The book is not as awful as its cover suggests.

Our mammoth first chapter opens telling us about The tomb they called Talat’s Howe. It’s near the city of Great Forks. I will not make any attempt to track how well the author conformed to the maps of the region because it’s a good day in canon when they remember which corner of the world a town is. (Fun fact: they made the Exalted map by making a regular fantasy map, then deciding to make it EPIC by increasing the scale several hundred times, then went back to writing various cities as if they were close neighbors and discussing their trade relations and wars between them.)

Anyway. So, the tomb is haunted. Everyone makes sure to lock their doors and windows before dark because now and then a wandering dead will come into town.

The farmland was good by Talat’s Howe, now that the gnarled laurel trees and scrub pines had been pulled from the soil

And this bit is a twofer of Exalted and biology fail. Those plants are not a sign of awesome soil – gnarled anything usually isn’t – and shadowlands, which is what a haunted place that spawns undead must be, are correspondingly bad for the living. Shadowlands aren’t volcanoes. They don’t lure you in with super fertile soil then explode undeath all over you.

But let’s say that what’s really going on here is that there was a large section of abandoned farmland next to the shadowland rather than in it. Not too fond of having clear delineation between shadowland and not, but it’s actually rather canonical. The dead showed up, people ran off, the fields lay fallow for some time, people came back. Still, if the dead are actually manifesting to pound their doors, that suggests the town itself is within the boundaries, which is dumb not only because of the dead thing, but because seriously, shadowlands are bad to live in. It’s like living in a fallout zone.

What is nice here is how the people deal with it. No zombie apocalypse hysteria, they’ve gotten used to it.

Even when the dead found a village and started pounding on a man’s door, it was a relatively simple matter for torches and scythes to do their work and lay the menace to rest.

Sure, it’s undead and here to feast on your flesh. But you can hack it up fine.

It’s actually a bit disappointing that the book doesn’t go farther. Perhaps people live around in part because the dead are a natural hazard that keep out other threats. Bandits would probably think twice about messing with this place. Shadowlands are connected to the underworld, so even if they’re confident of their ability to kill any wandering dead, you don’t want to travel around at night in one, or you’ll risk walking into the underworld itself.

Anyway, this night something pounds on our farmer, Bold Hare’s, door.

Setting discussion over, we switch to the riders, who are all dressed in black. their horses’ tack jingling with an odd, funereal sound. They’re also dragging some clouds along with them.

Early Exalted was rather cagey about what was going on with the underworld. The Abyssal splatbook came out not long after, so the confusion was minimal, but you’ll see the fruits of it here – the author is utterly befuddled about what the various undead are.

We’re told there aren’t even animals out, since something drained one of the people’s cows. That’s quite accurate. Essence is found in blood, so any undead that can will nom on the stuff.

The lead rider looked left, looked right, and then raised his hand. Behind him, the column halted obediently. The riders bore names like Bonedust and Shamblemerry and Pandeimos, and only some of them could still be said to be, in any sense, living. Their leader, who styled himself the Prince of Shadows and who had helped to bring slaughter and madness to the ancient city of Thorn, frowned beneath his helm. ‘‘We,” he finally said after a long pause to survey the scene, “lack direction.”

Here we go.

By rights, the leader should be an Abyssal, with nemissary servants. Instead, the leader is apparently a deathlord, one of the people in his entourage is an abyssal, and the rest are nemissaries and ordinary mortals who mock the abyssal.

Or, to put this in D&D terms, the leader is apparently a tarrasque, one of the people in his entourage is a giant dragon, and the rest are dire wolves and dogs that mock it. To further confuse things Prince of Shadows is one of the signature Abyssal exalts. The only way to reconcile this in the slightest is that the author thought straight Abyssals were a different breed than transformed Solars. Even then it runs into internal problems, where the book itself can’t seem to decide what’s going on..

Anyway, one of the riders is singled out for some description.

He, alone of all the Prince’s entourage, went helmetless. His black hair was long and held in place with a silver clasp, and his sharp features were pinched with disapproval. A row of crimson tears had been tattooed down his cheek, in imitation of drops of blood, and his eyes were a shocking shade of green.

Our main character maybe Abyssal, folks. This might seem kind of over the top, but Abyssals are pretty over the top. The actual book talked about how they were “romantic” figures and blah blah drama. There’s a mechanic where when they go up in essence they have to either become more hideous and corpselike…or turn unnaturally hot. I mean, sure, we all know there’s people there just to play sexy vampires, but you don’t need to actually build that right into the system. Plus at least with vampires you can mumble something about evolution and luring prey.

Anyway, he establishes himself as our future buttmonkey quickly, by saying maybe they wouldn’t be lost if the guy’s map hasn’t been a fragile piece of shit.

