The Most Learned and Venerable Hai Sholosh took his duties very seriously, which is why Tanak Milam didn’t take him seriously at all. Had Sholosh known this, he probably would have disciplined his acolyte severely, but since he was fundamentally absorbed in his work, it worked out for the best for all concerned

When this is your opening, you know it’s not going to be a good chapter. This is commits the greatest sin of being overly wordy and smug about it.

We get a long explanation about the temple they’re at – it’s a cushy backwater, in short. And the guy is an elderly Dragonblood in semi-retirement who spent his previous years on illuminated manuscripts.

…The Immaculate Philosophy loathes iconography.

This is not an inconsistency between the book and the broader game, though. Exalted tends to have interesting tidbits that aren’t followed through on very well, so Immaculate monks are a slapped together mess of Western monks crossed with kung fu.

Anyway. He decided he wanted to spend his remaining years in divination because that’s what he first entered the Order to do so he figures it’ll prepare him for his next life, and they’re like sure whatever, so he does.

This raises a point, which is that I’m not sure how much divination the Order actually does. See, the whole thing is just the arm of the third hidden group of celestial-tier exalts, who get direct access to fate and super divination powers, and they can just give the orders for people to go deal with it. Having Dragonblooded diviners around would just make it obvious that the Order is somehow impossibly good at it, which would lead to them trying to sneak in to learn the secretly-not-a-Dragonblood’s methods, and then someone sees them gate off to Heaven while they’re supposedly divining in their room and must not be disturbed for the next eight hours.

Not that any of this was known at the time! Sidereals. So meta.

We then switch to our second viewpoint character, who’s in the exact same place. Or about to be. See, apparently he’s rather annoying, so he gets transferred there. The book decides to get even more ridiculously longwinded, culminating in:

Thus it was that a brilliant plan was conceived. To teach Milam humility, he would be placed under the authority of the humble Sholosh. To teach him patience, he would be removed to the sleepy temple at Trae Chanos. And to teach him that his elders and betters in the Order had seen a thousand like him come and go, and that he had best learn to behave himself if he ever wished to achieve a more desirable posting, he would be sent packing with no notice and less consideration.
In the end, it was decided that Milam, who had just attained the First Coil of the mysteries, would be sent to “study” under Sholosh, to assist him in his labors for the foreseeable future.

Terrible writing is terrible.

But you get the point. He’s less than pleased to be dragged into the whole divining thing, because he figures that anything important will be caught by the more skilled diviners.

We run into, at this point, one of the really common problems in fantasy – we’re reading it because magic is cool. So having a character sit and discuss how boring it all is doesn’t work well. The author seems to realize this and has the character suddenly develop an interest, but that doesn’t work well because it’s nonsensical he’d be sulking through dozens of divinations then conveniently decide it’s awesome right this moment.

The ritual isn’t anything particularly interesting, but it’s decently done. They use five instruments, which include jade, gold, and silver, and one of them is a rod carved from five different woods so cunningly that it seemed to have been taken whole from a single, miraculous tree. Interestingly they have to burn part of that to get ashes, which raises questions about how expensive this whole thing is, because the idea is to invoke the five elements.

So, the ashes go in a crystal bowl full of water. They’re supposed to form patterns, but the kid gets distracted and daydreams instead. Then, they put in a single drop of ink.

Immediately it began to dart back and forth, looking like nothing so much as a tadpole created from the stuff of night.

…tadpoles often look black in color, Mr. Purple Prose. Also, I think it probably looks more like a tadpole made of ink.

The idea is the ink will find the spot of some anathema’s appearance.

Now, I said I wouldn’t be harping on geography, but there’s a limit, okay. In terms of landmass, Creation is roughly twice Earth. There is a lot to map. The book says it’s only the Realm, which is narrowing it down from absolutely no way in hell to just no way in hell. Plus, the author seems to think “the Realm” means the same thing as all of Creation, because the little tadpole lands somewhere decidedly not in the Scarlet Empress’ domain.

Anyway, the little ink tadpole starts to move. Then everything goes wrong, because everything goes wrong!

The single dot of ink had been transformed. Where it had been was now a cloud of darkness spreading around the outside of the bowl, and the surface of the water now boiled and hissed.

Then ink shoots upward in a geyser and the bowl shatters into a million pieces.

When I first read this I thought it was the breaking of the jade prison and the events of the first chapter were happening in the future, because this seems exactly the sort of error divination should produce when the number of incoming exalts goes from one to one hundred fifty in the space of a single fuckup.

