CHAPTER ONE-HUNDRED AND FOURTEENTH: THE ORIGINAL SIN

I was myself, a weakling.

The corpses of my consorts hit the steps of the pyramids, piles of limbs torn to pieces, quartered pounds of flesh, empty husks, and crushed skulls. The Nightlords squeezed them dry for every last drop of their blood in front of a silent audience.

I did not react, nor did I care. I was too tired and dazed to do so. My skin was flaccid, and my senses dulled with drugs, pulque, and herbs. I felt them swirl within my blood and shackle my mind. I wished to sleep, but I lacked even the energy for that. Priests had to help me climb to the top of the pyramid to the altar for my execution. My spirit was adrift, running from one half-formed thought to the other.

I was a corpse who hadn’t yet forgotten how to breathe.

I recalled the night I saw Nochtli the Fourteenth walk to his doom a year ago under a crimson moon. I’d known this would be my fate since the moment the Nightlords grabbed me off the street, and spent the better part of the past trying to forget it with pleasure. I had enjoyed privileges I could only dream of once. I’d discovered flavors I never knew existed, read more books than I could count, played all the games that existed under the sun, found confidants, and I’d slept with the greatest beauties of the realm.

I would never forget the joy I felt when Lady Sigrun gave birth to my first child. Holding my firstborn son had granted me peace for a brief peace for a brief instant… and then filled my heart with despair once I realized he would live his entire existence as a prisoner.

At least I took solace in the knowledge that Eztli would be spared all of this. I’d only shared one night with her—the first night of her wedding—but I hoped her unborn child was mine; that a part of me would still be free somewhere.

The year had been so pleasurable… but it didn’t even make me happy.

Not even once.

As the Nightlords gathered to tear open my chest, I briefly regretted never pointing the dagger I’d found in the Reliquary at my own heart. I would have died younger, but at least I would have mocked and taunted them. That blade—and that hope—looked so far away now, so beyond my grasp.

I had always been a disappointment, to myself and my masters. I would never forget their looks of displeasure when I completed their New Fire Ceremony and watched them flee the rising sun. Even Lady Yoloxochitl’s words that I had done my duty and had nothing to be ashamed of sounded so empty. I could tell that she and her sisters had placed high hopes in me, and in my mediocrity, I extinguished them.

When the Nightlords finally moved to take my life, it was with the frustration of failure.

The pain was sharp, but nowhere near as much as the fear cutting through the drugs. Lady Yoloxochitl wept tears of blood as she slew me, thanking me for having been a son to her, but her warped affection didn’t stop her from murdering me. The Nightlords ripped my ribs open, severing flesh and skin to reach that precious blood they craved, yet I did not scream. I denied them that pleasure as my first and final act of defiance.

They took my heart and my life with it.

My vision went dark, my body convulsed and froze, yet death was no release. I denied the Nightlords my screams, and they denied me freedom. I perished, yet I did not depart. Darkness bound my soul to a chain in which I was little more than a link.

“Our covenant is renewed,” the Jaguar Woman said as she impaled my beating heart on her father’s altar. “We Nightlords accept your tribute on behalf of the First Emperor. A ruler’s blood shall purchase a prosperous dawn for Yohuachanca. Fear not the silent dusk, for we shall guide and protect thee through the long nights.”

The Nightlords murdered my soul and cast it into shadows. My flesh was stiff and dead, but my spirit screamed a wail that none could hear as I joined a legion of weeping ghosts.

“Long live Yohuachanca!”

My hatred would endure as another skull on the pile.

Waiting for a successor, and the hands that would finally set us free.

I was myself, a monster among monsters.

The Crimson Moon shifted into a Sulfur Sun whose blue radiance provided neither warmth nor comfort for the oppressed masses. Though I remained atop the pyramid, I no longer lay on the altar. Instead I sat on a great obsidian throne to better observe the piles of bodies falling down the stairs. My winged sons laughed as they dropped screaming Sapa warriors from high above, their bones shattering in such a sweet symphony on impact. Few could match my children in cruelty.

The blood that coursed through my veins was not my own, and my skin was so cold as to turn tears to ice. I was paler than a corpse, with crimson eyes filled with the malice of my blackened soul and hands bringing a cup carved from Manco’s skull to my lips. How sweet he had tasted when we finally dragged him out of his hiding hole, his wife weeping in my arms…

“Weaklings,” Sugey snickered in disdain behind my throne. “None of these cowards had the guts to fight to the death.”