“Ratcatcher? Do not speak.” The Prince’s voice was high and soft, but it carried with it the unmistakable tone of command. “Whether the map was frail or not is immaterial. It was, after all, over a thousand years old. I at least can find it in my heart to forgive it for being fragile. What concerns me at the moment is the fact that, without the map, finding our destination becomes somewhat problematic. Hence,” and he gestured disdainfully at the collection of huts, “our visit to this charming place.”

All their dialogue is like this. I quite like it.

Ratcatcher is not how Abyssal names work. The Prince of Shadows is how Abyssal names work (Prince in the Shadows would’ve been even better), because, and this is kind of the whole point, Abyssal names aren’t supposed to work like names, what with them having given their actual names to oblivion. Oblivion exists, for a given value of exist, in Exalted, and it really does eat your name, and then you don’t have a name. And then you get a title, which is long, dark, and ridiculous..

Anyway, our semibyssal says that the village obviously is made of suck so why would any of them know where it is? The Prince asks what part of “do not speak” sounded like he wanted semibyssal to talk and to get moving.

Amidst low laughter from the other riders, Ratcatcher swung down from his horse. It made neither motion nor sound as he did so. “Good boy,” he murmured

Ratcatcher’s behavior toward his horses and other creatures is going to come up again. It’s quite inconsistent.

We jump back to Bold Hare’s POV. Ah, multiple POVs, I missed you so much during the endless first person whiners.

The family in the cottage is your usual peasant family – father who works hard in the field, wife weaving something, boy who’s imitating his dad. Exalted is, supposedly, a gender neutral world, but it actually tends toward much higher levels of assumed sexism than this, so it’s impossible to criticize him for defaulting to this norm when canon itself does it. Exalted has one particularly cringe-inducing bit about how the Dragonblooded look down on anyone effeminate because they’re a military culture. When you’ve had seven hundred years of the Scarlet Empress’ jade fist around your throat, your language no longer contains any words that use “feminine” to mean “weak”.

Understandability aside, it still sucks that everyone defaults to this norm. I poked canon a bit to try to decide how to balance things back to gender equality and ended up going fuck it and making everything a matriarchy. Nothing is ever a matriarchy in fiction unless it’s a dystopia getting set up for an aesop about how wrong sexism is when it happens to men.

Anyway, so, as the man of the house Bold Hare grabs their sword, which is the only sword in the village and we go on a bit about how they think it’s really awesome despite how battered it is.

Certainly he’d held his own in dealing with the handful of beasts who’d preyed on the livestock at various times, and more famously in a fight with a pack of woodland barbarians who thought that a passel of farmers would be easy pickings.

It’s unclear where those barbarians came from (Great Forks is in one of the more civilized areas) or why they sucked so much at fighting. There really aren’t vast swaths of woodland in the area. Bandits, sure, but not entire cultures of people living in forests. The Scavenger Lands are the region this is all set in and they’re supposed to just be sort of like the wild west only instead of looking for gold it’s Indiana Jones type temples. And a bunch of amoral traders. Okay, not sure exactly what the area’s theme is beyond that it’s an adventurer setting, but you get the idea. It’s not exactly the untouched wilds.

I would have expected that they won the fight because they’re used to fighting the dead, but there’s no mention of it and as we see now they actually really suck at it. Remember earlier when they were saying the dead were easy enough to handle? Now they’re freaking out and just sitting real quiet hoping it goes away.

Naturally Ratcatcher does no such thing. He pauses just long enough for them to think he might have left, then punches through the door. We get another description of him, again mentioning he’s “bareheaded”. Also he’s covered in black armor that looks like scales.

A long sword in the shape of a serpent was in his fist, and absently the stranger sheathed it across his back

Considering he didn’t use it to cut the door open, it’s not clear why it was unsheathed, unless he was more nervous about what he was facing than he let on.

No mention is made of any of his equipment moving or making noise, which is the signature effect of soulsteel.

The fire leaned away from him, the flames moaning, and shadows crept across the room as the intruder advanced, heralds of his darkness.

He does seem to have some low grade resonance going on. Resonance in first edition has a lot of really cool effects, so naturally they completely redid it into a big, boring stick to hit players with for second edition. This is probably just thematic, though.

Ratcatcher asks for directions while the guy threatens to kill him. This is never quite explained and I think should be classed as the first of the many idiot balls that will feature in this story. All the guy knows is that a heavily armored super strong guy wants directions and by all appearances will go away if he gets his answer. First the guy wants to know why Ratcatcher wants to go there, then who he is, and so on. Ratcatcher points out that come on, the guy doesn’t want to know that stuff. Let’s keep this professional, okay?

