I was never one of the first at anything. I was not the first Solar, I was not even the first from my part of the world. I was not the best Night Caste. The only real claim I ever had was that I was very good at surviving and hiding. I was in the middle of the pack in every way. I met with the Unconquered Sun, Luna, the Maidens, Autochthon and Gaia in a group and never on my own. There were all told 300 of us, 60 of each Caste and there were 700 Celestial Exalted.
The way you read it in the history books it was like we Exalted then we beat the Primordials and then we established the Solar Deliberative; that is just wrong, but it is a convienent lie that they like to tell the young and the newly Exalted. It was not like that at all. First of all there was a lot of time between the first Solar Exalt and the 300th. That is nothing when you think that we were the generals and the leaders of the armies and there were no armies when I first Exalted. There was the brothel pit, with the Terestrials constantly fucking in it. How do you get a million soldiers? Put their thousands in a pit and have them fuck for a century and then have their children fuck for a century more. There was a huge training time before we fought our first battle.
Autochthon he was plain when he told us what was what. His brethren were a lot more powerful than all of us put together, if he wanted to he could crush us all without a thought, but he did not want to, because we were precious to him. He told us that he made our exalted soul shard, each personally and he created a God whose sould job it was to administer them, Lytek. He told us many things including that when this shard was added to our Human Souls it created a special person who was capable of limitless possibility. He said that it was that limitlessness that was necessary to defeat his brothers and sisters in battle.
He told us why he had made us. It was because Everytime he made a race of people to populate the world, they were wiped out carelessly by his brothers. First his people he made were not sentient, but later they gained that and then they exceeded his last creation. Each try had been wiped clean from the world and he had to start over. It sounded a little petty in my ears like a tempertantrum, but then it was clear that the next time they decided to clean house, it would be the humans who disappeared. The ashfalls and the rain of blood and fire was merely unpleasant compared to what had happened in the past, like rivers turned to acid and then back again. In the past it was worse, the air was turned to smoke for a day or so and everything died. One day one of his brothers thought the world might look better flipped on its head and everything died. He and his sister, Gaia, was worried that it was going to happen again and soon so he made a pact with the Gods and he fashioned us.
As I said there was a lot of work to do. For a hundreds of years we trained; for hundreds of years we built and fashioned weapons for an army of millions; for hundreds of years we prepared. Very unlike what people think that we did. And people and friends died. People know the roles, the names of the Heroes who died in the Primordial War. School children learn their names and recite them. They learn our names and they honour us. They call it honour, but they don't praise the ones who died before the war. There is not an army in creation at any time of peace or war that has not had casualties training. Our bodies, the Exalted bodies were more durable and stronger and more powerful, but that does not mean that we did not die; we did die, but it was not in the way that Mortals died, it was in ways that Exalted died. Autochthonous said for us to learn to fight the powers, we had to have real challenges and this meant the real threat of death. He provided that threat. Perhaps it was that we remembered the brutality that we endured to become strong enough to defeat his brethren, that he decided to remove himself years after the war, before we thought to take revenge.
When the Exalted came back, after they re-Exalted, they had the memories of their former incarnation, better to learn the mistakes that lead to their deaths. I remember one who had not entered the Role of Heroes, the accounting of those who died in the War. There was one named Ashkaas, a Dawn Caste who moved to fight a danger that would have destroyed his unit a danger that would have obliterated a village they were in. He fought and died so that they could remove the innocent from the path. He is not on the Role and he was not the only one. The gods and the two others seem to forget why we are here, to protect the innocent. Of course my nievity is obvious in retrospect, the gods wanted to play with the big toys, Gaia wanted her body safe, Autochthon wanted his creations to last, but none of them were concerned for the individuals that we came from.
After the Terestrials had finished pushing out a few generations of soldiers we began to train them. Each of us took thousands of them and trained them, soldiers and assassins, craftsmen and sorcerers. We took those first million Terestrials and turned them in a few short decades into the greatest forces that had ever been seen. These soldiers would take on the foot soldiers of our enemies while the Celestials would take on the generals and the Primordials themselves. I myself, along with most of my Caste were the ones that killed and took over souls of the Primordials and learned their movement and weaknesses, because it would be foolish to rely on Autochthon and Gaia for that information. We stalked the streets of Yu-Shan ferreting out our goals and interests. Before reporting to our circles and then to the planners.
Autochthon built in the relationships to our souls, saying that we would be drawn to work in these groups and at our abilities would compliment each other. I will always remember my circle, we were Exalted all from the The same region of the world, we had all had been instrumental to our villages making the Hecatomb Sacrifice. We each were one of the first of our caste, but not the first either. We worked well together right in the beginning and we saved each other many times while training. And there were the the Lunars. We were each paired with one, one that was to be our mate. It was in the design. We were told that Luna had wanted it that way and in a way it made sense. The exalted of the Sun and the Moon were mated just as the Sun and the Moon were mated. For my part, I was attracted to my mate right as soon as I saw her. Which was a little odd, because I have always been attracted to men and she was not. Privately she told me the same thing, such was the power of the mystical pairings.
