Last time on so many characters, the fact Wren is a puny mortal finally caught up with him, even if we still have yet to see any exalts do actual impressive stuff.

Now, to Yushuv.

Yuyu has decided that sleeping is for chumps, years before Infernals introduced a fun charm to that effect.

He’d walked all night that night, and stayed awake to greet the dawn. The experience had calmed him, and somehow he felt stronger than if he had slept.

Actually, he’d make a good akuma for Adorjan, wouldn’t he? Likes to run around, weirdly detached from events, he’s even driven off by the priest screaming. This would be some lovely subtle foreshadowing. He’s even a boy who used to be a girl with a different name before getting killed, like she used to be Adrian.

Speaking of noise, he suddenly hears a voice telling him to get off the path.

“I won’t leave until you show yourself to me!” he shouted. “Why should I believe you?”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t. But what do you lose by listening to me? A few minutes’ walking? And you might gain your life.”

Or lose it. Brain eating chaos fairies, remember. They’re very into luring. Plus all manner of spirits can have a limited area they can actually affect while being extraordinarily powerful within it.

Proving that he’s honestly too dumb to live, this doesn’t even occur to Yushuv.

“I’m probably going to get myself bitten by a snake doing this,” he grumbled to himself, and choosing randomly, went off the road to the left.

Luckily it’s just his raiton friend.

Finally, Yushuv hears something from the road, and climbs a tree to see that it’s a Wyld Hunt. Considering how very loud they are and the fact Yushuv is still hiding from everyone just because, it’s a bit hard to see how much help the raiton really gave. It’d have worked fine if the author just hadn’t insisted on the hiding thing.

Riding past was a party of mounted warriors, clad in ornate armor and flying banners from their saddles that proclaimed their allegiance to the various Great Houses of the Realm.

Well, not really allegiance, more like relation. You can say that it’s not technically wrong, but it’s far vaguer and doesn’t get across how the Great Houses actually work – they’re kids of the Empress, and the kids of those kids, and so on. You can get into a house by marriage or literally being adopted by some existing member.

Yuyu suddenly wants to kill them.

Unconscious of doing so, he reached back to his quiver and pulled an arrow from it, sighting along its length to target the priest. His forehead burned, and his limbs trembled. Do it, a voice in his head whispered. Make them pay!

This would be the past lives thing kicking in.

As I mentioned, Exalted does not feature traditional reincarnation. Souls are recycled but they’re stripped of everything that’s you first. But when you exalt, a varying amount of the previous person comes with the shard.

I would personally discourage any of it being put in terms of actual voices, since a key part of this is that, from your perspective, it’s you. You remember this sword or this place or this person. You remember the glories of the past. You remember gutting a child because it bumped into you on the street. That last one is why it’s particularly important that things are perceived as you and not some other person in your head.

Anyway, before Yuyu can shoot they pass by and the murderous rage fades.

He took the arrow off the string and hugged the bow to himself, willing himself to be small and still lest they come back.

It’s nice to see some normal human emotions out of Yuyu. And even if he is a Solar, he’s still a baby one and a kid as well. He decides to stay in the tree and sleep until night, thinking he might be safer then.

And night, apparently, is what the raiton’s waiting for.

The bird easily dwarfed any bird Yushuv had ever seen. Its wings were longer than his arms, and it looked as if it could carry off a small child with neither fuss nor inconvenience. It cocked its head and looked at him, and Yushuv saw the unmistakable gleam of intelligence in its bright eyes.

Those of you who know Exalted might think this sounds like of like it’s a Lunar.

Lunars are the best. Solars exalt for trying to do something epic. Lunars exalt for surviving it. Like the Sidereals, they’re trying to protect Creation and have elders around since the first age. Unlike the Sidereals, they don’t go home to their penthouse and kick back to watch some magic TV after a day in the office, and their elders are various delicious flavors of fucked up. They survived the Usurpation in large part because surviving is what they do – their exaltations couldn’t be trapped at and to avoid the Sidereals’ ability to read fate, they dove headlong into the Wyld and spent centuries fighting against the monsters there and occasionally appearing to massacre chunks of the Shogunate realm. This shattered their castes and warped both their minds and bodies – so they now tattoo their bodies with metal to bind their form and their caste. They ruled the first age with the Solars, and share some of the blame for it. On the other hand, they’re also subject to a feature called solar bond, which means they’re the destined mate of a particular Solar. Optionally, players can put points into this and get a higher ranked version, which lets them get extra dice to help out that Solar and, uh, means they’re even more defenseless against social attacks from the Solar. Lunars get no breaks. But they also remember this, and many have taken precautions against the return of the Solars. A couple have even juryrigged a new charm to let them devour their bonded Solar and go up a level of essence for doing so.

