back, but he doesn’t register that.

He doesn’t even really care about Holok right then, I think – he just has to reiterate that there is absolutely no stopping for anyone, because if anyone could stop than he could stop and he can never, ever let himself consider stopping, because this has to work, it has to be the right choice, there has to be an ends enough to justify the blood on his hands.