“You would think we would have run out of them by now,” Iztacoatl joked on my lap as she sipped from my skull cup and caressed my thigh with a hand. Death and murder had a way of exciting her. “The Sapa truly have an inexhaustible supply of bodies.”

“So many widows left to comfort,” my dear Yoloxochitl whispered at my side, my hand caressing her ass. She was my favorite of all the Nightlords. “I weep for them.”

Of course, her sympathy never compelled her to suggest mercy. In fact, nothing provided her more pleasure than claiming children I’d sired on war captives as new Nightkins. She would always come to me wet and willing before adopting them, as if to symbolically usurp their filiation.

“That is a good point, sister,” Ocelocihuatl said behind me. “Many of your concubines are past their expiration date, Iztac. We need new blood.”

“True,” I replied. “Sigrun is reaching her limit.”

A pity. She and Astrid had served me well by giving me many daughters and concubines. Humans lived such short and miserable lives.

Necahual and Mother had never lost their appeal, though. Forcing them both to drink my blood had prevented them from bearing me any more children, but it kept them fresh and young enough for me to take pleasure in them. It had taken a while, but they had finally given up on trying to kill themselves to escape my touch.

I would torment them forever.

I hung back and looked at the sulfur sky, which I had helped bring into being. I had betrayed the living and the dead for vampires, bargaining where I could have submitted or revolted. I had brought about the Sulfur Sun and ascended to become a Nightlord, turning the four into five.

I understood that the human I had been would be disgusted with what I had become… but the gift of vampirism had cured me of that disease called a conscience. My mind was a cold abyss devoid of doubt or remorse, free of guilt and compassion. Only bloodthirst remained, and the ambition to conquer all that existed.

I was the Dark Lord, the Fifth Nightlord; the Last Emperor, who would rule forever under the glow of the First while all others wept in their tombs. My loins alone among vampirekind could sire new nightmares. There was not a maiden in Yohuachanca I hadn’t raped on her wedding night nor a family who hadn’t shed blood for me one way or another.

And I regretted none of it.

I glanced at my fellow Nightlords, my cruel wives. I was their lover, their master, their slave, their son, and husband all at once, equal in power and perfectly balanced. We were the twisted hand that guided the world, the fist that crushed the hopes of millions. Our terrible names inspired such fear that men killed their wives and children when they heard of our coming, thinking it would save them; instead, their deaths fattened up our burning ancestor in the sky even as we grew strong on their flesh and blood. None could stop our war machine, and all those who dared to try met a cruel fate.

The west was ours, from the ice of the north to the jungles of the south… but Ingrid’s people had taught us about lands beyond the sea, about the pastures of Winland and continents that had yet to join our pens. Our fleet should reach their shores anytime soon, to unleash a plague of disease and murder upon them all. We would choke the life out of these nations until they all learned their place.

One day, the whole world would bow to Yohuachanca, and all of mankind would weep in despair.

For a Nightlord’s belly was never full.

I was myself, a coward who had failed his kin.

I held a woman in my arms, pressing her against the bed as the lights of lamps danced on our skin. She grunted as I took her like a beast, biting her breast, kissing the sweat off her skin. She gasped with each thrust, her belly pushing against my chest.

Mother liked it rough.

I faced the woman who had brought me into the world and kissed her, my manhood slipping into the mound I first crawled out over sixteen years ago. The sick thrill dulled the pain of our forced coupling. The first time—forced upon us by watchful Nightkin—had been filled with pain and tears.

I came inside her, though her belly was already full with my child. We continued to have sex for the sake of Seidr, since the connection was at its strongest then and because lovemaking was one of the few things that dulled Mother’s despair. Visions flooded my mind, giving me the position of Sapa tablets and spells which might—might—turn the tide.

The pleasure was brief, and the shame that followed agonizing. Neither of us said anything as we uncoiled from the other, with Mother bringing up the bedsheet and turning away. She always sobbed after our unions, and sometimes, she even cried.

I should have struck Sugey when I had the chance.

There wasn’t a night when I regretted not taking the shot. I had replayed that moment in my head so many times, seen it from all possible angles. I recalled the fear which had stayed my hand, and I now recognized that caution for the act of cowardice it had been.

I’d told myself I should wait to spare Mother, that the time wasn’t right, but I now realized I had been wrong. The time had been right—perfect even—and I had let it go.