So naturally, this isn’t a Lunar. It’s just some god.

Yuyu isn’t really thrilled by this and is quite suspicious, but he still gives it a gift of some of the last of his meat.

“You show respect, Yushuv, even when you don’t know that you are. You have honor. In this, you are much like your father.”

Remember that charm thingy he looted from his dad’s corpse?

“Did you give this to him?”
The raiton’s head bobbed up and down. “Bone wrapped in a dead man’s sinews, yes, I gave him that.

Huh, wonder if Yuyu knew what his little trinket was made of. Suitable for a raiton.

The bird explains that it’s its nature to talk in riddles and lies, but it’s actually pretty straightforward on every subject that matters.

“Your father was a heretic, you know. He worshiped the Hundred Gods more devoutly than the Immaculates would like, though the Immaculates themselves know we’re not gods at all.

Seriously, that’s just a term for someone worshiping anything outside the Immaculate religion, and they are so gods.

Riddle me that, boy-an Order founded to preserve order by lying about the order of things. It exalts those whose Exaltation is lesser, and casts down in the dirt those called to the heavens. On the whole, a most curious way of striving for perfection, do you not think?”

The vision of bronze was, and this is repeated often, about settling for the safest outcome, not the perfect one. The Sidereals knew that the best outcome of the bronze path was Creation being horribly diminished.

Also, just for the record, lesser just means in strength terms. The Order is striving for moral perfection and, as the Dragonblooded suffer from the weakest curse, are arguably right. Not that they go about it very well, but still.

Interestingly, the Dragonblooded are the only ones who really can strive for perfection. They’re capable of learning Celestial martial arts despite not being in the Celestial tier. It’s extremely hard for them and when the styles were still being fine-tuned numerous students accidentally knocked their own souls out during training. And they’re trying to find a way to get them to manage Sidereal martial arts, the highest tier.

Anyway, Yuyu says thinking wasn’t much encouraged where he lived. The bird rambles, and Yuyu complains he doesn’t understand, and the bird says it’s expositing for its own sake (ie, ours). He’ll get an actual teacher later and that guy can deal with the “actual information” business.

Yuyu wants to know what he’s supposed to do if the bird won’t tell him.

And…we get this thing:

“Ah, but you do know where you’re going, or at least where you think you are. Yes?”
“I.. .I thought that I did. I was following the dagger,” he ended, somewhat lamely. “But I don’t know where to look for it.”
“Then why did you choose this path? Every road, even the one leading to Qut Toloc ,has two directions to it. Why this one?”
“I don’t know.” In genuine puzzlement, he added, “It just felt right.”
“Ah. Then it was the right choice. You’ve made many choices, though you did not know you made them. You chose to bring water to the Immaculate, and to leave your home. You chose the path you took, and the manner in which you trod it, and you choose how you would make your parley with Bonecrack.”
“But I didn’t choose anything,” Yushuv cried. “I just did what felt right.”
Again, the raiton laughed. “And is that not making a choice? It is rather that you did not deliberate. You did not sit in counsel and stroke your beard and say great things of ponderous wisdom before coming to the conclusion you could have reached in an instant. Your purpose is clear, Yushuv. Hold fast to that.”

Yes, indeed.

Yushuv chose to tell Ratcatcher the way out and even warn him so he’d be prepared for the monks. He chose to drag his feet getting the water in the hopes the guy would die. He chose to threaten a dying man trying to crawl away from him. He chose to leave his home without doing anything to help the priest or looking for other survivors.

It felt right. Or perhaps more accurately, it felt easy. Yushuv here is learning that however he feels is the right thing to do. No need to actually think about it, no need to hold himself to any standard.

