Stone met bone with the crack of snapping branches. Teozcal struck an outcropping of calcified coral, tumbled across a jagged shelf of black sediment, and rolled to a halt in a pool of foul, stagnant water.
He did not pass out. Pain would not grant him that mercy.
His collarbone grated underneath his pectoral muscle. A hot sliver of rib pierced his lung with every shallow wheeze. Spitting black brine from cracked lips, he clawed at the mud, dragging his fractured frame toward dry slate. Overhead, the open mouth of the Cenote appeared as no more than a pinprick of pale lilac sky. Far above, the solar disk already wore an ink-black crescent at its western curve. The eclipse was biting into the afternoon.
Four hours. Perhaps three.
"Get up," he rasped, his voice tearing on raw gravel. "Move, you fool. Move."
His hands trembled violently. The golden mantle of his solar core lay dead inside his chest, snuffed out during the fall. Without that internal furnace, the frigid, mineral-heavy air of the deep cavern bit into his wet skin like teeth. He was completely blind. Darkness pressed against his eyelashes like wet wool.
He patted the slick floor in frantic arcs until his fingers snagged on something taut. A thread.
It was a spirit-tether, vibrating faintly against the limestone floor. Teozcal followed the strand with trembling fingertips. His skin tingled, recognizing the familiar, stubborn frequency of her essence—the scent of roasted maize, dried chilis, and wild marigolds.
Then he recoiled.
Between his fingers, the golden twine was crumbling. Black rot ate along the fibers like dry rot through balsa wood, sloughing off as cold, lifeless gray cinders. The strand had shrunk to the thickness of spider silk.
"No. No, no, no..."
Her core was dissolving. When the moon fully swallowed the sun, the cord would snap, scattering her remaining thoughts into the subterranean lake until nothing remained of her mind except hungry sediment.
He needed light. In this pitch-black graveyard, following the thread by touch alone would take days. He had hours.
He reached deep into his belly, seeking the solar wellspring that had obeyed him since boyhood. He pushed, begged, commanded. Nothing answered. The well was dry, poisoned by the realization that he had banished his betrothed over a forged scrap of parchment.
"The ancient rites," he murmured, his jaw shivering against the mud. "Blood feeds the flame. Grief binds the altar."
A Sun-Priest could kindle light without faith, but the price was absolute: recollection. Not bad memories—the underworld drank only the gold. To forge an ember in the Cenote, he had to burn the happiest moments of his life until they turned to soot.
Teozcal reached into his belt, found a sharp flake of broken obsidian, and pressed it into his right palm. He dragged the glass downward, splitting the meat from heel to knuckle.
"Take it," he snarled at the dark, holding the bleeding hand aloft. "Take the morning I was chosen for the Zenith. Take the feast. Take the pride."
A puff of red smoke hissed from his palm. In his mind, the vision of his father placing the feathered mantle over his juvenile shoulders began to unravel. The proud face blurred, washed out by gray water, until only a blank silhouette remained. Teozcal felt the scene vanish, leaving behind an empty, cold ache in his skull.
A spark leaped from his torn palm.
"Not bright enough!" he roared, weeping as he squeezed the wound until fat and marrow seemed to weep into the frost. "Take the day I learned the sky-dance! Take every sunrise I ever watched! Burn it all!"
He ripped away his childhood. He stripped out the taste of honey-sweetened pulque on feast days, the memory of his mother singing by the maize-mill, the triumphant shout when he bested his first master. The memories vanished like dry grass tossed onto a forge fire.
*Crack.* A sphere of agonizing, radiant amber flared over his head. It burned with a terrible, screaming purity, fueled directly by his shredded past. The light cast harsh, sprawling shadows across ancient stalagmites, illuminating a vast, drowned cavern littered with the petrified bones of forgotten gods.
Teozcal rose on trembling legs, clutching his shattered ribs with his left arm while his right held the floating, cannibalized sun-lantern.
"Itzelia!"
The name tore his throat. The glowing filament ran across a shattered terrace, plunging into a dry, vaulted rotunda that reeked of damp copper and ancient lichen. He stumbled forward, dragging his right foot, which trailed a dull smear of crimson across the calcified tiles.
"Itzelia, answer me! Please!"
The tether dipped into an alcove formed by three collapsed megaliths. Inside the recess, a small figure sat curled against the wall, knees tucked tightly against her breast, shivering beneath a shredded feather-cloak.
His knees buckled. Teozcal collapsed onto the stones five paces away, tears cutting pale trails through the grime on his cheeks. She was alive.
"You're here," he whispered, a cracked, sob-choked laugh breaking from his lips. He crawled forward on palms and knees, uncaring of the sharp coral grinding into his raw wounds. "I'm sorry. Gods above, I am so sorry. Yaotl—he lied about my sister. Coaxoch is alive. I was an idiot. A blind, gullible wretch. I didn't read the parchment. I never meant to hurt you. Please... look at me. Please hit me. Just take my hand so we can go home."
He reached out toward her boots.
The figure did not flinch. Slowly, the head lifted from between drawn knees. The chin tilted up.
Teozcal’s hand froze an inch above her sandals.
Her sclera were gone. The warm, dark brown of her irises had drowned in a pool of viscous, liquid night, leaking down her cheeks like twin tracks of pitch. From her right sleeve, shadow condensed, twisting into a jagged, serrated blade of hardened void-glass.
She rose in one smooth, unnatural motion, stepping forward until the cold tip of the black blade pressed into the soft hollow of his throat.
"Who," she whispered, her voice layered with the ringing echoes of a thousand drowned souls, "is Itzelia?"