Last time on Chosen of the Sun, the sun’s chosen sure are dicks. May your lunar mate eat your socipathic ass, Yushuv.
Now back to Ratcatcher.
In his dream, he saw the Prince, terrible and beautiful.
This reminds me, there is a tragic lack of gay in this book.
Like with women, Exalted tries with this, and I think they do a better job. (I mean, sure, there’s tragic dead gays everywhere, but it’s Exalted, there’s tragic dead everything.) Although I feel their more recent output has had a sharp downward turn – see Glories of the Most High: Did you know Luna’s a sexy lesbian who has lesbian sex (but would still totally fuck you!)? all that much.
It’s probably for the best, the Prince is kind of a poser and Ratcatcher’s a dumbass.
So, the Prince is invading Ratcatcher’s dream. Interestingly, this is exactly what happens to the Prince in the opening fiction of Abyssals. Only that was done by his deathlord. Also it involved sex, but I’ll let that part pass. I suppose you could have a charm to do this as an Abyssal, it’s just noteworthy to me that this is yet another point where the book is giving the signature Abyssal the powers his deathlord shows.
in the road before the Prince was a single dead rat with a golden blade through its belly. It opened its eyes and stood on its hind legs. With its forepaws, it drew forth the dagger from its gut, and presented it to the Prince, who took it gravely.
Then, because letting your writing stand on its own is for suckers, the rat turns and explains to Ratcatcher that the point is he’d better go see the Prince and tell what he’s learned. What Ratcatcher’s learned would appear to be “I can totally kill an entire temple full of monks fuck yes!” but as you may be able to guess by the +1 dagger showing up, it’s about the +1 sword.
And then Ratcatcher wakes up after being told he’s summoned by the Prince and says he’s summoned by the Prince.
The Prince of Shadows commanded that he dream no longer, and so his sleep was disturbed.
Terrible writing, it is terrible.
…and that’s the end of this chapter. It’s about a paragraph or two shorter than the one featuring the Prince.
On to Ch13 and Wren. Wren is hanging out in a knockoff version of Nexus that’s near Sijan with the idea they’ll take advantage of the traffic from all the people bringing the dead for funeral rites. That sounds surprisingly reasonable. Not sure if this place is canon, I don’t think so.
The place was just thrown up as fast as possible, so the buildings are constantly breaking down and being patched back up, and it’s full of dumb petty feuds. So Wren loves it.
it was something of a relief to him to once again be embroiled in the schemes of the petty, instead of those of the great. To cheat the cheaters, to unmask the swindlers this was surely part of his task as much as hauling his weary bones across the Realm at Kejak‘s whim.
I can almost hear Chejop shouting that no, it isn’t.
Wren is a mortal, of course, so it’s unlikely anything he does matters, but it’s just really funny to think he’s messing with the intricate game of destiny mousetrap the Sidereals are playing.
Since this book is boring, let’s talk about the Loom of Fate a bit.
In Exalted, they introduce things by talking about Fate and Destiny and all that, and then later you find out that this is basically all bunk. When they say you’re “fated” to do something, it means that’s what you feel like doing. The loom isn’t trying to make you do things, it’s just doing its best to predict what you’re going to want to do so it can then make sure reality works properly. It’s there to inforce causality – heating water makes it boil instead of freeze, actions produce reactions, you don’t fall into the sky. If you sit down shouting “FUCK YOU FATE I’M NOT GOING TO DO ANYTHING SCREW YOU” the loom put down your fate as “sitting on the floor shouting ‘FUCK YOU FATE I’M NOT DOING TO DO ANYTHING SCREW YOU'” Until Sidereals. Sidereals will have opinions about what you should be doing. You can’t be sitting there because you need to leave to the big city so you’ll be in this bar so that when Head of Silver, the Lunar Full Moon, goes on a killing spree, you’ll be collateral damage and you happen to look just like their beloved younger sibling, prompting the Lunar to stop and repent their violent ways and decide to spend their life helping others and while they’re distracted by that the Sidereals will jump in for the kill. And that’s why you get Destinies and have everything suddenly shoving you to leave your beloved peasant village.
My point is, in Exalted, when you ask, “Why is there suffering?” the answer is often “Sidereal office politics.” So it’s funny to think that some Sidereal is busy setting up destinies left and right for some convoluted plan and then Wren blunders in and fucks it all up because the guy was supposed to take the stolen goods to the market where he’d sell them to a peddler who’ll end up trying to sell it back to the Dragonblood they were stolen from and in the process of righteously lighting the peddler on fire the Dragonblood will set the building on fire, causing a local godblooded kid who likes playing hero to intervene, and in the process of saving everyone will meet their true love, but little do they know…
Wren’s point is, he doesn’t have a job lined up so he’s going to fuck around here doing good deeds because the writer didn’t get the memo that Chejop is not about random good deeds. He also says he’ll try meditating at the temple and wishing he was a better monk.
He was Kejak‘s creature, and had been groomed to be such since long before he’d known it. Often he wondered how far back Kejak‘s hand had touched him. His childhood? The night he’d decided to run away and join the Guild? He’d certainly had some sort of influence on the day Wren turned his back on that life, and had no doubt crafted the events that led Wren to the Order seeking refuge.
Now that you know about the loom, you may be realizing the answer here can be “before birth” but you forget that Wren, yet again, is a mortal and mortals suck. Also, there’s billions of them. You don’t need to manipulate their lives to get one you want, you can find one from the existing masses.
Wren’s slightly unsettled by the idea but gets back to looking for something to do in town.
And that’s the chapter. Nothing much happened but this did an okay job with characterization – it just treated priests as assholes a few chapters ago so now it’s making it clear Wren’s one of the good ones. There’s nothing much important here, but decent.