The Third Layer was pitch black.
I awoke in the depths of sinister Tamōhuānchān amidst the mad and damned. The shadows of torches and pyres hardly lit up the thick shadows blanketing putrid rivers and ruins of a long dead world. The morning star of Quetzalcoatl had grown so distant I could barely see it anymore. Once a small sun, it had been reduced to a tiny white dot in a sea of black. Its faint glow struck with the strength of a sharp rebuke, as was the absence of Quetzalcoatl’s priest Topiltzin.
The ssage was loud and clear.
The Feathered Serpent had denied his light, and left only a dead hell’s fires to warm .
I stood alone among a parade of demons and abominations rejoicing around the bonfires. They paid no mind, neither attacking nor fleeing. They simply sang and danced while the living cried and scread. The damned knew that I belonged here among them.
Mother wasn’t there to greet like she always did. She was probably still awake in the world above, fleeing the tide of undead that fell upon the Sapa camp like a swarm of hungry bats. Perhaps sothing worse happened to her after she assisted in the soul-transfer ritual.
The bitter irony wasn’t lost on . After abandoning for many years out of selfish self-preservation, I might have finally given Mother a good excuse not to show up. I would have laughed if our spell’s consequences hadn’t been so disastrous.
I didn’t think I would ever miss that woman, but her absence carried the bitter taste of failure in my mouth. I had managed to achieve one of my long-term goals and save Eztli from her curse, yet what should have been a joyous occasion left devoid of pride.
I raised my arm and crafted a skull within the palm of my hand. Its eyes lit up with the pale and ghostly glow of a hundred specters. One of them shone brighter than all others, his light more comforting than any star.
“You couldn’t know this would happen, Iztac,” Father whispered in an attempt to reassure . “None of us expected such devastation.”
“I did.” Father ant well, but I couldn’t lie to myself. “I simply refused to think about it.”
I had known since the disaster on Smoke Mountain that each Nightlord’s death would bring their vile father a step closer to freedom. I had received a glimpse of the destruction that would follow such an outco once Yoloxochitl perished. Even if I couldn’t anticipate that fully severing that part of the Nightlords’ ritual would result in such chaos, I knew that it would play into their progenitor’s hands.
Part of simply considered it part of the course on my way to achieve freedom; an acceptable risk to bring down the rotten pyramid crushing under its foundations.
Only now did I fully understand my choice’s consequences.
“The Fifth Sun will die with the Nightlords,” I whispered. That was not a question, but a fact. “The First Emperor’s freedom will spell this world’s end.”
I had been one with the darkness called Yohuachanca, felt his hunger, shared his wrath and pain. I had been the first and last emperor all at once for a mont, and in that union we witnessed the incoming doomsday. Centuries of tornt and captivity had driven the vampires’ progenitor to all-consuming madness. Where the First Emperor once sought to save mortalkind from Camazotz’s fangs, he now only craved a dawnless night.
Tlaloc warned that gods were slaves to their nature and power. The First Emperor was hunger and pain incarnate. His appetite had shed all traces of humanity until it knew no bounds. He would devour all that was, friends and foes alike, in a dood attempt to fill the bottomless hole he called a stomach.
I had unlocked the gate, and it would never fully close again.
“You couldn’t lay down and do nothing either, my son,” Father said kindly. “You tried your best to save Eztli from an unjust fate, and you’ve succeeded. That at least should be celebrated.”
He was right. No matter how crushing my guilt, I couldn’t say I regretted trying to spare Eztli’s soul from transforming into the very horror that had her father murdered and enslaved her mother.
It was the path I chose to achieve this objective that I now regretted.
“I should have found another way,” I whispered, both to myself and my father. The cost… the cost had been too great.
“Yes,” Father conceded a little bit more sternly than before. While kind and supportive, he knew when to set his foot down. “You have made a choice today, with the innocent and guilty both paying the price for it. That is a fact.”
