Blood & Fur-Chapter One-Hundred and Seven: The Emperor Protects

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My soul burned its way out of my flesh.

My blazing heartfire spilled out of my ribcage in an arson of the spirit, my bones no longer capable of containing it. I sensed a balance break within me, between the man and the god, the light and the shadow, the totem and the body, the immaterial and the physical. My flames became a bonfire that shone from within and coated my brittle mortal bones in gilded, imperishable steaming metal that would neither rust nor grow cold.

I surged with might, with sorcery and radiance that illuminated the mountains and the sky. My mind shone with the divine light that guided the spirits of men to raise towers of stone and everlasting glory. I shed my skin like a snake sheds its scales to be born anew, stronger and healthier than before.

The wisdom of Quetzalcoatl flowed into my mind through his embers, strengthening my Tonalli and filling my head with songs that stretched back to the world’s childhood. My sight sharpened to see both the future and the past until I could perceive the strands of destiny binding all into the gods’ order. I was the radiance of a star bright with smokeless fire that would never fade away. Age would not touch me, and death’s grip on my throat grew ever looser.

I was… I was…

I was in pain.

“This…” I said with a voice more akin to a crackling blaze than words. “This is… too much…”

My body struggled to hold the power within me… but I quickly realized that wasn’t right. My power struggled to shed my body, to cast away that human-shaped shell that held it back from achieving its grandiose metamorphosis into a great principle of the cosmos. I was suffocating within myself. The chains around my heart weakened until I could hardly feel their presence, but any form of restraint remained unbearable to the god I was destined to become. My bones were strong yet brittle, like an egg about to hatch, while my feathers burned with smokeless flames tainted with streaks of purple and sulfur.

How I yearned to escape this prison of form, to become a burning wind, formless and eternal, a firestorm of the spirit that would scorch all my foes, a light that would blind all mortals with awe! I felt the world slow down to pay attention to my presence, to shudder in expectation of the heights I would soar to!

“A god is his power, Iztac,” Lord Quetzalcoatl warned me, his voice alone loud enough for me to pay attention to and respect. “Sharing your power with your Mometzcopinque will help ease your progress into your new existence, but this will only be a temporary solution. Gods are not supposed to stay small for long.”

Yes, yes, he was right. This stage of my journey felt unbearable in a way that the others did not. I had previously delighted in my new powers, when I was a mortal tasting divinity; but now that I was more god than man, I raged at my limitations. I was a snake who had grown too big for his old, worn skin, and yet lacked the strength to shed it.

It was existentially unbearable!

I had to gain the final embers. I had to shed this mortal shell, to escape this pervading malaise of being bound to a body and shape that no longer reflected my truest inner self.

“I must…” I took a breath that whipped up a gust and exhaled smokeless flames. “I must leave now…”

“I would cross the gate now if I were you,” the Feathered Serpent advised me with a mix of caution and compassion. He empathized with my struggle, but feared what would come out of it. “You will wake up soon, and the next time you fall asleep might very well be your last. Gods rarely dream, after all.”

He was right. I could feel my spirit’s overflowing vitality calling me back to the world of the living already.

“Thank you… Lord Quetzalcoatl…” I said, each word of mine causing tremors around me. My power was like a raging blaze seeking to spread, and it would take practice for me to tame the fire within. “I will not… disappoint you.”

“I hope you will not.” The Feathered Serpent offered me one last blessing. “I wish you good luck, Iztac. For the sake of your kind, and your own.”

I nodded with the weight of an ancient mountain, then walked to the Gate of Mirrors. Its smooth surface shifted and rippled at my approach. Its shadows shuddered and fled from my brilliance. The obsidian glass melted at my touch. It was thin, so very thin, and I sensed cold behind the veil of liquid shadows.

“Go on, young god,” I heard Lord Quetzalcoatl say behind me. “You have my blessing.”

I barely had time to step through the threshold between worlds before I roared back to the land of the living.

The bedroom—nay, the entire Sapa palace—shook the moment blue light poured out of my open eyes and my breath turned to steam in my mouth. The tremors woke up Empress Killa at my side.

