Of bones and memories.
Only sludge and souls in his territories.
Ever slumbering is he.
Till he senses not just one blessing, make it three.
Rise he does for the first time.
Will it end as his last rhyme?
For marigolds bloom to guide the souls to their place.
So what the hell is it doing on your living Face.
The boat had been shattered.
The river turned violent—no longer the celestial current of Mayu, but a broken artery of Mictlan. A whirlpool cracked open beneath them, dragging both warriors into its spiral.
The stars above spun, twisting into streaks of sludge and darkness. Ashlight burned in their peripheral vision as they were pulled under.
Hands.
Hundreds of them. Skeletal, emaciated, writhing like worms. They burst from the silt and darkness below, clawing at flesh, gills, and bones.
Cenotlatlacatl howled underwater, a roar lost in bubbles. He tore at the hands with claws and teeth. Bit through wrists. Slammed skulls into each other. A ribcage wrapped around his leg—he snapped it like twine.
Kamelotl swirled beside him in a dance of speed and madness. His tail-hand coiled around necks and cracked them. He laughed even as fingers scraped his face. His obsidian leg glimmered with every kick, shattering collarbones. He grinned, wide and wild.
But the current wasn't done with them. They were dragged deeper—not by force alone, but by the sludge and bones of the riverbed itself. The water thickened like spit. Their bodies scraped against ancient ribs, forgotten weapons, rusted obsidian, and teeth without skulls. The sediment swallowed them. Then the hands came—again.
More skeletal arms, tangled in moss and coral, rose from the muck to drown them in the shallows.
Cenotlatlacatl grinned through the grime and said with a growl,
"It's a shame, isn't it? That we can breathe underwater."
Kamelotl, still flailing and thrashing like a hooked fish, froze for a heartbeat.
He turned to him.
And laughed.
Laughed like a mad child born from flood and thunder.
Together, they descended into fury. The hands were crushed. Bones were snapped. They shattered femurs with elbows, stomped jawbones into silt. Cenotlatlacatl drove a spine like a spear into the riverbed. Kamelotl spun, slicing limbs with his obsidian leg, giggling with every fracture. There was rhythm in their destruction—as if they were exacting vengeance on death itself.
But then the river shifted. They both felt it.
Too late.
They had been breathing in the water—welcoming it. And now it welcomed them back with visions.
Hallucinations.
Not ones they could resist. These were laced into the bones, into the breath itself. Like blood mixing with ink.
Their minds were pulled under.
Cenotlatlacatl saw faces—his victims, crying without mouths. Fires he started. Chains he broke that only led to more chains.
Kamelotl saw his birth.
He saw Cenotlatlacatl's claws ripping the surface of the cenote.
He saw his own tail-hand twitching.
He saw himself die in a dozen timelines, always smiling. Always hoping.
Their bodies trembled. But something else began to stir.
Their markings—glowed.
For Kamelotl, the ashlight roots on his gills and spine bloomed. They reached downward and took root in the very sediment. The water around him began to clear. Crystal veins spread like frost. His eyes opened wide—he could feel it.
The riverbed was no longer just a place. It was part of him now. His spine deepened. His breath calmed. The hallucinations stilled.
Cenotlatlacatl, too, felt the shift.
The orange glow from his flower markings began to pulse. The dew that had clung to his chest was drawn into his skin, absorbed into his spirit like an antidote. The fog in his mind lifted. No voices. No guilt. Only silence and clarity. The surface behind them broke—not with light, but with bone.
He blinked.
He remembered who he was.
But it wasn't a simple emergence. It was a tantrum.
Tlāzcacoātl, the Serpent of Drowned Bones, exploded upward with a screech that cracked the water into shards of memory. Its jaw tore free from the surface first—lined with the teeth of those it had swallowed, and those who had begged to be remembered. Its body followed, a spine of fused femurs and drowned warriors' ribs, clattering together like a ceremonial drum that no longer knew its purpose.
Its wings were not wings—but fragments of feathers stolen from sacrificial birds, still stained with the blood of long-dead offerings.
It saw them—the glowing ones.
And it screamed not in hunger…
But in envy.
It had guarded the river of memory for centuries, collecting bones, storing pain, swallowing prayers. But death had never marked it. It had never tasted the ashlight. It had never been seen by Mictecacihuatl.
And now these two—freaks of fate—bore her blessing.
Their roots. Their glow. Their silence. Their clarity.
It couldn't allow it.
Its jaw unhinged. A spiral of skulls burst forth—not to attack, but to drown the ashlight. To choke the orange glow.
Its body thrashed with the rage of a forgotten god. The water turned violent again, no longer crystalline. It slammed itself against the riverbed, crushing its own bones in fury, breaking coral, snapping arms of skeletons it had once collected.
It wanted them buried.
It wanted them unblessed.
It wanted to drag them down and whisper into their gills:
"She never loved you."