“What other option did we have?” the skull suddenly whispered with the voice of a hundred emperors pushing Father back. “You fought with the tools given to you by this unfair world, our successor.”
That was what I had told myself so many tis in the past. That was how I justified Smoke Mountain’s eruption, the bloody massacre I organized to bribe the Yaotzin into warning Mother of incoming danger, the war against the Sapa, and the chaos I left in my wake. I told myself that I had no choice other than to use the few weapons fate put in my path. The option of throwing down my arm never entered my mind.
Nothing I could ever do would compare to the evil which the Nightlords represented.
But now… now that I had tasted true evil… I had begun to doubt even that.
“If we succeed in destroying the Nightlords… then the world will end,” I told my father and predecessors. I had seen too many acts of divine power to doubt it. “Tlaloc ended his own with a surge of fire; his wife with a flood; and Quetzalcoatl with a hurricane. The First Emperor will simply bring down the final night.”
“There is still ti to find another way, Iztac,” Father tried to reassure , yet his warmth and kindness failed to break through my despair. “There are other paths to walk.”
“You are halfway a god yourself, our successor,” the Parliant of Skulls added. “The sa power Yohuachanca seized remains within your reach; and with it, the chance to oppose him.”
I only had to take a look at the distant starlight to know these hopes were misplaced.
Quetzalcoatl was the god of knowledge. No one could hide anything from him. He alone among the heavens cared for mankind for its own sake. The horrors of Yohuachanca were certainly no mystery to him.
I could only see one reason why he would deny the gift of his embers and the power to defeat the Nightlords, even after the latter nearly raised their Sulfur Sun and inflicted untold suffering upon mankind: the Feathered Serpent deed that my ascension and victory would be a worse outco for the world than letting vampires rule it.
Queen Mictecacihuatl had warned that all the gods were dead, that no one remained to light the Sixth Sun. Either Lord Quetzalcoatl feared that the First Emperor’s freedom would shepherd mankind into its final night, or that my godhood would beco an equal blight upon the universe.
While the Nightlords remained responsible for driving their father to madness, the fact remained that their existence alone stood between their dark progenitor and the world’s end. My quest for freedom would only lead to worldwide annihilation; to my death and that of all those I cared for.
Yet… yet as I looked at the dark horizon, searching for my unborn child’s blue eyes shining sowhere in this sea of shadows, I couldn’t forget that a fate just as terrible awaited and my consorts should I stand idle. Our souls would suffer inside either a pile of skulls or a vampire’s stomach, while our children beca breeding stock or monsters tornting the living and the dead.
What kind of twisted world required such pain to keep its end at bay? Did it even deserve to exist?
What was I supposed to do?
Father, as always, seed to sense my thoughts. “Why are you fighting, my son?”
His words caused great confusion. “Why?”
“The end determines the ans used to achieve it,” Father replied wisely. “I fear that in focusing on the latter, you have forgotten the forr… and why you are fighting for it in the first place. These doubts and lies cloud your heart.”
Why was I fighting? The answer felt obvious. I was fighting the Nightlords because they were monsters who deserved to die, and because letting them win ant everyone I loved would perish on an altar.
However, I began to see the wisdom in Father’s question when I thought of the Sapa… of Aclla. I’d told myself I would proceed with the Eztli ritual and bla it on the Sapa Empire because she had deserved better, and that a realm built on enthralling its population deserved to be destroyed.
Yet… I sent Zyanya’s first husband to be murdered, possessed a man into suicide in order to fra him, and piled bodies upon bodies for my own advantage. Aclla’s fate had indeed moved , but did her death excuse and justify a thousand others? The comparison sounded hollow even in my own head; a lie made to coat my own desires in a cloak of virtue and altruism. The truth was that I hated the Sapa because of the mirror they pointed at my face. I saw in them my own faults reflected.
Manco had told what he considered to be the value of a life, yet I had no answer to give.
I suspected that was what Father had sensed. How could I hope to overco a god when I didn’t even know myself as a man?
I felt the chains on my heart coiling on my heart-fire once again and strain it tightly. I held my chest with my free hand as I sensed the Nightlords’ hands pulled against my bindings. I tasted their panic, their desperation, their struggle to keep the evil which they leeched off for centuries safely trapped in his prison of blood and pain.
Their fear would have filled with happiness once, but not tonight.
The pain yanked my spirit back to the world of the living in an instant. I barely had ti to reabsorb Father’s skull back into my bones before my consciousness faded from the Underworld.
A faint ray of sunlight woke up.
My lungs gasped for air and a deep chill entered my throat. My eyes opened to a faint light piercing through black clouds and my roaming palace bedroom’s window. I shivered beneath thick blankets heavier than stone, and though I sensed breasts and flesh pressing against my skin to keep warm, my entire body felt cold like ice. For the first ti since I tasted a god’s embers, I struggled against sickness.
And more than that, I was thirsty; thirstier than I’d ever been.
I breathed heavily, my chest hurting from the aftermath of a stroke, but managed to look around. Two naked won pressed against inside the bed from both sides to keep warm: a sleeping Necahual on the left… and her awakened daughter on the right.
“Iztac?” she called out my na with Chindi’s voice and none of the savage edge. “Thank the gods, you’re awake.”
I stared at the latter as she rose from beneath the blanket, a blinded shell of flesh wearing a brand-new skin. The flesh was Chindi’s, but the body language… The body language was unmistakable. I saw the soul shining through this skin as surely as if it had remained in its previous ho.
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“Eztli?” I blurted out, before swiftly realizing my mistake. “Anaye?”
“Yes,” she replied with a soft, kind smile. “Yes, Iztac, it is .”
I wouldn’t lie, hearing these words after so much fear and devastation ward my heart of ice.
I squinted as a ray of light hit in the eyes through the window. Dark clouds slowly cleared to shine on what I assud to be the Sapa’s mountains.
“How…” I cleared my throat. “How long was I out?”
“A full day. This is the first ti the sun has shined since. It ca two hours late, but I suppose it is better to be late than dead.” Eztli turned to stare at the radiant orb of light banishing the darkness, basking in its radiance the way she used to before her… her transformation. “I had almost forgotten a new dawn’s beauty.”
So did I. I had feared part of the ritual’s collapse would imdiately spell this world’s end, yet it seed the Fifth Sun would not so easily be obscured.
The night had won a victory, but the war continued.
“We are in the mountains near the valley,” Eztli inford , reading my mind before I could ask for our location. “Chikal took command in your absence. Since monsters and battle prevented us from evacuating back to Chilam, she had your surviving troops regroup elsewhere to the southeast. Don’t ask to put this place on a map.”
“Survivors?” I asked, my throat dry. Eztli handed a jug of water sitting on the bedside table, but it didn’t help in the slightest. The hunger consuming required another kind of fluid. “Monsters?”
Eztli’s expression darkened. “The dead rose from below the earth, n and beasts both, to hunt all night long. Lahun suggested burning the corpses to prevent another incident, and so far it’s working. As for the old bat and her brood, they descended upon the Sapa camp and went on a killing spree. I don’t know what happened to them.”
I did. I could still feel Sugey’s hand tightening the chain of my heart. The Nightlord yet lived to tornt another day.
“Tayatzin and…” I cleared my throat upon recalling flashes of slaughter from last night. “The priests…”
“Dead,” Eztli confird. “They went all mad with bloodthirst. The Jaguar Warriors and Eagle Knights slew those who tried to attack us. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them.”
Tayatzin might have been a little more moral than my previous red-eyed advisors, but that didn’t an much. I wouldn’t mourn his loss.
Sugey’s reckless attack on the Sapa might have been an echo of her father’s madness. The First Emperor’s fury had rippled through his curse and enticed all his ‘descendants’ into a killing frenzy. The Bird of War had recovered enough to tighten the chain on my heart though, so it had only been a temporary asure.
