Lexicon/CraneflySchool
Cranefly School, The
From the writings of Foundation Apex, archivist to Ledaal Visaren of Tuchara:
In the first years of their reign, before the founding of the Solar Deliberative, the Exalted developed their first theories of Essence flow. In the Early Resplendent Period of Essence study (often conflated with the so-called Age of Amarnath, named for the esthetic discipline that arose from the Amarnath art colony near Rathess), the proponents of the most successful theories began to develop and institutionalize their theories and practices. Among the foremost of these new institutions of higher learning was the Cranefly School.
Founded by the Night Caste scholar Xianxhu of Amarnath, the Cranefly School studied the flows and patterns of Essence in and around living things. Body, mind, spirit and soul all came beneath Xianxhu’s discerning eye, and he and his disciples refined their discoveries into magical wonders. The iron honeycomb, the jade fire ribbon and the soul bell all descend from the Cranefly School’s experiments.
Xianxhu’s administration of the Cranefly School lasted until well into the Late Resplendent Period. Not long after his disappearance (attributed in the celestial censor Lao Lao’s Record of Fallibility to an attempt to brave the Jade Pleasure Dome to examine the Games of Divinity), the school splintered into factions led by the No-Moon Fara Lightning-Paws and the Twilight Caste Miriannic Totati. In the end, the School’s respectable wealth of land, magical materials, writings and artifacts were turned over to the Academy of Devon not long before the overthrow of the corrupt Deliberative by the Dragon-Blooded.
The school’s name came from Xianxhu’s propensity for the use of riddles in the educational process. Sau Tolenn’s Accepted Works states that Xianxhu would only admit prospective students if they could answer, to his satisfaction, this question: “Why did the crane swallow the fly?” No reliable record of the accepted answer remains.
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