They didn’t see where it landed before the whole exploding thing, but that’s not going to stop Sholosh! Or, it’s not going to stop Sholosh from saying it won’t stop his underling, since it’s the kid who’ll actually be piecing back together the bowl in the hope there’ll be a mark where the spot is. You know, if you think it’s so incredibly important you might consider helping.

Sholosh comes back later while the poor kid is busy working and explains that while he hopes the other diviners noticed this, if they didn’t he can’t go to the Mouth of Peace without proof, despite lie detector charms that would easily verify he was telling the truth, and the bowl is probably about as easily faked as whatever it’d take to get around those lie detector charms.

I’m not sure why it didn’t just go the obvious route and say they need to repair the bowl so they’ll know what the location, because without that all they have to tell the Mouth of Peace is that something really bad happened or is happening or will happen soon somewhere in Creation. And the Mouth of Peace will point out that last year undead anathema turned an entire city into a necropolis and their unkillable ghost lord rode his entire castle into it on the back of the corpse of a behemouth, and that if the Realm isn’t doing anything about that, what exactly makes him think they have people free for running all over Creation searching for “something really bad”?

Also an issue – another charm Dragonblooded have is basically text messaging with magic. Even if somehow this guy doesn’t have one, someone nearby should, so it should be trivial to get someone to send a message that’s just asking if anyone else already got this result. It wouldn’t disrupt the plot at all, because they’d learn that no, no one has and they should bring the bowl.

Anyway, Shooshpap tells the kid that when he finishes the bowl he’ll get to go along to see the Mouth of Peace, yay!

A few hours later the kid’s dead. Hands covered in black and looks like he died in agony.

The sight that met his eyes as he reached his destination was not entirely unexpected, though it saddened him nonetheless.

So sure, you could say that this explains why he wasn’t working on the bowl, but in that case why sacrifice another Dragonblood to it? That’s why you have mortals around.

It’s actually not clear if they’re Dragonblood at this point, but he’s a fourth coil monk and able to discuss his placement with the Mouth of Peace, and the kid is assigned to him and allowed to do stuff like make eye contact, which strongly suggests he’s not a mortal. They’re both followers of the fire dragon’s path, as well.

He tries to close the corpse’s eyes.

In elegant and tiny characters, an unknown hand had scribed a warning in characters of blood on Milam’s eyes. The message was simple enough, a combination of dire threat and ominous prophecy, and it commanded its reader to bear word of its existence to the Mouth of Peace.

Creepy but doesn’t really make much setting sense. Powerful things may work with subtly when they need to, but there’s little in the setting that uses blatant effects on cryptic messages. Whatever thing is strong enough to do this, it’s probably got a nice house in Heaven and can go chat with one of the various Sidereals about whatever message it wants them to know (since the only reason for the Mouth of Peace to be told something important is so the Sidereal handlers learn it – look at the title a moment for the pun.)

He tells the other monks to burn the corpse, then checks out the bowl, which is now black. For some reason he knows that touching it is safe now that it’s killed someone, despite having no idea how any of this works or if its effects were a one time only thing. He then cuts his finger on the bowl, and decides the bowl must want a drop of his blood despite the fact that it must have already gotten contact with blood by cutting his finger.

The drop of blood fell. As it struck, the bowl rang like a bell, tolling for uncounted dead. A charnel smell filled the air, and the entire bowl turned the color of blood.

And then it stops. But now that the bowl isn’t solid black, he can see the one black spot that remains.

a sign that something foul was brewing in the wilds between Great Fork and Sijan. “But there’s nothing between Great Fork and Sijan,”

a) Great ForkS
b) Seriously Creation is absolutely huge. You don’t need to know the exact distance between these two places, because the official design policy explained that the marked cities were supposed to be jumping-off points surrounded by other locations, not small dots in a void of nothingness.

So he goes to find a map.

Stumpy, fat candles burned in every corner.

They. Have. Magic. Yes, it’s a fallen age, but I think not having open flames in a library is one of those things that, once learned, is easily remembered. This is not a sucky backwater, this is a cushy backwater.

The map that young Taphat had led him to had been made over three centuries earlier, so he could no longer be sure of its absolute accuracy.

Arg. Not only do they have magic, but even if they didn’t, this is written like all low tech societies function like the dark ages. Creation has a giant trading guild that covers most of its territory, and the Dragonblooded themselves need good maps so they know where to go to demand tribute. You can’t run a giant empire if you don’t know people exist!