“Your Majesty? What’s–” Her hand reached for my skin and pulled back the moment she touched it with a slight cry of surprise. “Ah!”

She sensed the fire stirring beneath me. Whatever remained of my human sweat had evaporated, and my skin had become smoother than alloyed gold. My heart pounded louder than thunder.

My mortal shell had significantly bulked up. I had grown a head taller and towered over the empress, even though she was many years older than I was. My veins glowed with sunlight. My muscles surged with more strength than any mortal warrior would ever dream of wielding… yet my skin had never felt so much like a prison. It constrained me, shrunk me, imprisoned me. The fire within me struggled to break through this prison, to shine and awe the world with its radiance.

My very flesh struggled to hold my own divine energies. I was once afraid of parting ways with my divine power, but now I wanted nothing more than to give, to lighten my load, because I bore so much that it hurt. It hurt.

“The pressure… too great…” I clenched my fist, and all the mirrors in the room cracked as I did so. “Necahual, Lahun.”

My witches appeared at my bedside in a wisp of smokeless fire.

They did not walk up to the bedroom. They simply materialized out of thin air because I had willed it so. They arrived in Mometzcopinque form, their eyes shining with a blue glow akin to my own, and their feathers a mix of ebony black and gold. They did not seem all that surprised to appear this way in my presence, though they looked slightly intimidated. They didn’t need any order from me to stand on each side of the bed.

They already knew why I had summoned them.

A wedding ought to have its witnesses.

I moved over Empress Killa, who held her breath. We had already formed a pact yesterday, but now was the time to bind it with blood and magic.

“Shi of the Taycanamos, who have abandoned your name to become Empress Killa Huascar of the Sapa.” I put my burning hand against her chest, drawing a gasp of pain and shock as my fingers melted her flesh. “I am Cizin, God-in-Waiting and the Heavens’ Herald. I hold your life in my hand, and now I demand your soul.”

Her Teyolia and Tonalli bent to my will in an instant. My palm burned its way to her heart until I held all of her being tightly within my power. Killa did not scream, though, for she did not feel any pain.

I had no wish to inflict any, so I did not.

“I shall claim your name—both of them—and soul so that you may serve and worship me for all eternity,” I declared to the heavens and earth. “I shall take you as my wife for all to see. I shall sire a new dynasty upon you that will rule these mountains until the final nights.”

“For all to see?!” I sensed a dash of mortal unease coursing through the empress. “But Your Majesty, the world needs to believe my husband is–”

“I am your husband,” I replied with a voice louder than an earthquake, with the palace trembling around us in response. “The light does not hide.”

The godhood within me refused to.

The mortal part of me still cared about politics, practicality, and the opinion of others, but the divine energies within me raged back with overwhelming strength. They did not want me to hide my true self in shame, even when it was practical. The god within me demanded to be seen, and the mere thought that I would have to lie about my own child’s origins had become worse than unbearable; it had become absurd.

“In exchange, I shall raise you higher than any other empress before you,” I promised. “I shall bestow upon you the fires of the gods and a crown of sunlight. I shall make you a Mometzcopinque, wife and queen to a rising god.”

I looked into her eyes and let her gaze into the light coming out of me. She saw her heart’s desire within it, a fleeting glimpse of her crowned glory ruling as an empress beloved by all, who had freed her people from servitude and led the mountains into a new age of prosperity. She knew instantly that this future could be hers, only for a single price.

“Do you concede?” I asked. “Will you be mine forever and ever?”

“Yes,” the empress replied, her words an oath. “I am yours… my husband.”

I set her heart-fire ablaze with starlight and bound her soul in eternal covenant. She cried out in ecstasy as my divine power flowed into her and imbued her with magic. Her body began to change into that of a witch worthy of serving at my side. Her arms glowed and morphed into gilded wings of feathered gold, while her legs became talons. Her features were refined into regal poise, the same way the transformation heightened Necahual’s ferocity and Lahun’s curiosity.

It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t sliced off her arms or legs.