Tell me where to find Talat’s Howe, and I’ll leave. Continue to pretend you’re braver than you are, and I’ll gut your boy in front of you, then whisper a charm that’ll make your woman think you held the knife. For the last time, where is Talat’s Howe?”

Charm use marks Ratcatcher as an essence user, or non-mortal. In the world of Exalted, there are two classes of people. There are essence users – gods, ghosts, exalts – who can use essence to power various spell-like charms, and there’s scenery that bleeds. If you’re in the latter category, you’re fucked.

So that means Ratcatcher must be either a nemissary or Abyssal. The power of the charm he’s referencing narrows it to Abyssal charms – the ghost charms a nemissary can use are far weaker and don’t have super mindrape powers like he’s referencing here. Abyssals, as a Solar-exalt breed, have trouble breathing without mindraping everyone in the vicinity.

Then he grabs the kid to use as a human shield. The drama of this is lost by the fact that the guy could just answer the fucking question, and then lost again when instead of killing the kid, the sword hits him with the flat of the blade. And then the dumbass does it again, and the kid gets smacked again. The wife tries attacking as well and gets her cheekbone crushed by a backhand.

Finally, he realizes he should just answer the damn question.

“You ride south about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Due south, mind you, straight as you can go. You’ll come to a stream that’s got a hedge of mountain laurel around it, some of it burned by the roots. That’s your sign. Turn left and follow the creek upstream. When it peters out, you’ll be at the base of a hill. Climb it, though be careful for wolves. They’re thick that way, thick as thieves. Climb the hill and look east. You’ll see the Howe, surrounded by old forest. There’s dead men that haunt it, though, and I hope they tear you apart.”

This is far more helpful than it needed to be. The wolf thing is also pretty bad. As I mentioned, shadowlands are not places full of life. Animals tend to avoid them, and wolves aren’t the special spoooooky exception. There are actual monsters that take their place in shadowlands.

Also, the fact he’s warning Ratcatcher about dead men means he didn’t even guess that Ratcatcher was related to the undead, which wouldn’t have fixed the problems with the scene but would at least go a short way toward explaining why he insists on fighting instead of answering the question.

Ratcatcher says that they get along fine with the dead, but thanks.

When he tries to leave the wife grabs the sword and tries to stab him, only for it to break on his armor. He smacks her again, breaking her neck, then drinks the guy’s blood.

Vaguely dissatisfied but no longer hungry, Ratcatcher turned and left the cottage.

One of the better lines in this book. It’s ruined by the next one, though: The interlude that had played out within had not done much for his mood, and he’d found the farmer’s Essence vaguely dissatisfying.

Yes, you just used exactly that phrase.

Abyssals drain essence through blood. This is particularly important for them because they can’t regain essence naturally. Essence is just sort of free-floating stuff you absorb over time, but Abyssals are attuned to death essence, so they need to be in the underworld for that, like ghosts. (Shadowlands, as in-between areas, lets everyone gain essence but only at half rate. This in turn relates to why everything in shadowlands is sickly.) When in Creation, they drain essence from other things by gobbling blood, just like ghosts. (There’s also charms to feed off fear, though I think those may be second edition only, so well after these books were written.)

He left the boy.

wouldn’t have been worth the trouble-or the screams.

This doesn’t make any real sense – he chokes the guy into silence in a second, and the kid is there to shriek the whole time.

Besides, leaving him alive was crueler by half, a practice Ratcatcher followed whenever circumstances permitted. After all, he thought, without witnesses, artistry is nothing.

This makes far more sense, but if that’s his motivation, we shouldn’t have the first explanation, because they contradict. I think this is the usual writing mistake of just piling everything vaguely evil into a heap, but it makes it seem like he’s making excuses for leaving the kid unharmed. Pretty sure that’s not the intent, though, especially because we’re later told the kid was driven mad. (And also silent.)

Ratcatcher returns to the Prince.

Ahead, the Prince waited, the insufferable bitch Sandheart to his left. She had just told a joke, it seemed, as beneath his helm the Prince was laughing.

This is a good example of how to properly handle raging about how much of a bitch a character is. This is Ratcatcher raging about how he’s the buttmonkey while she’s competent and not annoying. I expect that if there was a fandom for these books we’d be getting a billion stories about how Ratcatcher is so awesome and does everything and Sandheart is dumb and just stealing his accomplishments but there isn’t.

Ratcatcher says that hey, the dumb peasant did know where the thing was. The Prince is disdainful of his longwindedness and they take off.

