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osmanthusoolong · 2 years

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This is absolutely fascinating, full text under the cut. (Obvious CNs for racism, colonial violence, Hitler mention and white supremacy.)

When he stepped ashore in October 1492, in what he understood to be part of India or Japan, Christopher Columbus’s first act was to claim possession of the land for the Spanish crown. After that, he distributed cloth caps, glass beads, bits of broken crockery, “and many other things of little value” to its inhabitants, recording in his diary that they were a “very simple” people, who could easily “be kept as captives…[and] all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.” They reminded him of the aboriginals of the Canary Islands, the most recent victims of Castilian conquest, Christianization, and enslavement. “They are the colour of the Canarians, neither black nor white,” he observed.

Columbus also believed that the “Indians” regarded him and his crew as celestial beings. His earliest description of this, two days after landfall, was unsure: “We understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven.” But speculation soon hardened into certainty. Though the natives “were very sorry that they could not understand me, nor I them,” Columbus nonetheless confidently surmised that they were “convinced that we come from the heavens.” Every tribe he met seemed to think the same: it explained why they were all so friendly.

Over the decades that followed, this notion became a staple of Europeans’ accounts of their reception in the New World. According to the sixteenth-century Universal History of the Things of New Spain, compiled by a Franciscan friar in Mexico, Hernán Cortés’s lightning capture of Moctezuma’s empire in 1519 was made possible by the Aztecs’ misapprehension that he was “the god Quetzalcoatl who was returning, whom they had been and are expecting.” The following year, while rounding the tip of South America, Ferdinand Magellan’s crew encountered a giant native, “and when he was before us he began to be astonished, and to be afraid, and he raised one finger on high, thinking that we came from heaven.” The Incas of Peru initially received Francisco Pizarro as an incarnation of the god Viracocha, so one of his companions later wrote, and venerated the conquistadors because “they believed that some deity was enclosed within them.”

It was a popular, endlessly elaborated trope. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white men colonizing other parts of the world were hardly surprised anymore to encounter similar instances of mistaken deification. After all, the error seemed to encapsulate the innocence, intellectual inferiority, and instinctive submissiveness of the peoples they were born to rule. What’s more, as Anna Della Subin explores in her bracingly original Accidental Gods, unsought divinity was a remarkably widespread phenomenon that spanned centuries and continents.

I In Guiana, the long-lived prophecy of “Walterali” commemorated Sir Walter Raleigh’s supposedly providential exploits against the Spaniards. In Hawaii, the death of Captain James Cook came to be regarded as the tragic apotheosis of a man mistaken for a god. Across British India, shrines sprang up around the graves and statues of colonists who were worshiped as deities with supernatural powers. The tomb of Sir Thomas Beckwith in Mahabaleshwar acquired a clay doll in his image, which received offerings of plates of warm rice. In Bombay, the effigy of Lord Cornwallis, the former governor-general, came to be permanently festooned with garlands and beset by pilgrims performing darshan, the auspicious ritual of seeing and being seen by a god who was present inside his likenesses.

Even as they battled to convert the local heathens from their misguided ways, Christian missionaries met the same fate. Long after he’d returned to Scotland, a portrait of the first chaplain of St. Andrew’s Church in Bombay, the Presbyterian James Clow, became the object of pagan veneration. In the church vestry, the congregation’s “native servants” offered up ritual homage to it and tried to carry off pieces of the canvas as personal talismans.

An especially celebrated cult grew up around the ferocious soldier John Nicholson, a staunchly Protestant Northern Irishman who’d begun his career in the disastrous British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, then rose to become deputy commissioner successively of Peshawar and Rawalpindi. He was an unspeakably brutal man, who kept a severed human head on his desk, frequently expressed his immense hatred for the entire subcontinent, and begged his superiors to allow him to flay alive and impale suspected rebels—so instinctively violent were his proclivities that “the idea of merely hanging” insubordinate Indians was “maddening” to him. Yet before he died, while leading the pitiless British invasion, slaughter, and looting of Delhi in 1857, he had inspired a cult of hundreds of indigenous “Nikalsaini” followers, army sepoys and ascetic faqirs alike, who surrounded his unwilling figure at all hours, solemnly chanting prayers and rendering obeisance to their idol.

Something similar befell General Douglas MacArthur, the conquering hero of World War II. From Panama to Japan, Korea to Melanesia, his persona was made to take on divine properties of different kinds, in the form of wooden ritual statues, shamanistic shrines, and spirit persons, and as an avatar of the Papuan god Manarmakeri, whose return will herald the age of heaven. Even Western anthropologists not infrequently became enmeshed as involuntary deities in the very value systems they were trying, as neutral, external observers, to describe.

Resistance was always futile: disclaiming one’s divinity never seemed to dispel it. Nicholson was deeply revolted at being worshiped. He raged against the Nikalsainis who followed him around, kicked them into the dirt, beat and whipped them savagely, and imprisoned them in chains, yet they interpreted all this as “their god’s righteous chastisement.” “I am not God,” Gandhi repeatedly yet fruitlessly declared from the early 1920s on, as ever more elaborate tales began to spread about his supernatural powers, and he was pestered incessantly by people wishing to touch his feet. “The word ‘Mahatma’ stinks in my nostrils”—“I am not God; I am a human being.”

In 1961 a group of Jamaican Rastafarians traveled to Addis Ababa to meet for the first time with their living god, Haile Selassie. They were unfazed by the aging Ethiopian emperor’s own stance on the matter: “If He does not believe He is god, we know that He is god,” his apostles maintained. In despair, the Jamaican government invited Selassie for a state visit, hoping that his public disavowal of their delusions would sap the movement’s growing strength and political clout. “Do not worship me: I am not God,” the diminutive septuagenarian politely beseeched his dazzled followers when he arrived in the Caribbean. But this only had the opposite effect, for Rastafarian theologians knew full well what the Bible taught: “He that humbleth himself shall be exalted, and he that exalteth himself shall be abased.”

What are we to make of such episodes? As Accidental Gods brilliantly lays out, European observers were quick to jump to obvious-seeming conclusions. Accidental divinity bespoke the natives’ recognition of the personal greatness of their overlords: Nicholson was adored because he epitomized “the finest, manliest, and noblest of men,” as a typical Victorian paean put it. The question of why such worship sometimes alighted on arbitrary, obscure, and unheroic figures (violent sadists, deserters, anonymous memsahibs) was submerged beneath the general idea of effeminate natives in thrall to their masculine conquerors.

It was also believed to testify to their intellectual inferiority. As the academic study of religious beliefs developed over the course of the nineteenth century, European scholars defined “religion” in ways that classified the practices of “uncivilized races” as superstitious, backward, or “degenerate”—thereby further justifying colonialism. Compared to “real” religions with fixed temples, scriptures, and “rational,” monotheistic worship, above all Christianity, the beliefs of “the lower races,” they theorized, were stuck in an earlier stage of development. The worship of deified men was a primitive category error, “the irrational, misfired devotions of locals left to their own devices,” in one of Subin’s many luminous turns of phrase: proof of their inability to rule themselves.

In reality, from Columbus onward, Europeans repeatedly blundered into situations they didn’t properly understand and whose meaning they then invariably recast as vindicating their own actions. Across the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia, the indigenous terms and rituals applied to them were in fact commonly used of rulers and other powerful figures, not just of deities, and signified only awe, not some separate, nonhuman, “godlike” status. Likewise, because sudden death precluded reincarnation, people in India had for millennia been accustomed to appeasing the powerful spirits of those who were therefore eternally trapped in the afterlife—that, not reverence for white superpower, was why they singled out many random, prematurely deceased Britons for the same treatment. Nor was the apotheosis of living colonists usually intended to honor them, let alone to reflect some personal virtue: it was simply a way of mediating and appropriating their power, one way of creating collective meaning in the midst of imperial precarity and violence.

Above all, the very idea of a binary division between humanity and divinity was itself a peculiarly Christian dogma. In most other belief systems, the two were not strictly separated but overlapped. Reincarnations, communications with the spirit world, living gods, avatars, demigods, ancestor deities, and the powers of kings and lords—all were part of an interwoven spectrum of natural and supernatural authority. Much the same had been true in European antiquity. The ancient Greeks thought it normal for men to become gods. Among the Romans, apotheosis became a tool of statecraft, the ultimate form of memorialization. Cicero wanted to deify his daughter, Tullia; Hadrian arranged it for his wife and his mother-in-law, as well as for his young lover, Antinous. For emperors, it became a routine accolade—“Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god,” Vespasian is said to have joked on his deathbed in 79 CE.

Similar ideas circulated among Jesus’ early followers. It was only from the Middle Ages on that the notion of humans being treated as gods came to be regarded by Christians as absurd, despite the fact that their own prophet, saints, and holy persons embodied similar principles. And so it happened that modern Europeans ventured abroad and began to impose their own category errors on the views of others. As Subin tartly observes, “correct knowledge about divinity is never a matter of the best doctrine, but of who possesses the more powerful army.”

Though Accidental Gods wears its learning lightly and is tremendous fun to read, it also includes a series of lyrical and thought-provoking meditations on the largest of themes. How should we think of identity? What is it to be human? How do stories work, grow, and stay alive? Belief itself, Subin suggests, is as much a set of relationships among people as it is an absolute, on-or-off state of mind. European myths about the primitive mentalities of others served to justify colonization and theories of white supremacy, and still do. Regarding indigenous practices as antithetical to the “reasoned” presumptions of “developed” cultures has always allowed Western observers to overlook their complicity in creating them—to see them only as the errors of “superstitious minds, the tendencies of isolated atolls, rather than a product of the violence of empire and the shackling of peoples to new capitalist machineries of profit.”

It also serves to mask the extent to which Western attitudes depend on their own forms of magical thinking. Our culture, for example, fetishizes goods, money, and material consumption, holding them up as indices of personal and social well-being. Moreover, as Subin points out, none of us can truly escape this fixation:

Though we may demystify other people’s gods and deface their idols, our critical capacity to demystify the commodity fetish still cannot break the spell it wields over us, for its power is rooted in deep structures of social practice rather than simple belief. While fetishes made by African priests were denigrated as irrational, the fetish of the capitalist marketplace has long been viewed as the epitome of rationalism.

To see a myth is one thing; to grasp it fully, quite another. It turns over, changes its shape, slips away, fades out of view. The further back in time Subin ventures, the more fragmentary her sources become, the larger the gaps in what they choose to notice. But more than once she is able to illustrate, almost in real time, how indigenous and Western mythmaking can be intertwined, codependent, and mutually reinforcing.

Following its “discovery” by Captain Cook in 1774, the Melanesian island of Tanna was devastated by centuries of colonial exploitation: its population kidnapped to provide cheap labor, its landscape stripped bare for short-term profit, its culture destroyed by missionary indoctrination. By the early twentieth century this treatment had provoked a series of indigenous messianic movements that looked forward to the expelling of the colonizers and the return of a golden age of plenty. The messiah would incarnate a local volcano god, it was believed, though the exact human form he would take was not clear.

One perennially popular idea was that the savior would appear as an American (perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt, perhaps a black GI). This was because the island was under British and French control—movements of deification provoked by colonial injustice often sought to access the power of their tormentors’ rivals or enemies. In 1964 the Lavongai people of the occupied Papua and New Guinea territory sabotaged the elections organized by their colonial masters by writing in the name of President Lyndon B. Johnson, electing him as their king and then refusing to pay taxes to their Australian oppressors. On similar grounds, midcentury Indian and African religious sects sometimes deployed avatars of Britain’s enemies—in India, Hitler was seen as the final coming of Vishnu, while Nigerians worshiped “Germany, Destroyer of Land”: My enemy’s enemy is my friend.

