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Welcome to Exalted: Sunset on the Blessed Isle

01:14, 29th March 2024 (GMT+0)

Exalted: Sunset on the Blessed Isle

The orca is impossibly large, the kind of beast a sailor describes after a night of hard drinking or in fevered delirium. Such is the scale that it is hard, at first, to tell the creature is moving. It is, though descending from the sunlit reaches toward the broken remains of a First Age city, long hidden beneath the West's waves.

As the orca breaches the city's broken shell, it becomes a man. The trident in his hands is wrought of moonsilver and jade, and though much of Creation has forgotten, it is named "Islebreaker."



Graves in Thorns are prizes for those who can win them, anchors for those souls chosen to serve the Mask of Winters beyond the frail thread of their mortal lives.

The rest? Their bodies serve and their souls go to the forges.

Juggernaut has been rotting outside the city for years now, but there are some who yet walk the long circuit around the animated behemoth: the would-be champions of the city, dragon-blooded who had ridden to face down the dead and instead been trodden beneath their feet. Their corpses walked steadily, rotten enough now that even the flies leave them alone. They are clad still in jade and steel, though the armor shows the wounds that killed them.




Tepet had broken itself trying to wrestle down the Bull of the North, but the Realm still stands. The anathema warlord did not know idleness before his curse had descended, and he does not know it now. Yurgen Kaneko has a hunter's patience. Let the wounded prey tire itself, remain in readiness as it bleeds. Then, when it is exhausted, snap its neck, drive a spear through its heart.

He has raised armies from chaff and necessity. Now, he builds to endure, works to marshal a force that might march all the way to Nexus and hold all the territory it claims along the way.



Sana rarely introduces herself as a Cynis any longer. This is not because she fears aggravating her neighbors in Great Forks. Rather, she has begun to think of herself in the same terms as Sesus. Or Ragara. Or Cynis herself. (Not yet Mnemon, for even Sana's pretensions have boundaries.) She's training her young daughter to introduce herself as Sana Vorona (the latter a nod to the girl's father).

Sana is building something here in the Threshold, something that's aspiring neither to be Lookshy nor the Imperial City. Her parties are already becoming legendary in their combination of hedonism, business, and diplomacy. Outcastes and expatriates alike have come to buy properties, pledging alliance (or at least neutrality) to Decadence's ruling gods in the process. Some have brought spouses. Others have agreed to betrothals. Sana tells them--the ones who have ears to hear, anyway--that they are the cleverest, wealthiest refugees Creation has ever seen. It's just that the war they're fleeing hasn't yet begun.




Mnemon has not spent four centuries puzzling out the secrets of Empire and Creation to plan a wedding.

She has spent four centuries puzzling out the secrets of Empire and Creation to plan this wedding. Some of the arrangements have been hasty, completed only in the last few years after her mother disappeared again. Others have taken decades, growing from seeds planted two centuries before. This fivefold wedding will secure the allies necessary for Mnemon to claim the Scarlet Throne when the regency ends.

The cost in blood and favors has bankrupted kingdoms and left satraps ruined. Mnemon has pushed and pulled against all the assorted forces that resent her strength, her House's strength, those that fear that Mnemon will be a more active, decisive authority on the Scarlet Throne than her aloof mother.

After this wedding? They will not fear. They will know.



Sesus Neva stares across her captain's desk. "Lintha."

The smiling Water Aspect keeps his dead eyes on her. "Or raksha. Or one of the Moon Mad. It will be something suitably heroic. Unless you care to retire gracefully?"

Neva is no fool. "If your masters meant to give me that chance, they wouldn't have sent you."

The man's smile does not waver. "This is true. It's now only a matter of dignity. And blood, perhaps."

"Damn right there will be blood. You--"

She has her daiklave halfway out of its sheath when the assassin vanishes from her sight. She has managed to draw it a handspan further when the dagger's point finds the hollow between her neck and shoulder. For one of Pasiap's heirs, it is far from a mortal blow. The grand captain instinctively thrusts herself backwards, toppling the chair and sending her assailant back against the cabin's wall. Wave-shatterer at last comes into open air, but Neva quails at the effort it takes to bring the daiklave up to a proper guard position.

"Stalling," she manages to choke out around the constriction in her throat.

The answer comes from shadows that should not be deep enough to hold a man. "And making sure. Your dinner was dosed with enough red urchin to kill a yeddim, but we have not moved so patiently only to fail in underestimating our enemies."

Neva's aura flares as her body tries to fight the poison and the wound. Alone, she might manage it. The assassin has not lied, though, about his mission. Again and again, he and his dagger emerge from the shadows. Every time, he draws blood.




Cathak Cainan sets the letter aflame with a brush of Hesiesh's gifts. It had all been coded, of course, polite nothings from an old hearthmate continuing a conversation that has played out over so many of Cainan's long years of Imperial service. Rarely has their correspondence held such weight, though, and rarely have the general's best choices seemed so poor.

Wearily, he shakes the ash from his fingertips. His eyes go to the wall of this, his private office, and the map of the Imperial City that hangs there. It's a favorite pastime of Legion commanders to game out attack and defense of the Scarlet Empire's capitol. He has argued with his peers about gates and avenues, about the manses and fortifications. Arguments made while sipping wine or tea, arguments that have been academic.

Always academic. The letter that's already nothing means that they are about to become decidedly less so...