We switch viewpoints back to the village, where we’re told what the villagers find when they come out in the morning. Thing is, everything but ghosts function normally in sunlight, so waiting for dawn doesn’t do any good. I guess maybe they didn’t want to go out and risk any other undead, but still.

in the center of the room, they found a withered husk that they agreed must once have been Bold Hare, and they silently congratulated themselves for not coming to his aid when the shrieking had started. Then they started piling up wood for the pyre, and made damned sure that their own doors were stout.

Problem is, it doesn’t make sense the community would leave individuals to deal with the usual undead instead of ganging up on whatever wanders into town. The way this was brought up originally made it sound like they formed a mob and killed anything that wanders in, which makes so much more sense than leaving it to individual families. Especially when you run into the same problems with ghosts as you do in the zombie apocalypse where killing makes more of the same, and with a shadowland right nearby any ghosts created won’t have trouble coming back to get revenge.

They’d also see his door was smashed apart and that there’s no way their own doors would have held. And since they don’t know what happened or why, they don’t know if it’s coming back.

And the “silently congratulated” bit, ugh. I see that pop up a lot, and no, never a good idea. Only the most vicious and hateful of communities will be smug in the face of someone’s death. Most will be guilty and anxious about failing to help. This phrase should be limited to situations where the community is rather toxic and there’s some sort of thing people can do to keep them safe, leading to the perception that those who die deserved it for failing to do so.

Anyway, this entire bit? Pointless. We didn’t need to spend all that time on Bold Hare and while the digression about the local area could have mattered, in practice it didn’t – no one reacted in a way particular to people used to wandering dead, they just acted like your usual terrified peasant rubes. And now they’re here for one final moment to tell us about how they found what we just saw happen. This was our first completely unnecessary POV.

As our not-heroes continue, a storm forms above them and Ratcatcher decides to start bitching about it.

Pandeimos muttered something about rain drowning out foolishness. He was a nemessary, an unquiet soul who’d clawed his way out of hell and stolen one body after another in order to wreak havoc upon the living. As each shell either rotted away or was hacked down by enemies, the soul inside fled to another corpse, and then another one. 0nly hatred sustained such as him, which was why they were drawn to the Prince’s service.

This is a mess.

Hell and the underworld are two very different things in Exalted, and it doesn’t take all that much clawing to stick around as a ghost. Nemissaries aren’t violent psychos either – that’s the niche of hungry ghosts. Indeed, if you look at the name you can guess what their actual game role is – emissaries of the dead. They can function as part of the underworld army, but they’re far more useful as spies and diplomats and anything else that requires interacting with the living.

And nemissaries have charms to keep their bodies from rotting, charms to heal rotting, and often have specially prepared bodies instead of just grabbing whatever’s on hand. So while plenty do let them rot away, that’s really more for short term use. Ones traveling like this are presumably using prepared bodies, otherwise why bother with bodies at all?

Furthermore, due to the weirdness of how ghost charms work, nemissary charms require certain minimum compassion virtue scores. But since that part is terribly screwy, it’s understandable to just ignore.

the sole trait that they shared was a poor sense of humor

This may be more of Ratcatcher’s POV, though if so it’s quite subtle. Ratcatcher’s whinging isn’t particularly clever, while Sandheart told a joke that made the Prince laugh.

After Pandeimos’ comment, the others – living and dead – ignored Ratcatcher stonily. He paused for a moment, then, undeterred, bantered on.

See? Ratcatcher won’t take a hint that he’s just not that clever

Ratcatcher rants on about how the place is probably already stripped of whatever was in it.

And yet, here we are at the Elemental Pole of Boredom, of Idiocy, of Sheer Bloody-mindednes. That peasant certainly was an avatar of it, I swear, if such things can be said to exist. After all, the sages are still debating as to whether or not a shadow that falls in the forest creates darkness, while-”
“Silence.”
The single word cut across the chatter like a whipcrack.
“Your Majesty, I most humbly apologize. I was merely-”
“I believe I called for silence.”

The Prince explains he doesn’t give a fuck if Ratcatcher wants to be here and asks if Ratcatcher knows why that’s his name.

It is because you are here to serve me in the same way that a small dog serves its master, namely, by ridding the pantry of rats. Your services are welcomed, but not indispensable, and should you prove troublesome, there are always much larger hounds than you about who’d view you as a morsel. A snack.

This is why Ratcatcher is a semibyssal. Abyssals are meant to be Solar tier. It’s possible someone might treat an exalt of some sort like this, but they’re gonna end up gibbed in short order. The Prince is, in theory, just another Abyssal, without even the stacked advantages of the deathlords, and it’s not like the deathlords’ position is all that stable. It’s also stated repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that Abyssals pwn nemissaries in every way and that it’s only because there’s a very limited number of Abyssals to field that the deathlords still use the ghosts.

