Exalted is the past, WH40K is the future

[drakensis]

Somewhere deep beneath Holy Terra, beneath the Imperial Palace itself, is a hidden chamber. No one has entered the chamber for ten millenia.

The chamber is paved in five colours of jade to display a map of no world that the Administratium can identify, The walls are twenty five panels of precious metals, each displaying a different constellation and notation in an incomprehensible script. It is lit by hundreds of lanterns suspended from a vast and slowly spinning chandelier so that they hang at shoulder height in concentric circles. The lanterns contain glowing crystals but no light reaches high enough to reveal the ceiling.

The outermost circle of cystals glow blue, green, saffron, red and violet. They number one hundred and are evenly divided between each colour. The metal of their lanterns reflects rainbows if hit by a white light.

The second circle of lanterns are made of silver and the light of their contents has a silvery hue that flickers and shifts in unpredictable patterns. The three hundred lanterns in this circle themselves seems to change their shapes if you take your eyes of them. Twenty of these lanterns have been opened at some point. Some have been closed again, welded shut with silver wire. Those still open, about half, contain no crystals.

The innermost circle and the most closely packed, also numbers three hundred lanterns, each of gold. At first glance the light from these lanterns is also golden, but careful examination shows a dark tinge touching around a third of them. Another fifty seem to have a greenish tint to their lights. None of these lanterns have been opened, but one has cracked and the crystal within is missing.

At the back of the chamber, a man-shaped figure entirely made of golden light rants and raves in an unknown tongue, chained to the wall at the back of the chamber by both wrists. He can just barely reach the chandelier, but never the door of the chamber.

The door... ah yes, the door. The door is the height of ten men, carved of a single piece of bone. In a thousand different scripts, ten thousand different languages - from Imperial Gothic to the tongues of the Eldar and the Tau - it warns that should the door be opened, the era that follows will be one of great and terrible deeds.

For ten thousand years, the door has stood ajar.

 

[lord geryon]

So... who is chained to the wall?

Random Solar Exalt? The Unconquered Sun? The whole of the Solar Exalt shards?

If the Solar(and it has to be a Solar, with the obvious mention of golden light) is still around, where are the other Celestials?

Sidereal would fit the Tau or the Eldar(maybe one is the Gold Faction and the other is the Bronze faction), I'd think and maybe the Lunars are Tyranids?

The Terrestrials(Space Marines?)?

Abyssals(Chaos Marines?)?

The Wyld isn't gonna disappear either(although that's probably the Warp).

Are the Alchemical Exalted the Necrons?

WTF are the Orks, a Lunar experiment gone feral?

Is the GEoM a Solar Exalt gone to the Great Curse? Or is he something else, like an Uber Exalted?

 

[drakensis]

The person in the chamber is Lytek (he's been stuck in there at least 10,000 years without food, so only a God would be likely to survive).

Counting the lanterns should explain where most of the Celestial Exalted are.

One Solar is out. Twenty Lunars were out although some have been put back in.

The Wyld = Warp is correct although the Underworld and Malfeas are also merged with it.

I hadn't considered Necrons being connected to the Autocththonians, but that makes sense.

Eldar are probably godblooded and the Webway is what's left of Yu Shan.

Orks are probably one of the species that was driven underground during the Primordial War. Same for Tyrannids.

 

[lord geryon]

Don't the gods die without worship? And there is food and such in Yu-Shan, so perhaps the gods need sustenance too.

Where are the Siddies? Your snippet doesn't even mention that they have lanterns... so were they not captured? Or were they the ones that did the capturing?

If Lytek can reach the chandelier... why hasn't he opened the lanterns and set them all lose?

And who is the Solar Exalt that's free? Don't say it's the GEoM, please... that'd be cliche, even though this crossover hasn't been done to my knowledge, plus it'd be frustrating simply because that Solar would still be bound in the Emperor's Throne.

And what about the Dragonbloods? Sure, they are represented in the lanterns... but Dragonbloods can Exalt without another DB dying to give up a shard... so they should still be appearing.

 

[drakensis]

Don't the gods die without worship? And there is food and such in Yu-Shan, so perhaps the gods need sustenance too.

Gods do not require worship or food although they enjoy both (well, some don't care for food but that's a personal choice.

Where are the Siddies? Your snippet doesn't even mention that they have lanterns... so were they not captured? Or were they the ones that did the capturing?

Count the lanterns carefully. Consider the colours of the outermost circle.

If Lytek can reach the chandelier... why hasn't he opened the lanterns and set them all lose?

Maybe he has good reason not to unleash most of seven hundred celestial essences on the universe.

