Ash is just the leftovers of the fire.
After consuming everything it could in gluteny and Ire.
Yet it is not waste
It provides nutrition in its place.
Destruction doesn't mean a lack of Luck.
Destiny is just fueling you with the ashes of your life when you're stuck.
So take those ashes and seeds to throw.
Add some water, sunlight, love and let yourself grow.
The boy was me.
That truth settled on his chest like a second heart, thudding out of sync with the first. Everything burned. Not from heat—but from knowing. His mother's smoke still lingered in the air, braided with the scent of marigold and obsidian.
He pressed a hand to the mark on his face, that ash-born sigil Mictecacihuatl had left him. Sickly green. Cursed green. But now… it shimmered like memory. His mother's face, half-vanished in the flickering shadows, appeared within it.
She gave herself for me.
She died so I could live.
And I've wasted every breath.
The lake of Xarátenga remained still behind him. The ahuizotl crouched in the distance, watching with unfamiliar patience. Neither of them spoke.
Something had shifted.
He knew now.
There was no more mystery in that part of his story.
Only the weight of what came next.
And just as he wondered—
what kind of debt a soul owed for being spared—
The threads began to pull again.
It was calm.
Too calm. The lake no longer rippled. Not from breeze, not from breath.
Then—
The silver water split open.
No ceremony. No song. Just a terrible crack, like the earth itself had flinched. Roots, black and coiling, erupted from beneath the lakebed—pale bone-threaded vines writhing like snakes with nowhere left to hide.
From them emerged a skeletal foot, bare and dragging mud soaked with grief. Then a second. Then a hand, dragging behind it a thick red cord braided with something far older than sinew.
She did not rise like a goddess.
She climbed—
Like someone who had been buried alive and dug her way back for vengeance.
Ix Kame.
Her face was hidden beneath a veil of root and bone, her form robed in robes that dripped like blood-soaked moss. From her back trailed a woven ladder of femurs. From her chest hung a necklace of stillborn memories.
Above her, death bats circled—silent and winged in shadow, their eyes flickering with visions of long-forgotten funerals. They made no sound, yet their presence pulled the warmth from the air, as if memory itself grew cold in their wake.
Perched upon one of the writhing root-vines was a mourning bird, small and pale, its chest streaked crimson. It sang once—a single note that sounded like the moment a mother realizes her child is gone.
The note echoed. Then vanished.
And from the edge of the lake's shadow, something stepped forward.
It was not monstrous.
It did not roar.
It simply appeared, like a thought no one wanted to speak aloud.
Tz'uul'tok.
The Griefbound Deer.
Its bones were long and dry, laced with old bark. Its antlers were red ropes, tangled in knots, each one pulling with the weight of buried sorrow. It made no sound as it walked—not even upon the water, not even across the dead.
Its eyes glowed dimly.
Not with fire.
But with witness.
Even the ahuizotl froze.
Even the lake dared not ripple.
Quetzalmictli descended.
The moonlit guardian swept down with a breath of elegance. Wings like woven obsidian and pearl flared outward, casting ripples across the surface of Tsïrunhanti. From her antlers—those crowned with glistening axolotl gills—emerged a radiance that did not shine, but softened.
The ground responded.
Monarch butterflies, thousands, stirred from beneath the flowerbeds. Orange and gold wings pulsed in rhythm, and where they danced, the oppressive silence shattered like old glass. Cempoalxōchitl began to sway again, each petal vibrating in perfect unison, creating the sound of living harmony—a melody born of roots, wind, and water.
"Enough!" Xarátenga's voice rang like a bell rung through silk.
"What purpose do you and your creatures serve by invading my beautiful garden?"
Ix Kame did not look at her.
She stared into the lake, her head cocked slightly, as if listening.
Then the water began to bubble—not gently, but violently, like a primordial stew stirred from below.
Ix Kame's body froze. Her eyes unfocused. Her divine sense reached too deep—
Then she burst into a cackle.
"Seems like the primordials are sensitive to our divinity... even when it's just a glance."
She finally turned to Xarátenga, veil swaying with rot.
"Sister," she spat the word, "I've come to your... realm,"
her voice soaked in sarcasm.
"For these souls that are owed to me. They have no right of choice. So prepare yourself—
to be taken.
To be... corrected."
Xarátenga laughed.
A sound like water cupped in a child's hands, like wind through chimes.
It healed what Ix Kame's laugh had torn.
"What gives you claim over their souls?"
"As for being corrected..." she leaned in, voice still sweet,
"your supposed methods of correction are just torture, cloaked in sacred rot."
While the goddesses bickered over the fate of their souls, Cenotlatlacatl turned—
not to the lake, not to the sky, but to the only other being who bore the same ashlight curse in their bones.
The ahuizotl stood not far, his gills twitching, eyes unreadable.
"I guess I can call you brother," Cenotlatlacatl muttered.
"Well... you've never told me your name, sooooo..."
The ahuizotl tilted his head. Water dripped from the bone-feathered gills on his crown. He didn't smile.
"I wasn't given a name."
That silence might've lingered awkwardly—if not for Ix Kame, who turned toward them like a corpse remembering how to dance.
"Well that just won't do now, will it?" she crooned.
"Even the dead need a name. How else will my root-snakes listen to your secrets..."
Her voice thinned into a whisper,
"...after a day of correction?"
Before Cenotlatlacatl could speak, he felt something cold and wet slither along his ankles.
He looked down.
Roots.
Threaded with red sinew, pulsing faintly—they were growing from Ix Kame's own feet, twisting across the lakebed like vines hunting for shame.
He stumbled backward as they wrapped around his legs, creeping higher. They moved with intelligence—no, with intimacy, like they already knew where his scars were.
By the time they reached his chest, he gasped.
But when a single root reached his ear—he nearly screamed.
Tsïtsïki Sachi…
It echoed without sound.
Not in his ears, but in his bones.
A name buried so deep, even he hadn't known it lived in him.
"She had a name after all," he murmured. "And it still reached for me."
His mother's name.
A flower rooted in blood and sacrifice.
A name that would not be forgotten.
Then a chill was felt in the air. The lake started to sway, waves forming in a rhythmic way. An owl screeched, heralding the next moment. Cempoalxochitl started to bloom like a path from the shore to the center. Some sickly green, some sunlit orange, some dripping with crimson ichor intertwined.
Then the music started
Ix Kame sighed "Does she have to be so dramatic?" Even her roots started to sway with the music. All the creatures in the realm started to dance. Even the ahuizotl stood on his hind legs and began to sway.
Xarátenga laughed and said "Look, at least they're all having fun. Maybe you should try it sometime…"
Then.
Silence.