During World War I, indigenous populations in far-flung Allied colonies independently developed cults of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, it was said, would shortly sweep away the English-speaking whites who had stolen their land and were exploiting their people. High above the Bay of Bengal, on the plateau of Chota Nagpur, tens of thousands of Oraon tea plantation workers gathered at clandestine midnight services and swore blood oaths to exterminate the British. They spoke of the Germans as “Suraj Baba” (Father Sun), passed around the emperor-god’s portrait, and sang hymns to his casting out of the British and establishing an independent Oraon raj:

German Baba is coming,

Is slowly slowly coming;

Drive away the devils:

Cast them adrift in the sea.

Suraj Baba is coming…

The salient point is not that such hopes were untethered from reality, but what they expressed. For what can the powerless do? To what can they appeal to restore the rightful order of things, in the face of endless loss? “Do you know that America kills all Negroes?” a Papuan skeptic challenged one of LBJ’s apostles in 1964. “You’re clever,” the apostle replied. “But you haven’t got a good way to save us.”

Around this time, the British colonizers of Tanna were indoctrinating its inhabitants in the goodness of their young queen Elizabeth II and her handsome consort—a man, they learned, who was not actually from Britain, or Greece, or anywhere in particular. As it happened, the legend of the volcano god told that one of his sons had taken on human form, traveled far, and married a powerful foreign woman. Prince Philip vacationed in the archipelago and participated in a pig-killing ritual to consecrate a local chief. He was the Duke of Edinburgh, and Tanna’s island group had once been called the New Hebrides. In 1974 one of the many local messianic factions realized that he must be their messiah.

It proved to be a match made in heaven, for the British monarchy itself, in the twilight of its authority, was ever more reliant on invented ritual and mythmaking. Once Buckingham Palace learned of the prince’s deification, it began to celebrate and publicize the story for its own purposes, deftly positioning it as evidence of the affection in which the royal family (and by inference the British) were supposedly held all across the former empire, and as a counterweight to the prince’s well-deserved domestic reputation as an unregenerate racist. This Western interest in turn produced an unceasing stream of international attention and visitors to Tanna, to investigate and report on the islanders’ strange “cult,” which not only helped to strengthen the myth’s local appeal but even influenced its shape.

In 2005 a BBC journalist arrived on the island to report the story, bringing with him a sheaf of documents compiled by the prince’s former private secretary, including official correspondence from the 1970s, press clippings, and other English descriptions of the islanders’ beliefs. His sharing of these papers, and his lengthy discussions with the locals, inadvertently seeded new myths, many of which, as Subin dryly notes, sounded “much like palace PR describing philanthropic activities in an underdeveloped land.” Myths stay alive by constantly adapting, encompassing, and feeding off one another. This was a classic case of mutual mythmaking: the deification of Prince Philip was produced in Buckingham Palace and Fleet Street, as well as in the South Pacific. To this day, white men from Europe and America keep turning up on Tanna, claiming to be fulfilling the prophecy of the returning god.

In Subin’s irresistible medley of history, anthropology, and exhilaratingly good writing, the most powerful stories are those of indigenous mythmaking as outright political revolt. For in many instances in which white men were turned into gods, the purpose was wholly subversive: not just to channel the strength of the colonial imperium for one’s own ends, but to grasp the colonizers’ power and turn it against them. In 1864 a Maori uprising led by the prophet Te Ua Haumene killed several British soldiers. The head of their captain, speared on a pole, became the rebels’ protective talisman against other white invaders and their divine conduit to the angel Gabriel. Just as they reinterpreted the Bible to mean that Maori land should be restored and the British driven out, so too they appropriated a colonist’s actual mouth and made it speak their truth.

Even more unsettlingly, across their newly conquered African territories, from the 1920s onward British, French, and Belgian administrators found themselves faced with a strange contagion of spirit possession, in which the locals took on the colonists’ identities. People would fall into a trance and then claim to be channeling the governor of the Red Sea or a white soldier, secretary, judge, or imperial administrator. They demanded pith helmets and libations of gin, marched around in undead formations, issued commands, and refused to obey imperial edicts, calling themselves Hauka, or “madness,” in the Sahel, and Zar in Ethiopia and the Sudan.

One version in the Congo claimed to have created deified duplicates of every single colonial Belgian. Each time an African adept joined the movement, he’d adopt the name of a particular colonist, and his wife that of the spouse. In this way, Hauka captured the entire colonial population, from the governor-general down to the lowliest clerk. On entering their trance state, the locals usurped the colonists’ power: the wives went around with chalked faces and wearing special dresses, screeching in shrill voices, demanding bananas and hens, clutching bunches of feathers under their arms in representation of handbags.

Precisely because spirit possession was unwilled and painful, this was a means of resistance that mechanisms of imperial power could not easily counter. Early on, a district commissioner in Niger named Major Horace Crocicchia decided to suppress it by force. He rounded up sixty of the leading Hauka mediums, brought them in chains to the capital, Niamey, and imprisoned them for three days and nights without food. Then he forced them to acknowledge that their spirits could not match his own power, taunting them that he was stronger and that the Hauka had disappeared. “Where are the Hauka?” he jeered repeatedly, beating one of them until she acknowledged that the spirits were gone.

It only made things worse. Almost immediately a new, extremely powerful specter joined the spirit pantheon. All across Niger, villagers were now possessed by the vengeful, violent avatar of Crocicchia himself—also known as Krosisya, Kommandan, Major Mugu, or the Wicked Major. Deification of this kind was a form of ritualized revolt, a defiance of imperialist power that not only mocked but appropriated its authority.

All this also explains why, toward the middle of the twentieth century, the rise of a powerful, proud, anti-imperialist black ruler at the heart of Africa was so intoxicating to people on the other side of the globe who had been dehumanized for centuries because of the color of their skin. For black people in the Babylonian captivity of the New World, Ethiopia had long been held up as Zion, the land of their future return. Even before its dashing new emperor was crowned in 1930, American and Jamaican prophecies had begun to foretell the coming of a black messiah. Rastafarianism became a religion for all who opposed white hegemony: to worship Haile Selassie as a living god was to reject colonial Christianity, racial hierarchy, and subordination, and to celebrate black power. No wonder its tenets have spread across the globe and attracted nearly a million followers. As Subin’s rich, captivating book shows, religion is a symbolic act: though we cannot control the circumstances, we all make our own gods, for our own reasons, all the time.

#long post

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kuramirocket · 3 years

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August 13 marks half a millennium since the fall of the Aztec Empire, and dozens of new books are casting doubt on the version of history written by the victors.

History is not only what happened, but what we are told happened.

Of course, that does not mean that history is subjective, because some facts are undeniable:

Hernán Cortés reached the shores of Veracruz, Mexico in 1519. But to understand the conquest of Mexico, we need to look at who was narrating it, as the angle or the sources they choose can tell us more about that moment than the facts themselves. “History is a consequence of power,” wrote Trouillot. “The most important task is not to determine what history is, but how it works.”

In the last two years, publishing houses in the country have produced dozens of new volumes questioning the credibility of the powerful storytellers who saw 1521 as a set victory of the Spanish over the Mesoamerican indigenous people. The full story of that battle, they say, was more complex.

“Every source is first and foremost a fact within its social, spatial and temporal context,” writes Luis Fernando Granados, a historian at Mexico’s Universidad Veracruzana, in his new book Relación de 1520 (or Record of 1520). He is critical of Hernán Cortés, considered the master storyteller of his time. In the book, Granados questions the credibility of the letters that the conquistador sent to the Spanish crown between 1519 and 1526, and that for centuries were taken as official accounts. Granados points out that there is no original manuscript from Cortés, but rather a transcription made years later by a scribe. There were letters written by several people, but these were political documents to the queen rather than a careful historical account. “If we stop considering them as the master version of Mexico’s past, that could have as refreshing an effect on the historiographical as on the purely historical,” he said. (Granados died in July of this year.)

One of the most interesting books on Cortés’ lack of credibility is entitled: ¿Quién conquistó México? (or Who Conquered Mexico?), by historian Federico Navarrete, and published by Debate books in 2019. This book poses different answers to the question of who conquered Mexico, and states: “The idea of the absolute victory of the Spaniards in 1521 is nothing more than a partial and self-serving version, invented by Hernán Cortés himself, to extol and exaggerate his own role in the events,” the book adds.

Another narrator whose words were taken as gospel was Bernal Díaz del Castillo, conquistador and author of La Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (or The True History of the Conquest of Nueva España”), whom Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes called Mexico’s “first novelist.” In 2019, the Taurus publishing house translated into Spanish When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History, a work by US historian Matthew Restall dissecting official narratives, which begins by casting doubt on Díaz del Castillo’s credibility regarding Aztecan emperor Moctezuma and Cortés. The Aztec leader was neither cowardly nor naive, and Hernán Cortés was not a brilliant Spanish strategist, the book asserts.

“We have abandoned the term conquest, in the singular, and instead prefer the term conquests plural, in order to emphasize that the defeat of [the capital of the Aztec Empire] Tenochtitlan was only the beginning of a historical step,” writes historian Martín Ríos Saloma of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has compiled essays by the best researchers in Mexico and Spain in his work Conquistas (or Conquests) released this year. His book makes an effort to search for the narrators whose past has been silenced, including “the voices of indigenous actors, of women, of the army captains, of the Castilian soldiers.” To ignore them, he believes, is to offer “a simplistic, Manichean and isolated vision of the historical processes happening in the world at that time.”

One of these silenced voices opens El quinto sol (or The Fifth Sun) by Camilla Townsend, translated into Spanish by the Grano de Sal publishing house this year. Chimalpahin, an indigenous historian who worked in a church, wrote in the evenings during his spare time to try and save the memory of his ancestors. To revisit writings like his, set down a century after 1521, is to deconstruct false narratives, Townsend says, offering the example of the exaggerated myth of Aztec human sacrifice. “The Aztecs were conquered, but they also saved themselves,” the author notes, “by writing down everything they could remember of their peoples’ history so that it would not be lost forever.”

The list of new publications in this year of commemoration can seem endless. Mexican historian Pedro Salmerón rejects the term conquest in La batalla por Tenochtitlan (or The Battle for Tenochtitlan). “The war was much more prolonged, the resistance was far greater and long-lasting and, in fact, it has not ended,” he stresses. Enrique Semo, in La conquista, catástrofe de los pueblos originarios (or The Conquest, Catastrophe of the Original Peoples) is more interested in the history of a new capitalist system present in Mesoamerica than in the date of 1521 itself. “Instead of eliminating or displacing the indigenous people in order to make use of empty spaces, the imperative was to reduce them to manageable groups,” he says.

Novelists and graphic novelists have also done their part as the anniversary approaches. The Planeta group published several novels this year focused on women. Montezuma’s daughter features in La otra Isabel (or The Other Isabel) by Laura Martínez-Belli.

#mexico #history #mexican history #spain #indigenous #aztec #hernan cortes #montezuma #Tenochtitlan #🇲🇽#books

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freakscircus · 3 years

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i’m so glad that being a latin americanist has required me to learn about pre-contact and colonial latin america because i absolutely love it and i am so happy that it technically falls under my area of expertise. i worked very hard to be a specialist on colonial latin america as well as being a modernist. while i’m nowhere near the expertise level of my peers who are specifically designated as colonialists, i worked hard reading a ton of books and getting tested on my proficiency on the subject so maybe one day i can teach it or write on it in the future. one of the things that fascinates me most is life in mesoamerica and the andes pre contact and immediately post contact. it is horrendous to wrap your mind around, but i find the moment of complete culture shock and slow realization at the point of contact (whether that be with cortes and moctezuma or pizarro and atahualpa) fascinating. the source base for this period of time is especially interesting - i loved reading the firsthand account by titu cusi yupanqui taken down by spanish notaries... i think that account of just complete shock and misunderstanding of the spaniards as gods or in the case of the aztecs perceiving cortes as the reincarnation of quetzalcoatl is so incredible to read.

