The winds of battle roared across the sea of clouds. New ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄhapters are published on n͟o͟v͟e͟l͟f͟i͟r͟e͟.net

I wove them, bent them, commanded them like a conductor with its singers. I called upon the Slice and the Cloak, upon the winds of chaos and fortune shaped from hatred and gratitude. The flow of air danced at my fingertips into a procession of sharpened blades and whirlwinds that could cut through stone.

And cut through stone they did. Inkarri summoned a shield of earth from mere dust in the wind, my projectiles shredding through his defenses like a sword through warm flesh. His golden wings proved solid enough to withstand my strike though, and a beam of golden light erupted from his beak in response to my attack. I dodged by moving to the side, the blast coursing across the heavens and beyond.

The Jaguar Woman immediately exploited the opportunity to strike. Blood boiled in her palms and then concentrated into two blackened spheres heavier than mountains. Clouds vanished out of thin air when she threw them at us, the moisture in the air sucked into the projectile as they whizzed faster than arrows.

The Cloak swirled around me like a shield of air. The sphere absorbed the winds into itself as it moved, but it glided off my protection and swiftly collapsed into itself. The other shattered Inkarri’s shield and hit him squarely in the chest. The sphere melted off gold feathers on contact and left a gaping hole in the condor’s plumage.

Sensing his weakness, the Jaguar Woman attempted to cast her Tomb again. Dimensions bent around her as she attempted to paint over the canvas of reality and trap Inkarri within it.

I didn’t let her.

I answered with my own Tomb, forcing a clash of would-be divine authorities. The frontiers of our souls met in a tug-of-war that rocked the skies and sent ripples across the land below. Two nightmarish worlds sprang into being in an attempt to devour each other, skulls of past emperors biting the arms of wailing effigies of the Jaguar Woman. Fear fought fear in a clash that left cracks in the very essence of the world.

The contest only lasted for a brief instant before our Tombs collapsed under our combined metaphysical weights—since neither of us had the means to overcome the other without surprise and initiative on our side—but it saved Inkarri from a gruesome fate. I could see the surprise and confusion in his gleaming eyes.

“Leave,” I told Inkarri. “Even you do not deserve this fate.”

I understood more than anyone the agony of my predecessors trapped on the threshold between life and death. Using the Tomb on Inkarri and the Mallquis would probably grant me victory, but it would be no different than drinking their blood.

Lord Quetzalcoatl had warned me. I refused to fall so low again when I had barely begun to rise.

“It is still not too late to side with the light!” I told Inkarri, who glared back at me. “If you truly fight for your homeland, then let us combine our strength to banish the night from this land!”

As much as I loathed what the Mallquis represented, I was willing to compromise if it meant they would lend me their strength against the last of the Nightlords. The First Emperor was bound to escape his tomb with her demise, and all allies would be welcome during this fateful confrontation. We had little to gain from fighting each other when the cosmos risked its end.

For a brief instant that seemed to stretch on forever, Inkarri and the ancient souls within him appeared to consider my offer. Yet that moment didn’t last more than a second, my hope buried under a tide of resentment.

“The time for words passed the moment you and your vile patrons shed Sapan blood,” Inkarri replied bitterly. “Only death awaits you now.”

I knew it would end like this, but his shortsightedness still disappointed me.

The Condor King proved wise enough to understand he was at a disadvantage in the air. His and the Mallquis’ strength came from the earth they lorded over, not the sky; so he dived down back towards the mountain in preparation for his counterattack. The Jaguar Woman immediately gave pursuit in her hunger to claim his power for herself.

I called upon the Fall to yank them both back to me by reversing gravity, but my foes were prepared this time. Inkarri flew quickly enough to escape my spell’s range, whereas the Jaguar Woman simply shrugged it off with a counterspell of some kind and whipped me back with her serpentine tail. I had no other choice but to chase after them with a heart filled with anger.

Inkarri lured us below, to mountains less than a mile beyond the secret valley from which he arose. The Condor King sang a clangorous song, and the land of the Sapa answered with a thunderous roar.

I recalled that Aclla once compared the Sapa Mountains to the back of a giant serpent stretching across the land, and Inkarri proceeded to turn that metaphor into a literal truth. Hills rose and rolled the moment Inkarri sat on the tallest of them, reshaping themselves into a new living form.

I could only watch in amazement as a great snake of stone whose mouth could have swallowed my imperial palace whole arose to challenge us.

What power you wield, Mallquis, I thought, finding myself impressed as the great beast’s movements started quakes shaking the entire Sapa Mountains. You weave stone like I do sorcery.

Even the Jaguar Woman showed fear. Unwilling to let Inkarri complete his ritual, the Nightlord unfolded her wings and let acid blood fall down from them. The crimson rain melted through stone, earth, and trees alike, even managing to stain and rust Inkarri’s golden plumage.

The Condor King endured the pain and threw his gigantic snake at the Nightlord. The colossal being moved with the swiftness of a landslide and arose to catch the Jaguar Woman within its jaws. The Nightlords struggled with all of her strength not to be swallowed whole and only managed to escape an early death in a gullet of stone by pushing it back with the Doll.

Sensing my chance, I infused my feathers with power, wove them in a Veil, and then flapped my wings. My projectiles flew in the false form of fireballs, with their true nature obscured by my illusions. The Jaguar Woman summoned arms of black miasma with the Doll to deflect them, while Inkarri simply had his stone serpent coil around him as a moving shield.

My fiery feathers thus fell across the land, all of them infused with my hatred, my hopes, and the weight of my curses.

I had laid my trap well.

The Haunt spell, which cursed a land rather than a person, required the feathers to infuse themselves into the flesh of fresh corpses. The chaos unfolding across the land and the battle my own troops waged in the valley against the Jaguar Woman’s ghosts provided more than enough vessels in which they could take root. An invisible web of sorcery formed across the landscape, overlapping with the leylines from which Inkarri drew his strength from.

The Jaguar Woman’s many eyes widened in understanding as she recognized the shift in magic from her disastrous Sulfur Sun. My essence infused the very land, the same I’d once used to subvert Smoke Mountain, shifting the tide of sorcery in my favor.

“This power… from the very beginning…” she said, her jaws clenching with otherworldly rage. “It was all you!”

I couldn’t lie, it did please me to see the fear and anger in her eyes.

“Only now, at the end, do you understand?” I said as I wove my Haunt spell into being. “I wasn’t born to play the slave.”

No one was. Not even stone.

“Open, gates of Xibalba!” I said, spilling my burning lifeblood onto the earth with a talon. “Come and take your fill of dread and fear!”

The earth shuddered and its jaws snapped open.

Inkarri’s serpent of stone collapsed under its own weight, startling the Condor King. The mountains that made up its structure rearranged themselves into fangs hungry for souls. A gaping pit formed at their center where my blood had fallen, glowing with the infernal flames of Xibalba. The Mallquis incarnate flew back, and I allowed them to; it was the Jaguar Woman who deserved hell more than anyone else. A flash of dread and unease spread across her face when cries of agony from countless tormented souls arose from the pit.

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Sugey’s screams cut through them all.

However, where her sister had failed to offer any better response than brute force, the Jaguar Woman hastily waved her claws in grand gestures akin to Lahun’s dances. She played a performance that bound the world itself to her decadent will, summoning great dark chains of woven shadows around the Pit’s fangs. The jaws of Xibalba failed to trap the Jaguar Woman and began to pull back under the pressure.

I had hoped the Pit would claim her like her sister, but I had anticipated such an outcome. What mattered was that my foe was briefly occupied holding back the tide.

“It is nearly time, my witches,” I whispered through the wind and let the gusts carry my words. “Bring my mother with you.”

I didn’t need to tell them more. Their hearts pulsed with the same purpose as mine.

I turned to face Inkarri, only to be taken aback when he closed the gap between us in an instant by flying straight at me with undying fury. I barely had time to catch his talons with my own before he slammed me against a hill of stone below.

“Was it not enough to stain these lands with blood?!” he all but spat at my face. His beak tried to tear out my throat and forced me to move my head to the side. “Now you had to befoul them with your sorcery?!”

“I carry more regrets than you will ever know,” I retorted. “But that ship has sailed, and the shore remains far beyond our reach.”

I summoned the Doll’s phantasmal arms, grabbed his wings, and started pushing him off me. It was a far greater struggle than I had expected. The condor clawed at me with all his rage, while the Jaguar Woman was beginning to force the Pit to close.

I had so very little time left to act.

“However great our differences, Inkarri, I sense a seed of valor beneath your fellow Mallquis’ greed,” I said with sincerity. My Gaze, which stripped all souls of lies, showed me the light within the Condor King. His sins were great, especially against Aclla and others like her, but he was no Nightlord; only a believer in the wrong cause. “You fight for what you believe to be justice, and for that, I offer you one last chance to turn back. Relinquish Yohuachanca’s brother and fight at my side.”

Inkarri didn’t even entertain it. His golden talons lunged at me and clawed at my chest deep enough to draw boiling sunlight blood. “Your promises are as hollow as the caverns your slaver-bats crawled out from!”

A shame, truly a shame… but I guessed I had nailed that coffin with my bare hands a long time ago.

Even the gods couldn’t change human nature.

“Your power is false,” I told Inkarri. “You do not even draw your strength from a god, only the shadow of one. You are an imitation of an imitation, hiding his weakness behind gaudy gold and borrowed glory.”

“I am the will of the Sapa,” the Condor King replied with unbending pride. “The shield of peace and the spear of prosperity. I am no more than the defender of my people, the wish of millions.”

“Is that so?” I asked before weaving the winds around us. “Let us see if you can endure their silence then.”

I’d learned from the queen of the dead that the Mallquis drew their false life from the breaths and prayers of their living descendants. Their souls would not pass on so long as the living wished them to remain as eternal idols.

But what worth were prayers when they failed to reach a god’s ears? Could a lake survive without the river to keep it full?

I immediately received my answer when Inkarri’s strength began to wane all of a sudden. Four dams had sprouted around us, guiding the wind I’d called up into a great wall that no mortal breath could penetrate.

My witches and mother had spread in all four cardinal directions, dancing atop peaks of stone in a shared performance of which Inkarri was the centerpiece. I completed it with a single Word of power.

“Silence.”

The world listened, and all grew quiet.

Few understood true silence. Mortals lived in a world of sound and sensations rhythmed by their breaths, the gentle gust of the wind, the subtle cracks of the earth beneath our feet, and the chirping of bugs. Most would experience quietness, but silence? True silence was absolute stillness.

True silence was death, the first and greatest terror.

My Word gave Inkarri and the Mallquis a taste of that inevitable end which they feared so much, and the Haunt granted me enough metaphysical control over the land to prevent their descendants’ voices from reaching them.

I created a bubble of silence that no prayers could breach; and for perhaps the first time in centuries, these ancient elders found themselves devoid of the breaths of the living carried by the wind.

The golden condor began to rust away.

The false idol could no longer sustain its image in reality.

I called upon the Doll and summoned great phantom talons that sank their claws into Inkarri’s chest. His effigy body had grown too fragile to resist me, and I quickly cleaved my way to the rotten heart at the center of it all; a mummified corpse who had long passed away, but whose image of divine power could not be allowed to die.

Tonatiuh, brother of the First Emperor, had yet to find rest.

“A spear you shall be, Inkarri,” I said as I plucked a feather from my wing. In it, I wove all of my hopes and determination to see this through. “For at your heart…”

I placed a feather into the embalmed body of Tonatiuh and bound it to the Haunt.

“Is a corpse.”

The silence was shattered with a final pulse.

My grand trap, the work of many interlocked spells which I had mastered, combined and refined, was finally sprung. My Haunt reverberated within the Sapa leylines, both of which my final Curse had turned Tonatiuh into the center of. My witches and mother guided the energies coursing through the land and the sky in my direction, the same way the Nightlords manipulated their dark father’s power to their ends. We sang the symphony of life together and brought forth a dark miracle.

“Beware false idols,” I chanted. “For I shall make a curse of your light!”

Tonatiuh glowed with sunlight.

The Condor King and the Mallquis had yearned to craft a god from their own hands, and for this time only, I gave them a taste of bitter success. I wove the tales and the stories of the Sapa into reality, that their first emperor would come to return the light to their realm in its moment of peril… and then twisted them into a potent curse. I guided the power of the land harvested by my Haunt into my target and turned him into a dreadful pyre.

After all, the only difference between a curse and a miracle lay in the caster’s mood.

Tonatiuh burned away his birdlike shell and hatched into a colossal, baleful sphere of eternal fire. Its glow was so bright my witches had to cover their eyes so as not to be blinded in an instant, and the darkness recoiled at its coming. The cursed shining radiance swallowed Jaguar Woman, even as she attempted to cloak herself in shadows. Those could not survive the rays piercing through it.

Tonatiuh had become fire, and a false sun was still a sun.

The Jaguar Woman burned to cinders with a scream that shook the heavens and earth. Her skin melted off her flesh, which then returned to the dust, exposing mangled bones. Her wail was music to my ears, and like all good things, it ended much too soon.

My greatest foe died in the sun she had tried to conquer all of her unlife.

She was incinerated like any other vampire, vaporized in an instant by the light she was never fit to bask in until naught but ashes remained.

The sun of Tonatiuh proved as bright as it was fleeting. Its heart of fire imploded upon itself, immolating the ancient corpse which had given it life. The souls of the Mallquis, having lost their anchor, found themselves at death’s mercy. They fell down into the Underworld to the afterlife they had struggled so hard to stay out of.

Inkarri’s soul lingered longer than the others. I couldn’t say whether it was out of spite, duty, stubbornness, or because of a particularly strong connection to the land of his ancestors, but his golden spirit briefly materialized from the ashes of his false sun. We both knew it was a doomed effort from the start and that the inevitable yet awaited.

“Take pride,” I comforted him in his final moments, for mercy and dignity were a god’s duties. “You have spared your land from darkness.”

The Condor King stared back at me, not with hatred or anger as I would have expected, but with something else. His eyes only glowed with sorrow and fear as they glanced from me to the pitch black night which had befallen us.

“Can you shine brighter than us?” he asked me.

His fear was palpable; not for his immortal soul, but for his descendants whose prayers had sustained him and the empire he had fought to protect.

And though I carried the strength of three dead suns, I feared I could not shine bright enough to keep the night away forever on my own yet.

“I will try,” I promised.

Inkarri did not believe me and faded away, filled with despair.

I watched his spirit disappear into the night, leaving my burning embers as the only source of light gracing this valley. I glanced at my sorcerous allies and briefly basked in the fleeting feeling of victory…

Only for a tightening chain to crush it.

An overwhelming pressure grew in my chest. The Jaguar Woman was ashes and dust, yet her chain remained coiled around my heart with all the weight of her malice and fear for her mortality. I sensed her spirit somehow holding on to a life she didn’t deserve, refusing to fade out into the dark.

Then I heard Nenetl’s scream.

The wind carried it to my ears, striking my heart with fear. No, no, I thought as I flew towards my sister. Mother, Necahual, Lahun, and Killa followed me, the former quicker than all the others. This cannot be!

I returned to the valley and my troops. Tonatiuh’s radiance and the Jaguar Woman’s ‘demise’ had wiped out the remaining Nightkin, sparing my soldiers’ lives. It didn’t take me long to find Nenetl among them. She screamed and spasmed on the ground in spite of my consorts’ attempts to restrain her.

“Nenetl!” my father’s skeletal ghost said, trying to calm her down. The mere fact that he and the past emperors yet lingered in this world confirmed that the fight for our freedom wasn’t over yet. “Please, speak to me!”

But my sister couldn’t do more than screech in pain and agony. Her nails scratched her cheeks deep enough to draw blood, and her pale eyes had gone white from the shock. Shadows coiled and gathered around like an impenetrable shroud that not even my light could dispel.

“Nenetl!” I said, upon landing and regaining human form, my hands seizing them away from my consorts. “Nenetl, listen to me!”

My voice seemed to briefly draw her out of her daze, but a malicious presence broke through her mind and stared back at me with immense hatred. My burning blood froze in my veins as I realized where my foe’s spirit had taken refuge.

“Even with all the powers in the world, Iztac,” the Jaguar Woman said through my sister’s lips, glaring at me with her eyes, “You are still weak.”

Her Tomb surged to engulf us all.