The Prince decides to ask for Ratcatcher’s riding crop, which has a nasty barb on it and which he uses all the time. The Prince does something, then gives it back and tells him to smack his horse, which makes Ratcatcher bleed instead. While this is minor, I think it’s also setting-breaking – it’s ridiculously hard to damage Exalts. It’s also stupid, because they’ve also got spurs and stuff. (And furthermore, the basic Abyssal ride charms are a mindrape into compliance and/or kill set.)

Ratcatcher also takes a moment to rant about how fearless and badass he is – pledged to the neverborn, slaughters so many foes that the blood had coated his armor inside and out, killed entire villages, made dark bargains with scary spirits, etc. But how even he fears the Prince! This only makes things even more confusing, because it’s establishing Ratcatcher the semibyssal is apparently at Abyssal power levels. This does fit with the way the Prince seems to be more at the deathlord level, but keeps the problem that he really shouldn’t be.

“One more thing, my little terrier:

The Prince goes on to say that Ratcatcher can’t talk for the rest of the trip, and then a year and a day after that. This seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face…particularly when the guy shouldn’t think anything of punishing a servant by actually cutting off parts.

Back to more competent people, Sandheart notices something.

Her helm was crafted to mimic the visage of a fanged stallion

Everyone but Ratcatcher has some themed helmet. The Prince’s is a hyena, which has some interesting implications. I have no clue if there’s any point to any of it, though.

We’re then told that Sandheart is super competent and gives good advice, which I appreciate, and also that everyone resents her for it. The latter bit is, I think, your standard evil can’t work together stuff. I find that a tedious cliche most of the time, and it’s particularly bad here. The deathlords are running armies, they can’t have everyone more focused on backstabbing, and more broadly, people in the neverborn’s service are doing it to wipe out all existence, which will include their own. It’s just not where you’d expect people whose main goal is jockeying for minor perks to hang out.

The Prince of Shadow’s deathlord is the Lover Clad in the Raiment of Tears. Her whole thing is sex, BDSM sex, shapechanging sex, and sex. Her secret goals are for everyone to realize how meaningless those things are and give in to nihilism, which makes more sense than just fucking everything living or dead for the hell of it, but not really all that much more. She’s mostly in the setting so that there’s a hot shapechanging dominatrix for the characters to drool over and someone for the other deathlords to call a stupid whore all the time. Actually, the introduction for the Prince of Shadows has him calling her a stupid whore too.

Exalted tries, but not very hard or very well. (In fact, if you look over the canon deathlords, only three of the nine are female, and one of the others is the deathlord who fucked up and was a coward and also stupid, and is now bound as the servant to this guy over here.)

Anyway, point is, the Lover’s dynamic is all about how what you want won’t make you happy, so if you have something like this going on, it should be as part of a lesson that’ll lead everyone involved to throwing themselves into the void when they realize how pointless their life is. Instead, it’s just happening because evil people don’t work together lol.

But anyway. So what’s Sandheart being super competent at? Why, it would be about realizing someone else got there ahead of them. There’s some charred stumps, but someone’s cut them recently, and there’s a footprint by the tiny creek. Well, says the Prince. Sucks to be him.

“He is alone, or nearly so, and on foot. And we are many, and well armed.

That’s really lame. The Prince and/or Ratcatcher are celestial-tier exalts (and Abyssals are meant to be Solar class, which is the strongest of those) and the rest of them are extremely well trained fighters who can’t be killed normally. As we just saw, even the semibyssal buttmonkey doesn’t need his sword to murder people, let alone the help of other armed people. Unless the guy’s Dragonblooded, he’ll go down to any of them. If he’s Dragonblooded, he’ll still go down to an Abyssal.

So let’s switch to the guy, our third viewpoint character.

His name was Eliezer Wren, and he was by profession a priest, though not a very good one.

Part of his not being a good priest, presumably, is that he’s struck a bargain with the local god to hide is passage. See, the Immaculate Philosophy, dominant religion in creation, is very much about getting as secular and disconnected from actual gods as possible in a world that has literal gods that demand prayer and can fuck things up if they’re not happy. The way it works is you give general prayers and it gets dispersed to the gods as they deserve, and find a priest whenever one of the gods tries to extort you directly.

The god references in a bit that this hasn’t always been the case, and that at other points in time he’d be the one calling the shots, then puts this a mere four hundred years back, when Dragonblood policy of punching gods in the face goes back to the Shogunate period. Now, this is an area that’s not well controlled by the Scarlet Empress, but that’s been a decline thing, so if anything gods should be throwing their weight around more in recent years than in the past.