The Mometzcopinque ritual demanded that I switch those limbs and seal the wounds with the caster’s blood. Both Necahual and Lahun had undergone that harsh ordeal before they could undergo the transformation. I had skipped the steps with Killa in my hurry, when it shouldn’t have been possible. I could see on Lahun’s face that this detail hadn’t escaped her. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I no longer followed the rules of magic; rather, the rules of magic bent around me.

The pressure within me had hardly diminished by the time I removed my hand and allowed Killa’s flesh to heal. My skin had barely chilled from meltingly hot to unnaturally warm, but little else. The very air remained tense and hotter than a summer’s day.

“Your Majesty…” Lahun said at my side, her breath short. “Your power is… intoxicating.”

“Maybe too much,” Necahual whispered, and she was right.

I needed to blow off steam, and so I did. I pressed my lips against my new witch and grabbed her waist. Killa surrendered to my touch and welcomed me with folded wings and legs. I took her once again, faster and more fiercely than the first time. She moaned as her flesh melded with mine and her cries of pleasure echoed across the palace, so loud that none would ignore who had sired the new Sapa Emperor. I didn’t need Seidr to feel my unborn son take shape within the empress’ womb, though I did practice it. I did not look for a vision or exchange memories, though.

I simply gave.

I gave my lifeforce, I gave my magic, I gave my seed, I gave my fire. I had to give the same way a vampire had to take, because it hurt to hold so much power within this flesh of mine. It was an existential agony to be a hurricane trapped in a cave, an ocean in a bottle, or an eruption in a molehill.

I had to escape myself.

I took no pleasure in this. I was just trying to dull the pain.

Unfortunately, there was no container that could hold all of me. I would have to give her so much lifeforce I would have burned Killa from within, but Necahual brought me back to my senses with a firm hand on my shoulder and a gentle caress on my back.

I looked up to find Lahun dancing in front of the bed, her eyes closed, her wings folding and unfolding. Her hips swayed in a way that mesmerized me. Her movement spellbound me and briefly distracted me enough to snap me out of my frenzy.

“Shush…” Necahual whispered in my ear. “It is alright… you are in control...”

Her voice was soft like a lullaby and helped quell the fury. I pulled out of Killa to sit on the bedside and to better watch Lahun’s dance. A combination of her movements and Necahual’s words calmed me down somehow and anchored me back to reality.

I had regained some presence of mind by the time the dance concluded. I was about as stable as Smoke Mountain before an eruption, but the tide had receded enough for me to pause. To think.

“Is it… always like this?” Killa asked in between gasps of pleasure and exhaustion, my seed steaming on her thigh.

“No,” Necahual replied softly. “But I have the feeling it will be.”

My witch of disaster had been with me the longest. I had claimed her with my first set of embers, so she had experienced every step, every transformation, so she understood better than the others.

“How do you feel?” she asked me with genuine concern in her voice.

“Like a volcano trying to contain its magma,” I replied. Each of my words now carried a weight to itself, as if the world itself leaned in to hear them.

My sorcery had forced its way into the world before, summoning the rain and other phenomena on its own whenever I denied my divinity for too long, but those happenings had been the exception rather than the norm. I could feel deep within myself that I had to continuously spend my power lest it destroy me from within. I held too much energy for my mortal self to contain, but I couldn’t shed it either.

It was such an existential agony to be stuck on the very brink of apotheosis. I felt like I was pulled between extremes, but couldn’t commit to either.

It hurt to stay still.

“What is that dance you practiced just now, Lahun?” I inquired.

“A dance meant to appease the gods,” she replied quietly. “I always wondered if it truly did anything…”

“It did,” I replied. “It does.”

Just enough.

Lahun’s dances and lifeforce transfers with Seidr would only carry me so far. I could hardly call this reprieve more than fleeting, and I doubted there were enough women in the world to quell the fury within me. I needed grander displays of power.

I felt Lahun slither behind me, her hands taking my palm. I had seen her take my fortune this way as a prelude to more complex predictions, but there was nothing left to read. My skin was smoother than marble, with not a single lifeline to follow.

