The Road Between Light and Dark: Off the Beaten Path (Exalted)

Alright, been a couple of weeks since I've done this, let's see if I still remember how...

Hey there, folks, and I welcome you back to Creation yet again! This is the first session of my group's Exalted series, "The Road Between Light and Dark." For those of you who missed my intro post, this is a game about a trio of heroes moving back and forth between Whitewall and Gethamane, protecting fellow travelers and people in the small settlements outside the protection of Whitewall and Gethamane. The previously-linked intro post has a quick introduction to our characters, so I'm not going to repeat all that here. 

(Though, of course, if one of my players sees this and I got something wrong because I'm still getting used to your characters and their names, let me know.)

Also, before I get us into it, in case you haven't heard, Onyx Path is running a crowdfunding campaign to do a fresh print run of the Trinity Continuum core, Trinity Continuum: Æon (which I worked on), and Scion: Origin, including a couple of updates to the text. If you want a traditionally-printed copy of those books, check out the link! (Move fast, it's a shorter than usual campaign.)

And now...

The story begins with a shot of the Traveler's Road, made of a glassy stone and lined by 8-foot high marble pillars at regular intervals. The road extends both north and south and connects to the sole gate allowing entry to the city of Whitewall, surrounded by 15-yard high stone walls. It's overcast, there's still snow on the ground, but that doesn't stop people from traveling every which way along the road -- spring has yet to arrive, but the days are getting longer and it's just over the horizon. 

It's early in the month of Ascending Water, and farmers and miners who've been hunkering down in the city's mundane and mystical protections during the winter are starting to filter out to surrounding villages and settlements to assess the damage, rebuild, and get to work feeding the city and mining the ores that pay for Whitewall's needs.

A group of beast of burden-pulled wagons travel north along the road, and the camera zooms in on these. First we come to Wandering Dawn, a rugged northerner in his 40's with blond hair and a beard, decked out in warm clothing and a variety of weapons as he follows the road on-foot with a steady stride. Trundling along at his side is his trained wolverine, Mollie (short for 'The Mauler of Man and Beast'). 

Next to him, Lecht drives a small horse-pulled wagon of their own. They're decked out in black, pale with white hair, very goth-looking by modern standards. They're currently regaling an accompanying merchant's bodyguard with all of the gross details of what goes into embalming a body, and the look on the guard's face makes it very clear that he didn't ask for any of this knowledge. (The merchant driving the wagon, a red-head in her 30's, is very amused by this.) As Lecht talks about the importance of packing bodies in salt to preserve them, Wandering Dawn comes up and reaches up to pat them on the back with a hearty chuckle.

"Who knew you could use salt for more than packing meat?" he asks with a big grin.

Lecht half-scowls. "What do you think people are?"

The camera pans over to a small caravan, kind of ramshackle, managed by a ragtag group of nomads-- most of them Northerners, but their clothing suggests a wide range of cultures. Their movements are focused around a carriage where a short, round man with a long, thin mustache and a 'chinspike' beard smokes a hookah. This is Stray Dog Serenade, and he is positively jubilant. He's just done a trip to reinforce protective shrines just south of Whitewall with a party, and now that he's traveling north again he's planning more parties. Lots of clamor and music come from him and his followers.

Lecht yells for Stray Dog Serenade to stop the music, and as the good-natured bickering continues, the camera pans up to a roadside sign with the title of the episode.

"Off the Beaten Path"

As the camera pans back to the group, everything grows darker as we transition to an after-sunset scene of a campfire with wagons about it. The weather's clear enough to see the half moon hanging in the sky, and signs of recent rainfall suggest that a few days have passed. Everyone's camped out on a wide, flat chunk of field next to the road, which is visible at the edge of the firelight. The marble pillars are gone, suggesting that some distance has definitely passed. Stray Dog Serenade's followers mingle with other travelers, and people are generally doing the 'keeping watch so some folks can try and get some sleep' schtick. Everyone's close enough to Whitewall that certain centuries-old pacts keep travelers safe during the day, but the sun has set and right now, anything goes.

We get a shot of Lecht in their wagon, suddenly sitting up, their supernatural senses tingling.

