SandJack/FirstExalts

The First Exalted

While Autocthon made his own Exalted years before the Celestials came to him for help in defeating his brother Primordeals, there was a huge amount of refinement that had to be made between the Alchemical Shards, which had bodies tailor grown for them, and the final Celestial Shards, which had to be able to fit into a variety of different hosts that were created BEFORE the shards were put into them, and this was all to say nothing of the dragonblooded who had to be exalted without shards and be able to pass on exaltation to their children.

To this end, Autochton made several prototype Exaltings using power he was given by the Exalted, and ended up producing a Prototype for each of the Eight individuals who had expressed an interest to show the different ways that Exaltation could be managed. There were several more he made along the way -- he had taken enough power from each of the gods to make several Exaltations, but the prototypes were the ones he showed to the Celestials in the end, the ones he actually let loose into the world in order to demonstrate their effectiveness.

Below are the two Prototypes that were eventually the models for all the Exaltations to follow.

Champion of the Earth - The Power of Gaia

Champion of the Earth was undoubtedly Autocthon's best work, and in many ways the Exaltation he was most proud of. Essentially, Champion of the Earth was a single exaltation that could be put into anyone who could bear it and flourish, enhancing her natural abilities and giving her the power to command essence like the gods. As an added benefit, it kept memories of past incarnations, allowing individuals to know instantly how to channel essence and work a few charms rather than needing to be taught how to, again, regardless of whom the exaltation was put into. The drawback, however, was the maintainence. Someone had to look over every Exaltation and to decide who was worthy to receive it. Someone had to make sure that the right memories would come out at the right times, so as not to confuse the newly exalted. The Celestials decided on it almost instantly, knowing that they could stick the task onto some lower god. Gaia, however, did not feel that any one of her elemental servants had the breadth of knowledge required to know which exaltation was right for which person, and cringed at the idea of it being done by committee.

Champion of the Earth was, however, different from the mass produced Celestial Exaltation in several key ways. Firstly, Champion of the Earth was not aligned with a specific Caste. Rather, the Champion of the Earth chose a combination of the skills that lived in its memories and the skills the person already posessed to accelerate. Given that anyone could receive the Exaltation, this quickly led to people exalting with a completely random mishmash of skills that seldom made for an effective champion. The Caste System was introduced to standardize the skills a person would receive through Exaltation, ensuring that whatever skills she got from her Exaltation's memory, as opposed to her own skills that were augmented, would be mutually beneficial and would provide a solid base for whatever else she worked on. It also served to make life easier for the person making the decisions.

Secondly, when Champion of the Earth was built Autochton did not know what method would be used to manage the final product between Exaltations, so he decided that he would make this one simply jump to the nearest available mortal exalting him instantly, unless of course Gaia, or someone in her charge, was paying attention and sent someone to collect it. He built in a failsafe memory that would, essentially, brainwash anyone who received the Champion into becoming a loyal servant of Gaia. Of course, Gaia could just decide to revoke it from a mortal anyway. This 'emergency exaltation' procedure was scrapped for the final product because it was judged too dangerous, mostly in light of what happened to Champion of the Earth.

Finally, Champion of the Earth drew from Gaia's power rather than the power of the Celestials. The powers that it granted were usually elemental in nature, and it was designed so that a person could gain access to essence through connection with the earth and its natural essence flows. A Champion of the Earth could regain personal essence simply from walking over the ground, and her peripheral essence pool was almost unlimited because she could draw in power from any elemental source. The Celestial Exalted firstly did not like their servants to be so powerful and secondly did not have such close access to their servants, and so the final Exalts were designed so that they could carry essence around them, stored up from the light shone on them by their patrons in the sky.

What Happened To It?

The Champion of Earth was so successful in its trial run that the Celestials immediately began talks with Autocthon about what sort of improvements and specific alterations each wanted to make for their own models, and Gaia became preoccupied thinking of which of the other types she might want to try having now seen them all. The Champion was left unattended at the scene of his exaltation, where he had beaten to death a gang in his city upon finding that they had killed his beloved on a whim. Now he stood in the middle of the bodies, and his heart was empty because he had gotten his revenge, and it had not brought Leyla back. Nothing would bring Leyla back, not even the power that Gaia had granted him. And so, in a fit of depression, he cast himself into the river to drown. Half a block away, a woman sat bolt upright in bed, her mind suddenly filled with an unspeakable loss. Without knowing quite why, she reached for the knife she kept under her pillow to guard against intruders and slit her wrists. By the time that Autocthon and his clients turned back to the world, the entire town was dead, and the trail of death had been lost somewhere in the large city nearby. Every time they located a Champion, it was too late. Each time it hit another person, the weight of despair gained another degree, and by the time it rested in someone who could bear its weight, the Primordeals had noticed the wake of destruction, and the gods dared not show their hands in it by reclaiming the shard.

