CHAPTER ONE-HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN: THE OLD GOD AND THE NEW

I ascended.

My blazing soul arose from the depths of the Underworld in a great pillar of fire that melted through the four layers of the Land of the Dead Suns. My star traveled through the gates of the afterlife on its way to the realm of the living, my wings whipping up hurricanes in their wake. I passed by Lord Quetzalcoatl, who watched me with a mix of pride and apprehension; I flew through the dust of Tlalocan, shining light on the House of Xibalba and dashing its hope that the Fear of the Gods would be a nightmare upon humanity; I heard the lightning of Tlaloc follow me across the worlds, thundering my arrival with a storm’s pride and approval; and I illuminated the streets of Mictlan until no shadow would hide within its walls.

I sensed many gazes looking up at me as I flew. Huehuecoyotl playing another trick on unsuspecting dead; my feathered friend Itzili the Younger, whose bones had joined those of his ancestors; Xolotl guiding my predecessors across the wastes; young Ueman and Chipahua, the first souls I had ever helped; Inkarri and the Mallquis, forced to join their own ancestors; and so many others whose lives I had cut short in my quest for power. I took in their blessing and grudges, their joy and curses, accepting them all.

I passed by Queen Mictecacihuatl listening to my father pleading on my mother’s behalf and for the salvation of his unborn child’s soul. My kin looked up to me with pride, and the goddess with relief; for the light I shone showed her that her hopes hadn’t been misplaced.

“Mercy,” I said with a voice that crackled with flames.

After all the tribulations and ordeals, after all my sins and mistakes, I remained dedicated to protecting life.

The queen listened to my words, not as a mortal’s plea on behalf of his parents, but that of a fellow deity of equal power beseeching her for divine mercy. She accepted them and bestowed upon me one last piece of wisdom.

“Anyone can seize their second chance, Iztac,” she said. “They only need to seek it.”

I understood.

My light broke through the Gate of Skulls like a shooting star, immolating my mortal body in a burst of sunlight. My consorts and witches backed away and screamed my name as I shed my flesh and bones in a pillar of holy flames. They feared for me, thinking I had died, but their cries turned to awe and surprise as the flames of my soul filled the night sky with light. The starless night recoiled from my ascendancy. I took my place among the celestial heavens and cloaked all of the Sapa Empire with sunlight.

I had become a concept rather than a man. I was a rising phoenix, immortal and everbright, an owl of smokeless fire whose wings stretched across mountains and whose talons could cut through the horizon. My feathers each shone with incandescent starlight. I had no bones left, no flesh to coat my soul with. I was power itself in its most naked form, an immaterial presence that only adopted the shape of a bird for the sake of my onlookers.

I was all that I had been, purified and magnified. Revenge and justice, crime and atonement, the fires of fury and mercy. All my failures and triumphs had coalesced into a feathered sovereign heralding the light of tomorrow.

I was the dawn.

My immense head gazed down upon the valley of Paititi with twin newborn stars for eyes. My heat should have boiled the lake to steam and melted onlookers, but I did not desire their deaths, and so my light brought them warmth and comfort rather than death. My soldiers and followers knelt in awe and adoration of my power, praying with their hands held together and their knees shaking. Though their minds could not comprehend my grandeur, they all knew that they were in the presence of a god.

My concubines, consorts, and witches instinctively bowed too, but unlike all others, they dared to look up to me. Mother’s eyes bore tears of maternal pride, for her son had succeeded where she herself had failed. I felt her thorny love and accepted it into my own sun-heart.

I gazed upon my consorts, with whom I had shared so much pain and struggle in the name of our freedom. Eztli, my first love; Nenetl, my sister and the moon to my sun; Ingrid, my trusted confidant; Chikal, the ferocious queen who would rather break than bend. The chains that bound our fates had shattered, freeing and splitting us.

Beneath the awe, I could sense their sorrow, for they only had to take a look at me to know that I had grown too big and had risen too high.