“I…” Lahun breathed in and out, a strange and new eagerness in her voice. “Your Majesty, if I may…”

“You may,” I indulged her, though I already knew how her divination session would turn out; namely, however I willed it to.

Lahun searched through her belongings with a feverish urgency I’d rarely seen coming from the well-composed seer. She brought out her tools from her pouch and ran through the fortune-telling rituals under her fellow witches’ gaze. I had gone through the process twice before, so I knew what to expect.

Lahun threw corn on the bedside table seven times, checking whether they formed rows or lines to assess the strength of my Tonalli. Six times they landed on a pile, and then briefly caught fire on their own on the seventh attempt.

Lahun then filled a bowl with water and put the grains within it to assess how many of them would rise or fall. The liquid turned into blood the moment the grains hit it, after which they disappeared in a burst of smokeless fire. When she presented me with the bowl so that I might admire my face, the surface only reflected light back at me.

When the time came for me to blow into shells to assess my Ihiyotl, my fiery breath shattered them like glass the moment I exhaled. I sensed Lahun’s nervousness rise with each sign, and the mix of awe and unease in my other witches’ silence.

The only thing that went as expected was the birthdate and star consultation, likely because neither of those depended on my own divine qualities. I recalled that Lahun once told me that questioning the stars provided more accurate results when consulting the fate of nations or the world’s course, both of which my actions had heavily influenced.

“Snake shedding skin,” Lahun whispered to herself upon assessing the results, repeating the prophecy she once uttered to me. “Battle of the three wings. Golden city answers the tide of sorrow. To the banquet of blood, the dark one triumphs.”

“Betrayal with a friend’s face” was gone, perhaps because it referred to Chindi—whose face and body Eztli took for her own after we exploited her feeble trust—or to Sugey—whom I had betrayed and challenged to battle after I’d seemed to grow into a good servant.

I very well recalled this prophecy’s final verse. “New skull on the pile weeps in night eternal.” I had feared with all of my heart once… but my heart shone with the light of a newborn star and pulsed with fire rather than human blood.

The words remained stuck on Lahun’s lips, within reach and yet refused to come into being, because I knew they were no longer true. The chains of destiny no longer bound me as tightly as they once did.

“I cannot read the end,” Lahun whispered, though she didn’t sound defeated. Quite the contrary, her voice had a slight edge of excitement to it. “Your Majesty’s light blinds me to your future.”

“I am surprised to hear a seer sound so happy about their own ignorance,” Necahual noted.

“I am happy,” Lahun replied with a hint of excitement. “Because while my insight has never been greater, I still cannot foresee what His Majesty will do.”

It was the privilege of the gods to weave fate rather than suffer it.

“However…” Lahun took a deep breath as she reviewed her findings once again. “The uncertainty only applies to the final sentence of my prophecy. All other signs remain set in stone.”

The pressure returned as my burgeoning godhood was reminded of my crippling limitations. Destiny’s chains had loosened, but they still bound me. Worse, my blazing gut told me that my skull ending up on a pile was not entirely beyond possibility. The fact that it remained uncertain rather than absurd enraged the power within me.

The urge quelled by my passions returned, demanding that I assert my authority, demanding that I assert my divinity. Gods and winds alike had reminded me time and time again that no true god had to demand worship because they had nothing to prove, and here lay the problem. My power remained tainted by the insecurities and flaws of mortality. Either I proved my power to the world and myself, or my power would prove itself by force.

I had to be seen, to be witnessed, or else I would be consumed.

But what can I do? I wondered. I could tell the power would drive me mad if I didn’t spend it on something, like magma building up beneath the earth before the fatal explosion. Either I spilled lava in a controlled manner, or I would explode in a violent way. How can I spend this power the best?

The solution hit me in all of its simplicity.

Gods answered prayers. That was why they were gods, because they often took pity on mortals to answer their requests. The gods showed others the compassion of the strong.

There had to be someone outside these walls who needed me; who needed a god that would listen and answer. I had always resented the heavens for remaining silent in the face of injustice, and I now had a chance to prove I would not do the same.

I rose from the bed in a skin that felt too small for me. I walked towards the balcony while my witches watched and the shadows recoiled from my steps. The winds sang my coming like heralds.

