Last time, Ratcatcher met the neverborn above the void itself. Today something much more horrible.

Yushuv.

He’s taken off early, while Dace is asleep.

He does the usual quick rundown of how he totally did so much training and is even more awesome now you guys, and then gives something more concrete – he explains that when he went out hunting yesterday, he’d actually spent most of the time preparing a false trail in the wrong direction.

He takes off and is shortly stopped by a lunar.

A female figure swung down from the branch she’d been perched on and landed lightly on the path in front of him. She was tall and lithe, with intricate tattoos down her arms and legs. Her face was sharp and angular, and had more than a hint of the beast in it. Her feet were bare, as was much of her legs and arms, and a brace of javelins were strapped to her back. It was his other teacher, Lilith.

I think I mentioned last time how it makes no sense Lilith is doing any of this. She has no reason to hold positive feelings toward solars generally and the post-Usurpation rulers left her alone to hang out pretending to be an owl. It really feels like part of how the whole solars getting boxed thing was straightforwardly wrong and everyone who actually remembers those times and doesn’t personally benefit will obviously support the true glowy kings.

Lilith took a step forward and, involuntarily, Yushuv took a step back. Almost involuntarily, his hand went for his knife, and he had to forcibly restrain himself. A knife in hand wasn’t going to help him, not against her.

This, I think, says a lot about Yushuv. It’s likely meant to just be telling us she’s really badass, but she’s been helping Yushuv, yet when he sees her, he wants to grab a knife and restrains himself only because he doesn’t think it’d work. It’s unclear how much is Yushuv fearing someone even though they haven’t threatened him and how much is Yushuv wanting to kill her just to get her out of the way. Even the former is pretty concerning – someone with Yushuv’s level of power who can’t trust even allies and would stab them to death if he thought he could is really not going to end well.

She asks what if he’s sure of why he’s leaving.

I was wondering if you’d tell me what you think your reasons are. If they’re good enough, I won’t sling you over my shoulder and carry you back to Dace.”
Yushuv adjusted his posture, easing ever-so-slightly into a defensive stance that she herself had taught him. A smile quirked at the corner of her mouth when she saw this, the expression of a teacher proud of her pupil.“I don’t think I’m as easy to carry off as I once was.”
Lilith threw back her head and laughed, a sound that to Yushuv’s ears was eerily close to a howl. “Really! Good, that means you learned something from me after all. Well, you almost sound as if you were challenging me to try.” Suddenly she stopped laughing, and her face was a mask of serious intent once again. “But I asked you a question. Why are you leaving?”

Yushuv really doesn’t seem to want to go along with this, and the implication with the knife just above suggests he’s honestly thinking that if he could fight her off rather than answer the question, he would.

It ends up with,

Yushuv tensed for a second, then relaxed and sat down in the middle of the path.

And it’s just really weird he’s in fight mode this entire time when this bit suggests he was never actually afraid. It’s not a matter of being concerned he’d be attacked, it’s just that he’d rather use violence as his first response.

As to why Lilith doesn’t seem to register any of this as a bad sign, who knows. She may well just accept this level of fuckery as normal to solars and not care so long as they don’t have social charms. She’s perfectly confident in her own fighting skills, after all.

He suggests breakfast and she says she’s got her own, thanks, and starts chewing her way through some skinned raw rabbits. Lilith I cannot believe you bothered to skin them you’re a disappointment to lunars everywhere.

We then get the explanation – Dace is supposed to teach him (Lilith helpfully explains she said to do so because spirits said so) but he won’t accept Yushuv’s learned enough.

“He’s got another twenty years worth of things to teach you before he considers you possibly ready to go off on your own. And even then he’d tag along

I don’t know if Dace had any backstory at this point or was just generic grizzled mentor. It’s really ridiculous in the context of him ending up as running a mercenary company, though. You don’t exactly train your recruits forever in those places.

Come to think of it, it seems like mentors tend to either teach people all they know and shove them out the door or teach them everything important but try to hold on with unimportant tasks because they aren’t ready to let their babies spread their wings. You generally don’t see people teaching the basics and saying that’s all there’s time for, but’s precisely the behavior you’d expect from someone with actual experience in teaching, and if something’s important, isn’t that a better mentor choice than finding someone who’s apparently never done this before? Plus it’d give a situation better stakes than claiming that no really they mastered everything already and they’ll be able to handle themselves.

Lilith them claims that as true as this is, it doesn’t explain why Yushuv left, and we replace the extremely serviceable implied “I know enough for what I need” with “because special destiny bullshit intuition”.

It’s hard to explain. I just know that it’s time.

ARG. Lilith attempts to salvage that by saying he’s avoiding saying something, and Yushuv says okay because dreams, and maybe the goal here was to say something that’s such a shitty cliche that “okay because dreams” is a welcome relief.

It started with him dreaming of his beloved peasant village for a week.

The temple there. Bodies in the streets. I can still remember the flies, you know. They were so loud.