The Nightlords kept me under close watch now. I had been recalled to the palace, away from the frontlines and denied almost every freedom. I wasn’t even allowed to visit the gardens during the day, and my nights were spent in the company of vampire guards. They didn’t yet suspect me of having plotted their demise, and Eztli still remained beneath their notice in her new shell of flesh… but they believed something was amiss, and that drastically reduced my options for the future.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

My chance had passed, but another might come… it had to come.

Time was marching on, and Quetzalcoatl could not deny me his light forever…

I was myself, watching what I could have become through a fractured mirror.

I saw myself walking a thousand paths. In one, I uttered a different name and Lady Sigrun lived where Necahual died. Eztli did not forgive me, and I lost her; and while Lady Sigrun grew to respect me, I could never bring myself to trust her like I did Necahual. I was betrayed, and I was beaten.

On another path, I was discovered, and the Nightlords learned the truth about my totem. My veins were pumped with drugs that prevented me from sleeping, so I could no longer enter the Underworld. I spent a year trapped in a waking nightmare from which my promised death beneath the Crimson Moon was just another.

Sugey bested me in countless reflections. Sometimes, my only solace was that my mother and a few of my consorts managed to escape, eventually dooming the Nightlords’ ritual to failure; but more often than not, I lived long enough to watch her personally crush Mother’s skull with her bare hands and then spray me with my own kin’s blood.

I failed so often and in so many ways. In most, I was discovered before I could fight and swiftly crushed by the Nightlords. All mistakes I had avoided would have proved fatal, all misplaced trust repaid with treachery, all setbacks cascading into defeat.

I did not always die, but even my victories were tainted with bitterness.

On one path, I managed to seal an alliance with Inkarri against all odds, and our combined strength finally overcame our shared tormentors. Yohuachanca fell and the condor’s flag flew atop the imperial palace, but Mit’a demanded that the few sacrifice themselves to save the many. As I watched thousands being brought to the Blood Pyramid to keep the First Emperor imprisoned, I realized that although I had saved myself and my consorts from death, my country had only traded one set of undead overlords for another.

In a different and rare future, I ran beyond the sea so far away that not even the Nightlords could catch me, fleeing with Astrid to Winland while her family perished and a skinchanger was sacrificed in my place. I settled with her in Winland, and we were happy in my old age; but in the twilight of my life, I looked at the horizon to see a Sulfur Sun shining on a fleet of the ravenous dead.

I saw all of these possibilities reflected in the mirrors of Tezcatlipoca’s eyes, the fractured tapestry of potential lifetimes, and searched for an optimal future where I and those I loved could live happily.

I did not find it.

An obsidian mirror only showed twisted, darker reflections.

“Do you yield?” Tezcatlipoca asked again, his voice a hurricane, his eyes my entire world. “Or do you die?”

The answer was the same as the first time he asked this of me.

“I refuse this false choice,” I replied. “Because to yield is to die.”

A true and perfect future did not exist. I had learned that cruel lesson the moment the Nightlords selected me as their puppet emperor before parading me from one horror to another.

Yet those visions showed that yielding would have always resulted in my demise. Cowardice and submission led to defeat, and I would never regret taking a stand. In the end, freedom was a constant fight, and to surrender it once was to give it up forever… but it was the price to pay for the chance to forge one’s future.

And as lips appeared on Tezcatlipoca’s face, as a grin of sharp jaguar teeth shone at me with vicious glee, I knew my choice was the correct one.

“Yes, you are right,” the Lord of Chaos said. “To yield is to die.”

I was brought back to reality, my mind extracting itself from the allure of the fractured mirror of what could have been for the world that was. My surroundings had changed from a gate of obsidian to a great and tall cliff overlooking a stormy sea of stinking tar-blood. The blackened sun of Tezcatlipoca gleamed above a dark horizon from which arose the skull of a colossal beast whose size beggared comprehension. The body of King Mictlantecuhtli, who held the entire city of Mictlan within his ribs, would have barely fit within the space of two of its teeth. Four empty eye sockets could have each held a sun within them, and its reptilian jawline extended farther than any mountains.

Lord Quetzalcoatl’s size and power had intimidated me, but the remains of this ancient entity made me pause at the thought of the kind of creatures that used to walk the gods’ first creation.

“Behold the deepest point in all of creation,” Tezcatlipoca said. “The corpse of the primal beast Cipatli, from which my kin and I built the world.”

I recalled the legends very well. It was said that when the primal entity Ōmeteōtl shaped the four celestial gods, who then found the universe buried beneath primeval waters. Many times they tried to craft a world of their own, but each time the beast Cipatli would rise from the waves to undo their work. So the creator gods banded together, slew the monster, and used its corpse to make the earth.

