DariusSolluman/FallenSidereal

This passage comes from the hardcover limited edition Laws of Ascension rulebook, covering MET rules for Mage. It is printed against the scaly background that marked the original ads for Exalted.

If you don't like Exalted / World of Darkness crossover, deal and go away. I think it's neat :)

Whispers from the Exalted Ones

We are the voices of the time before this time. We are the fire that burns within you. We are your hand upon the locus of Creation, and your transfigurations.

Once, we were as great blazes, and now we are as the campfires of men. Once, we shaped the turnings of the heavens. Our destinies changed the destinies of men and ended kingdoms. Now we are made lesser, echoes of the greatness that once was, choked into silence by the doom our hands wrought.

Our story is one of hubris. Once, we were party to a crime so great that words cannot contain it. We laid our hands upon the pillars of Heaven, and our bloodied knives gave birth to death itself. Our payment was the power to shape the fates of men, and we took it, for we were young and proud in those days.

And the power we had gained brought us nothing but sorrow. We were senseless with our power. Our road to perdition was paved with a hundred curses, each worse than the last, brought down upon our heads by the sin that brought our might.

In penance, we sought to mend the ills of the world without realizing that we ourselves were sickend. A war raged over Creation's destiny. Blindly, we followed prophecies we ourselves had pronounced. Although the signs showed us that our pronouncements were in error, we closed our eyes to them. Surely, our vision was not in error. Rather the protents of ill omen were mirages. The signs we ignored must be only the anxious dreams of cowards and old women.

We were wrong, and the world was broken for our error. Since then, it has been the way of things. Ceaselessly, we strangle one another while the world around us grows ruddy with the sunset of Creation. As age piles upon age, our pride builds for us a mountain of murders so great that a man might stand upon it and have commerce with the sad and shabby things that once were gods.

This is our punishment. No good can come of this power that our sins won when the world was young. I have seen what must be done. I have spoken with the victims of our awful crime, as they lay sleeping in their tombs. I have set my face into the darkness.

I will bring justice to this world. I will return to those who are its rightful orders. They are not unforgiving, my new masters. In the dark places beneath the underworld, they will teach us the error of our ways.