Even though they bore my sons and daughters, the seeds of new life which I had sown, I had become more than the man I used to be. Though I knew I could force my power into the shape of a man for a moment, the same way Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, and Tezcatlipoca could manifest human avatars, it would be akin to forcing an ocean into a bottle. It would be a constant fight against the inward pressure to grow and expand back into the force of nature I had become.

Every personal interaction with mortals would be fraught with danger, because I had become fire and will, wild and untamed. Mortals had become so fragile to me that I could crush them with a mere flap of my wings, or incinerate them with a stray thought.

The precious time we had shared had unfortunately come to an end.

“This is goodbye.”

I did not speak, because gods had no need for words or breaths to carry their messages. The world simply echoed my will in the wind and the whistling trees, in the movements of the earth, and the crackling of fires.

“A great battle awaits me,” I said with sorrow, “and no matter the outcome, this journey we shared together has come to an end. Know that the light you have nurtured within me shall always shine upon you, and that so long as I exist, the heavens shall always shower you with their blessings.”

That was my oath as a god. That those who had believed in me and loved me would always find felicity.

“You shall reign wisely, Chikal, and never again shall your people know slavery,” I decreed. “Ingrid, know that my light shall one day guide you to the land of your ancestors and to the grass of Winland.”

Chikal was too stern for words, and simply bowed with all the respect a queen and a woman could muster. Ingrid tried to keep a solemn face and her dignity, but then broke into a sob. I wished I could hold her again, but my wings of fire would have melted her flesh away.

“Nenetl, my moon,” I told my sister, who unlike her fellow consorts, didn’t bother holding back her tears. “Your kindness shall never go unrewarded. I shall protect it from bitterness until your final days.”

“Please, don’t go…” she begged me. “Please…”

It broke my heart of fire, for that was a wish I could not fulfill.

Only Eztli, the one who understood me most, dared to ask me her dearest wish. “Will we meet again, Iztac?”

“Yes, we shall,” I promised. “For even the longest and cruelest nights always come to an end.”

Eztli nodded in assent, her smile full of sorrow and the tiniest of hope. “Thank you,” she said ever so softly. “Thank you for everything.”

I turned to my witches, those women who would become my prophet and priestesses. The connection we shared imbued them with the burgeoning power of the totems. I saw Empress Killa crowned with condor wings and wise Lahun with lynx fur. As for Necahual, the woman who, through all the ordeals and pain we share, might have become my true love, she smelled of the same fierce wolf spirit who inhabited my sister.

Three was a strong number, but a fourth throne remained to fill for balance’s sake and an oath I had yet to fulfill. Mortal promises were empty words, yet a god had to remain true to his essence at all times. I was the law of the sovereign, the will of the heavens incarnate, bound to fulfill any covenant my human self had sworn.

“Zyanya.”

I had promised a traitor a price for her service, and I would grant it.

“I bestow upon you the fourth throne, but know that such a seat never rests on sound foundations. Only through wisdom shall you avoid the Nightlords’ fate. Remember this well.”

I bestowed a ray of light upon the fourth and completed the set, so that balance might be achieved. Zyanya welcomed my gift into her soul, growing wings of ambition to whip up an echo of the previous cycle, its blood washed away for a new beginning. She smelled of the jackal and Huehuecoyotl, cunning and shifty.

The Nightlords had said their covenant preserved the sun, and that their chosen emperor would bring the fiery dawn.

In a way, their lie had become the truth.

“Carry my words to all corners of this land,” I declared. “So long as I shine, the Fifth Sun shall not set.”

I only had three final words to offer all of these women who had shared my pain and joys.

“I love you.”

Necahual looked up to me, meeting my eyes for the final time, and then said some final words of her own.

“I know.”

I blessed them with light and took flight to my destined battle. I sensed their gazes upon me as I rose across the pitch black and starless night sky, a shooting star blazing across lands I had conquered. My light shone upon Hananpacha, Chilam, Zachilaa, and a dozen cities besieged by the living dead. My radiance incinerated these ghosts back to primordial ashes and shone hope in the hearts of the living.

But my light dimmed as I approached the heart of darkness.

All of Yohuachanca’s roads were veins pumping tributes of gold back to its splendid capital, Mazatilia, the greatest and most populated city in the world. Its bustling markets were always booming with activity. Hundreds of thousands called this monument to the Nightlords’ arrogance their home.

