Work Text:
When the first wolves walked alongside the first golden women and men there was a great war. As part of the Unconquered Sun's fight against the makers of the world, they fought shoulder to haunch against evils too bizarre to even remember. Many did great deeds, many died and were reborn to the fight. But the stories are told by the survivors. That's why the wolves of the world have so many good stories.
One such survivor was the golden woman Merela. She was more favored in the eyes of the golden ones' father, the Unconquered Sun, than her sisters and brothers. Their first meeting, it is said, was aboard the Daystar. Yes, the very sun in the sky. Merela sought the power to end the fight against the makers of the world, and she saw it sailing above her. Hardened by the fighting she had already done in the name of her father, she flew through the fires of the sun to its center and demanded entrance. The Unconquered Sun allowed her inside his dirigible, and they spoke.
This, many stories agree on, but here the stories diverge. Some say the Unconquered Sun offered her Aidenwiess, the Key of White Fire, which would have granted her authority over the entire Exalted host, and she refused, adamant in being allowed to captain the Daystar. Some say he taught her the secrets to war itself, secrets that served her well through the Primordial War and all the conflicts of the First Age up to the Usurpation that claimed her. Some say they simply loved one another with no war in their minds for some time. However, the story Merela repeated when asked goes like this. I heard it from her own mouth, pups, for she said it in a ceremony every year as parades commemorated the long ago first victory of the Exalted.
She asked the Once-Guiding Star why he did not pilot the Daystar in support of the Exalted host. He told her that since time uncounted he had unleashed the Daystar's power upon the enemies of Creation, but not once had he done so within Creation itself. Such was his puissance in battle that he had never let his enemies rage on one inch of Creation across ages of keeping the Wyld things out. It was the Sun's conviction that all who see the rays of his second self would know them as life-giving and kind, not as the threat of destruction his father Theion held over the world like the lash above a slave. Awed by his skill, his ideals, and his foresight into the peace that would come after their victory, Merela left without quarrel, and renewed her efforts to see that peace spread across Creation.
Yes, with that story and many others she counselled peace despite being marked as the most warlike of the golden ones. In the fight against the makers of the world she grappled with one of their number and shook the life out of it with her own hands after it had spent itself slaying her mate and second in command, Grand Tortoise. This great deed and many others, her desire for peace that matched her father's, and the guidance he had personally given her resulted in more favor in the eyes of her patron god. He gave to her the Crown of Thunders at the war's end to signify the rule of all Exalted over Creation. Then he, the other Incarna, and the Celestial gods took their respite in Yu-Shan to play the Games of Divinity.
Merela visited the Celestial city often. She was seen among the Sun's company more than any other being who was not a spirit. His favor shone brightly over her, and she in turn shone brightly over Creation. There are rumors she even bore a child with him, though this is a story for another time.
But as all love eventually does, even between Luna and Gaia, they drifted from one another. The Unconquered Sun, so often in the Jade Pleasure Dome where Merela could not follow, favored new friends and lovers. Merela, so often ruling with her fellow Exalted in Creation that the Unconquered Sun had sworn not to lord over, was visited seldom by the highest Incarna and in the later centuries not at all.
As so often happens with the golden women and men, Merela's greatest virtue curdled into her own undoing. Merela's Deliberative provided little output for the violent nature of the Exalted. Merela's Deliberative kept the peace and spread the wealth. All was civilized and bureaucratized, stamped and sorted, meted and counted. In such a world Merela and her peers thrived, able to bend every rule, sway any bureaucrat, acquire the right approval or fund or token. They were the Lawgivers, the very source of justice, and all paid them deference. But the golden ones are not the entire Exalted host, and discontent grew from the frustrated passions and ambitions of the stars and the wolves and the fire.
In secret the stars planned the Usurpation with the fire, leaving the wolves out due to their storied loyalty to their mates. And as occupied with each other and their stamps and their forms and their hobbies and their peace as they were, the golden ones let them, unwatched, unchecked. When the battle finally came most of the sun's children were wiped out in a single night.
That night was the failure of Merela's peace and by extension her father's. We may never see such a time again.