Only now did I realize that the cliff I stood on was a spine.

The bones of the dead had shaped the very first cosmos.

“Do you not see the culmination of your lessons?” Tezcatlipoca asked, his eyes gleaming with starlight. “The truth buried in the tale?”

Yes, I did. The truth was plain for me to see, the parallels with the Nightlords’ ritual, the endless cycle in which the cosmos was trapped.

“I always wondered how Cipatli came to be, but now I understand,” I muttered softly, feeling some sympathy for this creature whose death paved the way for my own existence, however unwittingly. “Ōmeteōtl was Cipatli. There was ever only one primal being.”

Tezcatlipoca nodded gravely, each move carrying the weight of four dead universes behind them. “These are the bones of my progenitor, the mindless beast who sired the first gods and then sought to devour us upon birth. It devoured my own leg in the battle that followed, but we won. We sacrificed our creator so that you might live, and in doing so, set the wheel of the world into motion.”

That was why the Nightlords’ ritual worked so well at binding their Dark Father. They did more than reenact the First Emperor’s betrayal; they had emulated the very rite that led the gods to shape the universe, and in doing so, crafted chains capable of holding a god prisoner.

The fountain of power had always been sacrifice, with each act carrying its cost. Not even gods could avoid this fact.

“Since it was I who brought down the knife, I became the first to bear the curse of Skinwalking.” Tezcatlipoca raised his hand and I watched smoke obscuring his fingers, blurring their very shape. “The mirror of my soul fractured between light and shadow, so when I sought to become the sun, I could only offer your ancestors half-light. Among the gods, I am forever the crippled, the outcast, the exiled, the rejected… the other.”

Much like you, the wind blew in my ear.

I had so many questions, one greater than all others. “Did you guide me here?” I asked him. “Was it your plan that I would reach this place from the moment I heard your voice in the wind?”

“I did not guide you,” the Jaguar Lord said. “I tempted you, and I tested you.”

He waved his hand, and the winds shaped the smoke into a vivid Veil of an age long past. I saw a vision of a universe unlike my own, cast in twilight, of colors forgotten by men, of giants raising cities from stones buried so deep in the earth the living would never find them. I witnessed the rise of the first civilization and its inevitable fall.

“We made the first of our creations from our progenitor’s flesh and shaped them in their image, great and strong… and ravenous. They devoured all that this half-born world had to offer until I could no longer sustain its light with their Teyolia and fell down from the sky.” Tezcatlipoca’s predatory grin morphed into a fearsome scowl that would frighten nightmares. “I decided that if our creations couldn’t control their appetite no more than our progenitor, then they would be devoured themselves; and so I created the first jaguars to hunt them to extinction.”

And it was that first act of cruelty that paved the way for mankind’s existence.

“Seeing the disaster, my brothers Xipe Totec, Quetzalcoatl, and Huitzilopochtli decided that we would shape our next creations in our image rather than that of our progenitor. Huitzilopochtli shared with you his bravery and courage. Xipe Totec taught you patience and humility. Quetzalcoatl lavished you with wisdom and knowledge…” Tezcatlipoca’s laugh echoed across the ruins of his domain, low and deep like the first jaguar’s roar. “But it was I who gifted your kind with free will when the world was young, who taught you freedom and lawlessness.”

The Veil of dust faded away, leaving only the howling wind standing between us.

“I am the voice that calls for revolution,” Tezcatlipoca said. “I do not compel or order. Whether you listen is your choice alone. You choose to be here, as both Iztac Ce Ehecatl and Cizin, the Fear of the Gods.”

“But why whisper to me at all?” I asked. “Why did you tell me the truth, that the Nightlords were no gods and that they could be defeated?”

“Because I am the god of the downtrodden and the defeated, the one who raises the slaves and the oppressed,” he explained. “Where my brothers raise pyramids, I always found greater joy and pleasure in casting them down. I have always been the foe of the arrogant, and the friend to the ambitious.”

I recalled the stories I’d heard of Tezcatlipoca on my journeys across the Underworld. How he had tricked his brother Quetzalcoatl into excess and exposed his creations’ sins to him, how he had stolen mighty Tlaloc’s wife, and played tricks on all gods, great and small alike. In that way, he might have served a purpose; a reminder that even the almighty could still lose and suffer like their creations.

“It does not matter to me why you rebel, so long as you do,” Tezcatlipoca concluded. “Revolutionaries and criminals alike are equal in my fractured eyes. I shall extend the lawless and the ugly my providence when no one else will. This year has tested you, but know that your pain shall not go unrewarded.”