Yet in the dead of night, I could not hear a sound.

The streets were devoid of people and movement alike. Not a bird remained to sing, and the wind choked on the miasma-filled empty houses. My palace smelled of a fresh grave, but neither servants nor concubines remained to be buried there. Plants rotted across dead gardens and a silent menagerie. I sensed no life, not even bones.

Not a single living soul remained in this tomb.

Evil stirred deep beneath its putrid stones. The Crimson Moon shone high above the Blood Pyramid, a waterfall of divine ichor raining down from the former onto the latter. I heard the wheezing agony of Tecciztecatl, the moon of this age, as the night bled it dry. The Fifth Sun hid behind its partner’s eclipse, its light slowly fizzling into nothingness.

There was so little time left.

Then I heard his voice echoing through rattling shadows, clearer to my divine essence than it had ever been to my feeble human ears.

You are too late.

I have strangled the sun.

My shadow and opposite erupted from beneath the Blood Pyramid to greet me, clad in tar and children’s flesh.

My predecessors had warned me that the Nightlords kept the failed Nightkin imprisoned there to suffer a gruesome fate I was better off not knowing. I had seen black tar flowing through so many of the Nightlords’ abodes, but I hadn’t made the connection between those two until a mountain of flesh arose to face me.

That had never been tar flowing through my palace.

It was blood; the blood of the failed princes of the empire, whose boiling fluids were used to burn their ancient progenitor in a sulfur pit from which only the world’s end could free him.

Now their flesh had become a vessel for the First Emperor’s spirit rather than a prison. He arose from the pyramid’s ruins as a great bat-shaped shadow matching me in size and power, his darkness as deep as my light was bright. His body was made of thousands of corpses merged in an unholy embrace, a tapestry of pallid and rotten corpses stitched up and joined in a harmonious mass. The blackened remains of the failed nightkin formed the core of the structure, but the capital’s citizens had joined into talons and legs fit for a god of pain and hatred. Wings of deathly miasma expanded while two sulfur stars glowed from a face of thick shadow, above which glowed a halo of blood.

The gods were pure power, the distilled essence of the concepts they embodied. I assumed this monstrous shape was the result of the First Emperor forming himself a body when Iztacoatl’s seal broke and his soul tethered on the edge of freedom. The flesh of the dead was meant to serve as a body, but now he would wear it as a regal cloak as he decreed the world’s end.

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I am the starless night which brings no comfort.

I am the cruel empire that crushes the weak.

I am the final wail and the hunger that remains.

I am the First Emperor.

I am Yohuachanca.

Here at last, the First Emperor faced the Last.

We faced each other over the ruins of the capital, over which we had both ruled. Above us, the stars were called down to Earth. The Tzitzimimeh demons would soon descend upon the Earth to devour those whose Yohuachanca’s brood hadn’t already consumed.

The Fifth Sun was fighting for its life, and with it, the very cosmos which I’d called home.

“This world’s time has not come yet,” I warned Yohuachanca. “Retreat back to the depths from which you came and let me herald the dawn!”

This is the land of darkness, where light fades away into nothingness.

The stars will feed, but I shall devour them too in turn.

Nihility beckons, my successor.

Not while I stood.

Sorcerers manipulated the world through spells, but gods had no need for such artifices. Our will was that of nature itself, the wind our breath, and the earth our dominion. I only had to think to see my wishes become reality.

I breathed a searing beam of sunlight that filled the night with a blinding flash. The whiteness of my flames struck the dark lord Yohuachanca with the strength of the raging summer sun and threw him across the capital, shattering buildings and city walls. The very earth shuddered at his wail, but I did not let him recover. I flew at him like how an owl hunts a bat, seizing him in my talons as we brawled among the heartlands of our empire. What remained of Acampa, my forgotten village, was crushed beneath our wings alongside forests and rivers.

You welcome me with pain, but your very pain I am.

Your torments I have sharedthrough so many nights.

