Last time on LOLSTATS, we talked about Ratcatcher’s abilities.

Ch15 brings us back to Yushuv. Let’s see if he redeems himself, sinks further into proving the Sids right, or just wanders being boring.

Yushuv starts by saying he appreciates the warm weather, having not bothered to grab a blanket or even some extra clothes from his untouched house.

The first day’s journeying was easy enough, though the bow grew heavy after an hour’s walking.

Variants of this sentence are quite common. Like so many things, this is because it’s often an accurate statement, but…let’s consider this. The idea is to point out that the person isn’t used to the extra weight of something. But Yushuv seems like he’s a pretty active kid. A bow will weigh you down (how much depends on type and make) but so will lots of things, and you’d think a peasant kid would be doing relatively hard labor for his age. Plus, Yushuv is also carrying a giant serrated dagger, a quiver of arrows, and food. Does the bow really weight more than all of those?

On top of that, Yushuv’s an exalt now, with corresponding boosts to everything. It’d make far more sense to be pointing out how, for some reason, he wasn’t bothered by the weight.

Yushuv had heard tales of far-off cities where the streets were paved in silver bricks, but here travelers had to make do with a dirt track

First, if it’s all he knows, he wouldn’t think paved streets were better, and second, dirt paths are perfectly good for travelers when it’s dry and/or there’s minimal travel. The reason paved streets are better is they can stand up to more abuse instead of turning into a giant mud pit.

The land through which the road traveled was best described as “civilized”: long meadows marked on occasion by farms and homesteaders’ huts.

Someone’s unclear on how towns work!

If those people are close enough they can travel to town, they’re part of it. Those are his distant neighbors. If they’re not his relatives, they’re his friend’s relatives. If they’re not that close, then what are they doing? You live close together for protection, not the for the hell of it. The farmers in the opening chapter lived together, but now suddenly things have gone safe enough for people to live whereever they want? Fuck no. It’s Exalted. You’re livestock there to be farmed for prayers or slaughtered outright. All that stands between you and the tyranny of a hundred demanding gods is the other tyranny of the Dragonblooded, so get back to cowering.

A further issue is that there are wandering sheep, despite the fact that sheep are easily killed and easily stolen, and you kind of need to keep somewhat of an eye on them. Despite the association we have, cultures who keep sheep tend to be super aggressive, because it’s so easy to poach from someone’s flock that you need the threat of disproportionate retribution for the few who do get caught.

This pastoral setting, and the fact Yushuv shows absolutely no interest in actually seeking any of the people out, renders everything strange and unreal. He later claims he’s still worried about meeting Ratcatcher, despite the fact that if Ratcatcher was continuing his murder spree he’d be seeing it.

he knew that the nearest village was a full day’s ride away. How much further, then, for a boy on foot?

Well, I’m too lazy to look up travel times, but the thing is, peasant kid. This isn’t like where you get driven everywhere, Yushuv presumably has never ridden a horse (and if he has, he’s a fucking moron, because Ratcatcher didn’t bother to murder the animals and he could have grabbed a horse before leaving) and the same should be true for plenty of other travelers. Most people should think in terms of travel on foot.

willow trees dotted the streams’ banks. These were the only trees Yushuv saw

This is not how biology works.

Yushuv tries to picture the place as the sight of a big battle since he knew that that had once been the case now, despite the fact that a big battle happening in his town doesn’t mean it was happening here too. And he fails to imagine it.

the image would not come. He could not see the green fields dotted with corpses, or the slow streams thick with blood.

This is some astonishingly stupid writing. Yushuv just saw the aftermath of a battle. He should have no trouble imagining corpses dotting the landscape because he just saw them dotting his village. So for this to be true, he has to not only have no imagination, but to have already half forgotten what he saw, in the way you forget the details of things that you don’t care about quite soon after looking at them.

Yushuv’s forehead is still glowing.

This is canon, although the claims it’s painful are odd. It’s actually a clever bit of the setting.

See, as I’ve mentioned, Solars get murdered when they appear. Part of exalting is that your anima flares up like a DBZ character, visible for miles. Your forehead will show your caste mark for quite a while after that, first glowing brightly, then less brightly, then just visible, and finally it’ll turn invisible. As you spend essence, you can go back up this scale, so that if you, say, attack a Dragonblood, in short order you’ll be glowy and obvious to everyone.

Now, this might sound like it really sucks in a world where people kill you if they know you’re an exalt. But Solars aren’t supposed to be hiding the fact they’re exalted. In a world before the Solars were getting murdered on sight, having a big marker saying HEY, NEW EXALT HERE GUYS was a good thing. The fact that exaltion is so amazingly ill-suited to the current setup is a nice reminder of how this is not how things were designed to go. (It also fits with how Solars, no matter what they do, will end up being noticed by virtue of what they are. Solars are meant to change the world by existing in it – the fact that doing things makes the air around you glow just drives in that you’re not the same as everyone else.)

It bore a resemblance, if he squinted hard enough, to the rising sun

…So. There’s five castes: Dawn, Zenith, Twilight, Night, Eclipse. Here is what they look like:

Now, if you know what you’re looking for, you can see how the Twilight one looks like the sun on the horizon – only half is filled in, like when the sun is cut in half by the horizon. From that, you might be able to guess that the full-gold is the full sun, ie, Zenith, and then the empty circle would be like the bottom half of the Twilight, indicating a lack of sun, or Night.

So, “risen sun”? Should be Twilight, actually, because there’s no way to know IC if it’s going up or down. The Dawn caste, which is what this is presumably talking about, is an empty circle with rays coming off it, making no sense in terms of how the rest work. And let’s not even get into the Eclipse caste, which makes the moon the golden one. I like them, but they’re really not intuitive.

Yushuv considers what’ll happen if anyone gets a good look under his bandana.

The reaction of the priest to his appearance, not to mention the word “Anathema,” gave him a clear idea of what his reception would be were his new nature to be discovered.

Because it’s not like this is widely known or anything. It’s only the ultimate point of the Immaculate Order and all.

You might think this explains his disinterest in the houses he’s passing, but it really doesn’t. Even if he believes he can’t risk going near people, he should still want to. That’s why he feels so incredibly flat, there’s no tension between what the best rational option is and how he feels. This is not unlike his leaving his beloved peasant village to rot and burn – looking at it in mechanical terms, there was nothing else he could benefit from there, and the book failed to consider that people don’t act based on what’s the most optimal path to the next plot point.

Anyway, he climbs a tree to rest for the night and eats some of the small amount of food he brought with him, thinking that he’ll need to find more somehow. Well, dumbass, you have two weapons and you’re passing by unattended sheep. Surely you can figure something out?

Shockingly, the chapter continues instead of jumping to Wren or something to talk about dreams. Yushuv wakes up the next morning and says he feels surprisingly good for someone who slept in a tree. Apparently he dreamt of beating wings but not all the deaths.

A glance at his reflection in the water made him marvel further; the shape he saw there moved effortlessly and smoothly, so unlike the clumsiness for which the other children had taunted him.

The fact he’s clumsy has never been mentioned before. What was mentioned was that he could run through the halls of corpses from one end to the other blindfolded, because he did so on a dare and managed to outrace his brother in the process. That suggests decent coordination.

It’s not quite a show/tell thing, but it’s related. You can’t really compare his current situation to his past and see the improvement, because we never saw that. We’re just told that now, his current situation is nebulously better.

Also he’s seeing this super clear, mirror-like reflection in a bubbling stream. Unless water has started functioning very differently since I last checked, that really doesn’t happen.

The second day’s travel passed much as the first had, though there was slightly more traffic along the road.

I spent a while pondering this.