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astonishinglegends · 3 years

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Ep 202: The Scrying Game

“The scryer does not seek reflections, but visions.”

– Donald Tyson, author of "Scrying for Beginners: Use Your Unconscious Mind to See Beyond the Senses

Description:

Who among us hasn't wanted to know the future or have insight into the hidden, at least in passing? From the first instance a human had a premonition that came true, it seems likely that the adventurous who were shocked and astounded wondered how those without the "gift" could duplicate this impossible experience. Then, when someone stared too intently into a reflective pool of liquid, a glowing ember, or even the night sky, and experienced an extrasensory perception, a technique and its medium are discovered to tap into a sixth sense. Practiced now for millennia, this procedure for obtaining occult information has become known as scrying. One interesting observation is that although there are general guidelines for preparing oneself and performing a scrying session, many mediums can facilitate the phenomenon. It appears that any object can be used that can capture the light and dazzle the eye, or a reflective surface that can offer deep introspection or a dark void that focuses the senses. But then the burning question becomes, how does this process work, and from where does the information come? Does this "second sight" materialize from deep within ourselves, external omniscience, or some combination of both? In tonight's episode, we'll look at the elements, the history, and the concepts behind this ancient and mysterious means of knowing the unknowable.

Reference Links:

Scrying on Wikipedia

The 1992 motion picture, The Crying Game

Samhain

Lori Williams’ Controlled Remote Viewing website IntuitiveSpecialists.com

Russell Targ

Crystal Gazing – Its History and Practice, with a Discussion of the Evidence for Telepathic Scrying, by Northcote W. Thomas, M.A.

Benjamin, from the Old Testament or “Hebrew Bible”

“The Forgotten Art of Scrying” by Fernando S. Gallegos on ExploringTraditions.com

Bernardino de Sahagún

Moctezuma II

Nostradamus

John Dee

Edward Kelley

“Notes on John Dee’s Aztec Mirror” by Ed Simon on NorthernRenaissance.org

Horace Walpole

“Making a Sigilum Dei Aemeth out of Wax [Esoteric Saturdays]” on YouTube

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Thelema

“Joseph Smith's "Magic" Glasses and Other Bizarre Objects from Mormonism” on ranker.com

Related Books:

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Credits:

Episode 202: The Scrying Game. Produced by Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess; Audio Editing by Sarah Vorhees Wendel. Sound Design by Ryan McCullough; Tess Pfeifle, Producer, and Lead Researcher; Research Support from the astonishing League of Astonishing Researchers, a.k.a. The Astonishing Research Corps, or "A.R.C." for short. Copyright 2021 Astonishing Legends Productions, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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notapaladin · 3 years

Text

and this faith is gettin' heavy (but you know it carries me) redux

This is literally and unironically the SECOND TIME i have added another thousand words to this fic but now it is finally done. Behold, over 10k words of food as metaphor for love/angst-with-a-happy-ending! In which Teomitl goes missing on a foreign battlefield, and Acatl mourns...but events in his dreams suggest Teomitl maybe isn’t gone for good.

Also on AO3

Acatl grimaced as he stepped from the coolness of his home into the day’s bright, punishing sunlight. Today was the day the army was due to return from their campaign in Mixtec lands, and so he was forced to don his skull mask and owl-trimmed cloak on a day that was far too hot for it. Not for the first time, he was thankful that priests of Lord Death weren’t required to paint their faces and bodies for special occasions; the thought of anything else touching his skin made him shudder.

He’d barely made it out of his courtyard when Acamapichtli strode up to him, face grave underneath his blue and black paint. “Ah, Acatl. I’m glad I could catch you.”

“Come to tell me that the army is at our gates again?” They would never be friends, he and Acamapichtli, but they had achieved something like a truce in the year since the plague. Still, Acatl couldn’t help but be on his guard. There was something...off about the expression on the other man’s face, and it took him a moment to realize what it was. He’d borne the same look when delivering the news of a death to a grieving family. Ah. A loss, then.

He’d expected Acamapichtli to spread his hands, a wordless statement of there having been nothing he could have done. He didn’t expect him to take a deep breath and slide his sightless eyes away. “I have. The runners all say it is a great victory; Tizoc-tzin has brought back several hundred prisoners.”

It should have pleased him. Instead, a cold chill slid down his spine. “What are you not telling me? I’ve no time for games.”

Acamapichtli let out a long sigh. “There were losses. A flood swept across the plain, carrying away several of our best warriors. Among them...the Master of the House of Darts. They looked—I’m assured that they looked!—but his body was not found.”

No. No. No. A yawning chasm cracked open beneath his ribs. He knew he was still breathing, but he couldn’t feel the air in his lungs. Even as he wanted, desperately, to grab Acamapichtli by the shoulders and shake him, to scream at him for being a liar, he knew the man was telling the truth. That his face and mannerisms, the careful movements of a man who knew he brought horrible news, showed his words to be honest. That Teomitl—who had left four months before with a kiss for Mihmatini and an affectionate clasp for Acatl’s arm—would not return.

It took real effort to focus on Acamapichtli’s next words. The man’s eyes were full of a horrible sympathy, and he wanted to scream. “I thought you should know in advance. Before—before they arrived.”

“Thank you,” he forced out through numb lips.

Acamapichtli turned away. “...I’m sorry, Acatl.”

After a long, long moment, he made himself start walking again. There was the rest of the army to greet, after all. Even if Teomitl wouldn’t be among them.

Even if he’d never return from war again.

Greeting the army was a ceremony, one he usually took some joy in—it had meant that Teomitl would be home, would be safe, and his sister would be happy. Now it passed in a blue, and he registered absolutely none of it. Someone must have already given the news to Mihmatini when he arrived; she was an utterly silent presence at his side, face pale and lips thin. She wouldn’t cry in public, but he saw the way her eyes glimmered when she blinked. He couldn’t bring himself to so much as lay a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. If he touched her, if he felt the fabric of her cloak beneath his hand, that meant it was real.

It couldn’t be real. Jade Skirt was Teomitl’s patron goddess, She wouldn’t let him simply drown. But there was an empty space to Tizoc’s left where Teomitl should have been, and no sign of his white-and-red regalia. Acatl’s eyes burned as he blinked away the sun.

Tizoc was still speaking, but Acatl heard none of his words. It was all too still, too quiet; everything was muffled, as though he was hearing it through water. If there was justice, came the first spinning thought, every wall would be crumbling. No...if there was justice, Teomitl would be...

He drew in a long breath, feeling chilled to the bone even as he sweated under his cloak. Now that his mind had chosen to rouse itself, its eye was relentless. He barely saw the plaza around him, packed with proud warriors and colorful nobles; it was too easy to imagine a far-flung province to the south, a jungle thick with trees and blood. A river bursting its banks, carrying Teomitl straight into his enemies’ arms. They would capture him, of course; he was a valiant fighter and he’d taken very well to the magic of living blood, but even he couldn’t hold off an army alone.

And once they had him, they would sacrifice him.

Somewhere behind the army, Acatl knew, were lines of captured warriors whose hearts would be removed to feed the Sun, whose bodies would be flung down the Temple steps to feed the beasts in the House of Animals, whose heads would hang on the skull-rack. It was necessary, and their deaths would serve a greater purpose. He’d seen it thousands of times. There was no use mourning them. It was simply the way nearly all captured warriors went.

It was what Teomitl would want. An honorable death on the sacrifice stone. It was better to die than to be a slave all your life. But at least he would have a life—all unbidden, the alternative rose clear in Acatl’s mind. Teomitl, face whitened with chalk. Teomitl, laying down on the stone. Teomitl, teeth clenched, meeting his death with open eyes. Teomitl’s blood on the priests’ hands.

Nausea rose hot and bitter in his throat, and he shut his eyes and focused on his breathing. In for a count of three, out for a count of five. Repeat. It didn’t hurt to breathe, but he felt as if it should. He felt as if everything should hurt. He felt a sudden, vicious urge to draw thorns through his earlobes until the pain erased all thoughts, but he made his hands still. If he started, he wasn’t sure if he would be able to stop.

Still, it seemed to take an eternity for the speeches and the dances to be over and done with. By the time they finished, he was light-headed with the strain of remaining upright, and Mihmatini had slipped a hand into his elbow. Even that single point of contact burned through his veins. They still hadn’t spoken. He wondered if she, too, couldn’t quite find her own voice under the screaming chasm of grief.

And then, after all that, when all he yearned for was to go home and lay down until the world felt right again—maybe until the Sixth Sun rose, that would probably be enough time—there was a banquet, and he was forced to attend.

Of course there’s a banquet, he thought dully. This is a victory, after all. Tizoc had wasted no time in promoting a new Master of the House of Darts to replace his fallen brother, with many empty platitudes about how Teomitl would surely be missed and how he’d not want them to linger in their grief, but to move on and keep earning glory for the Mexica. Moctezuma, his replacement, was seventeen and haughty; where Teomitl’s arrogance had begun to settle into firm, well-considered authority and the flames of his impatience had burnt down to embers, Moctezuma’s gaze swept the room and visibly dismissed everyone in it as not worth his concern. It reminded Acatl horribly of Quenami.

Mihmatini sat on the same mat she always did, but now there was a space beside her like a missing tooth. She still wore her hair in the twisted horn-braids of married women, and against all rules of mourning she had painted her face with the blue of the Duality. Underneath it, her face was set in an emotionless mask. She did not eat.

Neither did Acatl. He wasn’t sure he could stomach food. So instead his gaze flickered around the room, unable to settle, and he gradually realized that he and Mihmatini weren’t alone in the crowd. The assembled lords and warriors should have been celebrating, but there was a subdued air that hung over every stilted laugh and negligent bite of fine food. Neighbors avoided each other’s eyes; Neutemoc, sitting with his fellow Jaguar Warriors, was staring at his empty plate as though it held the secrets of the heavens. He looked well, until Acatl saw the expression on his face. It was a mirror of his own.

At least his fellow High Priests didn’t try to engage him in conversation, for which he was grateful. Acamapichtli kept glancing at him almost warily, but he hadn’t voiced any more empty platitudes—and when Quenami had opened his mouth to say something, he’d taken the unprecedented step of leaning around Acatl and glaring him into silence.

If they’d been friends, Acatl would have been touched; as it was, it made a burning ember of rage lodge itself in his throat. Don’t you pity me. Don’t you dare pity me. He ground his teeth until his jaw hurt, clenched his fists until his nails cut into his palms, and didn’t speak. If he spoke, he would scream.

Even the plates in front of him weren’t enough of a distraction. Roasted meats glistened in their vibrant red or green or orange sauces. Each breath brought the deliciously warm fragrance of chilies and pumpkin seeds and vanilla to his nose. The fish and lake shrimp, grilled in their own juices and arrayed on beds of corn husks, would at any other time have tempted him to take a bite. Soups and stews were carried from table to table by serving women in gleaming white cotton; he breathed in as one woman passed and nearly choked on the rich peppery scent. He didn’t need to look to know it was his usual favorite, chunks of firm white fish and bitter greens in what was sure to be a fiery broth. Teomitl had always teased him for that, saying it was a miracle he could even taste the greens with so much chili in the way.

Don’t look. Don’t think about it. The ember in his throat was slowly scorching a path through his gut. He couldn’t eat. Didn’t even try.

There were more courses, obviously. More fish, more vegetables, more haunches of venison or rabbits bathed in spicy-sweet sauce. More doves and quail, and even a spoonbill put back in its own pink feathers for a centerpiece. When the final course was triumphantly set in front of him—wedges and cubes of fruit, with a little cup of spiced honey—he was nearly sick over the sweet crimson pitaya split open on his plate. It had been Teomitl’s favorite.

Somehow, he held it together until after the dessert had been cleared away. He rose jerkily to his feet, legs trembling, and fixed his mind firmly on getting home in one piece. No one hailed him on his way out of the room, and for a hopeful moment he thought he was safe.

