Kicker/SharpPath
Brief and incomplete epistemilogical overview: The Perilous Bridge is a staple of the mythology of cultures the world over. In it's more recent, mystick/theological incarnation in the the west, it is the Sword Bridge. As it sounds, it is a bridge, that passes from this world to paradise, and all who walk upon it find everything of themselves not worthy of Heaven being sliced away. Yeah, I know, yuck.
Sharp Path is one of the more mysterious legacies of the first age. He was a prolific author, ranging across such disparate topics as geography, sorcery, animal husbandry, economics, the nature of Possession and the creation and application of political power. Thoughtful savants realize that his common thread was Social Science; He studied the impact that various factors have on a society's culture, and the impact of that culture on the society's future. Further, hapless travelers sometimes come across evidence that Sharp Path was not content with the dry theory of his written works. Throughout Creation can be found villages and tribes with natures and customs bizarre in the extreme, and every so often, those with supernatural aid discover nearby a viewing post, usually with a small library. The tone of the works therein are half self-congratulatory and half antiseptic, resembling that of an artist who is allowed to curate in the museum displaying his work. One book will detail Charms that can create and remove memories. Another will praise the efficacy of Mythology on shaping bizarre (and often painful) customs. Another will explain how widespread polygamy can increase a nations resistance to natural disasters. Another will be a book of childrens stories, the repeated reading of which to a newborn are proven to result in any number of effects (terrestrial exaltation, a given virtue at 4 or 1, being a successful serial killer). Almost every one of these books will be written in a different hand, for the secret of the power and ubiquity of Sharp Path is that he was not an individual, but an organization.
Perhaps there was a single person responsible for it. A bored, inhumanly powerful Eclipse, the minds of his lessers open books to him, books that, after a few centuries, he must have felt he had read through repeatedly. His true name name was almost certainly not Sharp Path, as outside of these libraries, there is no surviving record of any such Exalt. He and his brethren, against convention and almost against their natures, chose to be published under a pseudonym, and a collective one at that. They forsook their names, in part because their purpose was to create immense riddles for their successors in ages to come, their identities being an added facet to those conundrums, and in part so if (perhaps when) one of their exhibits grew to become a problem, they would retain some degree of deniability.
To judge from the written works, they were having more fun than ever before in their lives.
Coming Soon: Examples!