The night was hot outside, and the sun was late. A sea of torches burned in the streets. Hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens prayed for the light to come, for the dawn to shine with all of their heart and despair. They offered sacrifices of food, gold, and blood, begging the heavens to save them. They fought to believe that tomorrow would come, that the gods had not abandoned them.

They prayed for hope. For salvation.

I stood on the balcony with eyes that shone brighter than the stars above. Gazes turned to me, to their beacon and lighthouse in a sea of darkness. They looked up to me, begging me to guide them, to lead them, to save them; and as I did so, I was reminded of the nights I had myself been powerless and prayed for hope.

My pleas had fallen on deaf ears back then.

But not tonight.

I leaped from the balcony and shed my human disguise. The Spiritual Manifestation had once been a spell to me, a transformation from man to totem, but it didn’t feel like a change anymore.

It had become a revelation.

I burned away my prison of skin and flesh on my way out of my human-shaped egg of a body. My Tonalli, Teyolia, and Ihiyotl all burst free in a form that no sorcerer could hope to replicate. The divine bird I had always been destined to become grew, grew, and grew until the Sapa Palace became my gilded nest.

It had taken Sugey the blood of thousands to reach her immense size during our battle, but I soon equaled it. I realized that all the sacrifices and murders she committed only allowed her to match the sorcery which I now commanded by will alone. She had been the twisted mockery of a rising deity, a pallid imitation of my newfound radiance.

My new self arose on wings of smokeless fire. I appeared to my subjects in the form of a bird of prey with owlish features. My bones were carved from gold, and my feathers were blinding flames. I still had arms and legs with talons the length of a man, with a tail of starlight flowing after me. My eyes burned with the glow of the past suns.

I summoned a dry wind with a flap of my wings. I took flight atop the city and announced my presence with a roar that woke up all souls in this city. My beak let out a blinding blaze that reached across the horizon, to inspire fear in the encroaching darkness that would threaten those I sought to protect.

And the shadows scattered.

The light of my soul expanded until it blinded the darkness encroaching on my heart and this world both. The radiance of the Last Emperor overcame the dark grip of the First for the briefest of instants, and the Fifth Sun sighed in relief. It had found its defender in me, and rewarded me with the blessing of the dawn.

The horizon glowed behind me with the shine of hope.

“Do not fear the dark!” I told both the empire and the world while crowned in sunrise. “For I shall protect you!”

My voice carried far and wide across the mountains and the sea. All heard. From my consorts and concubines to false emperors and the lowest of peasants, all bore witness to my proclamation and, for a second, believed in me. They looked at me the same way I had once gazed upon Tlaloc, Mictlantecuhtli, and Quetzalcoatl.

I was a demigod no more in their eyes and mine. I had become what the Nightlords pretended to be; a true God-in-the-Flesh, a God-in-Waiting on his way to ascend among the Gods-in-Spirit. My subjects saw me for what I was, and in that impossible moment, the fire within me was briefly satisfied.

And as their hopes flowed into me, I finally understood what kind of god I wanted to be; the kind that people looked up to, like the sun in the sky.

I did not wish to be feared, though I would tolerate no disrespect. I did not wish to demand worship while offering nothing but pain and cruelty in return. The only veneration I craved was the one I earned through my deeds.

I wanted to be the kind of god I had always hoped would one day answer my own prayer, just and compassionate; the kind of god that inspired hope; the kind of god that Lord Quetzalcoatl had trusted me to become.

So I listened.

The wind, my faithful companion, ferried the prayers of mortals to my ears. Most asked me to protect them from the eternal night, and I would do so. I had shown all that the darkness encroaching upon the land could be defeated, and though I understood it would return, it would now know that it could be challenged. The sun it so feverishly sought to devour had now found a powerful defender, and the hopes of Lord Quetzalcoatl would endure.

However, there were other and humbler prayers to answer. Calls to heal the sick, demands for a bountiful harvest, or relief from pain. Those, too, I would fulfill, because these people had to know that someone above cared for them.

Such was my right and duty.