First came the skull—huge, hollow-eyed, its teeth a mismatched graveyard. Then the spine, each vertebra clacking into place like drums made of drowned bone. Feathers, soaked and broken, hung from the ridged neck like torn banners. Some of them gleamed obsidian; others were soft like mourning doves.
Tlāzcacoātl.
He didn't know how he knew the name. He just did.
It was in his bones, where the guilt had lived. The Serpent of Drowned Bones. Keeper of River Trials. The one summoned when death needed to remember its sins.
The serpent opened its mouth. It didn't hiss—it moaned.
A sound like all the children lost to rivers crying at once. A dirge wrapped in drowning.
Then it struck.
Cenotlatlacatl dove sideways, narrowly avoiding the jaws. Kamelotl didn't move—he twisted, catching the serpent's body mid-surge, riding it for a heartbeat before being flung off like a discarded thought.
They separated. The hands retreated. The river paused, watching.
Cenotlatlacatl dove deep, circling. He wanted its throat. When he found the underside of the beast, he slammed into it from below—claws sinking into bone. He tore. Feathers burst from the wound like inked petals. The serpent shrieked.
But it didn't bleed.
It turned, tail whipping with enough force to crack obsidian. It slammed into him, sending him spiraling through the current like driftwood. His gills spasmed. He hit a rock, gasped, and swallowed old death.
Somewhere above, Kamelotl spun in laughter and fury. He bit one of the serpent's feathers and spat it back like an insult.
The serpent reared again.
Now they both surged toward it.
Kamelotl slashed at the eyes—obsidian gouged across obsidian. Cenotlatlacatl went for the jaw again, tearing bones loose. But the serpent only shrieked louder, and from its scream, skulls poured out—skulls of children, of jaguar warriors, of old priests. They flowed from its mouth like vomit, and each one opened its mouth in a scream of memory.
The water grew thick with them. The screams became a wall. It wasn't just a fight—it was drowning in every sin that had ever gone unburied.
Cenotlatlacatl faltered, stunned by the image of a slave child's face floating past—maybe it was him. Maybe it wasn't. But the guilt rang like a drum inside his ribcage.
Kamelotl surged forward, pulling him away just before a set of teeth snapped down.
His flower—the ashlight one—pulsed with a blinding green. The roots dug into his spine burned white-hot. He screamed, not in pain, but in fury. In demand.
The serpent recoiled, blinded. Cenotlatlacatl took his chance.
He bit. Yes—bit into its ribcage, like a predator, and yanked free a vertebra the size of a skull. He smashed it against another and howled into the current.
His howl didn't last long.
A tail came slamming into him, crushing him deep into the riverbank. The bones beneath gave way like brittle branches. Silt clouded his vision. He shook off the impact and dragged himself upright just in time to see—
Kamelotl, hurled into the mud not far from him, gnawing on a rib like nothing had happened. Still lying there, recovering. Still smiling.
Cenotlatlacatl blinked once. Then shook his head.
That gave him an idea.
"Hey brother," he called out, spitting mud. "You think you can use those roots of yours to bind something together?"
Kamelotl looked up, half-delirious. Still shaking his head.
"Now's as good a time as any to find out, brother."
He flexed his back, the roots twitching like limbs ready to obey. He used them to push himself up from the riverbed.
"Looks like they'll listen to me just fine," he said, grinning.
"Good. I'm gonna rip off as many bones from that thing as I can. You take those bones—use your roots—twist them together into something big. A mallet, a club… hell, even a Macuahuitl if you can manage. Then take that beast apart until it can't rebuild itself."
Kamelotl gave a wide grin and said,
"I have no idea what those things are—but I'll figure something out."
Cenotlatlacatl launched himself back at the serpent. Claws tearing. Arms wrenching. He tore ribs, snapped spines, yanked vertebrae loose with sheer force. Every bone he flung landed by Kamelotl's side.
The little one got to work.
Roots extended, dragging bones toward him like a spider collecting prey. He grabbed anything he could—bits of jaw, shattered limbs, broken spears—and bound them together.
He didn't build a club.
He didn't build a mallet.
He built a tail—a massive tail, made of bone and root, curved into a monstrous claw at the end. It wasn't a weapon. It was an answer.
He howled and charged, dragging it behind him like a chain of death.
And then—he swung.
The first strike split a ribcage.
The second broke the spine.
The third sent feathers spiraling.
Again. And again. And again.
The river shook.
The serpent screamed.
Then—they saw it.
Hidden before beneath the sludge, revealed now by the glow of the cempoalxōchitl, was something pulsing:
An obsidian bone.
Jet black, veined with ashlight green. Lodged in the serpent's core like a buried truth.
Without speaking, they rushed it. One took one end. One took the other.
They pulled.
The bone groaned.
Cracked.
Snap.
Ashlight burst into the water. The serpent began to unravel.