Hey there, folks, I've got another Exalted post for you in my Sisyphean quest to try and get caught up while sessions are still happening.
Just as a quick note, I'm still looking for input and feedback regarding my recent post elsewhere on this blog.
And now, let's get into it!
So we pick up as the group is making their way down into the tunnels once more, planning to return to the room with the pit and work things out from there. It's just the three of them this time, as everybody's sidekicks are guarding the caravan. The tunnels, fortunately, don't move around as they were once told -- that was a case of Zephyr's sense of direction getting messed up by some unintentional magical feedback from the orrery in the Dragon King ruin. So the rough map they've got still works.
As they traverse the dark, damp Underways, Wandering Dawn holds a hand up to stop the group. He asks if Lecht has any combat magic that could shoot straight down the tunnel. Lecht asks why he'd want them to do that, and Dawn says he can hear chittering and clicking that he thinks is coming from a giant insect up ahead -- maybe a lot of them, it's tough to tell. He wants to hit them first hopefully wipe them out, or at worst give them an advantage.
Lecht plants their staff in the ground and gathers power, conjuring up blue spirit-flame. About the time they and Stray Dog can hear the sound, they unleash a necromantic version of Death of Obsidian Butterflies[0] down the tunnel, the obsidian insects wreathed in that blue fire. The flame lets the group get a look at the incoming attackers, for both better and worse -- human-sized centipedes seemingly chiseled out of onyx and black opal, their mandibles dripping mercury as they salivate. They skitter and scramble over the walls and ceiling as well as the floor, getting around the obsidian shards left behind by the spell.
"What the fuck?" Lecht shrieks in horror. "That's the last time I do you a favor!"
Lecht starts channeling their anima into readying another spell while Stray Dog immediately begins gathering power for his own. Wandering Dawn rushes forward with a spear, conjuring armor and a shield out of sunlight and giving off an inspiring golden aura as he puts himself between the bugs and the others.
This gives Stray Dog time to unleash his own swarm of Death of Obsidian Butterflies, which rush past Wandering Dawn and start tearing up the giant monster-bugs -- enough, in fact, that there are now gaps in the swarm big enough to see through. As Wandering Dawn tries to hold back the ones that are left, he takes his spear and swings it with a Solar power-infused burst to knock them all back since the confines of the tunnel allow for it, and that puts them in the right spot for Lecht to reignite the obsidian shards from their earlier spell to recast it, shredding many of the remaining bugs finely enough it's tough to guess how many there were to begin with.
"Good work, everyone," Wandering Dawn says as he catches his breath. Stray Dog says that's at least one less horror for the people above to contend with. Lecht gestures to the repurposed shards and comments that that's why necromancy is 'the art of using what's left behind.' Lecht then asks if that was the horror Dawn thinks was unleashed by their previous trip, but he's pretty sure he heard them in a side tunnel before and they managed to avoid them. He's pretty sure if anything's risen up, it was after they initially left the cave.
"Wonderful," Lecht sighs. "Let's move on."
And as the group does so, gingerly stepping past bits of giant onyx centipede, the camera dips down to give us the proper episode title 'written' out in still-twitching bug legs...
"Nightmare"
Soon enough they get back to the chamber where they fought the quicksilver monsters before, with the big open pit in the middle, everyone's animas glowing as they ready whatever powers they've got for a fight. There's no immediate threat, but as they approach the pit they can see a ring of black footprints -- like the ones in Wandering Dawn's dream -- circling the edge, with occasional deviations like someone stopped to look down.
They talk about going down themselves, working out the easiest ways to get to the bottom. Stray Dog uses his telekinesis to lower himself and Lecht down while Wandering Dawn reworks his glowing golden arsenal to produce a pair of daggers and uses them to climb down the side of the pit for as far as he can, the glowing armor leaving afterimages in the darkness. They get down to a ledge after several minutes to catch their breath and reorient themselves, and before landing Stray Dog spots a figure at the edge of the light and points them out to the others as he angles his descent towards them.
They approach a cloaked figure facing away, weeping, at the end of the trail of black footprints. The magic lantern the group has causes the figure to cast a translucent shadow -- they're still not entirely sure what that means, but they know it means whomever that is isn't human, and their first thought is a creature like Zephyr. As they approach, they hear the weeping and muttering and realize it's an old woman -- the one that Wandering Dawn saw in his dream.