He grabbed Smoke Mountain with talons of darkness, ripped it out of the earth in a great earthquake, and then smashed it against my beak. An immeasurable weight of stone impacted me, but it was barely enough to make me flinch.

The darkness of his face split in two, forming a vile grin filled with obsidian teeth, each taller than hills and sharper than any mortal blades. They sank into my throat, oozing poison and tar, evaporating at the touch of my flames. I did not truly feel pain—for fire knew no such thing—but the cold spreading through my neck was so opposite to my nature that it displeased me.

Do you not see?

Mortal lives are filled with fear and despair.

Betrayal, war, pestilence, hunger, pain, sorrow, and the bitter kiss of death.

This abominable world filled with tears…

Does it truly deserve to exist?

“Yes,” I replied firmly, for my word was the truth itself.

The fires of the dying earth answered my call and rose from the boiling wound which used to be Smoke Mountain. Lava sprang forth in a cataclysmic eruption and swallowed Yohuachanca in a tide of magma. The First Emperor’s stolen flesh burned at its contact, but only immortal darkness oozed from his wounds. I could hear the screams of the souls trapped in his stomach, begging for a release I could not yet provide.

We both took flight at once, our wings of fire and shadows carrying us above the clouds while our empire’s lifeless heartlands burned beneath us. A tide of magma swallowed the rotten foundations of the Nightlords’ capital and boiled the rivers to steam.

Five times have the gods tried to craft a better world.

Five times they failed.

I too have failed, because not even pain can change human nature.

All I found was sorrow.

We danced in the heavens above, the world singing to our opposing symphonies. We called upon clashing hurricanes and thunderstorms while warring in the sky. I sensed the gazes of mortals on the ground, from humans to beasts to ancient trees growing as far as Winland and beyond, watching light and darkness fight for control of the universe. Chaos ruled the sky while the earth wailed and screamed.

My flames and lightning had burned Yohuachanca’s stolen flesh, reducing him back to the very essence of darkness and miasma which he embodied. He expanded like a puddle of black oil on the surface of water and raised his wings to the moon. I heard a great scream, a sinister wail rippling across all of existence as a balance was shattered beyond recovery.

Two wails echoed across space and time, those of two gods who had once given up their corporeal flesh to shine upon the Fifth Cosmos; one bathing it in sunlight and the other in moonlight. The fangs of night sank into their weakened souls and hammered the final nail into their struggle’s coffin. The balance shifted in an irreparable way as Yohuachanca’s malice reigned supreme.

Their lights flashed one last time and then died out.

The bleeding moon cracked and broke apart.

Pieces of red moon shattered in a rain of fiery rocks falling upon the Earth below in a cataclysmic rain of shooting stars. I gazed at these blood drops of death—each capable of annihilating a country—and willed them away with all of my strength. My flames incinerated many of them into dust dispersed across the atmosphere and deviated others into the ocean far away from any civilization.

Yet I could not destroy them all either. The divine will of Yohuachanca clashed with mine the same way the Jaguar Woman and I fought with our Tombs, undoing my power, guiding pieces of moonstones onto the earth. I watched a few of them crashing on continents I had never seen, incinerating forests and cities, burying mountains in clouds of dust, and leaving scars of fire in their wake. I heard millions of lives cry in unison all at once, inflaming me with sorrow and rage alike.

Worse than this cataclysm, however, was the nothingness it left in its wake.

The Crimson Moon had shattered, but there was nothing behind the eclipse. Neither a sun nor a speck of starlight left.

A terrible despair sank into my heart of fire as I realized I was too late. The vile ritual the Nightlords had performed for six hundred years, the constant assaults of the night, and my failure to rise in time had weakened the Fifth Sun beyond recovery.

The light of Nanahuatzin had departed this universe, leaving only darkness.

Why do you spurn the night’s embrace?

This comforting darkness?

This numbing cold?

No.

I refused to accept this. I refused to watch this world die after I’d worked so hard to reach this moment, to bear witness to my loved ones’ deaths and to deny a future to my descendants below.

Prayers of the living flowed to my ears, begging for a god who cared enough to protect them, and I would fulfill their wishes.

So long as my wings burned, the light would never die.