The speaker was not a man, nor would it ever be mistaken for one. It was a shambling effigy of woven reeds and grasses, with sinews of climbing vines and eyes of shining water.

The fact it’s not a man doesn’t stop “it” from immediately turning into “he” in the narration. So far, there’s only been two female characters, and only Sandheart really counts – the wife was just there as part of a family unit. This is actually a pretty fair portrayal of what actual Exalted ends up looking like – female characters tend to be there as exceptions. It does have a higher percentage than this, though.

Anyway, the payment for hiding him is A word, a deed and a gift – ie, let the exposition begin, because the god wants to know what just happened.

Two days ago I first found your banks, and as I had been instructed to do by a friend whose name I prefer not to utter, I turned my course upstream to where my destination lay. You no doubt have heard tell of a mound that lies beyond where your spring arises. Men call it Talat’s Howe when they feel kind, or Talat’s Hell when they are drunk.”

It’s all like this. Words words words. It’s okay when it’s some Abyssal going on like this, because that’s Abyssals for you, but this is just shameless padding.

He goes on to babble about what the hill looks like, and apparently covered in regular healthy plants, despite, as I said, that shadowlands completely don’t work that way. It’s an obviously constructed one (rather like a regular burial mound in our world) and once he’s done with this the spirit complains that no duh, he knows this. The author does not realize his character is complaining about his terrible writing and that’s a bad sign, and just uses that for more longwinded padding.

At the top is a stone and in the stone is a lock.

Beneath that stone is a passage, and at the end of that passage is a burial chamber.

You couldn’t just have said it’s a tomb? You had to double the sentence’s length by going on about a passage leading to it? Anyway, and this is where it gets a bit odd, what’s in the tomb is something that was once known as Talat. This probably just means it’s a Solar, since the official stance on non-Dragonblood exalts is that they’re not exalts, they’re possessed by demons.

But he doesn’t have any of the glorious treasure that’s supposed to be done there

“That was, of course, because someone had found Talat’s burial chamber before me, and had emptied it of everything, including Talat, in a manner of speaking.

“In a manner of speaking” turns out to be that the tomb was a fake and never had anything in it. I don’t know what the fuck the writer or editor were doing here. He goes on for a bit about how he somehow got his hands on the key, and killed a rabbit to activate it (this, at least, actually fits well into canon – if you can’t wield essence, you can use the essence in blood to supply the motes) and goes down, but all he finds is a single coin.

The spirit flips out about how stealing bones is an affront to heaven. Heaven doesn’t give a shit and you know it. In-universe, proper burial is a big deal, but only because it will pacify the lower soul of a ghost and the buried goods can be used by the higher soul if that remains in the underworld. But if you dig it up afterward, the ghost still has the ghostly equivalent. And all this is only because the world’s broken after the whole killing the gods’ bosses thing, and in Heaven’s opinion, there shouldn’t even be ghosts to have opinions about burials.

Wren says that there never were any bones and the whole thing was just to distract people.

The coin was from the first days of the Empire. Not sure why that’s noteworthy, since they presumably already know when it was made, and it’s also not telling us anything, because there’s two big empires. See, after the murdering the glowy people and stuffing them in a box thing, there was a Shogunate that ruled for a while. So, if this is a Solar tomb, it should be about then. If this is from the Scarlet Empress’ time, though…well, then what’s the big deal? No one’s burying filthy demon anathema by that point, and there’s no one else you really need to worry about, tombwise.

I mentioned earlier there’s going to be a lot of idiot ball holding in this. And here’s where it begins in earnest.

Wren took the coin and left his own token. So far so good! You can see how this is an understandable mistake. He solved the architect’s little riddle, and felt like leaving something for the next person. He couldn’t have foreseen that someone else would be showing up so soon when this is either seven hundred or fifteen hundred years old.

He also stuffed the place with deathtraps. No explanation will ever be given for why he did this in the first place, yet alone why he thought leaving his name on the room full of deathtraps was a good idea. And they’re hastily rigged deathtraps, which suggests they weren’t going to last. And that means he must be assuming more people will find the tomb soon, which then renders leaving his name stupid even before the death trap thing – it’s one thing to do assuming that you’ll be dead before the next person comes by, and another to imply to anything powerful enough to get in there that you made off with the loot first.

He then fulfills the gift portion by giving the spirit the coin. Which is gold. One of the minor things Exalted does well is it doesn’t have fucking gold coins. This is both nice because it gets away from the omnipresent gp thing and because it makes a great deal of sense in setting – the people murdered and boxed glowed gold.