Sure, this wouldn’t necessarily be centralized, but any local area would probably have more detailed maps of what’s around it. Since again, Dragonblooded have magic text messaging, it’d be relatively easy to contact the nearest city with those. They can’t email the map or anything, but they can at least tell you what’s there.

I realize that remembering people can communicate over long distances is a common problem, but this would have been so damn easy to edit in afterward, since it’s not going to affect the plot.

Anyway, so on the map is this tiny little scrap of a place called Qut Toloc and somehow he knows that’s the one. So, forgetting all that business about the bowl, he writes a letter to the Mouth of Peace.

Later, when he had finished the missive and chosen an initiate to bear it to the Palace Sublime, Hai Sholosh was informed that the divination bowl had miraculously crumbled to a pile of red dust, which had been swept up by the wind and mingled with the smoke from Milam’s pyre.

Creepy but once again really not working within the framework of how magic works in Exalted. It’s also a plot hole in that he was going on about how important the bowl was as proof, but now he doesn’t care it’s gone.

Everyone thinks that’s a bad sign. What, the part where the bowl exploded and then killed him for rebuilding it and then drank blood were fine, but turning into dust, that’s where you draw the line?

This was a long chapter, but most of it’s taken up by a lot of pointless description and time spent characterizing people who don’t matter – and to be clear, it’s the kind of shoddy characterization that’s boring to read about and only tolerable when necessary to build up to something later. “This kid is arrogant but might learn wait nevermind he’s dead”? Not good

The errors of this chapter are where the lack of Exalted is starting to really show. We’re on the second chapter and no one’s used any damn charms. Our surviving character seems to be a fire aspect, but wasn’t involved in the corpse burning and doesn’t use his charms to accomplish anything else. And the Dragonblooded are supersoldiers and this includes superlogistics, areas under their control never resemble isolated chunks of western Europe during the boring ages. You can’t run a continent sized empire demanding tribute from another continent’s worth of kingdoms while fighting a shadow war with three hundred furious celestrial tier exalts like that.

The whole of this chapter is D&D level. There’s big scary magic that isn’t really explained, because D&D can have magic effects without instantly being mobbed by enraged players demanding to be able to replicate it. They’re in an isolated monostary despite Dragonbloods having more options for communication than getting on a horse and riding to wherever it is. And the mysterious prophesy bit only makes sense if it’s some sort of xanados gambit where whatever god or such involved thinks it’d be more productive to send a bunch of confused Dragonblooded to the area than actually say what’s wrong to the group of exalts actually in charge of fate stuff.

But had that been the intent? Lovely things. After the whole rope to hang themselves with thing, another fun part of the setting is that no one has any idea what’s going on. All groups in Exalted are smug about how unlike those rubes, they know the secret truth, but even the secret conspiracy master exalts behind all those groups don’t actually know.

So. The Dragonblooded doesn’t know that this message is fishy as hell. Neither does he think anything of the fact he’s loudly and repeatedly mentioned what a huge deal the divination was and blah blah mouth of peace blah we’re all doomed, because it’s not like real people were around to overhear, just a bunch of mortals who know not to mess with things involving their betters.

How fast would this rumor travel? Pretty fast, I’d say. Remember, divination actually works and everyone knows it, plus the Dragonblooded have convinced everyone they’re basically gods. He then looked up something in a map of the Scavenger Lands, and what happened in the Scavenger Lands? Why, that would be the whole necropolis thing. Five minutes later you have a lot of people convinced that they’re the next target and the walking dead are about to boil up under their feet. Or throw in a couple more messages and signs to tilt them toward whatever other rumor you want – like that it marked the Scarlet Empress’ death, that’d sure go over well.

Meanwhile, he’s absolutely convinced that he did the divination right, and even says that if the Mouth of Peace tries to brush him off he’s just going to keep insisting louder. So if they do that it’s either fate ninja him to death (and they’re kind of busy) or let him start another rumormill among the Dragonblooded and mortals who hear about it there. Plus, they don’t know what’s going on with the prophesy in the first place, so they’ll want to check it out, and the place is probably a nasty snarl in the loom of fate so they can’t check on it remotely. (Or worse, everything looks absolutely fine.) So they really have no choice but to send out a bunch of Dragonblooded to search the area, even though they know it’s some sort of trap, and the only real options are if they send expendables or go the opposite route and load the team up with secret fate ninja in the hopes they can take out whatever was trying to trick Dragonblooded into the place, unless of course that’s what it was expecting them to do… And all the while keeping an eye out in case this is all trying to distract them from something else.