Quenami’s voice stopped him in the next hallway. “Ah, Acatl. A lovely banquet, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t turn around. “Mn.” Go away.

Quenami didn’t. In fact he took a step closer, as though they were friends, as though he’d never tried to have Acatl killed. His voice was like a mosquito in his ear. “You must not be feeling well; you hardly touched your food. Some might see that as an insult. I’m sure Tizoc-tzin would.”

“Mm.”

“Or is it worry over Teomitl that’s affecting you? You shouldn’t fret so, Acatl. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s not dead after all; there are plenty of cenotes in the southlands, and a determined man could easily hide out there for the rest of his life. He probably just took the coward’s way out, sick of his responsibilities—“

He whirled around, sucking in a breath that scorched his lungs. It was the last thing he felt before he let Mictlan’s chill spill through his veins and overflow. His suddenly-numb skin loosened on his neck; his fingers burned with the cold that came only from the underworld. He knew that his skin was black glass, his muscles smoke, his bones moonlight on ice, his eyes burning voids. All around him was the howling lament of the dead, the stench of decay and the dry, acrid scent of dust and dry bones. When he spoke, his voice echoed like a bell rung in a tomb.

“Silence.”

You do not call him a coward. You do not even speak his name. I could have your tongue for that. He stepped forward, gaze locked with Quenami’s. It would be easy, too. He could do it without even blinking—could take his tongue for slander, his eyes for that sneering gaze, could reach inside his skin and debone him like a turkey—all it would take would be a single wrong word—

Quenami recoiled, jaw going slack in terror. Silently—blessedly, mercifully, infuriatingly silently—he turned on his heel and left.

Acatl took one breath, two, and let the magic drain out of his shaking limbs. He hadn’t meant to do that. It should probably have sickened him that he’d nearly misused Lord Death’s power like that, especially on a man who ought to have been his superior and ally, but instead all he felt was a vicious sort of stymied rage—a jaguar missing a leap and coming up with nothing but air between his claws. He wanted to scream. He wanted blood under his nails, the shifting crack of breaking bones under his knuckles. He wanted to hurt something.

He made it to the next courtyard, blessedly empty of party guests, and collapsed on the nearest bench like a dead man. His stomach ached. I could have killed him. Gods, I wanted to kill him. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my life. All because...all because he said his name...

“...Acatl?”

Mihmatini’s voice, admirably controlled. He made himself lift his head and answer. “In here.”

She padded into the courtyard and took a seat on the opposite end of the bench, skirt swishing around her feet as she walked. Gold ornaments had been sewn into its hem, and he wondered if they’d been gifts from Teomitl. “I saw Quenami running like all the beasts of the underworld were on his tail. What did you do?”

Nothing. But that would have been a lie, and he refused to do that to his own flesh and blood. “...He said…” He swallowed past a lump in his throat. “He said that Teomitl might have deserted. He dared to say that—” The idea choked him, and he couldn’t finish the words. That Teomitl was a coward. That he would run from his responsibilities, from his destiny, at the first opportunity…

She tensed immediately, eyes going cold in a way that suggested Quenami had better be a very fast runner indeed. “He would never. You know that.”

Air seemed to be coming a bit easier now. “I do. But…”

Of course, she pounced on his hesitation. “But?”

I want him so badly to not be dead. “Nothing.”

Mihmatini was silent for a while, wringing her hands together. Finally, she spoke. “He would never have deserted. But...Acatl…”

“What?”

“I don’t know if he’s dead.” She set a hand on her chest. “The magic that connects us—I can still feel it in here. It’s faint, really faint, but it’s there. He might…” She took a breath, and tears welled up in her eyes. “He might still be alive.”

Alive. The word was a conch shell in his head, sounding to wake the dawn. For an instant, he let himself imagine it. Teomitl alive, maybe in hiding, maybe trying to find his way home to them.

Maybe held captive by the Mixteca, until such time as they can tear out his heart. He closed his eyes, shutting out everything but the sound of his own breathing. It didn’t help. He hated how pathetic his own voice sounded as he asked, “You think so?”

“It’s—” She scrubbed ineffectually at her eyes with the back of a hand. “It’s possible. Isn’t it?”

“...I suppose.” He took a breath. “I think it’s time for me to get some sleep. I’ll...see you tomorrow.”

He knew he wouldn’t sleep—knew, in fact, that he’d be lucky if he even managed to close his eyes—but he needed to get home. He refused to disgrace himself by weeping in public.

The first dream came a week later.

He’d managed to avoid them until then; he’d thrown himself headlong into his work, not stopping until he was so tired that his “sleep” was really more like “passing out.” But it seemed his body could adapt to the conditions he subjected it to much easier than he’d thought, because he woke with tears on his face and the scraps of a nightmare scattering in the dawn light. There had been blood and screaming and a ravaged and horrible face staring into his that somehow he’d known. He did his best to put it from his mind, and for a day he thought he’d succeeded. He shed blood for the gods, stood vigil for the dead, tallied up the ledgers for the living. Remembered, occasionally, to put food into his mouth, but he couldn’t have said what he was eating. Collapsed onto his mat and prayed that he wouldn’t have a dream like that again.

It wasn’t like that. It was worse.

He was walking through a jungle made of shadows, trees shedding gray dust from their leaves as he passed under them. There was no birdsong, no rippling of distant waters or crunching of underbrush, and he knew deep in his soul that nothing was alive here anymore. Not even himself. Though his legs ached and his lungs burned, it was pain that felt like it was happening to someone else. His gut held, not the stretched desiccation of Mictlan, but a nasty twisting feeling of wrongness; part of him wanted to be sick, but he couldn’t stop. Ahead of him, someone was making their way through the undergrowth, and it was a stride he’d know anywhere.

Teomitl. He thought he called out to him, but no sound escaped his mouth even though his throat hurt as though he’d been screaming. He tried again. Teomitl! This time, he managed a tiny squeak, something even an owl wouldn’t have heard.

Teomitl didn’t slow down, but somehow the distance between them shortened. Now Acatl could make out the tattered remains of his feather suit, singed and bloodstained until it was more red than white, and the way his bare feet had been cut to ribbons. He still wasn’t looking behind him. It was like Acatl wasn’t there at all. Ahead of them, the trees were thinning out.

And then they were on a flat plain strewn with corpses, bright crimson blood the only color Acatl could see. Teomitl was standing still in front of him as water slowly seeped out of the ground, covering his feet and lapping gently at his ankles. There were thin threads of red in it.

“Teomitl,” he said, and this time his voice obeyed him.

Teomitl turned to him, smiling as though he’d just noticed he was there. His chest was a red ruin, the bones of his ribcage snapped wide open to pull out his beating heart. A tiny ahuizotl curled in the space where it had been.

He took one step back. Another.

Teomitl’s smile grew sad, and he reached for him with a bloody hand. “Acatl, I’m sorry.”

He awoke suddenly and all at once, curling in on himself with a ragged sob. It was still dark out; the sun hadn’t made its appearance yet. There was no one to see when he shook himself to pieces around the space in his heart. It was a dream, he told himself sternly. Just a dream. My soul is only wandering through my own grief. It doesn’t mean anything.

But then it returned the next night, and the next. While the details differed—sometimes Teomitl was swimming a river that suddenly turned to blood and dissolved his flesh, sometimes one of his own ahuizotls turned into a jaguar and sprang for his face—the end was always the same. Teomitl dead and still walking, reaching for him with an apology on his lips. Sometimes it even lingered after he woke. Once he jolted awake utterly convinced that he wasn’t alone—that Teomitl was in the room, a sad smile on his lips and an outstretched hand hovering in the air. Only when he looked around, searching for that other presence, did reality reassert itself and he remembered with gutwrenching pain that it had only been a nightmare. That Teomitl was dead somewhere on a Mixtec altar, his heart an offering to the Sun.

He started timing his treks across the Sacred Precinct to avoid the Great Temple’s sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli. Sleep grew more and more difficult to achieve, and even when he caught a few hours’ rest it never seemed to help. He even thought, fleetingly, of asking the priests of Patecatl if anything they had would be useful, only to dismiss it the next day. He would survive this. It wasn’t worth baring his soul to anyone else’s prying eyes or clumsy but well-meaning words. He would work and pray, and that would keep him occupied. There was a haunting case that needed his attention; while he was tracking down the cause he had an excuse not to focus on anything else. He forgot to eat, no matter how much Ichtaca scolded him. The food tasted like ashes in his mouth, anyway.

Still, when one of Neutemoc’s slaves came to his door asking whether he would come to dinner at his house that night, he didn’t waste time in accepting. Dinner with Neutemoc’s family had become...normal. He needed normal, even if it still felt like walking on broken glass.

Up until the first course was served, he even thought he’d get it. Neutemoc had been nearly silent when he’d arrived, but he’d unbent enough to start a conversation about his daughters’ studies. Necalli and Mazatl were more subdued than they normally were, but they’d heard what happened to their newest uncle-by-marriage and were no doubt mourning in their own ways. Mihmatini’s face was as pale and set as white jade, but as the conversation wore on he thought he saw her smile.

He didn’t much feel like smiling himself. The smells of the meal were turning his stomach. It was simple enough fare—fish with peppers, lightly boiled vegetables in a salty, spicy sauce, plenty of soft flatbread to mop it up—but he couldn’t bring himself to touch it. The last time he’d eaten a meal like this had been with Teomitl at his side, hugging Mazatl and fondly ruffling up Necalli’s hair and barely paying any attention to his own plate until Mazatl had swiped something off it and he’d tickled her as revenge, the both of them laughing. Acatl would never forget the look on his face the first time she’d called him uncle.

He was vaguely aware Neutemoc was frowning at him. “Eat. Before it gets cold.”

He put some fish onto his plate. He ate it. He couldn’t say what it tasted like. Peppers, mostly. It sat in his stomach like a lead weight, and he swallowed so roughly that for a moment he was afraid he’d choke. I can’t do this. But they would notice if he didn’t eat, and then they’d worry about him. He forced himself to take a few more bites, filling the yawning void within.

A second course arrived eventually. Roasted agave worms and greens, which he usually liked. He took a small portion, nibbled on it, and set his plate down.

“More greens?”

Neutemoc’s voice was too careful for his liking, but he nodded. Another portion of greens was duly set onto his plate, and he ate without really tasting it. He only managed a few bites before he had to give up, his gorge rising.

Mihmatini picked at her own dish, and Neutemoc frowned at her. “You’re not hungry?”

She shook her head.

Silence descended again, but It didn’t reign for long before Neutemoc said, “Acatl. Any interesting cases lately?” With a quick glance at his children, he added, “That we can talk about in front of the kids?”

“Aww, Dad...”

Neutemoc gave his eldest the same look his father had once given him. “When you go off to war, Necalli, I will let you listen to all the awful details.”

It wasn’t enough to make Acatl smile, but nevertheless the tension in his throat eased. “Well,” he began, “we’ve been trying to figure out what’s been strangling merchants in the featherworkers’ district…”

Laying out the facts of a suspicious death or two was always calming. He could forget the ache in his heart, even if only briefly. But even when he was done and had just started to relax, Neutemoc was still talking to him as though he expected to see his younger brother shatter any minute. The slaves, too, were unusually solicitous of him—rushing to fill up his cup, to heap delicacies on his plate. At any other time he might have suspected the whole thing to be a bribe or an awkward apology for some unremembered slight; now, he just felt uneasy.

When the meal was done, he declined Neutemoc’s offer of a pipe and got to his feet. “I think I’ll get some air.”

The courtyard outside was empty. He lifted his eyes to the heavens, charting the path of the four hundred stars above. Ceyaxochitl’s death hadn’t hit him anywhere near as hard as this, but gods, he thought he could recover in time if only the people around him stopped coddling him. Everywhere he went there were sympathetic glances and soft words, and even the priests of his own temple were stepping gingerly around him. As though he needed to be treated like...like...

Like a new widow. Like Mihmatini. He sat down hard, feeling like his legs had been cut out from under him. Air seemed to be in short supply, and the gulf in his chest yawned wide.

But I’m not. I care for Teomitl, of course, but it’s not like that. It’s not—

He thought about Teomitl sacrificed as a war captive or drowned in a river far from home, and nearly choked at the fist of grief that tightened around his heart. No. He shook his head as though that would clear it. He wouldn’t want me to grieve over him. He wouldn’t want me to think of him dead, drowned, sacrificed—he’d want me to remember him happy. I can do that much for him, at least.

He could. It was easy. He closed his eyes and remembered.

Remembered the smile that lit up rooms and outshone the Sun, the one that could pull an answering burst of happiness out of the depths of his soul. Remembered the way Teomitl had laughed and rolled around the floor with Mazatl, the way he’d helped Ollin to walk holding onto his hands, the way he sparred with Necalli and asked about Ohtli’s lessons in the calmecac, and how all of those moment strung together like pearls on a string into something that made Acatl’s heart warm as well. Remembered impatient haggling in the marketplace, haphazard rowing on the lake, strong arms flexing such that he couldn’t look away, the touch of a warm hand lingering even after Teomitl had withdrawn—

He remembered how it had felt, in that space between dreams and waking, where he’d thought Teomitl was by his side even in Mictlan. Where, for the span of a heartbeat, he’d been happy.

There was a sound—a soft, miserable whine. It took him a moment to realize it was coming from his own throat, that he’d drawn his knees up to his chest and buried his face in them. That he was shaking again, and had been for some time. As nausea oozed up in his throat, he regretted having eaten.

It was like that, after all.

And he’d realized too late. Even if he’d ever been able to do anything about it—which he never would anyway, the man was married to his sister—there was no chance of it now, because Teomitl was gone.

He forced his burning eyes to stay open. If he blinked, if he let his eyes close even for an instant, the tears would fall.

Approaching footsteps made him raise his head. Mihmatini was walking quietly and carefully towards him, as though she didn’t want to disturb him. As though I’m fragile. You too, Mihmatini?

“Ah. There you are.” Even her voice was soft.

He uncurled himself and arranged his limbs into a more dignified position, keeping his fists clenched to stop his hands from trembling. At least when he finally blinked, his eyes were dry. “Hm.”

She sat next to him, not touching. There was something calming about her company, but gods, he prayed she couldn’t see the thoughts written on his face. She stretched out a hand and he thought she’d lay it soothingly on his shoulder, but instead she traced a meaningless pattern in the dirt. “...It’s hard, isn’t it?”

His dry throat made a clicking noise when he swallowed. “It is.”

“At least we’re both in the same boat,” she murmured.

The words refused to make sense in his head at first—but then they did, and he reared back and stared at her. No. I’ve only just realized it myself, she can’t have...she can’t be thinking that I—! “I beg your pardon?”

Her voice lowered even further, so that he had to strain to hear her. There was a faint, sad smile on her face. “You love him just the same as I do, don’t you?”

He drew a long breath. He knew what he should say, what the right and proper words would be. No, like a son. Or like my brother. But he couldn’t lie to her, not even to spare what was left of her broken heart, and so what came out instead was, “Yes. Gods, yes.” Hate me for it. Tell me I have no right to love him, that you’re the one who has his heart. Tell me I’m a fool.

She lifted her head, and her faint smile grew to something bright and brittle. “Good.”

Good?! He blinked uselessly at her, gaping like a fish before he could find his voice again. “You—you approve?”

“You’re my favorite brother,” she said simply. “And...well.”

She fell silent, her smile fading until it vanished entirely. He waited. Finally, in a much softer voice, she continued, “If you love him, there’s no harm in telling you what he swore me to secrecy over.”

Dread gripped him. Of course Teomitl was entitled to his secrets, but he couldn’t imagine what would be so horrible that Mihmatini wouldn’t tell him. At least, not while he lived. He didn’t want to ask, but he had to know. “...What?”

She blinked rapidly, fingers going still. She’d traced something that looked, from a certain angle, like a flower glyph. “...He...he loved you, too.”

No.

But Mihmatini was still talking. “He didn’t want me to tell you; he was sure you’d scorn him. But he loved you the same way he loved me...gods, probably more than he loved me.”

It was the last straw. His nails bit into his palms hard enough to draw blood, and he barely recognized his own voice as rage filled it. “Why are you telling me this?!”

Mihmatini took a shuddering breath; he realized she was fighting tears, and had been since she’d spilled Teomitl’s heart to the night air. “In case he comes back. If he does...no, when he does...you should tell him how you feel.”

He rose on shaking legs. “I think I need to be alone.”

Without really seeing his surroundings, he walked until he came to the canal outside the house. The family’s boats were tied up outside, bobbing gently on the water. When he sat down, the stone under him was cold; the water he dipped his fingers in was colder still. Neither revived him. Neither was as cold as the pit cracking open in his gut. Mictlan was worse, true, but all the inexorable pains of Mictlan were dull aches compared to this.

In case he comes back. In case he comes back. I love him—I am in love, that’s what this pain is—and I will never see him again in this world. Mihmatini says he loves me too, and it doesn’t matter, because his bones lie somewhere in the jungle and his flesh feeds the crows and I will never get to tell him.

Between one breath and another, the tears came. They spilled hot and salty down his face; he let them, shoulders shaking, because he no longer had the strength to stop them. And nobody would come to offer unwanted sympathy, anyway. Mihmatini had her own grief, and the hurrying footsteps he’d grown so used to hearing would never run after him again.

Eventually, when he was spent, he wiped his face and left. It was time to go home.

The rest of the month ground on slowly, and his dreams began to change.

At first they were minor changes—the blood was less vibrant, the forests and plains brighter. Teomitl bled less. Acatl woke without feeling as though the inside of his chest had been hollowed out and replaced with ash. His appetite started to return; he still never felt properly hungry, and his meals didn’t exactly fill him with joy, but he could eat without feeling sick. The bones in his wrists were not quite so prominent as they’d been. And if that was all, he might have simply thought he was beginning to deal with his sorrow. Such things happened, after all. Eventually the knives scraping away at his chest would lose their edges, and he would face a life without Teomitl’s sunny smile.

But there was more than just a lessening of pain. He dreamed of a sunsoaked forest in the south, and woke feeling like a lizard basking on a rock, warm in a way he couldn’t blame on the heat of the rainy season. He dreamed that Teomitl was fording a fast-flowing river—one that did not turn to blood this time—and when dawn broke his legs were soaked up to the shins. That got him to visit a healing priest; he knew when he was out of his depth, and if his soul was wandering too far in his nightmares then he wanted to be sure it would come back to him by dawn. But the priest was as befuddled as he was, and only told him to call again if he woke in pain or with unexplained wounds.

Unexplained wounds? he thought bitterly. You mean, like the one where half my heart’s been torn from my chest? But he knew better than to say that out loud; his feelings for Teomitl were none of this man’s business. So he thanked him and left, paying a fistful of cacao beans for the consultation, and tried not to think about it until the next time he slept and the dreams returned.

And they were dreams now, and not nightmares. While he slept his soul seemed content to follow Teomitl’s solitary travels through the very outskirts of the Empire, and he no longer had to see him torn apart by monsters or smiling ruinously with bloody teeth. Teomitl barely bled at all now, and his wounds were only the normal ones a man might get from traversing hostile terrain alone—a scraped knee here, a bound-up cut there. He sang to himself as he walked, though the words slipped through Acatl’s mind like water. Once Acatl stood just over his shoulder at a smoky campfire while he roasted fish in the ashes, and his heart ached as he watched him cry.

“Acatl-tzin,” he whispered into his folded knees. “Acatl, I should have told you.”

“Should have told me what?” he tried to ask, but before he could form the words he woke up. There were tears in his own eyes.

It’s only because I miss him, he told himself. This is grief, that’s all. But there was the smell of smoke and the sweet fresh scent of cooked fish clinging to his skin, and a single damp leaf was stuck to the bottom of his bare foot. It hadn’t rained in Tenochtitlan last night. He stared at it for a long time.

Each night went on in the same vein. He would clean his teeth, lay down on his mat, and drift off to sleep—and in his dreams, there would be Teomitl, hale and whole and walking onwards. Despite himself, Acatl started to wake with a faint stirring of hope. Maybe Teomitl really had only been separated from the army. Maybe he truly was on his way home. And maybe I’m delusional, came the inevitable bitter thought when he’d finished his morning rituals. It had become much harder to listen to.

It was almost a surprise when he dreamed about a city he knew. It was a small but bustling place about half a day’s walk from Tenochtitlan, and as he walked through the streets he realized that the torches had been lit for a funeral. He could hear the chants ahead of him. There was a darker shape in the shadows which spilled down the dusty road, and he knew the man’s stride like he knew his own.

“Teomitl!” He hadn’t been mute in his dreams for a while now.

Teomitl didn’t turn. He never turned. But he stopped, and by the way his head tilted Acatl just knew he was smiling. Wordlessly, he pointed at the courtyard ahead.

A funeral pyre had been lit, and it was so like the rituals he presided over that he felt a distinct sense of deja vu. There was the priest singing a hymn to Lord Death; there were the weeping family members of the deceased. There were the marigolds and the other offerings, brilliant in the gloom.

“That could have been me,” Teomitl said, and Acatl heard his voice as though he was standing next to him in the waking world instead of only in a dream. “But it’s not yet, and it won’t be for a good long while. So you don’t need to fear for me. I keep my promises.”

They’d never touched before. But this time Teomitl turned to face him, and the hand he held out was free of blood entirely. Slowly, giving him time to pull away, Teomitl pressed his palm to his. Their fingers laced together, warm and strong and almost real.

“Teomitl,” he said helplessly.

“Acatl.” Teomitl’s smile was like the sun. “I’m sorry I made you worry, but I’ll be home soon.”

And then he woke up, the dream shredded apart by the blasts of the conch-shell horns that heralded the dawn. For a long moment, he stared blankly up at the ceiling. He could still feel Teomitl’s hand in his; each little scar and callus felt etched on his skin. He lives. The slow certainty of it welled up in him like blood. He lives, and he is coming back.

He rose and made his devotions before dressing, but now his hands shook with something that was no longer grief. As soon as he left for his temple, he could feel the change In the air. Scraps of excited conversation whirled past him, but he couldn’t focus long enough to pick any out. He concentrated on breathing steadily and walking with the dignity befitting a High Priest. He would not sprint for the temple, would not grab the nearest housewife or warrior or priest and demand answers. They would come soon enough.

They came in the form of Ezamahual, rushing out of the temple complex to meet him. “Acatl-tzin! Acatl-tzin, there is wonderful news!”

Briefly, he thought he should have worn the hated regalia. “What news?”

Ezamahual’s words tumbled out in a headlong rush, almost too fast to follow. “The Master of the House of Darts—Teomitl-tzin—he’s returned! Our warriors met him at the city gates!”

Even though he’d half expected it—even though the recurring dreams, his soul journeying through the night at Teomitl’s side, had kept alive the flickering flame of hope that now burned within him—he still briefly felt like fainting. He clenched his fists, the pain of his nails in his palms keeping him upright. “You’re sure?”

Ezamahual nodded enthusiastically. “The Revered Speaker has reinstated him to his old position, and there’s talk of a banquet at the palace to celebrate his safe return. I think he’s at the Duality House now, though—they’re like an anthill over there.”

Right. He exhaled slowly, forcing down joy and disappointment alike. Of course Teomitl would want to see his wife first above all, to reassure her that he was well, and of course he had no right to intrude. Nor would he even if he did—Mihmatini deserved her husband back in her life, deserved all the joy she would wring from it. The things she’d told him didn’t—couldn’t—matter in the face of their union. “I see. I suppose we’ll learn more later. Come—tell me if there’s been any new developments in those strangling cases.”