Life is a temptation, a sweet fruit hiding the seeds of bitterness.

Why won’t you let us all rest?

“Because our people pray for a new dawn,” I replied, “and it is my duty to listen.”

I focused the light of my soul into my beak and blasted Yohuachanca with the radiance he so despised. The bat god flew across a dying world through clouds and storms alike, his immense frame landing onto a land of eternal ice to the far north, where no ship could sail. We passed above the green heaven which Ingrid’s people called Winland and beyond to a frozen expanse where life was as rare as water in a desert.

The impact split this land apart in a terrible explosion that blanketed the sky with ice, yet the shadow of Yohuachanca arose, colder and more relentless than winter’s icy grasp. My light refracted across the icy emptiness as I faced this immense shadow, my obsidian reflection, my equal in strength and determination. Only then did I realize the awful truth.

This fight was pointless.

I understood it now. We were light and darkness, functions of the world, wearing the masks of beasts and men. Neither of us could overcome the other by force, because we were both beyond strength. We were the building blocks of reality, as everlasting as time and gravity. We would undo all of existence before one defeated the other.

This duel would only end when one yielded.

I stared at this ancient and primeval abomination, this stain of darkness, this gaping abyss carved into the skin of the world. The fire I had become demanded retribution for his crimes, but enough of the human I had been remained deep within me to lift the veil off my gaze. I sought to see him for what he was, not what I wished to see him.

I looked beyond my enemy to see the true nature of Yohuachanca, flayed bare for all to see.

The First Emperor was a wound.

He was pain itself.

Beneath all the hunger and cruelty, there was only suffering. That was the concept which Yohuachanca came to embody once he ascended. He had sought to take upon himself the ills of mankind in order to bring them salvation, only to become an incarnation of all their rage and sins.

I found myself remembering the depths of Xibalba, when I faced the fears of control and victimization. The two came hand in hand, because the role of victim and tormentor could shift so easily in this cruel world of ours. I had worn both masks myself once.

I am tired.

I am alone.

I am in pain.

“This pain, too, will fade, as all awful things do.”

I had learned this lesson over the past year, pushing through the pain and torment to find love and beauty. For all the tortures I had suffered under the Nightlords, all the crimes I had to commit to survive, I had met kind souls like Nenetl, Ingrid, and so many others. I had forgiven Necahual and Mother, reunited with Father, and witnessed wonders I would never have seen had I remained trapped in my village. Even the horrors of the Land of the Dead Suns hid good souls and paradises.

Yohuachanca welcomed my words with a screech that reverberated across the ice, echoed by the star demons who sought to rise from the Underworld’s depths to devour all of life. I answered them both with my radiance, forcing the Tzitzimimeh back from this plane and enveloping Yohuachanca in my wings.

He lashed out at me with talons of fear and shadows, fighting, biting, screeching with all the weight of his sorrow and despair.

You have seen the worlds that were.

Drowned in sorrow, burning with anger, twisted by madness, and slaughtered in envy.

Again and again, the gods have tried to perfect us, but our flaws are their own.

“And yet the gods will try again,” I retorted, welcoming him into my bosom. “And again, and again, as many times as it takes.”

I felt the strength of his anger wane slightly, for my embrace was not one of hostility. The fire I embodied represented more than revenge and punishment, and it did not always burn the flesh. I was the warmth that comforted those whose prayers went unanswered, the glow that kept the cold away.

I had become salvation.

What salvation is there for bloodsoaked hands such as ours?

There is no one left to carry the sun’s torch.

The gods are dead.

“No,” I replied simply. “Not all the gods are dead.”

Only then did he stop resisting me. The First Emperor ceased to struggle, pondering my words. They had shaken him to his very soul, and perhaps even reached the man he had once been; the soul who had once wanted the same freedom and justice I craved myself.

Why?

Then I showed him.