And who is the Solar Exalt that's free? Don't say it's the GEoM, please... that'd be cliche, even though this crossover hasn't been done to my knowledge, plus it'd be frustrating simply because that Solar would still be bound in the Emperor's Throne.

That's precisely what I'm implying... although nowhere is it stated that the GEoM is a Solar.

And what about the Dragonbloods? Sure, they are represented in the lanterns... but Dragonbloods can Exalt without another DB dying to give up a shard... so they should still be appearing.

Dragonblooded are not represented in the lanterns. The blood of the dragons is weak and thin after eons of interbreeding. Should any Exalt, it would be hard to pick them out from the other psykers and heretics.

 

[lord geryon]

Hrmm. I was reasonably sure the multi-colored outer lanterns were DBs. I was wrong, it seems.

I'm not sure of the DBs being so weak though, even if I don't like them. DBs are a certain power level, regardless of how much their blood has thinned out. Remember, the book states that at time, a human will Exalt as a DB when they never had any DB blood in their veins at all. I would, however, believe that DBs are rare to Exalt anymore, but those that do are so powerful that it takes alotta Imperial Guard, or a few Space Marines to put em down.

The GEoM is an Abyssal then... lol.

And finally, what is the purpose of this idea? You gave us a wonderful set up... but didn't give a direction to go.

 

[drakensis]

The Dragonblooded are no less powerful that they have been, but the ancestry that allows them to Exalt is far more tenous. Only a fairly improbable combination of ancestry can cause exaltation at this point. Now given the scale of the Imperium, it's not at all unheard of for them to exalt but it's rare enough that no one's noticed any pattern.

Remember, the book states that at time, a human will Exalt as a DB when they never had any DB blood in their veins at all.

This is explicitly not the case. Every single Dragonblooded has ancestry that leads back to the first 10,000 Dragonblooded. However, that ancestry is sometimes very very obscure and often no Dragonblood appears in their ancestry for hundreds of years.

The GEoM could be a Solar, or an Abyssal, or Infernal (or even a reformed example of the last two). Abyssal might be appropriate since he's been refered to as a corpse-god a time or two.

As for where to go with this, my own feeling would be that someone should find this room. Logically, at least some of the lanterns should be opened. Not only will this cause several exaltations - pretty much guarenteed to cause a lot of havoc even if the new Exalted support the Imperium - but there might be a damn good reason why Lytek has been trying to stuff the shards back into the lanterns. Say, because the combined power of the Exalted in them is holding the galaxy together? After all there were no Tyranids and might well have been no Eye of Terror before the Emperor's shard got loose and stole twenty lunar shards to be his warlords.

 

[lord geryon]

Hmm. I reckon I coulda misread or misremembered that bit about the DBs.

On the GEoM, how exactly did they keep his shard from leaving once he died? Or was it his shard they captured and not his soul?

And as for the Exalts holding reality together... let em all out. The fucked-up-ness of the current universe is 'cause the Exalts ain't there to fix it - I think that's been pretty well established that it's the Exalts that keep reality running right and without em out and about to do that... well, that's why you got stuff like Chaos running around.

And what did happen to the other gods, anyway? Sol Invictus, Luna, the Five Maidens, the Elemental Dragons, they should all still be around if Lytek is - he is weaker than them, after all. Or did they become the Chaos gods? I could kinda see Sol being Khorne, and maybe Luna being Tzeentch, and the Elemental Dragons being Slaanesh... would that make the Five Maidens Nurgle?

 

[Lord Raine]

Interesting. Mixing High Fantasy with High Technology/Pseudo-Fantasy. Considering the size of both respective verses, this isn't so much a fic as it is an entire setting. You could write hundreds of stories from this without ever really running out of material.

I like.

Also, I find it interesting that Lytek is talking to himself like that. Not only am I curious as to what he's saying, but I wonder what drove him to madness. Gods are usually more resilient than that. Unless, of course, he has some other reason to be talking to himself.

Also, it's unusual for another reason. Lytek is going against his duty. From what I remember, it's his job to maintain the cycle of Exaltation by maintaining the crystals and ensuring the cycle continues. It's rather odd that he decided the best course of action was to stop doing that.

Hmm. . . is that what drove him to madness?

 

[drakensis]

That might very well explain Lytek's condition.

The GEoM is still alive, barely, so his shard is still with him.

As for the other gods...

Well the Eldar have many sagas about their gods, most of whom are dead. Suffice to say that the Unconquered Sun was conquered, Mercury set out on journey with no return, Mars fought her last battle, Saturn met her own Ending and the others all came to their own ends. Which doesn't mean that they are necessarily gone entirely - any similarity between Khorne and Mars, Tzeentch and Jupiter, Slaanesh and Venus, Nurgle and Han-Tha may or may not be a coincidence.