Tezcatlipoca pressed his hand against his chest. Shadowy flames surged from his ancient heart of stone and ashes, and for a brief second I could look into his Teyolia. I gazed into an abyss of swirling chaos and passion. I saw a reflection of the ugliness of humanity—our greed, our envy, our resentment and cruelty—but buried beneath all this vile mud, I noticed a glimpse of wisdom and care.

Tezcatlipoca’s compassion was rare, and always unexpected; and that was why perhaps it shone brighter than even Lord Quetzalcoatl’s own.

Tezcatlipoca plucked a flame from his chest and offered it to me. It was a small and sinister piece of blackened pyre, but the flame within my heart yearned for its power nonetheless. The rising god in me craved this last step that would finally complete it.

“I deem you most worthy of ascending to the highest of heights,” Tezcatlipoca said. “Link with my fire, and seize your destiny.”

“What will I become once I ascend?” I asked as I held the flame, the memories of Yohuachanca’s hunger and gnashing teeth flooding my mind.

“Whatever you choose to be,” Tezcatlipoca replied wisely. “Surely you have learned to know yourself on this journey. The god you will become is you, the true you, without lies or fears or compromises.”

“The same way Yohuachanca became hunger and shadows?” Ending up like him—a bane upon the living and the dead alike—frightened me the most. The cycle had repeated itself often enough.

“That man came to me, crowned with my brother’s grace, not too long ago. His heart’s desire was a noble one: to save his people from predation, and to spare them from suffering. He hoped that in becoming the god of pain, he could bear the burden of mankind’s ills upon himself and grant them eternal felicity.” Tezcatlipoca morphed into a sneer of utter contempt. “And it disgusted me.”

I could almost taste the weight of his disdain in the air. Lord Quetzacoatl had warned me that Tezcatlipoca was his opposite, cursing those his brother blessed, and so on. I immediately knew that Yohuachanca’s test had likely been far more painful than mine.

“Fear and suffering are the rods that keep the world running. Happiness is meaningful in itself, but it is rarely sufficient to spur men to do their best.” Tezcatlipoca’s gaze lingered on me. “Would you have yourself fought against the bat’s spawns in justice’s and fairness’ names alone?”

“No,” I replied bluntly.

“Then you know yourself better than he did,” Tezcatlipoca replied with a scoff that raised a hurricane in the distance. “Yohuachanca was blinded by his ideals, and his heart was weak. In trying to suppress the chaotic passions of humanity, he only strengthened those within himself. Thoughts which are not expressed grow stronger in the soil of the mind until they force their way into reality. I tested him through a hundred futures and a thousand stillborn worlds, and again and again he failed to understand himself.”

“If he disappointed you, then why grant him your embers?” I asked.

For a moment, it seemed as if Tezcatlipoca himself couldn’t quite explain his reasoning. “An impulsive and fickle whim of my nature… or an act of pity, depending on your interpretation. It was the flaws I loved in that man, not his virtues. Some gods are fools, so why should a fool not be capable of rising to godhood?”

He had allowed Yohuachanca to become a god to make a mockery of divinity itself. That was, I supposed, the crowning achievement of a career spent alienating the mighty and visiting calamities upon all.

Could I judge him? I didn’t feel qualified to condemn Tezcatlipoca in spite of all the disasters that could be traced back to him. He was an ancient being that predated morality itself, and who had paid a terrible price so that mankind could live and let the universe turn. He was the first to bear the burden of becoming a sun long before it had become an honorable tradition.

In the end, I could not judge him any more than a man could understand a jaguar. Tezcatlipoca was a wild force of nature, chaos, and disorder embodied, free like the wind he and his brother Quetzalcoatl represented.

And in the end, he had been the first to believe in me when no one else would.

“Yohuachanca awaits you,” Tezcatlipoca warned. “Every light casts its reflection, whether shadows on a wall or a picture in a mirror. He is your foil and opposite, the fated twin, the echo of your song, similar yet so different in the details. Your divine birth will herald the promised battle whose resolution is long overdue.”

I nodded gravely and raised my hand to seize the fire of the First Sun. “Will we meet again?”

“Not until the last days of your sun, when we shall pull the curtain on this age and usher in a new one,” Tezcatlipoca replied with a hint of respect. “For so long as the fire of mankind burns bright with hope, someone will always step forward to light the dawn.”

And it was now my turn to kindle that fire anew.

I pressed the final sun’s embers onto my chest and burned the man I was away.