Or perhaps Sugey had sensed the loss of Eztli and suspected that the Sapa were behind it. Her attack would have been a last-ditch attempt to prevent whatever spell she thought they had cast to ruin her and her sisters’ rituals.
Whatever the case, I knew this respite wouldn’t last. The Nightlords found scarcely a day after Smoke Mountain erupted. So long as they held my soul in bondage, they would always track down.
“So we’re…” I regained enough strength to form complete sentences. “Unsupervised?”
“Like on that mountain.” Eztli smiled kindly and seized the bandages over her eyes. “I’ve been waiting to show you this.”
I watched on with a mix of awe and surprise as Eztli transford before my eyes. Her curves changed in proportions from Chindi’s slender fra to fuller breasts and darker skin. Her black hair grew longer until it reached her ass, and her face altered back into one that resembled Necahual’s so much, albeit younger and kinder.
Eztli unveiled her bandages and stared at with bright black eyes, without a trace of red.
It was like watching ti rewind before my eyes. My childhood love and companion sat in front of , returned from the dead and purged of Yoloxochitl’s curse.
“You’ve retained Chindi's powers?” I asked in disbelief. Showing this was an extraordinary risk, so I imdiately raised a Veil around us. I sensed no outsider’s gaze upon us, no spy hidden in a corner.
Eztli was right, no one listened nor watched.
For a brief instant, we could be ourselves.
“Seems so.” Eztli pushed back her hair and let it fall on her shoulder. “Whatever you did broke the old bats’ hold on us. Her strength is mine now, unshackled and unbent.”
Would that include the Skinwalker curse too? “Do you feel… different?”
“Besides the fact that I have a new face and body now? Or the fact that I can look at people without thirsting for their blood?” Eztli shook her head with lancholy. “We have both changed, Iztac.”
Yes… yes, she was right. The children we were before the Night of the Scarlet Moon were long dead. Experience had changed , for the better or worse, and Eztli couldn’t wash away the months of vampirism, the murder of her father, and all the horrors she went through. She would have to live with those wounds for the rest of her days.
Not even the gods could turn back ti.
Eztli sensed my lancholia and leaned forward. “Don’t look at things that way, Iztac,” she consoled . “My mind is mine alone at last, and to that, I can only say one thing.”
Her hands pressing against my cheeks to better stare into my eyes.
“Thank you, Iztac,” she said with true and utmost sincerity, her eyes overflowing with gratitude. “Thank you for saving .”
Those words delighted my ears, and her smile seed brighter than the sun outside, but neither shook my lancholia. If anything, my guilt only grew heavier.
“Iztac?” Eztli frowned upon noticing my unease. “Aren’t you happy?”
“I am,” I replied, albeit only half-heartedly. “I am happy, and thousands paid the price for it.”
I had purchased this mont with tides of blood. I’d saved the woman I loved from the sa terrible loss of identity I had inflicted on Chindi, and I had done so by cursing the entire world.
And sohow, that wasn’t even the worst part.
Eztli studied for a mont before speaking up again. “Can I ask you a question, Iztac?”
My jaw clenched. I already knew what she was about to say, because I had asked myself that exact sa question many tis already.
“If you had the option to go back in ti, to choose between and those who died…” Eztli’s head tilted to the side like an owl. “Would you have picked any different?”
A deep sigh escaped my mouth. That answer was what I felt the most guilty about.
“No,” I confessed. I couldn’t lie to myself about this, let alone to Eztli. “No, I would still have chosen you.”
And that, I suspected, was what made just as evil as those I’d been fighting against.
The Nightlords sacrificed thousands in the na of their own stinking glory; Manco and the Sapa had no issue doing the sa in their immortal state’s na; and I myself slew the many to preserve the few people I cared about. Our motives were different, but the outco of our choices remained the sa: we had all brought death to the world.