I showed him the past, brief instants of tenderness shared with my consorts. I showed him Nenetl’s kind strength and desire to keep our child in spite of the circumstances that brought them into the world. I showed him Ingrid’s drive to save her sister and the joy she felt upon seeing Astrid again. I showed him the love of Eztli for her mother, and Necahual’s drive to protect her. I showed him Chikal’s drive to protect her homeland. I showed him the tears Mother shed when we reunited with my lost sibling and the strength of my father’s character, the determination of the past emperors, and the humble prayers of the Sapa people on behalf of each other.

I showed him so many small and beautiful things that had made my life worth living.

Why would you do this?

Why indeed? I, the man who had once killed himself rather than play the role of the sacrifice for his puppet gods? Why would he take this duty upon himself, and follow through in the footsteps of those who came before?

Why make this sacrifice?

“Because it is my choice.”

This sacrifice would not be forced upon me.

It was my choice, the expression of my freedom. I had the strength to protect my consorts and children, to rule over my patch of paradise even as the Fifth Cosmos sank into the Underworld’s depths. There was nothing compelling me into this path.

Nothing except my will and conscience.

I did not want my children to grow up on an island of light surrounded by eternal darkness. I wanted them and their mothers to inherit a world that they could explore, where the wind blew, where they could find joy and hope, where they could imagine what lurked beyond the dawn and seize it.

I wanted them to grow in a world where they could live.

I assumed that was what the gods meant for us when they crafted the first.

Mankind will disappoint you, as it always does.

Yohuachanca responded to my light and hopes with darkness. He showed me the sting of his daughters’ betrayal, the pain of burning in a sulfur pit filled with the tar-blood of his descendants for centuries, the endless procession of horrors the Nightlords and men across the land and sea perpetrated on each other. He showed me the worst of humanity, rape and murder and torture and theft and all the cruelties the mind could conjure.

The tide of evil slid off me, for it was nothing I hadn’t seen before.

You understand that.

“I do.”

And I would still do it.

I would bear all of the ills of the world for a single moment of happiness.

“Come,” I said upon releasing Yohuachanca, and then made him a promise. “I will shoulder your pain until our final nights, and my light shall soothe your hunger. No longer will you be alone or starving. We shall dance in the sky until this world comes to an end.”

The word of a god was his bond, an oath of the universe to itself. There was no lie in my proposal, no deceit, no trick of the mind. Yohuachanca listened to me, and for the first time in centuries, a glimmer of hope shone through the gnawing hunger and despair which he had come to embody.

For all the blood we had shed, for all the corpses which had paved our ascensions, for all the crimes which we had committed, this would be our salvation. We would take this world’s sins upon ourselves and offer them a second chance.

The same we never deserved, but received anyway.

For an impossible moment, the shadow of Yohuachanca basked in my light and pondered my words. The universe held its breath as the night faced the day, as hope met despair, as the First Emperor looked upon the Last and saw himself. He saw me as I saw myself through Tezcatlipoca’s eyes, what he could have been, and then as what I was.

I was what he had once wanted to be. What he had failed to become.

And the First Emperor finally felt the comfort of kinship.

Very well, my successor.

This time alone, I shall believe in you.

A new balance was forged, and the cosmos rearranged itself in response.

The sky reshaped itself at our command in an instant. Instead of fighting over the tapestry of the universe, we began to weave it, to forge it, to reshape it. We forced the souls of the Tzitzimimeh back into the earth below and the stars back into the heavens, where they would wait another eon for their chance to devour the world. Yohuachanca released the souls of the dead bound by the vampire curse back to Mictlan, and in return, I fed him my light. I carried the embers of Lady Sigrun’s soul, Guatemoc, and so many others back to the Underworld, where they could finally find rest.

The wounds of the earth ran deep, but though we could not bring the dead back, we knitted them the best we could. We soothed the fires of the world and quelled the raging seas until the quakes finally ceased. Then we turned our gazes to an empty sky.

We did not hesitate.

We arose together to the heavens, which I lit with the fire of a new day. I shone upon the world below, heralding the return of the day and the coming of a new dawn. Yohuachanca crawled into himself, turning into a great red sphere of blood and stone that would chase and bask in my life-giving light until our final nights.

A new Crimson Moon now followed the Sixth Sun.

I ushered the world anew, and the ancient curse of Yohuachanca finally came to an end.