Ezamahual looked briefly baffled, but then he nodded. “Of course, Acatl-tzin. It’s like this…”

The latest crop of mysterious deaths turned out to be quite straightforward in the end, once they tracked down their newest lead and had him sing like a bird. He nodded at the appropriate times, sent out a double team of priests after the perpetrators, and had it very nearly wrapped up by lunch—a meal that, for once, he was almost looking forward to. He was settling down with the account ledgers to mark payment of two gold-filled quills to the priests of Mixcoatl for their aid when he heard footsteps outside.

Familiar footsteps.

For the first time in what felt like an eternity, the tightness in his chest eased. But he didn’t have a chance to revel in it, because he knew the voice calling his name.

“Acatl? Acatl!”

He dropped the ledgers and his pen, getting ink all over his fingers. As the entrance curtain was flung aside in a cacophony of copper bells, he scrambled to his feet. Had he been tired and listless before? That must have been a thousand years ago. He thought he might weep for the sheer relief of hearing that beloved voice again. “Gods—Teomitl—”

He had a confused impression of gold jewelry and feather ornaments, but then Teomitl was flinging himself into his arms and the only thing that sunk into his mind was warmth. There were strong arms wrapped around him and a head pressed against his temple, and Teomitl’s voice shook as he breathed, “Duality, I missed you so much.”

Slowly, he raised his shaking hands and set them at Teomitl’s shoulderblades. He could feel his racing heart, feel the way he sucked in each breath as though trying not to sob. It was overwhelming; his eyes burned as he fought to blink back his own tears. He couldn’t speak. If he opened his mouth, he knew he’d lose the battle—and there were no words for this, anyway.

Teomitl abruptly released him, turning his face away. His voice was a soft, ragged thing, and his expression was a careful blank. “Forgive me. I was...Mihmatini said you’d be glad to see me. I wanted to look less like I’d been dragged over the mountains backwards, first.”

He swallowed several times until he thought he could risk a response, even as his eyes drank in the sight of Teomitl in front of him. He looks the same, he thought. His skin had been further darkened by the sun, there were new scars looping across his arms and legs, and someone had talked him into a fortune in gold and jade with quetzal feathers tied into his hair, but he had the same face and body and sweet, sweet voice. “It’s—there’s nothing to forgive. I’m glad you’ve returned.”

“They told me everyone thought I was dead.” Teomitl bit his lip. “Except for Mihmatini. And you.”

He steered his mind firmly away from the shoals of crushing grief that still lurked under the joy of seeing Teomitl before him. He is here, and hale, and whole, just as I dreamed. I have nothing to weep over. “I knew you weren’t. You wouldn’t let something like a flood stop you.”

There was the first glimmer of a smile tugging at Teomitl’s lips. “You have such faith in me, Acatl.”

“You’re well deserving of it,” he replied. And I love you, and even in dreams I could not think of any other path than your survival. That, he refused to say.

Especially because Teomitl still wasn’t looking at him.

They stood in agonizing silence, and he couldn’t bring himself to break it. Teomitl was so close, still within arms’ range; if he was brave enough, he could reach out and pull him back into his arms. Could bury his face in his hair and crush the fabric of his cloak in his hands and tell him...what? It didn’t matter what Mihmatini had said to him. There was simply no space for him in the life Teomitl deserved, nothing beyond that Acatl already occupied. He wouldn’t burden him with useless feelings.

But then Teomitl shook himself like an ahuitzotl and turned back to him, holding his gaze. “Do you want to know what got me home, Acatl? What sustained me?”

Mutely, he nodded. He still didn’t trust his voice.

“You.”

He felt like he’d been gutted. “I...Teomitl…”

Whatever Teomitl saw in his face made his eyes soften. He took a step forward, hands coming up to rest like butterfly wings on Acatl’s waist, and Acatl let him. “I thought about you. I...Southern Hummingbird blind me, I dreamed about you. Every night! I made myself a promise while I was out there, in the event I ever saw you again. Scorn me for it all you’d like, but I’m going to keep it now.”

Oh, Teomitl. I could never scorn you. They were very, very close now, and Teomitl’s gaze had fallen to his parted lips. His mouth went dry.

And then Teomitl kissed him.

It started out soft and gentle, lips barely tracing Acatl’s own. Asking permission, he thought with an absurd spike of giddiness—and so, leaning in a little shyly, he gave it.

Teomitl wasted no time. The kiss grew harder, fingers digging into Acatl’s skin as he hauled their bodies together. They were pressed together from chest to hip but it still wasn’t enough, they weren’t close enough; blood roaring in his ears, he wrapped his arms around Teomitl’s back and clung tightly. His mouth opened with a breathy little whine stolen immediately by Teomitl’s invading tongue, and when he dared to do the same, Teomitl made a noise like a jaguar and let go of his waist in favor of clawing at the back of his cloak, grabbing fistfuls of fabric along with strands of his hair. It pulled too hard, but he didn’t care. The pain meant it was real, that this was really happening. That for once it wasn’t a dream.

Teomitl only drew away to breathe, “Gods—I love you—” before claiming his mouth again, as though he couldn’t bear to be apart.

Acatl twisted in his arms, knowing he was making a probably incoherent and definitely embarrassing noise, but shame wasn’t an emotion he was capable of at the moment. He loves me. By the Duality, he loves me. “I didn’t think—Mihmatini told me, but I didn’t think...”

Teomitl jerked back, brow furrowed. “Wait. Mihmatini told you?!”

His grip on the back of Teomitl’s cloak tightened at the memory. “She was trying to reassure me, I think. I’d just told her...well.” He couldn’t say it, even with Teomitl in his arms, and settled for uncurling one fist and running his hand up the back of Teomitl’s neck in lieu of words.

He was rewarded with a shiver, and the near-panic in Teomitl’s eyes ebbed into something soft. “What did you tell her, Acatl?”

He’d asked. He’d asked, and Acatl had always been honest with him. He’d be honest now, even if it made his heart race and his hands tremble. “That I love you.”

Teomitl made a desperate noise and kissed him again. There was no gentleness now; he kissed like a man possessed, hungry as a jaguar, and Acatl buried a hand in his hair to make sure he didn’t stop. Teeth caught at his lower lip, and he moaned out loud. This seemed to spur Teomitl on, because his mouth left Acatl’s to nip at his throat instead; the first sting of teeth sent a wave of arousal through him so strong it nearly swamped him. “Ah—!”

Teomitl soothed the skin with a delicate kiss that didn’t help at all, and then he returned his focus to Acath’s mouth. This time he was gentle, a careful little caress that gave Acatl just enough brainpower back to realize that he’d probably been a bit loud. Which is Teomitl’s fault, anyway, so he can’t complain. “Mmm...”

Even when they eventually pulled apart, they clung to each other for a long while. Acatl stroked up and down Teomitl’s spine, tracing each bump of vertebrae and the trembling muscles of his back. Teomitl dropped his head onto Acatl’s shoulder, breathing slow and deep. He’d twined locks of long hair through his fingers, gently running his fingers through the strands. Acatl had to close his eyes, overwhelmed. The stone beneath my feet is real. Teomitl’s skin under my hands is real. This—this is real. He is in my arms, and he loves me.

“I don’t want to let you go,” Teomitl whispered. “I never want to let you out of my sight again.”

Neither do I. He tilted his head, nosing at Teomitl’s hair. Gods, even cut to a proper length again it was so adorably fluffy. He sighed into it. “You’ll have to eventually.” Even though he hated the thought, he couldn’t help but smile. “You’re the Master of the House of Darts, aren’t you? You have an army to help lead. Wars to wage. Glory to bring to the Empire.”

“Hrmph.” The arms around him tightened in wordless refusal.

Joy bubbled up within him, and he chuckled quietly. Still such a stubborn young man. But now he was Acatl’s young man, and there was something wonderful about that. He felt loose as unspun cotton, ready to sink into the floor with the release of all the tension he’d been carrying, but it had left a void behind. A void that rumbled—loudly—to be filled. His face burned with embarrassment at the noise. “...Ah. Why don’t we see about lunch?”

Teomitl snorted. “I have been gone a long time. You’re remembering to eat for once.”

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually had an appetite for food, but he decided not to mention that. Teomitl would worry too much. But eating lunch meant that they had to be seen in public, which meant they both had to actually let go of each other. Reluctantly, he lifted his head and lowered his arms, finding himself stymied halfway through by Teomitl’s serpentlike hold on his ribs. “Teomitl.”

At least now he wasn’t the only one blushing. “Right. You’re right. We should eat.” Teomitl stepped back, clearing his throat, but the look in his eyes was more awestruck than awkward. He was staring at Acatl as though he couldn’t get enough of the sight.

And since Acatl found himself doing the same thing, he couldn’t blame him. Had his eyes always been that dark? Was that scar slicing a pale line across his skin new, or had he just never noticed it before? I might have gone my whole life without this. What an idiot I was.

It took longer than Acatl liked for he and Teomitl to be properly alone again, this time with a plate of food between them. Lunch was simple fare: a plate of grilled newts and amaranth dough with a vibrant red sauce so spicy it made his nose prickle. The serving priests had taken one look at Teomitl and thoughtfully put it on the side instead of directly on their meal, which he’d had to thank them for. As he sat down, inhaling the scent, he felt as though his body was waking up after a long slumber. It filled his lungs and swirled through his veins, and his mouth watered.

He dug in greedily. Gods, it had been so long since he’d properly tasted the food he put into his mouth. The juicy grilled meat was the most savory thing he’d had in ages, and he couldn’t blame his suddenly blurry vision on the sauce he dunked his next bite in. It was perfect. He had one of the amaranth dough sticks to smother the burn, finding it crunchy and slightly sweet with its dusting of seeds on top. “Mmm.”

A hand landed on his thigh. “Enjoying yourself?”

He lifted his head, face hot. “I was hungrier than I thought.”

“That’s good. You need to eat more, anyway.” Teomitl smiled, and he couldn’t help smiling in return. “Pass me some sauce?”

He passed the sauce. Teomitl tore at his own grilled newt with more manners but just as much enthusiasm. The long trek through the wilderness must have hardened him, because he didn’t wince at the heat of the accompanying sauce. Then again, he also didn’t use quite so much. “Mm. This is good.”

There was a fleck of bright red chili paste by the corner of Teomitl’s mouth. He wanted to kiss it away. A heartbeat later, he realized that he could. They were alone. Nothing was stopping him now.

So he did, and Teomitl went crimson. “Acatl!” he yelped delightedly, grinning even as he turned his head and kissed him back.

Chaste as it was, it lingered long enough that Acatl was flushed when he pulled away. His pulse thrummed under his skin; he felt like he’d drunk a cup of pulque, dizzy at his own daring as it sunk in. They were alone. Good food was in his belly for once, giving him the energy he hadn’t realized he’d been missing. They could do a lot more than kiss, if they wanted.

Teomitl’s grin turned teasing. “I missed doing that.”

“It hasn’t even been half an hour,” he muttered. “You’re insatiable.” But there was no heat to it, and he found his hand resting at Teomitl’s waist. The skin under his palm was just so warm. He’d felt cold bones and grave dust for too long.

An eyebrow went up in stunning imitation of Mihmatini. “And I’ve waited years for even one kiss, Acatl. There’s a backlog to get through, you know.”

The blush had just started to fade, but now it returned with a vengeance. “Years?”

“Mm-hmm.” Teomitl’s eyes gleamed. “I’d like to make up for lost time, if you wouldn’t mind.”

He swallowed hard. Now that he could think again he wanted to know how Teomitl had survived, how he’d managed to make it all the way back home—the unreal fragments he’d witnessed each night had not been informative—but his questions suddenly didn’t seem that important anymore. Not when there were other, more immediate desires to be sated. “...I would not.”