I simply found better excuses for my cris than the others. Love and justice sounded better than glory and power to the uninitiated, but they could be just as cruel and selfish. I’d condemned others for the sa cris I had committed.
The title of Cizin suited well. I had been willing to burn down this world to save my father’s soul, and I helped set off this arson to protect Eztli.
Eztli accepted my answer with a small, yet sharp nod. She leaned in until her breasts pressed on my chest, her touch warming up.
“And that is why,” she whispered, her faint breath flowing on my face, “I love you.
Her lips pressed against mine.
I had kissed Eztli so often since she beca my consort that I had lost count… but none of our embraces ca close to this. Coupling with her vampire self had been like kissing a tepid corpse, yet her lips were now as warm as the sun. Their heat traveled across my face, my jaw, and my spine.
My hands slipped to her waist and seized her hips with a tight, unbreakable grip. I pulled her closer, her legs slipping over mine until no single gap of air separated us. A craving passion and desire pushed back my guilt and remorse to the far corner of my mind, at least for the mont.
Our kiss was long, full of lust, longing, and gratitude; and like all good things, it ended way too soon.
“I forgot I needed to breathe during this,” Eztli whispered upon breaking our embrace. “I have dread of it for so long…”
“So did I,” I replied. I had dread of it long before I even beca an emperor and she a vampire; the day I could hold her in my arms as my living, breathing wife instead of a possessed corpse. “I’ve killed for you.”
“I know.” Eztli’s smile had a sad edge to it. “So will condemn you for your choice, but I will never be among their number. I promise you that.”
I heard movent at my left, and a familiar voice whispering to . “Many tis have I prayed the gods to save my daughter, Iztac.”
I turned slightly to find Necahual staring at us. I had been so engrossed in kissing Eztli that I hadn’t noticed her waking up. Perhaps she had been listening from the start.
“I begged them to return Eztli to ,” Necahual said, her fingers moving to stroke her daughter’s hair. “I offered them everything I had to give… my soul, my body, and my life. No price would have been too great to pay.”
Eztli’s hand grabbed that of her mother’s and held it tightly. Necahual brought it closer and kissed her fingers.
“The gods ignored , Iztac, as they ignored so many tis before,” Necahual said, her voice brimming with bitterness and disappointnt. “No one listened… except you.”
She snuggled against , caressing my face and lips. Necahual’s confidence hadn’t weathered in the slightest, unlike mine; if anything, being reunited with her daughter had only strengthened it.
“I offered you my soul, and you delivered what you promised,” Necahual said with calm acceptance. She was at peace with our covenant and, unlike , did not regret its consequences. “Our people do not need a self-pitying fool wallowing in his doubts and misery, Iztac. They need a god that listens to their prayers like you did with mine.”
“I am no god,” I replied simply. And considering Lord Quetzalcoatl’s disdain, this goal would likely remain a distant dream.
“You will be. You must be, because soone has to ensure that they–” Necahual put her hand on her womb. “Will enjoy a happier life than we did.”
Necahual’s world stopped at her family. She had been ready to do everything for her daughter’s sake, and that intense determination was about as admirable as it was frightening.
The mory of blue eyes staring at from the darkness flashed into my mind, the pain as raw as the first ti I saw them. Images of Nenetl, my sister, stroking her belly while telling no one born of love could be cursed followed, alongside mories of my nights with Chikal and so many others.
The Nightlords would make monsters and tools of my children. They would feed on them, breed them, transform them, and sacrifice them. They would at least survive without the First Emperor running amok, but could I truly call that living? Was that the best future I could offer to my blood and the won who entrusted their hearts to ?
“Father is… Father is still trapped too, Iztac,” Eztli said with a grim look. “The curse did not let him go. He’s screaming in the dark as we speak.”
He would be but one among many. Sigrun, my predecessors, and so many others had been denied peace even after death. I could raise mountains higher than the Sapa’s if I piled up all the Nightlords’ victims, all those souls either screaming in the night or weeping as skulls on a pile.