You know…I was wondering what purpose the raiton would have for encouraging a second age of Solar dominance. But it’s a carrion crow, whose token is made with bone and sinew. The Solars acting on their gut impulses must have been a wonderful time for it.

Then the raiton decides to give him a crash course on human history. The exalted beat the “enemies of the gods” and the gods said they could rule “the earth” in gratitude. The Celestial exalts, being stronger, were in charge.

The Unconquered Sun smiled down by day, and His sister Luna by night

She’s not his sister. Luna has no connection to the Sun, she does her own thing.

The raiton goes on to explain the Great Curse, despite the fact that in the setting, no one knows about it except presumably the Maiden of Secrets, possibly the god in charge of exaltation depending on how important you think he is, the neverborn themselves and maybe the deathlords, since they’re involved in redoing the Solar shards and part of that involved removing the curse.

This is really important. Both the Sidereals and the Lunars have noticed the mechanical effects of the curse, at least on the Solars, but they thought it was inevitable and theorized it had something to do with the Solars being the strongest exalts. That’s why the Sidereals murdered and boxed them, because they didn’t think there was any other solution. Once you figure out it’s a curse, you can undo it and Solars stop inevitably going insane. You can also fix the other exalt types, so Sidereals stop making terrible decisions in groups and Lunars stop channeling the stupid side of animals.

(Depending on your view of human nature and how charms function in the setting, curing the Great Curse either would fix practically everything or have no real effect on the actual problems Solars cause. Canon suggests that removing the Great Curse will help a lot.)

The raiton then says that they saw two things – killing the Solars meant there’d be some degree of peace, and not killing them led to blank nothing. There were actually three visions – the vision of gold was if they told the Solars things were going bad and needed to change, and it’s a jumble of possibility where either everything’s fixed or the Solars go crazy and murder everyone. The vision of bronze was when they murder the Solars, and it’s pretty straightforward. And the third vision is where they do nothing, and it’s a horrible nightmare landscape where everything’s been corrupted.

“So dissent was fomented among the Dragon-Blooded

This implies the Dragonblooded were stupid and only had issues because the Sidereals told them to. There was plenty of dissent already – as the servants of the Celestial exalted, they had a front row seat for the breakdowns – the Sidereals just happened to have a plan to go with it.

The raiton ends with a bit about how maybe the Sidereals were right, which is dumb because a page ago it was practically frothing over the Usurpation.

Then it explains to Yuyu that Yuyu’s a Solar and hunted, which I thought he’d already figured out. It adds that Ratcatcher is his enemy, although how it knows so much about an Abyssal’s exact comings and goings is unclear. It also identifies Ratcatcher as a Solar converted to Abyssal, though how the fuck it can tell is beyond me.

He may wish you to do the same. Or he may try to kill you. He may even do both. You benefit from having a nemesis who is somewhat muddled in his thinking.”
“He didn’t seem very muddled when I met him.” Yushuv’s tone was defensive.
“May I remind you that he let you live? A purer evil would not have done so. That makes him quite interesting, but less dangerous than he might be.

So I’ve been mentioning Ratcatcher’s weird semi-mercy as an interesting character trait, but when you put it that way suddenly it seems stupid and lame. And kind of sueish.

For some reason birdy then tells him about the Great Contagion, despite the fact people should remember that, followed by the brain eating chaos fairies invading in unheard of numbers, which, ditto.

“So what happened?”
“A very young officer, one of the Dragon-Blooded

Oh come on. Everyone knows the story of the Scarlet Empress.

Then when he’s finally told that it was her, Yushuv from the ass end of nowhere knows that she’s disappeared.

Exposition done, the bird says it’s done everything it can to hide him, but it won’t be enough, so be careful and wait for the person the Sun will send to guide him.

thank you, for everything you’ve done. I think I’ll miss you.”
The raiton threw back its head and cawed, loudly. “You think you’ll miss me? Oh, Yushuv, you are what the world has been waiting for all these years. Beloved of the Sun, and yet humble!

Tell him more about how superior and awesome he is, I’m sure that’ll help keep him levelheaded.