The Garden
The Garden
Cynis Otalor was always a bit twisted, even by Cynis standards. She was overly bright, and did very well in the Heptagram, where her charisma and force of personality made her friends of many others, almost all Wood Aspects like herself. Unfortunately, she attracted those whose mindsets were quite easy to twist into shapes quite similar to her own, meaning she not only had encouragement from her peers to do new research in whatever direction she wanted, she had ample help.
Her father, Sesus Kodag, died shortly after her Exaltation in Primary School. He had accumulated quite a fortune in his short life (by Exalted standards), and Otalor received quite a hefty sum in inheritance. This she put use to research.
As a newly Exalted, she had once wondered what quality followed bloodlines, increasing the probability of Exalted members in a bloodline. When she went to the Heptagram, she took along several books from her father's items: family tree records for House Sesus and House Cynis, and books on proper calculation of how productive a given coupling will be in Dragon-blooded Exaltations. The ideas and principles she hypothesized from her reading led her research once she graduated.
The Garden is her masterpiece, a small settlement in the Southwest jungles. It was founded twenty-five years ago by her and several Wood-aspected friends who agreed with her noble goal.. There, separated from the Realm, she was free to conduct her research into the inheritance of Dragon-Blooded Exaltation, to perfect her system, and to prove her ideas that a single Aspect can be bred for, weeding the other elements out of the bloodline. She spent her inheritance in entirety on this concept, believing it would pay out. Five years later, she returned from the Isle and had to beg for a loan from her House, who gave her one begrudgingly.
To this date, she has successfully "bred" 300 Wood-Aspected Dragon-Blooded, all given Cynis family names, and has 500 more children who are believed to Exalt. By all standards, House Cynis could not be anymore pleased. The Exalts, ranging from twenty years old to ten years old, have been raised and educated at the Garden, and House Cynis has gladly brought a dozen of them back to Blessed Isle, and placed them in suitable professions (keeping their origin secret, of course). Something is amiss, though. These Dragon-Blooded seem angry, almost raging, and at times they seem afflicted with madness. It's been attributed to them growing up as a "farmed" Dynast, but others are beginning to wonder.
Cynis Otalor is not mother to these Dragon-Blooded, although she certainly treats them as if they were her children. Her House knows she had different Wood-Aspected Dynasts impregnate slaves as part of a paid volunteer program, and those slaves and their children were taken to The Garden. What the House doesn't know is that there are dark problems in her work that stretches much beyond that.
A look at Otalor's personal breeding records (not the ones she shows House Cynis) presents one easily spotted problem: Most of the children are results of male/male or female/female unions, which are obviously impossible… without the help of Neomah demon courtesans. That in itself would be a worrying point, but it gets much worse.
Originally, Otalor had gleamed some interesting ideas about Dragon-Blooded bloodlines from her research, and those principles were the basis for her original research. Using a few hundred slaves and some Dynasts as paid volunteers (as a starting point), she worked diligently to recreate a very rich breeding stock from a very poor breeding stock (half-Dynastic, half-slave blood). The proximity of the Garden to the Elemental Pole of Wood was an important part of her calculations. After five years of raising her starting stock, though, a jungle plague killed most of the children and their mothers. Otalor was assailed by doubts of seeing her plans through. The results would not come fast enough. She returned to the Isle and petitioned her House for a larger loan, and used most of it to buy offerings and new slaves.
Using Neomah to breed a new population of children from herself and her assistants (all well bred Wood Aspects), she then attempted in every way to contact a more powerful demon. Resaht, He Who Makes Churls Wither, answered. Her initial sacrifices (the remains of her original breeding stock and the offerings she bought in the Realm) made him complacent, and he agreed to “help” Cynis Otalor out if she agreed to keep him satisfied with bloodied sacrifice.
There have been seventy-four children at The Garden who did not Exalt as Wood Aspects, since Resaht began to bless and alter the babies. Most Exalted as some other Aspect, or were merely mortal. Each one was taken to a nearby First Age ruins, where Otalor and her lieutenants had made a hidden shrine to Resaht, and the child was made into a sacrifice. Their bodies were skinned and dissected, and left to hang in the dawn winds from tree vines. The bones fall to the ground, are ground to dust under the stars and then scattered into a burning hearth.
Recently, Otalor's Garden has begun to fall apart. Young, unExalted children keep being found heading for the ruins, playing around in the jungle. An Immaculate Monk, traveling through on his way to Rathess, stopped at the Garden, Otalor and her lieutenants put on a masquerade of proper Immaculate thinking. He was found beaten to death in the recess grounds, as Exalted children fed on his flesh. Otalor and her associates went mad with fear of their young charges. All around them, the Exalted children and unExalted children are falling under a dark power, doing Resaht's dirty work and becoming his pawns. If House Cynis finds out that there are now 300 young Dragon-Blooded of House Cnyis who have been tainted and maddened with demonic power, the results for Otalor could be disastrous.
--KingLeon