Lecht remarks she doesn't seem dangerous at all, and Dawn says that Lecht can go talk to her, then. Lecht points out this is his nightmare, and Dawn accepts that and steps forward. The woman is weeping about how everyone's dead because of her, it's all her fault, she couldn't save them. Wandering Dawn, deciding not to fall for this again, throws his sunlight dagger at her. It hits her and she lets out a high-pitched scream like a howling wind that tears through him with an intense bitter cold that might have frozen a mundane man to death. She whirls around on him, producing a stone maul from nowhere.
"Who... how... you!" she hisses, confused.
"Me!" Wandering Dawn says, also confused.
"Us!" Stray Dog adds, not wanting to be left out.
"Just them," Lecht drily remarks.
Wandering Dawn says he saw her in his dreams, and Lecht comments "So you stabbed her in real life." He says he thought she was like Zephyr and would dissolve into mercury.
"I was in your dream, because I warned you to leave!" she hisses. "But it's too late; everyone's dead, they're all dead, you're dead, the Deliberative needs to be warned but it's too late! The Bureau has forgotten us or they didn't come!"
"Who's dead?" Dawn asks.
"The city!"
"Who's coming?"
"Something older than old, beyond your language. It thirsts for the Solar blood..." She focuses on Wandering Dawn. "It thirsts for your blood, but you can't be here, because you're dead, none of you were here, that's how it killed everyone."
"We're not dead, we're here... except maybe them," Dawn says, gesturing to Lecht -- who is in that state of simultaneously alive and dead in the same sense that Abyssal Exalted are.
"What year is it?" Lecht asks.
"Three-thousand, four hundred and seventy-five," she says, which doesn't conform to any calendar that any of them know.
Stray Dog asks his unwoven coadjutor that's part of his Exaltation what happened in that year, figuring the memories of Hell would understand the context, and he shares with the group the answer... that's the year the Usurpation started. He tells her the Solars were being killed, that's why they weren't there.
"I know they were being killed, because It came up for the Solar blood, but Heaven has forsaken us, and all I can do is warn those who could help, or blame those who let us die."
Lecht tells Wandering Dawn that she must have known him in a previous life, like he got eaten or something, and she butts in.
"There were no Solars here, they were all gone, and it came to feed on them and ate the people in the city instead."
"She's like Zephyr, an echo," Lecht comments, nonplussed. "Someone taken by the creature, and--"
"I AM NO SIMULACRUM!" she shrieks again, the wind picking up like she's at the center of a whirlwind and sending a surge of awful cold through Lecht's veins. "I am Reshan of the Inward Breath, one of the gods of Gethamane, and I watched everyone here die because I couldn't warn the Deliberative in time!"
She breaks off into mad cackles that devolve into tears, as Lecht remarks that she's gone mad. But they're still pretty sure she knows Wandering Dawn from a previous life, and asks who she thinks he is.
"I don't know him, but I know what he is -- a Solar, like how you are an Exigent, and..." She looks at Stray Dog. "You confuse me. You smell of two suns, and of the desert, and of the Yozis."
With the coadjutor's help, Stray Dog recognizes that Reshan is indeed one of the forgotten gods of Gethamane, honored in the nameless temples in the city, originally placed by the Solars to keep the air flowing and fresh in the underground city. He asks her if they should continue downwards, and she says they can't go down, it's too dangerous.
"I won't speak the creature's name," she says, fearful of drawing it's attention. "But I will say what it is..."
She pauses and continues.
"Hekatonkhire... the first of them..."[1]
And we pause on that for now.
[0]-- For those of you who don't know, ExEss establishes a list of 'Universal Spells' that can be cast with either sorcery or necromancy, with alternate versions and adjustments for some of them. Death of Obsidian Butterflies is on that list -- when Lecht has cast Flesh-Sloughing Wave in the past, that is in fact a 'variant' of DoOB available to them as a necromancer. Stray Dog using Flight of the Brilliant Raptor is the sorcery-specific 'variant.'
[1]-- In the context of Exalted, a hekatonkhire is a monstrous horror of the dead, a ghostly abomination that is dead but also cannot die, very much like a behemoth. They're the sort of horrible monsters you cannot take down with just a handful of young Exalts and some fragile sidekicks. For those of you familiar with the setting from prior editions and wondering, this is the same one that was beneath Gethamane in those books, or at least a version of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment