I took flight with a roar and blazed into being.

My mortal flesh and bones melted away in an instant, my wings unfurling in a flash of light that illuminated the night. Darkness recoiled from my radiance as I grew into the great owl-fire I burned to become. I cast my roaming palace in blinding shining shadows and announced my coming with a shriek that shook the mountains.

A jaguar’s roar answered me from across the bloody horizon.

The Jaguar Woman arose from beyond the valley like a crimson sun promising a dawn of death. She had grown almost as large as I was and changed into a twisted horror straight out of Xibalba’s houses of nightmares. The upper part of her body belonged to a jaguar whose fur reeked of blood and whose muscles strained with cursed strength. Her nails ended in claws sharper than any sword, and her flayed human face peeked in the middle of her feline forehead like one final piece of rotten humanity. The lower half of her body ended in a long, white snake tail instead of legs, its scales shaped like screaming skulls and moaning faces begging for death. Vile bat wings with holes leaking pus and tar unfurled from her back.

As I faced the monstrosity, that fate of mine, I realized that the Jaguar Woman had truly become what she had always been deep down; a ravenous, twisted monster ruling from a throne of stolen lives. A kinslaying skinwalker who had shed her family’s own blood and then sucked it away in her vampiric thirst for more.

The Jaguar Woman’s betrayal of her sister did not surprise me in the slightest. Iztacoatl had long confirmed that it was Ocelocihuatl who masterminded the Nightlords’ coup and their father’s imprisonment. She had always reeked of cold cruelty and never expressed any sorrow at the loss of her sisters. She was a true fiend; a demon whose bottomless hunger for power could never be satiated.

She did not belong in this world, and it was my duty—and pleasure—to purge her from it.

I had waited for this moment for so long. So long. This was a battle all of my trials and tribulations prepared me for, and I couldn’t wait to fight it.

I could feel the danger in the air, the sorcery brimming from her bloody fur. The Jaguar Woman was a false goddess, but nothing said a fake couldn’t match the original. Belief was power in this world, and triumphing over me would no doubt force reality to accept her lies as the truth. She was the one who wove the First Emperor’s binding ritual in the first place and conceived the mad scheme that nearly painted the sun itself blue with sulfur.

This would have been a difficult battle on its own, but a third challenger soon arose to join us.

The golden city of Paititi shuddered and crumbled into the molten lake, flooding its shores in a tide of gilded death that consumed stone and trees alike. I held it back with a Word by inviting stones to rise in a moat that shielded some of my exposed soldiers and allowed them to retreat back to higher and safer altitudes. A cataclysmic quake rocked the land and mountains, and I could feel the awe of onlookers—especially the likes of Empress Killa—upon seeing the ancient Sapa settlement vanish so suddenly.

However, that did not last.

For a second that stretched for a lifetime to my senses, all was silent; but then the sea of metal quivered and receded as swiftly as it expanded. A whirlpool of molten gold formed at the center of the lake, swallowing everything into a single point. Ancient energies built over centuries of rituals stretching back all the way to the Sapa Empire and Yohuachanca’s founding reached their apex in a violent surge of sorcery.

Then I saw the souls.

I Gazed upon the whirlpool to see the mummified faces of a Parliament of Mallquis; the will of hundreds of undead too stubborn to die for good. I sensed Inkarri among the swirling mass of dusty ectoplasm and greed, but he was only a single will in an ocean that drowned out all individuality. A merged amalgam of countless existences merged their gilded bones into a gestalt being, then fashioned themselves a new body.

An immense creature rivaling me in size arose from the lake. It was a condor, but with none of my divine fire nor the Jaguar Woman’s twisted flesh. It looked wholly artificial on a close look, with feathers of gilded flagstones, wings of buttresses and crenelations, talons of spears and swords, and a beak of joined gates. Its eyes were windows gleaming with starlight.

At the heart of the magical construct was a single corpse gleaming with power buried deep within a chest and ribs of melded towers; a mirror of true divinity, the bright reflection of all-consuming darkness.

Tonatiuh the Sunborn, brother of Yohuachanca, brought this abomination to life.

The divinity inside me burned with newfound rage. I didn’t need magic to see the similarities between that abomination and the horrors of Yohuachanca. The Mallquis had joined together into a Parliament of the Dead, merging their souls to the enslaved corpse of their first emperor in the hope of mimicking true divinity; but whereas my predecessors endured their fate in the hopes of achieving eternal freedom in death, the Sapa elders had willingly surrendered their very identity on the altar of an ephemeral state. This condor was a false idol, a mimicry of Yohuachanca that derived its power from their heart’s relation to the First Emperor the same way the Nightlords had gained their foul power by draining those of their dread father.