The Primordeals found the shard and assumed that it was a Glamour meant to provide passion for fae to feed off of in the next invasion. They captured it and set it aside so that they might use it when the time came. They did not examine it for fear of taking the pain within it upon themselves. When the war came they tried to use it against the Exalted who had amassed against them and found that it did not work against Exalted. Gaia saw her moment to reclaim it before it did any more damage. She put it in a vessel and gave it to one of her elementals to keep.

When the Celestial Order crumbled, however, the elemental betrayed Gaia. He sold the Exaltation and Gaia still does not know of the transgression. Somewhere, Champion of the Earth is sitting on a shelf, collecting dust. It must be. If it had been released again, everyone would know. Right?

Hidden Blood - The Power of Jupiter

Autothon took a completely different approach with Jupiter's power. Instead of forging it all into a single Exaltation, he decided to use the power inherent in the shard to fuel the energies of a potential dynasty of individual exalts. After all, not every exalted was using her power at the same time, and much of the power potential in a single Exalt was routinely going to waste. The trade off was that no individual could use as much power as a single individual who kept her power within -- the routing process did not allow for it. Still, with more exalted going around, there would be no need to display such advanced power unless an individual were in a group with others and then they could share their power to create greater results. To effectively represent the product's effectiveness, Autocthon used almost all the power Jupiter had given him, instead of the fragments he used to make the other shards.

Hidden Blood put a small connection, inherent in a person's body and genetic heritage, into a person who was to be exalted by it. As a result, any individual who had a parent who was also Hidden Blooded had the potential to get the 'gene' that gave them connection to the power source and, therefore, to possibly be born Exalted. Hidden Blood became the model for the exaltation that Gaia chose for her Dragonblooded. There were, however, some minor alterations made to account for practical matters.

Firstly, the fact that Gaia chose to empower the Dragonbloods let Autocthon keep a large amount of the power within the individuals who were exalted, because they were part of Gaia's essence flow, being part of the earth as they were. By contrast, the original Hidden Blood existed almost entirely seperately from its exalted, only giving them power when it was needed. The Hidden Blooded, the individuals who were exalted by Hidden Blood, universally had two points of Essence: one granted by their birth and one granted by the Exaltation. They could not gain any more, unless they did it through sorcery or other means, and if they lost any they would lose either their Exaltations or, more frequently, their lives. However, they could gain access to power, for brief times, far in excess of what they usually carried around with them. While this prevented Hidden Bloods from learning Charms that were agressively powerful, as they had to exercise the full strength of their will in order to be able to temporarily open access to the power they had, it made them masters of Sorcery: opening the gate between themselves and the Hidden Blood was built into their understanding of spells, and was implicit in all the rituals they did: Hidden Blooded could access spells as high as Void Circle Necromancy and Solar Circle Sorcery so long as noone else was using the power at the time.

Secondly, Gaia's power over life allowed Autochton to give these individuals longer life spans, and her command of fertility allowed Autochton to keep the Exaltation from occuring until around puberty, further extending the lives of the exalted. The original Hidden Blooded lived, in general, shorter than mortals because the constant contact with higher power strained their systems and caused them to age at an accelerated rate. Hiddenblooded, on average, went through puberty at the age of eight, females could bear children until only the age of thirty, and most died by fifty. Of course gestation was also much shorter: a Hidden Blooded female usually carried a child for only three months before it was born healthy, and she usually carried a litter of at least four children to maximize the chances that one would be born with the power to Exalt.

Finally, Hidden Blooded were fundamentally connected to the Maiden of Secrets rather than to Gaia, and thus bore marks of her power rather than Gaia's. Hidden Blooded appeared no different from mortals except that they were less visible: they dissapeared in a room by themselves let alone in a crowd. They were completely unremarkable and even those things that separated them from mortals, such as their short lives and shorter births, were quickly forgotten. Even their use of magics was hard to trace back to them by anyone who wasn't looking quite closely to begin with. They had no peripheral essence and no anima banner, because all the essence they used that was not kept within came from Hidden Blood itself.

What Happened To It?

Though the Celestials, and Gaia herself, attempted to extinguish the Hidden Blooded line with a ritual that prevented the passage of the Hidden Blooded gene from parent to child, one person escaped the ritual through her innate power to hide, and she was already with child at the time. Today, about four hundred Hidden Blooded exist. However, not all of them know the power they have access to because noone has taught them how to access it. Hidden blooded are born different; they experience no exaltation to tell them they are different from anyone else. Furthermore, their very nature keeps people, even themselves, from discovering that they are different. Perhaps ten of the Hidden Bloods actually know what they are. Likewise, about ten Hidden Bloods know how to effectively and reliably access their power. How much these two groups intersect, however, is anyone's guess.