And so their mouths met. Teomitl’s idea of making up for lost time was long and hungry and tingled with the spice of their meal; Acatl’s lips parted for his tongue almost before he knew what he was doing, and that was still a little strange but far from unwelcome. Especially when Teomitl drew back, mouth wet and red, to catch his lower lip between his teeth in another one of those stinging little nips that made his blood sing. A breathy noise escaped him, but this time Teomitl didn’t soothe it.

No, this time he lowered his mouth to Acatl’s neck and did it again. It was light and delicate, unlikely to leave marks, but Teomitl’s teeth were sharp enough that he felt each one in a burst of light behind his closed eyelids. He had to bury one hand in Teomitl’s hair and wrap the other around his waist just to keep himself upright; he couldn’t entirely muffle his own gasps. “Ahh...gods...”

Teomitl hummed, low and wordless, and slid a hand down his stomach. Acatl’s fevered blood roared in his ears, and all of a sudden it was almost too much. “Teomitl.”

Teomitl lifted his head, eyes bright. “Mm?”

“You.” He sucked in a breath, willing his heartrate to slow down. There had to be some limits. Too much had already happened much too quickly. “You can’t keep doing that here.”

“You don’t like it?” Teomitl grinned at him. “Or do you like it too much, Acatl?”

If by some miracle all the rest of it hadn’t already made him blush, hearing Teomitl purr his name like that would definitely have done the trick. He had to turn his face away. “You know damned well it’s the latter. We both have our duties; we can’t very well take the rest of the day off to…” Flustered, he gestured between them.

“Hrmph,” Teomitl said, and kissed him again. This time it was slow and sweet and came with warm arms sliding around him, and he lingered in it for long, long minutes.

By the time they finally remembered the rest of their food, it was stone cold. They ate anyway; cold food was still good, especially with the chili sauce. Acatl was privately of the opinion that it even made the sauce taste better, but he’d learned that people tended to look at him strangely when he voiced it. Besides, Teomitl was leaning against him with one arm slung loosely around his waist, a reassuring weight against his side anchoring him to the earth. There wasn’t a need for speech in moments like this.

Not to mention that, strangely enough, he was still hungry. The joy he’d first felt at knowing Teomitl was safe and alive had opened the floodgates, but it felt as though his body was determined to make up for lost sustenance. Even after their plates were both thoroughly clean, he was still rather looking forward to dinner.

The afternoon light was turning the air gold when Teomitl reluctantly got to his feet. Acatl followed; they stood without touching for a moment that was just long enough to be awkward, and then Teomitl pulled him into a fierce hug. Acatl knew it was coming this time; he marveled at how they just seemed to fit together, with one hand buried in Teomitl’s hair and the other pressed flat between his shoulderblades to feel the steady beat of his heart.

Teomitl took a long, slow breath. “Lunch wasn’t long enough.”

“It wasn’t,” he agreed softly. “But there will be others. Many others.” With Teomitl by his side, he didn’t think he’d ever skip a meal again.

Despite the hint of dismissal—yes, he loved the man with all his heart, but they did both have other things to do—Teomitl made no move to let go of him. In fact, he squeezed a little tighter, turning to bury his face in Acatl’s hair. “Mrghh...”

He had to bite the inside of his cheek to quell the urge to laugh. As fond as he was, he knew it probably wouldn’t go over well. He made do with stroking Teomitl’s hair—gods, it was so soft—and taking a deliberate step back so that Teomitl had to release him or be pulled off-balance. Now Teomitl was glaring at him, but nothing would stop the slow upwell of joy in his veins. “Go on. I’ll see you at the banquet tonight.” He knew he’d enjoy this one.

Teomitl’s eyes were fierce as an eagle’s. “And afterwards? Will I see you afterwards, Acatl?”

He had a pretty good feeling he knew what Teomitl had in mind for a private celebration. Nerves twisted his gut, but only for a moment. He’d come this far, hadn’t he? “Yes,” he said simply.

The way Teomitl’s lips parted in wonder let him know he’d made the right choice. For the rest of my life. Whenever you want, for the rest of my life, I’ll be there.

Teomitl didn’t reach for him—he seemed to be deliberately holding himself still, tension ringing through his body like a drawn bowstring—but he looked like he wanted to. He looked like he wanted to yank Acatl back into his arms and finish what they’d started earlier, and the thought was exhilarating. “My chambers in the palace? They’re closest.”

Acatl flushed, shaking his head. That was a risk he refused to take. The palace had too many people, too many ears and eyes. Far too many chances to be interrupted. If he was going to do this, it would be somewhere safe. “My house. I’ll...I’ll be waiting.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.” There was a wild, radiant smile.

He smiled back. Though he’d miss Teomitl while he worked—Duality, they’d been apart for so long—it would be fine. He was already looking forward to the banquet and what would come after, when nothing would part them again save the dawn.

Teomitl had promised, after all.

#obsidian and blood #acatl #teomitl #teocatl #mihmatini #quenami #acamapichtli #paladin writes stuff

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darabeatha · 3 months

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Trope trope trope trope!

𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 “𝐓𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞” 𝐈 𝐠𝐞𝐭, 𝐈 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐚 𝐓𝐕 𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐲 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐞. / @caemthe

𝐌𝐨𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐳𝐮𝐦𝐚 𝐈𝐈

Animal motif: jaguar! a reference to not only Tezcatlipoca but also to the Ocelomeh (Ocelotl in singular and Ocelomeh in plural; jaguar warriors. They were basically members of the Aztec military elite) to whom he's the leader of.

Back from the dead: it's his second chance at life! "Moctezuma II, the unfortunate ruler of the Aztec Empire during its fall to Hernán Cortés' conquest. Having felt pity for his betrayal and terrible end, Tezcatlipoca had summoned Moctezuma into the South American Lostbelt for a second chance at life."

God in human form: technically he is Tezcatlipoca's impersonator! Putting a small parenthesis to fgo; to the Mexica, this person was called the 'Ixiptla' who for one year was seen as the god (in this case Tezcatlipoca) on earth. They were highly respected and seen as the god, and at the end of the year, they were sacrificed. Despite this, being the deity's impersonator was seen as an incredibly high honor and not a tragedy or something bad like how we would think in the present (this sacrifice just like death in battle was like the absolute honor). Real Moctezuma wasn't an Ixiptla in this sense, but I think that for the fictional narrative, it was an interesting choice especially considering the second reason as of why he was summoned by Tezcatlipoca (besides him taking pity of how his life ended) which i won't say how it ends bc it'll be spoiler

Rage helm: except that in this case, even if you take off his mask he is still frowning !

Perpetual frown: Rarely will you see him not looking angry or frowning even if he's literally just vibin' . Sometimes this scares people away and it doesn't help that he tends to have airs of grandeur moments (tm) sometimes (king moment), but when you get to know him, he's pretty considerate and chill person ! U just have to ignore his king-ly traits at first

Clean freak: inspired by his real counterpart, my Mocte is very much into cleanliness and tidyness. On a single glance u think he wears the same black body suit all the time but then u open his closet and he just has a bunch of exact same copies of it. U will not catch him wearing the same clothes he did again till 4-5 days or the next week. He's like that one lil robot in wall-E that can't stand stains, u leave a ketchup stain over the counter and even if it doesn't involve him, you'll see him going like -SCRUBS-

War is glorious: Or more specifically speaking; death in war. 'Dying in war was the highest honor and was something that was longed for. The concepts of war and sacrifice responded to the needs of cohesion and reproduction of society, by dying in war or through sacrifice, the warrior would be able to pay the gods their mythical sacrifice which had given origin to life'. Mocte is not devoid of this line of thinking.

Foreshadowing: goes by the name Izcalli when first introduced and then his true name is revealed; Moctezuma II the last Aztec emperor (which he's technically not really -the- last, as two other rulers succeeded him after his death but their reigns were quite short-lived so it's not uncommon to see him referred as the last)

#caemthe #;m.octezuma ii #;headcanons #headcanons #;about #about #/THANKS FOR SENDING THIS IN L.IRIIII #i extended it a lil bit bc im biased but but but but-#took inspo from t.ezca's page

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gdfalksen · 4 years

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A quick update for you all. As you may have noticed, there has been a delay on the release of the next Ouroboros Cycle book. There are a number of factors that have played into this, but the main reason is that early last year, my agent sold four of my books (one stand alone, The Secret Life of Kitty Granger being released on March 2, 2021; and one trilogy). In addition, I previously wrote a fifth book for my agent, which we haven't yet found a home for. Obviously, selling four books is great news, and I am extremely grateful to my agent for her amazing work. I hope you guys will enjoy those books as much as I enjoyed writing them. But what that means is that for the past couple of years, most of my attention had to be focused on researching, plotting, writing, and editing those books.

All of this came on the heels of the decision to put the originally planned next Ouroboros Cycle book (a Freddie centric WWI story) on hold in favor of the current Book Six, A Wilderness of Tigers (an appropriately Varanus centric tale set in the 20s). Given that the Ouroboros Cycle is ultimately Varanus's story, I feel that this was absolutely the best decision to make, but it meant that the timeline for research, writing, and editing had to be pushed back. Fortunately, the series' publisher has a much more flexible production schedule than most publishers and they have been willing to work with me on juggling the various parts of my writing schedule.

What this means is that Book Six of the Ouroboros Cycle will be ready for release in 2001. You guys are the first people to hear about this and obviously the public announcement will come closer to the book's actual release date. (In addition, there will be a Freddie focused 1920s book, The Heirs of Moctezuma, released some time after Book Six as well, so keep your eyes open for that).

I am sorry for the lack of books but this is why. But more books are coming very soon. I do have a new short story out in the Short Things anthology: APOLLYON, by G. D. Falksen

Thank you all for your continued support and enthusiasm.Readers like you are the reason why I keep writing.

#gd falksen #ouroboros cycle #The Secret Life of Kitty Granger #maiden of war #the thing

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mycarlos2019 · 4 years

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Going to Guatemala. Part I

As recently as three years ago, it would never have occurred to me that I would come to love a small country in Central America known as Guatemala. It’s a love affair that began with watching travel videos on youtube.com and culminated with a ten day visit in January of 2018, followed by a three week visit in February of 2019. The youtube videos in question were made by a trio of young people called The Budgeteers and, to a lesser extent, by a man named Andy Graham who has his own website called hobotraveler.com. Prior to watching these videos, I suppose I must have just lumped all Latin American countries into one homogeneous mass of poverty, corruption and CIA meddling. Watching The Budgeteers hitchhike their way from Baja, California to the San Blas Islands, just off the coast of Panama, I realized that every Central American country is actually a little different. My original idea for 2018 had been to do what many Canadians do in the bleak winter months of January and February, to spend a week to ten days in Cuba. But the more I looked into Cuba, the more it seemed to me to be a country which is presented to tourists as a kind of Caribbean idyll, when in fact the truth is far from what you see on the surface. Guatemala, on the other hand, appeared to be a country where people are simply living their lives and don’t care all that much about tourists unless they happen to live in Antigua, one of the touristy towns around Lake Atitlan or Chichicastenango. In the rest of the country, people seemed to making a living from farming or by owning their own store. There are, in fact, so many tiendas in Guatemala that it is hard to imagine finding a place where there isn’t one. The point is that most Guatemalans don’t go out of their way to please tourists and they certainly don’t alter their behaviour to present a pleasing picture to the outside world.

