TenThousandBrokenDreams/Sidereals
Sidereal Exalted in TTBD
In the lead-up to the Usurpation, the Sidereals considered how to prevent the Solars from being reborn in new bodies. They considered sealing all of the Solar shards in a single prison of jade, but eventually they discarded the plan. The risk involved was too great. What if some force overwhelmed whatever guard they set upon the prison and released all of the shards at once? Instead, they chose to seal each shard in its own separate prison, crafted from the Five Magical Materials and encapsulated in white jade, and to send each to a different place so that no single disaster could sunder them all. Some were placed in the care of mighty spirits, and others secured in hidden tombs warded with automata and potent spells. But most of the soul vessels were distributed among the Sidereal Exalted themselves, placed in their charge to watch over for all eternity.
A few Solars escaped the initial purge, while some others died in inauspicious circumstances such that the Sidereals failed to catch and imprison their shards, allowing them to reincarnate elsewhere in Creation. In many of these cases, rebellious Sidereals sabotaged the work of their brethren and allowed Solars to go free. These Sidereals had never agreed with the rightness of the Usurpation. In the debates leading up to that dreadful day, their fellows dubbed them the Gold Faction for their loyalty to the golden monarchs of the Realm, and no few of them chose to flee with their Solar masters. The Wyld Hunt caught Sidereals as well as Solars in those days.
As the years passed and the Dragon-Blooded Shogunate secured its hold, the Wyld Hunt continued to winnow the ranks of the surviving renegades. The survivors fled beyond the reach of the Hunt, into the Underworld and the fringes of the Wyld, seeking such safety as they could muster. The Gold Sidereals warded themselves and their Solar allies as best they could, and so they lingered on through the years, occasionally venturing a stand against the Shogunate, and always punished for it by the mailed fist of Terrestrial might.
Then came the Contagion.
In a matter of weeks, the Realm crumbled into terrified knots of order in a sea of anarchy and death. Even the Exalted were not proof against the plague, nor against the legions of Fair Folk that marched in from the Wyld to lay waste to Creation. Those Sidereals that survived the plague struggled to set things right. Five of them led the expedition into the Imperial Manse to reactivate the defense grid; the mission succeeded, but only a single Dragon-Blooded guard reached the control systems alive. Mastering the defense grid and the other powers of the Manse, she emerged as the most powerful woman in Creation: the Scarlet Empress.
This was not part of the plan.
Insofar as the Sidereals had considered the matter, they had assumed that the Shogunate would return to power and things would continue as if nothing had changed. The rise of the Empress burst that bubble, and forced certain flaws inherent in the Sidereal alliance to a head. Chejop Kejak and his adherents battened onto the newly fledged Empress, seeing an opportunity to expand their influence in the Realm and increase their ability to suppress any further attempts by the surviving Solars to reclaim their thrones. Others were not so pleased. Some saw it as a second betrayal, this time of the blood-rights of the remaining heirs to the Shogunate. Others remembered the golden years of the First Age, before the Usurpation, and opposed any plan that would sink Creation further into a perpetual dark age as a matter of policy. Breaking with Chejop Kejak, these Sidereals turned their back on the newborn Scarlet Realm and traveled into the Threshold to pursue their own agendas.
The deserter Sidereals named themselves the Jade Faction, while those who adhered to the Empress were called the Scarlet Faction. The Jade Sidereals were few in number and might have amounted to little, but for the effects of the Contagion itself. Never before, even during the Usurpation had so many Sidereals perished in so short a time, and for the first time, the Maidens’ Chosen were unable to retrieve them all in the days immediately after their Exaltations. Many new Sidereals wandered about for years before they met their kin, thus escaping the indoctrination so common to new Celestial Exalts, and as most Exalted in the Threshold, they found their way into the hands of the Jade Faction. The Scarlet Faction still contains the majority of all Sidereal Exalts, but not by much.
The Jade Faction established themselves in Lookshy, the last seat of the Shogunate’s might, and labored to maintain its strength, its customs, and its independence. For seven centuries they have devoted themselves to the defense of Lookshy and the River Province, acting as a bulwark against the Realm’s growth into the Scavenger Lands.
In the wake of the Contagion, certain surviving members of the Gold Faction saw an opening, a shift in the balance of power, and moved to seize the opportunity thus afforded them. They gathered under the aegis of a mighty city spirit of the East, seizing power and installing themselves as a ruling council. And so the Gold Faction became the rulers of Nexus under the very nose of the nascent Scarlet Realm. The struggle between the Jade and Scarlet Factions and the Realm’s failed wars against Lookshy gave the Gold Faction the time it needed to consolidate its power. In the Scavenger Lands, and particularly within the confines of Nexus itself, that power is considerable.
The three Sidereal factions are very different, and very much at odds. The Scarlet Faction seeks order and stability at all costs, and has thrown its power behind the Scarlet Throne. The Sidereals of the Jade Faction are a more disparate lot, almost all of its members having Exalted in the Threshold and holding little love for the Realm in their hearts. All agree that the Dynasty must be overthrown, but there is little agreement on what should take its place, though a few elder Sidereals still hope to restore the Shogunate, having saved the heirs to the Shogunate and protected their lineage these past seven centuries. As for the Gold Faction, they have little power or influence. Many have given up hope on the Solar Exalted and thrown in their lot with the Jade Faction; the rest lurk in hidden places or maintain their quiet rule in Nexus.
Of course, not all Sidereals affiliate themselves with any of these factions. Some have aligned themselves with the surviving Lunars; others of their kind refer to them disparagingly as the "Silver Faction," but they cannot be said to be a faction of any sort, due to their dispersal among the insular Lunar elders. Others are outcastes, remaining aloof from their fellows in hidden sanctuaries. And perhaps the largest of all Sidereal groups holds itself above all these factions, remaining in Yu-Shan and seeing to the proper function of what remains of the Celestial Bureaucracy.