While my circle and I were worked well together, we trained for years in this way, I never quite worked as smoothly with them as I did with my mate after only a few months of introduction. Her name was Saljina, and she was from the West. Her totem was of a bat, but she quickly learned to take the forms of hundreds of animals. Together we crossed Creation spying on our targets and sometimes taking them out quickly and silently. Other times we worked as part of a larger team, five Solars and five Lunars, we were a formidable force. Our Twilight and No-Moon castes worked tirelessly to out fit our group. They practiced their skills by making Jade for the Terrestrials then moved on to us. Their art perfected, they produced some of the best early wonders, they in no way were matches of the creations made exalts with a thousand years to perfect their designs, but they were good enough for the job at hand. I still treasure those over the ones that came later.
Once we were fully trained we began to work on the masses of troops that were building up. We trained the Terrestrials. We trained mortals. We trained ourselves too. There was no point in being less prepared than we could be. When we were ready, finally ready the troops had been moved all over Creation and trained and equipped. We knew, that when it began, everything would change. There were about a million Terrestrials, all equipped and trained. There were the 700 Celestials and there were millions of mortals. There were a million Dragon Kings and there were millions of animals too. It was their fight as much as it was ours. Ironically, it was the people we fought for who could not fight in this war, unable to because the Primordials had made them that way.
The first part of the battle was to distract them, the Primordials. We had to fight them and make them notice us. We had to kill the major and middling souls of the Primordials. Autochthon explained it to us. We could not even hope to kill one of the Primordials even if we could attack one with all the power of a thousand times what we had; it could not be done. But each Primordial had lesser versions of himself, aspects of their personality that existed separately of the main body. Each of these bodies contained a portion of the Primordial's souls. Each one had about eight to thirteen souls, each Primordial had twenty or thirty souls. Each one of those lesser beings had a different configuration of souls and so each had different personalities and differences from the main, they were known as Third Circle Demons. They each in turn created different aspects that had two or three souls, Second Circle Demons, and lastly each of those had an infinite number of beings with only one soul, First Circle Demons. Autochthon explained that there was one soul that was only shared once with one of their lesser beings. This soul was called the fetch soul, and the being the Fetch Demon. Each Primordial was invulnerable, except if the Fetch was killed, then it would die too. The Primordials knew this flaw and were very secretive about which demon was the had the soul of the Primordial. Even Autochthon and Gaia would not reveal this to us, so it was very necessary to draw the Primordials into believing that there was a real threat to them, so that they would hide their most important soul.
The war was completely one sided for almost five years; the draw of the Games of Divinity that they played was so complete. It was only after the first of the Third Circle demons died that enough of the Primordials took notice that they lashed out upon Creation at the most obvious targets they new about, not the humans, but the Dragon Kings. Each team redoubled its efforts to corner and kill Third Circle Demons. It was then that we noticed which Third Circle Demons was moved behind into protective positions. The Primordials that took to the field were always victorious, what Autochthon told us was truth, five teams on each one in the field always ended with all twenty-five Solars and twenty-five Lunars dead.
The last ditch attack in the war was to storm Yu-Shan and destroy as many of the Third Circle Fetch Soul demons we had identified, we had found thirteen that we knew where they were hiding. The plan was to move a large force in and to send small strike teams of twelve Celestial Exalts to each location, five Solars, Five Lunars and two Sidereals. The force of nearly one hundred thousand Terrestrials stormed into Yu-Shan in a dozen locations and began the last conflict in the war. The battle was a gambit and it contained the bulk of the survivors that had started the war. Ultimately, the battle was a success, five Fetch Demons died, taking five Primordials to their doom and the realization that the rest were mortal too, stopped the conflict there. The price of the war was high on our side, fewer than one in ten Celestial exalt that started the conflict lived through to the end. The Terrestrials faired worse, where one in a hundred lived. Some of the the Lunars and Solars had exalted and were killed again before the end.
My circle lived through the worst of the great battles against the Primordials and we only failed at the very end. I failed. I could not save them. I should have died with them. They were not the only ones to die in that battle. Four of my circle died and all of our Lunar mates died as well. We knew the risks, but it seemed like the price was too high. The fetch demon we fought was being protected by its Primordial. We killed it, though in the very end and the Primordial fell from Yu-Shan and it fell through Creation making a very large hole all the way through.
The quiet that came at the end of the war was palpable. I just wanted to head home and rest, but I had no family. They had all died years before the war started. I had no connection left to the people there. Moreover, the devastation that was wrought upon the region had destroyed most of the terrain where I grew up. The river had moved. The ravine where I sacrificed my Hecatomb was bigger and filled with water. The sea had moved further away. The forests covered more of the land and the Savannas were infertile. For being victors in the war, I felt that we had lost. I was not alone in that sentiment.
Truthfully, few that entered the war left alive and those that did live were not fully intact. A few could not carry on after the war, but most of us carried on. There was a wave of Exaltations following the war and these new exalts would be the ones that would rebuild Creation. I dedicated myself to making sure the boarders of Creation remained intact from the spawn of Primordials, who could now only be invited back into Creation, I would not have the sacrifice of my fellows tarnished in any way.
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