See, why would there be more people on the road? This is a road connecting point A to point B, his tiny burned hometown to the nearest other collection of houses. He’s still midway between both points, so you’d expect the traffic to be relatively stable (and nonexistent). It’s possible the travelers are the people living in the intervening houses, but people who chose to live in the absolute middle of nowhere are generally set up so they don’t need to travel much, and the traffic shouldn’t increase when you’re in the middle of all things, that should be the deadest section. And it doesn’t seem like anyone else would be traveling to his tiny flyspeck town – and if they did, well, you’d expect Yushuv to have enough of a sense of community to at least think that he could go get help. His behavior is only even halfway reasonable if you assume visitors are relatively rare.

Yushuv explains that he hides every time he sees a dust cloud on the horizon, because I guess everyone else has horses or travels in large groups, and that he does this because he’s afraid of the stranger – not, as would at least make some sense, his worry about his forehead marking him as a demon.

Yushuv was quite certain that his continued survival was an error his father’s killer would gladly rectify

Which contradicts Ratcatcher’s first chapter behavior, where he says you have to leave someone so they can remember how badass and terrifying you were, as well as Ratcatcher’s behavior toward him.

Here’s what Yushuv knows: Ratcatcher knows that Yushuv is down there. He was hurt, but far from a fatal wound or even one that trapped him. He knows that Yushuv knows of and is next to one exit, the one below the temple. He knows that, should Ratcatcher have wanted to, he could have just killed Yushuv on the spot. When Yushuv comes out of the temple, he also must have noticed that there’s no sign Ratcatcher backtracked – he didn’t try to go back down to murder Yushuv.

There is, in other words, no reason to think Ratcatcher assumed he was dead or even intended it. Ratcatcher says he won’t kill Yushuv if Yushuv tells him the way out, then says that if Yushuv is smart, he’ll wait a little while before coming out into the temple and Yushuv does exactly what Ratcatcher says he should do and finds Ratcatcher gone.

The only counterpoint we have is that in Yushuv’s fever dream, Ratcatcher is startled and says he thought Yushuv died. And if we’re taking weird fever dreams as fact, then he might as well declare he’s invincible for the moment because Ratcatcher won’t even meet him again until returning to the tomb and getting the sword, at which point he’ll find the dagger and kill Ratcatcher.

When evening came, he killed a rabbit, wasting a pair of arrows in the process.

So the exalting alters him enough he’s suddenly supernaturally graceful, but his aim still sucks.

Let’s talk more about Exalted’s mechanics. Broadly, the specifics tend to lead to insanity. You have various skills and, in addition to charms that do some specific thing (like creating a sword out of thin air) there’s also excellencies. Excellencies, as the name suggests, allow you to be excellent at a given task – add extra dice/extra successes to whatever you’re doing . One success would be enough to kill a rabbit without any issue. Five is killing a dozen rabbits in a single shot while blindfolded and facing the other way. Shooting three arrows and losing two in the process for one rabbit? That would be called failure.

He found one, broken, and managed to kindle a small fire with its pieces.

This is not how fire works.

Kindling is fine twigs, not sticks. One stick, which is all an arrow would amount to, is not at all a significant component of any fire. (There are specially designed cookers where you can concentrate heat effectively with a small flame, but he has nothing like that.) I’m assuming for my sanity that other wood was at least involved in making this fire, but there’s no actual evidence of that in this book. And, of course, you’ll note there’s no mention of any fire starter or any form of tinder.

he spitted the carcass and roasted it as best he could. The result was half scorched, half nearly raw, but it tasted delicious.

Yushuv is a peasant. We’re even told when we go into his home that they cook over an open fire. Yet he doesn’t know how to cook on one? You can’t even excuse this with gender roles, because even ignoring that Exalted isn’t supposed to have strong gender roles, boys should at least know how to cook wild game over a fire.

As night fell, once again he climbed a tree and made his camp there, pausing only to pour water on his fire lest the smoke betray his position.

Let’s play how stupid is this! Some of you may be noticing the obvious, which is that pouring water on fires makes them smoke and you’re supposed to use dirt. Those of you poor souls who never were allowed to play with matches as children may recall this factoid from the occasional movie. I remember Jurrassic Park 2: Darwinism in Action had an entire conversation regarding water bad, dirt good. But that’s really only the tip of the stupid iceberg. Yushuv apparently has a smoky fire during the day, and only when the sky darkens and starts to hide the smoke does he think he should worry about it giving away his location. And despite the fact it’s getting dark, he has no worries about the fire itself helping people locate him, despite the fact one of the points of fire is that it gives off light and stands out in the darkness. And he’s apparently otherwise fine leaving a burning fire going despite the fact it seems relatively dry (there’s been no rain on anyone since the first chapter) because Yushuv thinks forest fires are fun.

But my favorite part of this is subtle, and only makes sense connected to my earlier complaint about tinder and a fire starter. Getting a fire going is somewhat hard and very time consuming. If you want a warm breakfast, and you are absolutely going to want a warm breakfast when you’re sleeping outside because mornings are cold, you want to be able to restart your fire quickly.

That’s why you bank the embers. Banking embers combines the many benefits of putting a fire out using dirt without actually losing all the heat and fire you worked so hard on. In fact, it’ll help make sure those are still there next morning instead of risking the fire burning out during the night when it runs out of fuel.

Or you could be a dumbfuck and soak the area, including the nice, dry, half-burnt sticks that would otherwise make starting a new fire really easy.

Anyway, Yushuv keeps traveling. We’re told he’s improving quickly at the bow, as if before this he sucked, despite the fact that if his dad had a bow Yushuv would have been getting trained in using it. Also, while exalts do improve in skill fast, a baseline exalt is, as I mentioned, already going to manage at least competency in anything. (Literally enforced – a character with no points in a skill suffers a significant penalty in attempting it…unless they’re an exalt, in which case there is no penalty and they can apply the rest of their dice to it normally as if they have minimum competency.)

and now evenings found him carving from willow branches rough arrows which nevertheless flew straight and true.

This is a better example. In theory, at least. In practice you make arrows out of saplings. I can grant him not being skilled in making arrows, barely, but he should at least understand the concept.

You know, all this would make far more sense if it wasn’t his dad’s bow. Then you could say that only a few people hunted and Yushuv’s family wasn’t one of them. Three arrows for one rabbit when you’ve never held a bow before is a suitable competence level for an exalt, and it’d explain him not knowing to make arrows.

He’s reached towns, multiple, by this point, and avoided them all.

At best he’d be a penniless stranger, another beggar boy on the streets.

Except he has skills.

We don’t know what the hell Yushuv’s family actually did, but presumably he would help out enough that he could try getting a food and shelter type deal for doing it for some other peasant family. And we know he’s murdering his way through the local rabbit population, so he could trade skins and meat. Plus he’s got the not +1 dagger he could sell, which is probably worth a good amount since it’s Shogonate manufacture. And he’s just noted that he’s improving at archery supernaturally fast, so he should be able to at least guess that if he gets a job, he’ll get better at whatever it is until he’s at least decent at it.

He doesn’t even need to stay in any of them. He could go in and check things out and leave again. But no. And he keeps avoiding everyone he sees on the road.

At times he wondered why he continued to do so, since each man or woman passing along the road seemed to do so with a studied indifference to anyone else who might share the way with them.

Because the author says so, Yushuv.

That’s the final line of the chapter. It cuts off pretty weirdly.

Structurally this was actually a pretty good chapter – the things it tries to do are things that it should be trying to do. It shows how Yushuv’s changing, sets him up as an archer, and moves him to a new area of the map. It even makes an attempt to continue Yushuv’s characterization – it does so terribly, but at least it tried to put the right pieces down.