Last time on finally some exalting, Yushuv exalts. The Prince of Shadows is the next chapter’s viewpoint character! This book has never seen a viewpoint switch it didn’t love.

It’s an incredibly pointless chapter, but contains no lack of things not making sense. He wakes up in his bed and decides that he just knows something’s up, so he gets up and he’s naked because ??? and then goes for a walk without bothering with clothes.

In the hallway he finds a dying rat with a cut on its belly and somehow knows this means Ratcatcher, despite the fact it doesn’t make sense that Ratcatcher would be represented by a rat. I think you can fanwank an explanation for the symbolic part happening at all, though – when the Unconquered Sun fucked with the loom to produce the illusion/dream for Yuyu, he, like his Solars, did it by brute force instead of properly, causing there to be echos of the same situation happening in other areas of reality.

…and that’s the chapter.

In Ch11, we jump back to Yuyu, suggesting that the previous chapter was there just because the author wants to always switch viewpoints between a chapter.

It was morning when Yushuv awoke, though he had no idea how he knew this.

Canon! That is totally one of the random useless powers Solars get. I’m surprised this shows up when so much didn’t.

Yuyu is healed but feels like his forehead’s been branded. I think people don’t realize that brands are extremely painful things. He’s also no longer scared of the tomb. Instead he bows to the skeleton at the center. The ghosts are gone.

One wonders what the ghosts think of all this. Here they were trying to keep this sword out of anathema hands because the last anathema murdered so many with it, and then the mortal they find to help them promptly exalts as her replacement. The fact they made no attempt to finish him off can probably be taken as proof they were never capable of harming him.

Yuyu then loots a different corpse for a knife instead of taking the +1 sword.

At each intersection he took his knife, knelt, and carved a rayed half-circle into the floor, to indicate the direction from which he’d come. The process was laborious, but Yushuv was quite certain he’d need to return to this place, and as such was diligent about marking his trail

So he’s told over and over that BAD THINGS HAPPEN IF ANYONE FINDS THE SWORD therefore he marks his way in a showy manner that anyone else could follow. And does it using sun marks just in case they needed a clue that it’s the way to the magic gold sword they want.

Once he gets back to the upper area, he smells dead bodies and hears flies.

The massive doors to the temple had been tom from their hinges, and the hinges themselves were nearly ripped from the walls with the strain. One door lay on the floor in front of him, splintered wood marking its edges. The other was nowhere to be seen.

This is pretty cool but ends up not being utilized properly. We already know what did this, and it’s not even a particular surprise he did because Yushuv was assuming he’d murder everyone in the temple, and we don’t worry he’s still there at the end. So while Yuyu does the requisite detailing of the path of destruction left by Ratcatcher walking out of the temple, there isn’t the proper feeling of terror and suspense – he’s not struggling to reconstruct what happened because he’s never seen something like this, he’s not wondering about it, he’s not frightened that it might be still there when he gets to the end of the path of carnage. And neither does he feel any responsibility for it. It’s a shame because I really love these scenes.

Cadavers lay strewn in bedchambers, in hallways, in corridors and, on one memorable occasion, strewn across three rooms. Nor was the devastation limited to the living inhabitants of the temple. Tapestries were pulled down, urns smashed and murals defaced. Sacred incense had been stuffed in corpses’ mouths and then set alight, the sweetness of the scent mingling horribly with the stench of offal. But through it all, there was no sign of the stranger’s continued presence. Yushuv was alone. He knew this just as surely as he knew his name or the sound of his own voice, and so he walked unafraid through the temple, which had seemingly been reconsecrated as a shrine to death

I’m really not sure why it’s written like this. We spend paragraph upon paragraph on the violence and horror, but then the POV character just doesn’t give a shit, which undercuts it terribly.

But he goes on to up this and become the first character I really feel anything about:

In a way, this was all his fault. It was he who’d shown the stranger the way, and thus it was he who’d brought this death down upon them.