Outside, the group hears wailing coming from the forest on the other side of the road. While they haven't heard these particular sounds before, they're unmistakably the wails of the dead. Stray Dog sits up and scratches himself. "Always with the dead. Can't go anywhere," he comments as Lecht gets up and everyone starts getting into defensive positions. There is danger afoot, but random ghost attacks are a known quantity in the North. For anyone with experience moving on the local trade routes, this is a typical Saturnday night.

Wandering Dawn and Mollie get into position between the noncombatants and the incoming threat, the Solar coordinating the defense -- mostly consisting of those among Stray Dog's entourage who've clearly trashed their share of taverns and town squares. Meanwhile, the merchant whose bodyguard Lecht was grossing out earlier, Oguri, goes into her wagon where she's transporting spices, teas, medicines, and other things often kept in glass jars, and comes out with a sack of salt to start drawing a circle. Lecht steps up with a soulsteel and starmetal polearm -- The Grave Warden -- that has bone chimes on one end, and they bury the blade in the ground to plant the weapon into the center of camp. A ripple runs through the camp as it establishes a perimeter that isn't enough to keep everyone safe, but there's room for those who can't fight to huddle together and let the warriors handle this.

A handful of ghosts, plasmic and translucent, appear at the other side of the road, all of them muttering some variation of "So warm," "So bright," "So beautiful," "Where did he go?" Drawn by the firelight, and then by the sight of warm bodies, their moans and calls take on a darker, hungrier edge as they  begin to cross the road.

Wandering Dawn wastes little time -- he charges in with a spear and war cries, lashing out at them, watching their gaseous substance flow around the weapon with a little bit of resistance. Behind him, Lecth pulls their hood and cloak back and shrugs it off to reveal the priestly robes beneath, pulling the pin out of their hair and gathering up their power. They march up to the edge of the protective circle, arms turning translucent enough to see the bones, glowing green. Their nails grow out, and they take aim to blast mystical bolts of a sickly pale-green at the ghosts to try and scatter them.

Still sitting nearby, Stray Dog Serenade takes a big hit off of his hookah and when he speaks it's like the smoke forms the words in the air as he lazily gestures to the ghosts and addresses his flunkies. "Get them, my loves." Thus inspired, they rush forward into the handful of ghosts, yelling and swinging with clubs, and the sheer amount of chaos they inflict on the ghosts is enough to disperse the attack. Like I said, pretty standard hassle for a group like this. The sort of thing that wouldn't even happen on-camera, except...

There's a strange blue light out in the woods, a short distance away. Mollie, trained to pick up the scent of Wyld-mutated animals and such, is clearly disturbed -- though not to the degree she would be if this was an impending Wyld-beast attack. Lecht can't sense any more ghosts out there, but given that this stretch of road is relatively close to hills festooned with bordermarches everyone's on-guard.

Wandering Dawn suggests keeping a tight perimeter, and he sits for a bit with the night watch while everyone else mills about and takes care of the usual light night traveling caravan stuff.

A few hours pass, depicted as time-lapse of people zipping about the camp, keeping the fire up, watches rotating, etc., while Wandering Dawn sits nearly immobile by the edge of the road. With time to watch and stare, he realizes it's a series of lights, all about at waist-height. They're not moving or making any noise, and it's kind of a breezy night so he can tell they're definitely not flames of any sort -- though were it not for the steadiness of them, he'd assume it was a number of small blue-flamed candles.

After this time has passed, he has Mollie stay back while he picks up a rock and throws it through the middle of the lights to see what they do.

They don't react.

He frowns, considers, and grabs another rock and this time throws it at one of the lights. He beans it with a soft thud and it falls over -- along with another one, as if they're both attached to an object that just fell over.

He gets up and approaches the lights through the woods, leaving the warm camp fire behind. As he gets closer he can get a better look at the lights, and see what they're illuminating.

"By the Sun," he whispers in horror, as the camera pans over...

...to reveal a number of bodies. Human bodies, dead and frozen. All except for one (the one that Wanderer hit) kneel in a semi-circle, facing a spot next to a long-extinguished campfire. Their eyes, unblinking and unseeing, glow blue -- the lights seen from the distance.

To be continued...