I’d promised I’d fight for them too. That was why Queen Mictecacihuatl entrusted with her secret spells; so that I would fight for the rights of the weeping dead.
“Will you free him?” Eztli pleaded with the way a priestess prayed to her god for salvation. “Him and all the others?”
I had a duty to the living and the departed. To the gods. Tlaloc himself imbued with his power so that I would free my people from their false idols, and I promised Queen Mictecacihuatl that I would remind mortals of the Day of the Dead. I could not allow Ingrid, Chikal, Nenetl, and all the won who put their faith in to die on a bloody altar.
My cause did not excuse the cris I had committed, nor the bodies I’d piled up on the way. I saw that now. I should stop wasting energy on finding excuses rather than solutions.
I would take responsibility for my actions, both before myself and Lord Quetzalcoatl, but I could not give up the fight either. There had to be a third path between allowing the Nightlords get away with their cris and freeing their monstrous father to end the world; an outco where the dead could finally rest and my children prosper.
I had to dream of a better future.
“I will try my best,” I first replied, before realizing my best wouldn’t be enough for Eztli. I had to do, not try. “Yes, I will.”
I would bring back the dawn.
I could feel my magic recording my promise and binding my soul to this oath. My burgeoning divine self honored my ambition and would not let betray it.
“And I will be at your side the day it happens,” Eztli said as she held my hands. “I swear to you.”
“This cannot continue,” I told Eztli and her mother, my gaze turning to the horizon beyond the window. “This destruction I sow everywhere, whether I an to or not. I’m… I’m sick of it. Fighting fire with fire leaves the world ablaze.”
“Then take a step back and think,” Eztli advised. “Whatever you choose, I will be at your side.”
I knew she ant every word, like her mother before her; and that it ant she would also either close her eyes or support any atrocity I committed from now on. It was… it was nice in a way to receive such unconditional trust, but it also enabled the worst in .
Father alone had managed to put back on the right path through a mix of sternness and kindness. I could count on him to guide to the best of his ability, yet he remained a mortal; so were my predecessors.
If Lord Quetzalcoatl knew everything, then perhaps he alone could show the better path… should he deign to.
I’ve never asked, I suddenly realized. I only tried to prove myself in his eyes, but always acted on hearsay and assumptions. I’ve sought his power, but never his guidance.
A sharp pain in my chest returned to reality, followed by a familiar pressure in the air. Eztli had changed her face and pulled her bandages over her eyes in an instant while Necahual’s head snapped towards the window. I sensed magic at work outside, with clouds blotting out the sun in a mile-wide range.
That isn’t the First Emperor, I realized. A god had no need for magic; their power required no effort on their part, no more than the wind had to eat to blow one way or the other. This is a spell; a powerful one, but a spell nonetheless.
Its source flew in the cover of this roaming umbrella of darkness, her wings stained red with blood and guts, her twin-heads snapping their beaks while roaring and screeching with prival rage.
As it turned out, the Nightlords did have ans to protect themselves from the sun in a pinch.
That penumbra cloud spell likely required a great deal of resources to maintain or else the sisters would cast it all the ti, but it worked well enough. The cloud followed Sugey around and protected her like how a shield protected a warrior from arrows. She flew straight at us, lured by my blood and vengeance.
Sugey… Sugey had changed. I could tell the mont I saw her twin-faces frothing with anger. There was a sharpness to her crimson gaze she didn’t have before, a predatory edge once hidden within a sheath and now unveiled for all to see. The strain of holding her father prisoner had taken a toll on her and filled her heart with animalistic fury.
And she carried a trophy in her talons.
Only when I saw the face vainly squirming against her grip did I understand why the Nightlord had attacked the Sapa camp so brazenly… and why I had woken up alone in the Underworld.
Mother.
The Nightlord had caught Mother.
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