This entity was as fake as its stone feathers.

“Begone from these sacred lands, shadows of Yohuachanca!” the condor said. Though its voice carried the weight of the thousands of souls forming its collective consciousness, one cut through them all: that of Inkarri, whose words reverberated through the mountains and the clouds, guiding the chorus of spirits like the conductor of a singing choir. “You do not belong in this world, and you shall stain it no longer!”

My eyes gleamed with fury. “Your words sound as empty as your future, fool’s gold, false god!”

Both the Jaguar Woman and Inkarri were false idols that made a mockery of true deities, and of those who had earned their power through effort rather than deceit. I felt the sorrow of Lady Chalchiuhtlicue at this turn of events, the anger of Tlaloc at the blatant blasphemy, and the quiet disappointment of Lord Quetzalcoatl. The true gods of this world had gazed upon these counterfeits through my eyes and found them wanting.

The owl, the bat, and the condor flew into battle while the world was watching. The three of us faced each other under the pale moonlight, the flaps of our wings blowing mighty gusts of wind.

We exchanged no taunts, no clever wordplay, no banter of any kind. We had nothing to say to each other, nothing to trade besides spite and hatred. We had all come here to kill the others, and we all intended to do exactly that.

I struck first.

I opened my mouth and unleashed a Blaze-breath mighty enough to incinerate an entire city to cinders, aiming straight for the most dangerous foe: the Jaguar Woman.

She immediately furled her wings and matched my sunlight with shadows. Dark miasma so thick as to swallow stars coiled around her in a pitch-black mantle that repelled even my flames. The very essence of the night shielded her from me, and my redirected flames instead set parts of the shore on fire.

Inkarri—I refused to consider that condor abomination as anything more than a vessel for his and the Mallquis’ will—immediately exploited the opportunity to strike us both. The condor flapped its wings and fired tower-feathers at us. I used the Fall to cause the projectiles to crash down onto the earth below us with a thought, while those targeting the Jaguar Woman vanished in her summoned darkness.

The mantle of miasma surrounding her immediately unfurled into the shape of two great hands lunging at me and Inkarri, so quick neither of us managed to react in time. She grabbed us by the throats and smashed us against a nearby mountain with immense force.

The Doll spell.

I had known the Jaguar Woman could use it since the night we met, but she wove with such skillfulness that it bordered on the instinctual. The blow was perfectly calculated to decapitate the target in a single strike; and when both Inkarri and I proved too resistant to indulge her desire for an immediate demise, the Jaguar Woman immediately began to choke us with immense pressure.

She was skilled.

“Does it bring back memories?” the Jaguar Woman taunted me as she tightened her grip on my throat, her voice mixed with that of her murdered sister. “Insolent slave?”

Yes, it did. She had used the exact same move on me on the Night of the Scarlet Moon when I first voiced my word of defiance. She had choked the breath out of me back then until I passed out and woke up a prisoner.

But I was powerless no longer.

I countered her Doll spell with my own, shaping spectral arms of pure flames with the strength to sunder mountains. They grabbed the miasmic hand choking the life out of me and forced it off, while Inkarri cut off the fingers holding him with the sharp ends of his wings.

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The Jaguar Woman’s feline jaws clenched in annoyance, and then let out a hiss of rage when fireballs hit her in her last remaining patch of a human face.

My witches had taken flight to fight at my side.

The three of them had unfurled their wings and circled the Jaguar Woman from above, firing fireballs and lightning bolts from the tips of their hands. My mother joined my flock in owl form with none of the fear she had shown against Sugey; her mind was clear this time.

The fires of the heavens and the earth alike struck the last of the Nightlords, searing her skin and melting her flesh. Soldiers on the ground led by Chikal launched arrows anointed with my holy blood that ignited the moment they touched the vampire’s scales and flesh. I counted Ingrid among them, and judging from the smile on her face she was relishing the chance to strike back against the Nightlord as much as I did.

Unfortunately, the Jaguar Woman had grown so large and strong that they might as well have been a swarm of wasps assaulting a mountain lion. Their stings hurt and distracted, but they would never be enough to kill. The fires that seared her human face had melted off her skin to reveal a festering, glaring mass of flesh underneath, yet she seemed more furious than truly wounded.

The last of the Nightlords shed death.

Droplets of blackened tar-blood erupted from her wounds and immediately coalesced into batlike monsters. They had no skin, no fur, only bodies of coalesced blood with claws and fangs of sharpened obsidian gnashing in utter silence. Their heads showed crimson outlines akin to skulls rather than faces, each of them twisted in an expression of ravenous hunger. I briefly thought that the Jaguar Woman had released the souls imprisoned within her belly, but I quickly realized these were mere puppets and extensions of her will.

A true vampire never let anyone

go.

Bats great and small thus poured out of the Jaguar Woman in a great black swarm that immediately fell upon my followers. I activated the Gaze and let the sunlight pouring out of my eyes incinerate all the ‘Nightkin’ I saw into cinders. Alas, more of them fell upon my followers with indiscriminate hunger, ripping out throats with their fangs and tearing amazons apart with their mere claws. I caught a glimpse of Chikal beheading one with a sword while Eztli and Nenetl adopted animal forms to fight back… but the swarm only grew in number until it darkened the very moonlight.

So I summoned my own army.

I planted bonecrafted ribs into the earth and watched them ripen into an army of the dead. Emperors from centuries past arose as a legion of gilded skeletons hungering for justice and revenge. Warriors, scholars, fools, and geniuses, all answered my call with blades of ghostfire and undead fury. They carved into the vampires to protect the living, some of them their own descendants. Even my father joined the Legion to help wage its last battle.

My predecessors at long last could fight back from beyond the grave and relished the opportunity.

“Do you feel it now?!” I taunted the Jaguar Woman. “The tide of retribution?!”

The Jaguar Woman glared at the ghosts of her countless victims now rising as one to overthrow her. They were not puppets like her own thralls, and though I had granted them bodies to fight with, they did so of their own accord. Ours was an union of the damned fighting for a cause rather than a collection of slaves.

Surely the thought had finally crossed the Nightlord’s mind that this had always been a coordinated effort, the culmination of a chain of failed rebellions and failed schemes building up until one of them finally succeeded.

And in that moment of realization, I hoped that she finally felt righteous fear.

A quake and a screech interrupted our standoff.

Having freed himself, Inkarri flapped his wings and bent the wind itself into a booming song of ancient sorcery. The earth danced in response to his call, with hills reforming into great fingers lunging at the Jaguar Woman and I. Colossal hands of stone grabbed us both in a crushing grip.

“Release me!” I uttered a Word of power. The earth shuddered and trembled at my command, but I sensed a weight pushing back against me. An ancient and arcane wall cultivated across centuries stopped the momentum of my sorcery dead in its tracks.

The Mallquis used their magic to summon a quake once, and their power had only grown greater and more precise in their current form. For all of my burgeoning godhood, this remained their land, layered with their spells. None of us had proved our supremacy over the other yet, so Inkarri retained an edge when it came to bending the land to his will. I would always be at a disadvantage when fighting on the ground.

So I moved the battlefield elsewhere.

I cast the Fall spell again, this time turning it upward and reversing gravity for a select few. My move took aback Inkarri and the Jaguar Woman, sending them both plummeting towards the clouds above rather than towards the earth below. Inkarri’s hands of stones shattered and split off from the earth they sprang from to ascend ever further.

“Fight on!” I told my witches, followers, predecessors, and family alike as I flew upward to take the fight to the skies themselves. “As on earth, as in the heavens!”

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I had never tested how high I could fly nor how far up the Fall could send its targets, but when the surprise faded and my foes began to resist the spell, we had all ascended so high that the world had become a breathtaking sea of clouds under a court of stars. It was a sight as beautiful as it was haunting, for while the valley and dizzying Sapa mountains now looked like puddles and pebbles, the heavens’ moonlight remained so far away.

Still, we were high enough for me to cast a certain spell. I flapped my wings and uttered a single curse that would fill the universe with dread.

“Powerlessness.”

A flash of surprise passed over the Jaguar Woman’s face as my Tomb materialized with a birdsong of bones and shivers.

My spell had once collapsed under its own weight or at the mere contact of Sugey’s power. Now that three embers burned within the bonfire of my heart, I had grown strong enough to fully manifest it in reality. I painted over the world’s canvas with the brush of sorcery, warping reality into the physical metaphor of my own fears.

A dead emperors’ birdcage entrapped the sky.

A cocoon of skin bound by great bar-ribs encircled the three of us and a few clouds, cutting us off from the wind and starlight alike. No light but mine was allowed to burn bright in this dark prison fit for gods. A floor of moaning emperor skulls formed beneath us, their jaws snapping in hunger and malice, their mouths breathing out a sick purple miasma so poisonous it would kill any mortal that inhaled it.

The Jaguar Woman and Inkarri had both almost transcended such concerns in their own way, but they were no immaculate gods beyond death’s grip. The miasma immediately began to sap them of their strength and sorcery, dimming the condor’s glitter and dulling the jaguar’s fur. The vile and unavoidable grasp of age returned with a vengeance.