Really? Amazing you could make them out over the screaming of that dying priest. I guess that’s what exalted hearing does for you!

Then he starts seeing random places on fire with dead people.

Like what Dace and I saw in that city in the crater, but worse, because these cities had been alive.”

Hm. Two different things that you saw…but put together to be extra bad? Wow that is definitely not something dreams ever do, it must be a special sign!

“We’ve all had those dreams, Yushuv. It comes with the Exaltation. It’s a great deal of power, and not every one of us-particularly not every one of the sunchosen- has used it wisely.”
“You don’t understand,” Yushuv said quietly. “It wasn’t that I failed to prevent all that by not going. It was that I caused it all by staying. The one thing alive in all those dreams was me.”
“Ah.”

God dammit Lilith don’t “ah” at him, that is precisely what you just said! There is absolutely no way anyone, let alone you, would say that not all exalts PARTICULARLY FUCKING SOLARS have used their power wisely and just mean they didn’t always successfully save everybody when they tried.

Yushuv continues to go on about how no he’s so special because he’s dreaming of older-him and There was a sense that you had been with me, and Dace, but that you were gone. And everything I was doing was because of that. so he’s decided to ditch everyone and go try to kill random things.

Lilith decides he’s still lying about something, presumably because she knows Yushuv doesn’t actually give a shit about burning it all down.

But there was one more dream I haven’t told you about. It was a message.”
“A message?”
He nodded. “From the Unconquered Sun. He told me that I have to go meet a man, the man who’s carrying the sword from my dream. I don’t know who he is or where he is now, but I know what he looks like, and I know pretty much where I have to go.” He shrugged. “The rest is up to me. Or fate. Or the man carrying the sword.”

Oh, and a big component of his dream is having the sword, meaning that if those other dreams are motivating him, it’s not a matter of avoiding them.

But a more important question is, who’s sending the messages? There’s a bit in the books of the Unconquered Sun saying that he’s noticed his exalts have returned and is rethinking the whole “totally ignore Creation” thing, buuuuuut it’s in an exaltation message and exaltation messages appear to be about the only time he ever communicates with his exalts, assuming those are even him and not some weird subroutine baked in. We know he’s still ignoring his own department in Heaven so he’s not getting any prayers that are routed to him, and he otherwise seems pretty silent.

It can’t be Yushuv’s carrion friend, though, since we know that god has to lay low for a while. It could be sids, but there aren’t nearly enough Gold Faction sids to think siding with Yushuv is a good idea. Maybe the Bronze had a lunch meeting and somebody mentioned Yushuv and suddenly everyone thought supporting him in the hopes he killed off other solars sounded like a good idea…but I mean, there’s only a hundred sids max and they’re usually under that, I’m not sure there even are enough sids around to make them go with that plan.

My best guess is Raiton passed this tidbit up to some of his superiors who share an interest in the whole “endless fields of rotting carrion” thing and the head of the Slaughter and Rot department is currently bribing their way into messing with Yushuv’s dreams.

No doubt having completed a similar analysis, Lilith says that she’s pretty sure that’s wrong but whatever, she doesn’t care enough to actually drag him back to Dace anyway, plus she agrees he’s learned enough so there’s no point in Dace teaching him now.

Then for some reason, she dipped a finger still red with the rabbit’s blood into her hand. Then, she drew a single line across Yushuv’s brow, and two more underneath each of his eyes. The red of the blood made a sharp contrast to the gray of the ash.
“For the hunter,” she said. “Now go.”

Yushuv is happy to get her blessing and says thanks before running off.

Dace then gets up from where he was hiding and whines a bunch about how nooooo his little psychopath baby.

“The boy barely knows anything. If the Unconquered Sun is sending him out into the world, it’s for no reason I can see.

Exaltation are wholly autonomous, Dace. I realize you were born into the “idk demons???” timeperiod but Lilith is a certified first-age exalt, she knows this shit.

Also, there’s been hundreds upon hundreds of years of exalts getting ganked seconds after it hits by squads of fate ninja. You can try to pretend Yushuv is some noble underdog but the fact is he’s in a way better position here than any PC would be.

Then we jump back to Yushuv who decides that fuck sneaking he wants to say a sort of goodbye so he shoots up a golden firework arrow.

Halfway up, the arrow cascaded into a flare of golden light, arcing across the heavens. It rose upward, going ever higher, until it looked like the clouds swallowed it. There was a muffled blast, and then the light from behind the clouds faded.

A flare can be seen by merely human eyes for twenty-five miles. Solar glowy arrows should be more impressive, not less. Also, Creation doesn’t have a horizon to block visibility. And has a whole host of things that live in the sky itself.

There’s probably something even stupider he could’ve done, but I’m not sure what.

Yushuv smiled, and unstrung his bow. That, he decided, was a much more fitting goodbye, and proof to Dace that he might have learned something after all.

“Oh, I’ve taught him how to get the attention of sidereal death squads. Well, don’t I feel silly worrying he’d get killed now!”