“In a way”

See, you can say Yushuv was under duress. But that wasn’t actually a factor in his decision. Instead, he thought that since the monks never did anything for him, why shouldn’t he send a monster up to kill them all? He doesn’t regret it in the slightest. And the most he’ll say now is that in a way, deliberately sending them this thing and warning it about them so it knew to be ready for a fight does make it kind of his fault.

And now?

Distantly, Yushuv felt that he should be feeling something: sadness or guilt or disgust. There was only quiet acceptance, and the nagging of the burning at his brow.

Well, it’s nice Yushuv has managed to forgive himself for his part in this. How mature and impressive he is to be able to accept the fact horrible things happened to other people.

With this sort of thing, it’s impossible to feel bad for him when he walks out and realizes Ratcatcher massacred the rest of the town too. What the fuck were you expecting? Anyone who’s going to kill a temple full of monks isn’t going to leave everyone else untouched.

This gets a reaction from Yushuv. He feels quiet acceptance over seeing agonized corpses in the temple, but dead bodies outside it finally gets actual tears. Barely, but at least it’s something.

Then one of the bodies on the steps grabs him by the leg.

Yushuv panics understandably, but it’s one of the many priests Ratcatcher gutted and left to die. This one hasn’t yet. The priest asks for water.

Miraculously, there was an unslashed skin of water in one of the priests’ quarters. Yushuv gingerly stepped over a corpse to get it, then walked back more slowly. Part of him hoped the priest would be dead by the time he returned; another part of him felt distantly ashamed for that feeling.

See, I really want to empathize with this. When people are dying and you can’t do anything about it, that’s stressful and you can just want it to be over with. But you should be more than “distantly” feeling bad about that, and you shouldn’t be dragging your feet hoping you can just wait until they die. That’s just incredibly, incredibly awful.

Yushuv also won’t get close to the poor guy when he finally does get back, so he ends up dropping it next to the priest. Luckily the guy still has the coordination to grab it and uncap it himself, because all Yushuv is doing now is staring without even a tinge of guilt over acting like this.

The priest finishes drinking and tells Yushuv to come closer and he’ll bless him.

We then watch what could be a great scene be completely fumbled.

Yushuv stood and swayed uncertainly. “You don’t want to bless me.”
The priest spat, bloodily. ‘‘It’s a dying man’s gift, boy. You don’t want to refuse it. Come here.”
Yushuv bowed his head, bowed to the inevitable, and walked forward. “Heh. That’s a good lad,” the priest said, and propped himself up further. Then, abruptly, his eyes widened in fear.
“You.. .” he said. “What are you?”
“I don’t know,” Yushuv said. “But I don’t think you want to bless me.”

See, if Yushuv hadn’t spent the whole chapter being the littlest glowing asshole and felt actual remorse for this, the whole blessing thing would make so much more sense. He could even think what he did was connected to his exaltation – he doesn’t know what’s going on, but he knows it happened after he sent the stranger up to murder everyone. Of course one of the people he got killed shouldn’t want to bless him. And feeling shame would be a much more sympathetic reason for wanting to keep away from the priest.

Anyway, the priest immediately assumes Yushuv, being an anathema, is in league with the other one, at which point the book flips into the standard poor Solars, unfairly hated and persecuted. Yushuv says he’s totally not and none of this is his fault, despite the fact it’s his fault. And now that the priest is terrified of him, he suddenly decides he wants to get right next to the guy even though moments ago he wouldn’t even get close enough to hand him a damn thing of water.

He’s no friend of mine. And I gave you water.” Relentlessly, Yushuv advanced down the steps.
“Lies! All lies!” He slid down another step, leaving a smear on the stone behind him. “I’ll take no water from you.” He spat vainly, his eyes fixed on the boy in front of him.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Yushuv knelt down, his face close to the man’s. “You think I’m a monster. I’m not. Yet. But people like you will do their best to make me one.”

No, Yushuv. You’re already doing fine with the monstrous thing all on your own.

You know, I’ve never actually watched a horribly injured person flail around hurting themselves worse trying to get away from me.