My birdcage would reduce my foes to the same terrible state of powerlessness I had fought so hard to escape. The Jaguar Woman would be the one to collapse at my feet this time, and Inkarri’s wings would be clipped. I could already sense their waning strength and smiled at the Nightlord, delighting her shock, her surprise, and her awareness of the fate I had in store for her.

My relief didn’t last long.

The Jaguar Woman regained her composure and uttered one word; a single word carrying all the weight of her malice.

“Weakness.”

Her Tomb erupted from her heart and clashed with mine.

The blade of her deepest fear cut through mine like a puddle of oil spreading over water. A dark shroud of anxiety spread around her, heavy with choking dread and suppressed intrusive thoughts boiling up to the surface. I saw a glimpse of a house of horrors shaped by the crushed bodies of a hundred thousand Jaguar Women, old and weak and crippled and broken and bent and diseased. A great pyramid built from copies of the Nightlord stretched across infinity, their numbers so great that their corpses crumbled under the weight of others. All of them wailed or moaned in a myriad of agonies, from plague to age to war wounds.

I saw a twisted tapestry of all the ills and torments a mortal could suffer from, illustrated with a single woman’s face.

This was the fear rooted in the deepest abyss of the Jaguar Woman’s heart, the all-too-human frailty that underlied all of her actions; the very core of her being. A secret terror so overwhelming that she would rather bury it under the corpses of countless multitudes of herself and murder the sun rather than face it.

Such a grandiose goal, born of such a small and petty foundation… Yet her Tomb remained old and strong. The fact that the Jaguar Woman knew one of Xibalba’s secret spells was already enough of a surprise to me, and now it grew within my own Tomb like a second building clashing with another for space and stability. All of the weight of our fears and wills clashed with Inkarri caught in the middle. The condor king summoned a swarm of floating golden tumi masks that enveloped him in a golden barrier, but lacking a Tomb spell of his own, he could only witness our duel of wills.

The Jaguar Woman and I gave all that we had in this clash. My birdcage and her house of the weak clashed, merged, and untangled in the blink of an eye. We were two painters clashing over the color of reality, the lines between our Houses blurring and shifting with each second.

Her core fear was so close to mine that our spells almost seemed to resonate, but the longer they clashed, the sharper the edges grew. Though the god within me might argue otherwise, a momentary moment of weakness did not frighten me, because the mortal I still remained understood that those were inevitable. It was only the ultimate despair—the inevitable end when all options had been removed—that I truly dreaded.

In contrast, the Jaguar Woman hated the very concept of weakness, of vulnerability, of setbacks. She feared mistakes and the judgment that came with them. She couldn’t allow herself to appear anything else than perfect and almighty. All failures had to be blamed on others, and all triumphs claimed. All rebellion, all dissent, any hint that not all of reality bent to her will had to be crushed, for she dreaded that any influx of air would rust the iron chains she sought to put on the very concept of free-will.

She had to murder her sister, betray her father, enslave millions, and snuff out countless lives because she couldn’t bear criticism.

In a way, her fear was as all-consuming as it was pathetic.

In the end, neither of us could withstand the other’s anxieties. I felt a ripple through our bonded souls, an echo and resonance preceding a great shattering. The colorful canvas of twisted reality snapped under the pressure with a great crack. Reality bounced back with a vengeance, a powerful backlash sending us all flying back. The sea of clouds widened beneath with a terrible boom.

My heart burned with fury. For all of my divine power, the Jaguar Woman and I were evenly matched. Inkarri’s shield had also held up against all odds, which I took as a testament to his immense sorcerous skill.

“Father taught you well, Iztac,” the Jaguar Woman said, her claws swirling with red mist. “But he didn’t teach you everything.”

I cloaked myself in Bonecrafted armor so thick it would have stopped an eruption right as the Jaguar Woman unleashed a cloud of bloody mist… but she took me by surprise and turned her attack against Inkarri. The crimson fog she had unleashed dissolved the tumis and their shield away like salt thrown in hot water.

The condor king flew back even as the Jaguar Woman pursued him.

Realizing the Nightlord’s plan, I summoned the power of the Slice. The winds bent to my claws in great swords of sharpened air, cutting across the skyscape. One flew between the Jaguar Woman and Inkarri, briefly separating them.

The same idea must have crossed all of our minds.

A Tomb grew stronger with each soul that perished within its confines, and the condor king’s body held hundreds, if not thousands, of them. The Mallquis, in their greed, had turned themselves into a living hoard of spirits whose wealth could buy victory.

Whoever killed Inkarri first with the Tomb would break the stalemate.