The other vlogger who caught my attention, Andy Graham, did so because he has a number of videos of himself standing in front of Lake Atitlan saying, “Panajachel, Guatemala. I’m here. You’re not. Why not?” Mr. Graham’s shtick is that he has lived in 181 countries all over the world and can tell you how to live the same lifestyle he does, if you so wish. I won’t go into it any further than that, but suffice it to say that his assertions about Panajachel and Lake Atitlan being desirable places to head for if you wanted to live abroad were enough to make me open the Google maps Street View feature and start looking around. What I saw astonished me. Far from being a dreary, downtrodden backwater, Panajachel seemed to be bursting with life and colour. Souvenir shops selling multi-coloured clothing competed for room with open air restaurants and bars. Bright red Tuk-tuks, motorcycles and minivans somehow managed to share the narrow street with tourists and Guatemalan women selling their wares. A solid kilometer of interesting things to see, do and just be fascinated by. I decided that I had to go to Guatemala at least once in my life, if for no other reason than just to walk down Santander Street.

The view out the window at Pearson Airport the day I left.

I began planning my first visit in earnest when I realized that a return plane ticket on Air Mexico would only cost in the neighbourhood of $450. That would include a one day layover in Mexico City, but I was fine with that. Why not look around there too for a day? I managed to find a hostel that was only a 20 minute walk from Terminal 1 at Benito Juarez Airport. The only potential hiccup was that Air Mexico flights from Toronto land at Terminal 3 and, while there is a free Sky Train to Terminal 1, I had read that you need to show your boarding pass to get on it. I, of course, had a boarding pass, but it didn’t carry with it any express need to go to the other terminal. It turned out not to matter. Despite the fact that the security guard at entrance to the Sky Train boarding area was overtly hostile, as soon as I showed her my defunct boarding pass, she let me go through. Seriously, what do these people think? That gringos who just happen to live in Mexico hang around in the airport all day with nothing better to do than ride the monorail back and forth from one terminal to the other? In any case, I made it to Terminal 1 and managed to find my way to the far western end of it, where the footpath to my hostel began.

I had looked it up on Google Maps, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it could be done, by which I mean getting across the very large and very busy, multi-lane highway that essentially cuts off the airport from the adjacent neighbourhood. The Circuito Interior is a 42 kilometer long, six to eight lane freeway that forms a giant loop through the central neighbourhoods of the city. Fortunately, my hunch proved to be correct. There is a footpath, which leads to an overpass (i.e. footbridge), which deposits you on the other side of the freeway at the foot of the street, Norte 33, which, in turn, leads to the hostel. The service road, beside the Circuito is lined with airport hotels, fast food joints, car rental agencies and all the other sort of shops one typically associates with airports. In behind it, however, is a solidly working class, blue collar neighbourhood. This is where old VW beetles go to die. I saw three or four of them, at least, just in the short walk to the hostel, not actual working cars, mind you, just burned out shells of cars that had long ago been parked on the street and forgotten about. Clearly, the intention was to fix them up but it was an intention that, for whatever reason, was never followed through on. So there they sit, the unrealized dreams of anonymous Mexicans.

An old Beetle in Barrio Moctezuma.

Nevertheless, this is a neighbourhood that is full of life. Tiendas, restaurants and food stands line the streets. A large sports complex, complete with a soccer pitch and three basketball courts has been plunked down right in the middle of it. Around the walls of this complex are more street food stalls, fruit stands, miniature shrines where you can make an offering to the Virgin Mary (presumably to help your team win the soccer match).

If you should decide one day to stay at Punto DF, what follows is a short description of how to get from the footbridge to the hostel. Heading north, it is tempting to think you should stay on Norte 33 until you get to 166 Calle Oriente, and the cut over to the hostel, but it is much more interesting to hang a left on Calle Oriente 182 and walk over to Norte 25. This is where, to my mind the neighbourhood comes alive. Norte 25 is an absolutely unpretentious and, at the same time, lovely grand avenue with a line of small trees down the middle. A paint store sits next to the local stationary shop. Sidewalk eateries or comedors tell you that this is a place where people actually live and, to quote Van Morrison, have their being. Calle Norte 25 appears to come to a halt at Moctezuma and Fortino Serrano Parks (two parks side by side that are in effect one park), but it actually continues along the southwestern edge of these parks and resumes again on the northwestern side of Fortino Serrano. You could, of course, just walk through the park to get to the point where it starts again. From the corner of Calle Oriente 168 and Calle Norte 25, it is only one block further to Calle Oriente 166, the street Punto DF is on. Cocina Don Pepe has an orange awning. Turn left there. A large colourful mural will let you know you have found the right place.

My plane was two hours late, but it was still only about eleven in the morning when I rang the doorbell and was greeted by a very nice young man (I think his name might have been Francisco) who didn’t mind at all that I was checking in so soon. Of course, all I wanted to do was put my knapsack in one of their lockers and head downtown to see a bit of the city. Francisco gave me a map of the subway and confirmed that the cost was indeed five pesos. (It’s now six pesos, but that’s still less than fifty cents Canadian.) The Metro station nearest to Punto DF is R. Flores Magnon. It’s one of the more utilitarian stations in the system and is named after an anarchist who helped spark the Mexican Revolution. To get to it, you simply continue up Norte 25, navigating your way around the sports stadium and Mercado Moctezuma. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can cut through a pedestrian pathway that is actually part of the market. It’s just to the right of the low lying, yellow building that says Mercado de Moctezuma.

Moctezuma, as you probably know, was the ruler of the Aztecs at the time of first contact and he died on July the 1st, 1520 from being hit on the head with a rock thrown by a member of the Aztec uprising, because he was thought to be behaving in a way that was too conciliatory to the Spanish. They had, after all, massacred a large number of men, women and children in the great temple just ten days earlier. Another version of events claims that Moctezuma’s dead body–along with that of another Aztec king, Itzquauhtzin–was simply cast out of the palace once it became clear that he did not actually have the ability to stop the Aztec uprising.

At the far end of the laneway, you will emerge on Calle Oriente, just a short bit to the left of where Calle Norte 25 continues. Here there are more cafes, tiendas, stores to buy school uniforms, stationary shops, sidewalk food vendors, beauty shops and tortillerias lining both sides of the street as it leads up to the Metro. If you’ve never been on the Metro before, brace yourself. It isn’t even remotely close to the being like a ride on the TTC or whatever type of public transit you may have experienced in the States, Canada or even Europe. R. Flores Magnon, however, is a fairly mild introduction, in that it’s not very crowded. Just find your way up the stairs, buy a ticket at the booth, feed it into the turnstile, make sure the train is going in the direction you want and you are good to go, so to speak. One of the first things you will notice is that the cars are old. They were built by Bombardier, or at least some of them were, back in the late sixties and early seventies. Bombardier is the Canadian company that keeps getting its contracts cancelled by Toronto’s public transit system, due to its inability to deliver vehicles on time and to spec, but in this case, they seem to have done alright since these forty-year-old cars are still running. The next thing you might notice if you take the Metro at any time of day that is even close to rush hour is that these cars fill up fast. Mexico City’s population, if you take into account the whole metropolitan area, is 21 million, and a lot of those people use the Metro to get around. Nevertheless, it is relatively easy to negotiate and I was able to make my way to the station I wanted, San Juan de Letran, without too much difficulty.

My plan had been to land myself somewhere central and just sort of wander around, but I quickly realized how easy it would be to get lost in a city where no-one speks the same language as you. Eje Central Lazaro Cardenas is a large, bustling, multi-lane avenue, lined with shops of all kinds, and it also leads up to the Palacio de Belles Artes. You can probably figure out for yourself that this means Palace of Fine Artes.

Palacio de Belles Artes

It’s an absolutely awesome building that I wished I had time to explore further, but I didn’t, so I satisfied myself with sitting in the park beside it, Almeda Central. It’s a large park, with water fountains, trees and places to sit. At the eastern end is the palacio. On the northern side is Teatro Hildago and the National Stamp Museum, while on the western end, there is an art museum with a mural by Diego Rivera. I dare say you could spend three or four days just exploring the different buildings around this park but I didn’t have much more than an hour to just sit and contemplate my surroundings. It can be a bit of a shock to the system to get on a plane in a city where the snow is a foot deep and seven hours later find oneself surrounded by trees and water fountains in a space where people are just hanging out and enjoying the warm weather.

Almeda Central

I can’t say that I thought much more about it than that. Mexico City seemed a little on the inscrutable side, hard to understand and/or grasp the spirit of and I wasn’t going to have enough time to more than scratch the surface. I decided to fulfill my goal of seeking out a fish taco place I had read about on the internet.

El Pescadito is a chain of restaurants in Mexico City that only sells fish tacos. The one I was headed for is quite close the park, just one block south on Luis Moya and half a block to the right on Avenita Independencia. I really had no idea how to order because my Spanish was very limited at that point in time, but I somehow managed to muddled through and obtain a shrimp taco, a fish taco and a beer. The process, just in case you ever find yourself inside one of these places, is you order from the cook and sit down. Then someone brings the food to your table at which point you can take your tacos to the salsa table, where there are about ten different choices. Unlike most chains, you pay when you’re done. I sat looking out the window and watched a man using some kind of clay to remake the sidewalk curb, by hand. Basically, he made a cast from wood planks, poured the clay into it and then smoothed out the top with a trowel. I had the impression that he was some kind of private contractor, not a city employee, and I enjoyed watching him work while I ate my fish and shrimp tacos. Soon enough it was time to leave and begin making my way back to the hostel.

I was about to acquire a whole new appreciation for the term packed in like sardines. The trains on the Mexico City Metro become so full of people at rush hour that you find yourself pressed in on all sides and virtually unable to move. And just when you think that not one more person can press his way inside, someone manages to do just that by letting the doors close on him repeatedly until he is literally squeezed through the doorway. I began to grow concerned that I would not be able to get off at my station without bowling over several people first. Fortunately, after wracking my brain to find the Spanish version of “excuse me”, I came up with “permiso”, and that worked. People actually shifted to one side long enough for me to edge my way through them and get out the door and onto the platform of R. Flores Magnon Station.

It was later than I had thought and Barrio Moctezuma was already dark. I was a little nervous because I had read a TripAdvisor posting about my hostel which said that the poster wasn’t sure it was a safe neighbourhood to be walking alone through at night. Those feelings quickly dissipated as I realized there were still plenty of people dining in restaurants, going to the tiendas and just hanging out with friends on the street corners. Some houses had LED Christmas lights on them, giving the whole neighbour a soft glow.

Barrio Moctemzuma at night.

I saw a brightly lit store called, appropriately enough, La Luz 1. It had a bottle of beer on its sign, so I reasoned that they probably sold beer and decided to pick up a few to drink on the hostel patio. After stepping inside and giving the place a quick scan, I found that the owner was stationed behind a cage of half-inch, white bars. There was a fridge to my right with beer in it, but when I tried to open the door, I found that it was locked. The man behind the counter came out, unlocked it for me and went back inside his cage. I took three Coronas to the counter with no idea what they would cost. When he told me the price, in Spanish, I found that I couldn’t understand him and gave him my notebook to write the price on, but he had a better idea. He produced a calculator and showed me the price on that. I left feeling quite pleased with myself for having successfully navigated my first purchase in a Mexican store, not including, of course, my meal at La Pescadito. That didn’t count because in that restaurant the prices are posted on the wall in large letters and numbers. In the store, I had to ask “Cuanta Cuesta” and try to understand the answer.

Back inside the hostel, I found Francisco still on duty and I asked, needlessly, if it was okay to drink beer on the patio. Many hostels in Latin America have beer for sale right on the premises, but I didn’t know that then, and in any case, Punto DF does not. He told me that of course it was okay, so I made my way out the back door and sat in the open air with nothing on my back but a short sleeved cotton, enjoying my beers and listening to the sounds of the barrio; the occasional car engine revving, a dog bark here and there and, of course, the far away sound of airplanes taking off and landing. Cognizant of the fact that I would need to leave the hostel at 7:00 AM if I was to be at the airport three hours before my flight, I stowed my knapsack in one of the lockers, crawled into the cubbyhole which contained my bed, pulled the curtain closed, got undressed and quickly fell asleep.