Admittedly, the setting uses silver and the surviving branch of celestial exalts running around getting murdered for not going in the box properly glow silver. But the setting makes it clear that it’s the Solars everyone’s terrified of. Lunars have some crucial gaps in their charms, especially the ones for rewriting people’s brains. So the general dislike of gold and related things serves to emphasize how much bigger a deal Solars returning is.

Furthermore, the gold-type currency (the one that’s super valuable because everyone wants it) is jade. So an empire architect should be leaving a jade token, and if he wasn’t, it’d be some other coin because no one uses gold coins.

The final thing, the task, Wren says he’d like to renegotiate on given he wants to get the fuck out of Dodge right now.

Go. Find your way, if you can, and then return to me to settle your accounts. I’ll give you seven years, Wren

This is things regressing toward D&D. The “year and a day” earlier is a very common time period in Exalted, it crops up constantly, especially when it comes to servitude. Another big number is five – there’s (sorta) five seasons, five elements, the different exalts have five castes, there’s five different magical materials and five types of jade, there’s five maidens, the year requires five days of calibration for the calender to line up, five five five five five. Three comes up as well, but it’s often associated with things that are somehow off – the Lunar castes broke so now they’re down to three, and travel to hell takes three days in either direction (and demon have a three-tiered system of souls, with third circle souls the highest). Seven? Not really a thing in the Exalted world. And given the survival rate of mortals in the setting, it doesn’t make much sense either. The odds of Wren dying within seven years are pretty good.

The god threatens that the longer Wren delays, the bigger the task will be. Another problem here is that once Wren actually leaves, he can go find some Immaculate monks to beat the god to death if he feels like it. Wren’s only in its power because he’s stuck there, not because “god” and “spirit” in this setting mean anything beyond that they can fuck things up for those weaker than them.

Wren takes off, planning to put as much distance between himself and the scary guys as possible. He lays out in detail the fact that yeah, he did just leave a boobytrapped tomb with his name signed underneath. He claims he figured he’d be dead first, but as I said, it doesn’t really make sense given it’s hard to believe his traps would outlast him.

The Five Dragons alone knew what Anathema of that power would be capable of.

But here’s the bigger issue – the Immaculate religion? It’s an invented religion that’s largely there to get people to kill non-Dragonblood exalts. Their whole thing is murdering anathema. Wren is acting like anathema are just things to avoid and fear, but that’s for ordinary mortals. The Immaculate Order gets reports from those ordinary mortals and organizes killsquads. Wren should be worrying about them catching him before he can get to safety among other Immaculate monks, or even that a regular killsquad might not stop them, not acting like he’s on his own here.

But that’s all from Wren for now. Time to switch to anathema of that power.

Sandheart was killed by a trap. The Prince of Shadow is pissed off and he’s got anima flare going on. I don’t think deathlords have that, so that’s another notch for him being an Abyssal.

She lay on the floor, a narrow blade neatly protruding from her eye, and there could be no doubt that she was in fact dead.

Except she already was dead. She’s a ghost in a corpse. Moreover, given it’s a corpse, the brain isn’t necessary for its function. Unless you have something that lets you smack around incorporeal things, you’re only going to hit the nemissary’s body. Like zombies, you have to actually destroy parts for them to stop working, unlike zombies, aiming for the head doesn’t do jack.

Ratcatcher monologues that Sandheart was killed for being cocky and not watching for traps. He mentions that one of the local ghosts had tried to warn her, which is yet another idiot ball – the ghosts would have told everyone the place was trapped and there’s no reason for anyone to blow that off.

The Prince of Shadows didn’t fuck around with a key and just blasted the place open. It’s at this point I realize there’s a giant plot hole here.

Namely, why didn’t he just travel through the underworld? It’s an unpleasant place for the living, but Creation is correspondingly unpleasant for Abyssals and ghosts. And since, once again, this seems like a shadowland if ghosts are coming out of it, that means that instead of being mirrored in the underworld, the actual location can be accessed from either Creation or there.

But then, that just raises the question of what he’s even doing here in the first place. Our answers are not good.

They had come seeking a dead man and a sword.

See, when Abyssals seek “a dead man” they literally hunt the guy down across the underworld. Finding his former body makes at this point as much sense as someone hunting down the baby clothes of an old man.

We’re told the Prince has a grudge against the guy buried here – except the tomb is ancient and Abyssals are a new exalt breed created in the last five years, so this would have to be past life memories, which are rarely taken to this extreme. It’s the deathlords who hold the ancient grudges. There’s also some shiny sword buried with him that’s supposed to be really well made – yes, I wasn’t kidding about the plot being about a +1 sword – but that’s irrelevant because it can’t possibly have been made of soulsteel. Every exalt type is attuned to a different magical material. See, in Exalted, you’re running around with giant swords and stuff. Attuning to an artifact makes it metaphysically yours, and the most basic effect is that those giant swords turn light and usable. Attuning requires essence, and attuning to the wrong type of material means a doubled investment. So if you’re looting another exalt’s tomb, you want to make sure it’s your exalt type.

