LoreOneExalted/GodsGreatCurse
If there is one thing that the war against the Primordials made clear, it is that the Gods are greedier. They want Creation for themselves, and have no desire to share it with anyone. How then can we reconcile this with accounts of the First Age, when the Solars ruled over the gods themselves to organize Creation? It's very simple. The gods took to heart the lessons the Primordials failed to learn, and made sure not to build something that could destroy them.
When building the Exalted, the gods had two conflicting goals. They needed a weapon that was powerful enough to defeat the Primordials. Moreover, they have to give up all control over that weapon, in order to keep the Primordials from simply ordering them to stop the rebellion. However, any weapon powerful enough to destroy their masters would also be easily able to kill the gods as well. Even if the Exalted were loyal, the rebellion shows that the gods were greedy. Their weapon would be powerful enough to force them to treat it as an equal. The gods weren't going through all the trouble to destroy their masters just to share Creation.
To solve this, the gods took Autocthon's designs and twisted them to be not quite perfect. Every time a shard exalted a mortal, the melding of the divine power with mere mortal Essence wore away a tiny bit of the shard. Over time, the shards would tear themselves into nothingness on mortal Essence, leaving the gods the uncontested rulers of Creation. In this way, the gods satisfied both goals. The degradation of the shards would take too long to give the Primordials any advantage in the war, and would destroy the Exalted without any danger to the gods.
The effects of the shards' decay first appeared in the late First Age. The Solars' nature as perfection embodied was completely opposite to the mere concept of having innate flaws. The stress between these two contradictory states showed itself in insanity, growing worse the longer a Solar lived. And as the insanity worsened, so did the strain on the Exalted shard, wearing it away faster and faster. It is this degradation of the shards that manifests itself as the Great Curse today, and it's only going to get worse.
As the madness of the Solars showed itself more and more clearly, an elder Sidereal made a horrible discovery. The Exalted shards of the Solars, the very source of their power, were disintegrating before the Sidereals' eyes. If they didn't do something, then the Solars disappear, but not before shattering all of Creation in their madness. A great conclave was called and two possible plans of action emerged. First, they could reveal their discoveries to all the Exalted and attempt to fix the shards. It was a risky plan that would destroy Creation if it failed, but it carried the possibility of harnessing the genius of the Solars to fix their own Exaltations. A safer route lay with another discovery. It appeared that the Solar shards only suffered damage while within a human body. If they could free all the shards from their hosts, then capture them, it would allow the Sidereals as much time as they needed to work on a solution. It also would prevent the Solars from dragging Creation down with them. In the end, the second plan won, and the Solar shards were preserved in the Jade Prison.
Without the conflict between the Great Curse and their essential natures, the Sidereals and the Lunars have seen much less damage to their shards. However, they too show instability caused by flaws accumulated through countless rebirths. The Wyld would never have been able to pervert the Lunar castes without these chinks in the Lunars' armor. And all the Celestials exhibit the madness known as the Great Curse.
The Abyssals, however, are free of this flaw. When a Neverborn takes a Solar shard and twists it, they smooth away all the cracks that the Exaltation has accumulated. In fact, the more-than-divine touch of the dead Primordial actually restores the shard to its original perfect state, protecting it from ever suffering such damage again. If the Neverborn ever realized that this damage was deliberate on the part of the gods, they may be able to incite another Exalted rebellion, this time against a much different target...
Comments
Neat! I'm usually a "good gods" proponent, but I like this idea; it works well with the setting. - FrivYeti