I have dealt with are injured dogs that just would not get that they were injured and needed to hold still and would try to rush over to you because they’re dogs and they’re excited and love you. I, and everyone I’ve ever seen, deal with this by rushing over first to try to get them to stop moving, because it’s upsetting to see a dog hurting itself like that. I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I’m relatively sure that seeing a dying person should be even more upsetting than an injured dog. It should hurt to see them moving and you should flinch and stop.

And even uninjured people – you see someone back away from you because they’re scared, isn’t your first impulse to stop? And yet here he’s making someone hurt because they’re so scared and trying to get away from him, and Yushuv doesn’t even break stride.

And this is why the Sidereals murdered you all and stuffed you in a box. Not because you’re the noble X-Men dealing with unfair prejudice. Because you’re monsters.

Yushuv goes on to prove me right. He walks off, ignoring the screaming priest. He sees friends dead in the street and doesn’t slow. It does not at any point occur to him that if the priest is alive there might be others he could help, because who cares about other people. Instead, he just goes to his house, which is empty – he does not consider if maybe that means his family ran and they’re still alive. He doesn’t consider if anyone escaped the slaughter, in fact. He just takes his stuff from the house.

He figures he’d best leave. The wolves will come soon to eat the corpses and Besides, he had no desire to live in this place; the ghost of the priests would no doubt haunt him after all.

Yes. The people you got killed might haunt you. What jerks.

I linked Keychain of Creation earlier and I’m doing so again because one of the characters faces a similar situation (minus the part where it’s all their fault) and instead spends their time burying the dead like the ghosts ask instead of leaving them to rot.

Why does the author write like this? Because protagonist-centered morality. The bodies, like the people, are meaningless except for how they inconvience him. The fact he caused this is minor but the fact a priest blames him (unfairly!) is major. He has no reason to stay, so he leaves.

But it’s also terrible plotting. See, Yushuv finally pulls out of his self-centeredness when he finds the body of his father on the road.

Until now he’d hoped, somehow, that his family had escaped. Here was proof they had not.

No, he hoped no such thing. If he’d thought they or anyone had escaped, he’d have looked for them or left some sign so they could find him. Indeed, you can tell in part because Yushuv hasn’t found his family, just one member of it, yet he’s still not interested in seeing if anyone else lives. What you see here is the author realizing that the way Yushuv is acting is completely at odds with how people behave, but the author really doesn’t want to bother with the way people behave because it’s harder to write than just long descriptions of violence and Yushuv thinking about how many fucks he doesn’t give.

Yushuv then justifies not bothering to bury his father’s body by seeing that his dad died a horrible death so he’d better leave in case the stranger comes back, despite the fact that he might as well say he doesn’t want to leave because what if he runs into the stranger, and also despite the fact that START FEELING GUILT YOU ASSHOLE. Instead he just loots his father’s corpse for a bow, a quiver of arrows, and a protective charm that didn’t do much good. The book may have a poor grasp of the Exalted setting, but it’s great at portraying PCs.

Yushuv set out at a trot. Behind him, a dying priest howled to the heavens for vengeance. As the boy vanished in the distance, the heavens kept their own counsel.

The heavens don’t give a fuck about right and wrong and are actually just a lot of asshole gods fighting for power and bribes. Their apathy toward Yushuv’s behavior means nothing.

The problems of this chapter really boil down to two things – failing to admit guilt and deciding to rush the plot. There really isn’t much of a time limit here. Nothing goes wrong if we say Yushuv stays here a few days, just long enough to burn the bodies. If you want to insist the priest was being unfair, for god’s sake show it, show Yushuv trying to see if anyone else is alive, show him trying to deal with the bodies while the priest screams curses. Show Yushuv going back again to bring him water and food even though the man hates him. Show the priest hating him and cursing him every minute until finally he dies and Yushuv has to collect his body as well, and only once he’s done everything he can should Yushuv leave.

Because that’s the right thing to do. And Yushuv’s supposed to be a hero.

…If that’s not enough, if we need this to be about poor Yushuv, fine. Have him at least try, and when night falls the ghosts blame him and he’s forced to flee.