Also, why the hell would you even bother being an Abyssal if you didn’t want your weapon made out of the ever suffering souls of innocent people? Solar weapons are just made of magic gold. There’s no comparison.

And speaking of such, that’s what Abyssals do to people they don’t like, as well as everyone else. If he wants revenge on a dead guy, desecrating the tomb is really not cutting it. Either the guy’s soul is still in the underworld as a ghost, in which case finding it would be far more productive, or it’s passed on through Lethe to be reincarnated, in which case it’s no longer the same guy in any meaningful way and can’t care what you do to its tomb. Reincarnation in Exalted is more like soul recycling. You’re no more the same person than a car melted down and made into a door is the same object. There may be some set traits souls keep, but only minor ones and there’s not that much evidence for it. For traditional reincarnation, you have the exaltation itself, which will retain some memories of the past person and has a number of other stable markers, like caste and which Lunar they get bonus mindrape die for. (Exalted handles soulmates very well.) Exaltations are also the only things that are properly immortal – regular souls are quite destroyable and actually serve as power sources for some things, in keeping with Exalted’s design policy that you should always be kept well supplied with rope in case you feel like hanging yourself in a new and inventive way.

Ratcatcher had seen the trap, of course. It would have been nigh impossible not to, so amateurishly had it been set. But calling out a warning would have required him to speak, and he was not willing to risk the Prince’s ire in this matter any further.

Well, that, and he does admit he utterly hated her. But anyway, here we see more of what the book’s plot will run on – people doing something stupid, then running into problems because of it. This is actually as close as the book gets to doing so effectively – Wren’s side of things is mindbogglingly stupid, and in a little while Ratcatcher’s speaking issues will have similar problems.

I see this crop up relatively often in multi-pov fantasy like this – someone’s always doing something with terrible consequences. It’s rarely done well, likely in part because it’s such an easy way to pad things. And, of course, it’s always easier to write idiots than competent people. Still, it does mean that there’s usually things going on. Fanfic has a bad habit of forgetting to put in obstacles or only doing the bare minimum, and the recent YA books I’ve done have had the related issue of people just sitting around not doing anything.

Like all things, it’s really an issue of balance. The problem here is all anyone does is make stupid decisions, and they blow up immediately. And the decisions really beggar belief. Why the hell did Wren trap the tomb when he had no idea who the next people to enter might be? Why hasn’t Ratcatcher figured out to shut the hell up? Hell, why did Bold Hare decide to attack the heavily armed stranger who could punch through a door instead of just answering the question? It’s like in Lord of the Rings when the black riders show up looking for Bilbo. The proper response, as the hobbits show, is to answer the question (lying optional), not grab the nearest length of metal and try assault. People should have reasons for their mistakes and they should do other things than make them.

For example, it would have been perfectly good for Wren to leave the token and have them assume he’d made off with whatever was in there. Or, if he’d known they were on his tail, he might easily have mistaken them for nemissaries and ghostblooded and left the traps thinking they’d actually do real damage, not realizing that they’d barely slow down an actual exalt and that those actual exalts have some pretty nasty tracking charms – they really don’t need him to have actually left a business card to figure out who he is. Plus, if he thought they were just regular thugs, he wouldn’t realize the local ghosts would tell them about who they saw.

Anyway, so, the Prince is furious and promises horrible things for Wren. He says that she won’t rise again, which seems to be some real confusion over how ghosts function. If the place is warded against undead somehow, the ghosts shouldn’t be able to get in and also, all she’d need to do to manifest is get out of the area it’s affecting. It’s just this side of possible there’s some sort of effect in place that somehow shuffles “killed” ghosts straight to Lethe or Oblivion instead of letting them reform the way ghosts usually do when killed, but that seems really weird and wouldn’t apply anyway – all that happened is some minor damage to the corpse’s eye and nonfunctional brain, Sandheart herself was unharmed. Further confusing things, Sandheart’s going to reappear later on. Plus this seems like a pretty pro-ghost place given it’s crawling with them.

This reads like Sandheart was supposed to be one of the living, in which case an effect preventing her from ever forming into a ghost would be more plausible. Even then it’s unclear why or how, especially when this place is spawning undead.

In fact…why are the dead even there? The tomb seems to be a fake, so why set it on a shadowland? It’s one thing if the tomb is the site of a big battle and you want to get things buried and done with immediately, but that’s evidently not the case here.

These and more questions will not really be addressed in the book. But they’re fun to speculate on.