The cave walls lit up in sheets of breathtaking golden flame that made a Grillo Negro bonfire look like candles. Threads of light crawled inwards through the disk beneath our feet. When they reached me, my vision transformed.
Suddenly, the flames were close, but there was no heat. Just a great, all-encompassing warmth, that wrapped me up and made me feel more at home than my parents' own tent did. Around me, images formed. I was in a city that I somehow knew was a city, in a market square bustling with hundreds upon hundreds of people. They brushed past me like I didn't exist. Each was tall and terra-cotta-skinned, with straight, black hair. Their clothes gleamed white in the sun, or drew my gaze with all the colours of a flock of bright tropical birds. I looked down to find my jacket and snowpants replaced by the same. I was one of them. I belonged.
I lifted my gaze to the pyramids that dominated the skyline. The largest, Huēyi Teōcalli, had two shrines on top: one red, one blue. They trailed faint plumes of smoke from sacred fires. Tenochtitlan, whispered a voice in my head. You're in the city of the Mexica. And I somehow knew what those words meant.
A pair of sweeping stone staircases commanded the big temple's front. Carved snakes' heads at the lower ends of their balustrades snarled at another monument. This one was a low spire over a layered base. A massive, round stone was mounted on it, facing the temple. It was carved with a dismembered woman. I saw the story the moment I laid eyes on it. An eldest daughter grew suspicious of her mother's new pregnancy and conspired to kill her. She rallied an army of her four hundred older brothers for the attack. Her mother fled. She could not flee fast enough, though, and her children caught up and beheaded her. The baby she was carrying leaped from her and became a grown man in an instant. A warrior.
The man faced his oldest sister and did to her what she had done to their mother. He cut apart her body and threw it down the mountain, then chased the four hundred brothers as they scattered, leaderless. As they ran, they glowed. The man was the sun; the sister, the moon. Her brothers were the stars. Each day they battled back and forth, one side gaining ground in the nighttime, only to be beaten back at dawn.
The scene swirled, and I found myself among houses with thatched roofs and white walls, backed by trees so lush they looked painted. Canals crisscrossed the land ahead, where square-ended canoes glided between gardens that seemed to float. There was water everywhere. Women in the village wove baskets and worked on looms, and a man walked by with a bundle of firewood. I flinched as a turkey gobbled. There were two in a pen behind a house.
Another swirl. This time I recognized the scene, the Spanish and the Mexica standing face to face, negotiating, then fighting. Then I was back in the village, and something was wrong. Wailing drifted down the empty streets. I started to run. The man staggered towards me, his skin riddled with red dots. The women were gone. The turkeys wouldn't stop. A house, its whole family wreathed in sickness. A house with a body. An empty house. The turkeys grew louder and louder, and I could see flames again. The sound blurred back into the deep rush of the fire-cave.
I came out of the vision with a stagger, everything I had just seen scrambling my mind in an explosion of light and colour and emotion and meaning. I felt wrung in a thousand different directions. Jem stood beside me with a look of wonder on his face. Grifo barked and barked at the flames, his tail flailing. Was he seeing things, too? Did he have Mexica dogs in his ancestry? Still missing one friend, I turned to look for Emma.
She stood at the center of the room with her arms out to the sides, her head up and her eyes nearly closed. The wind that churned the cavern centered on her, but her curls barely swayed. A shimmering robe had materialized over her clothing. It was not a physical thing, but it was somehow still present, like the waterfall of jewelry that had mantled her turquoise pendant. Everything about her glowed.
Magical.
The fires went out in an instant. I spooked, and Emma startled so hard she nearly fell. She looked normal again. I turned to Jem to ask what he had seen, but before I could open my mouth, a man burst through the doorway. He skidded to a halt with a gasp when he saw Emma. "Itztia!"
I stared, dumbstruck. Everything about him was familiar, though I was certain we had never crossed paths. I would have remembered if we had. He was my height but as slender as a willow withe, good-looking, with my skin tone and long, sleek black hair tied back with a white ribbon. It was peppered with feathers. Soft ones, mostly green or blue, but some bright red. Were those real? Why were they in his hair? He wasn't wearing a costume. But the weirdest part wasn't any of that. I would have pegged him at thirty-five, but the harder I looked, the more impossible I found it to pin down his age.
Emma backed away. She threw me a desperate look, but something drove me from the space between the two of them. This was not my meeting to butt in on. The instinct was so strong, I obeyed it without question. Grifo had his head up and cocked. It wasn't aggressive, and he too made no move to intervene.
"Itztia?" said the man. He sounded unsure now. "It's me. Quet."
Emma's face matched my familiarity with the man perfectly. He—Quet—looked at her with a whole lot more recognition. Was this someone Emma had met? But then why did I feel like I knew him?
"I don't know you," said Emma. She wasn't lying. Not fully, anyway. The man faltered a step, and she screamed, "I don't know you! Leave me alone!" She flung out her hands, and a glowing snake reared from nowhere between them. Jem and I both gasped. A wind spun about the cave as the man skipped back. Emma was breathing hard. The snake's heaped coils rose to her waist; it could have spanned the cavern uncurled. It shimmered like her robes in the flames had. There but not there: an illusion that could be real if she tried hard enough.
Jem's hand found mine and clasped it tightly. I returned the grip.
"You don't remember," said the man.
Emma's voice trembled. "Stay back or I'll make it eat you."
He opened his mouth, but his face froze in a mask of pain. He fell to his knees with a feathered shaft lodged between his shoulders.
Terror rooted me to the ground as the warrior in the cave doorway lifted his bow again. The feathered man's face twisted in a snarl. "Xolotl!" he shouted, and Emma screamed as the cave vanished behind a wall of feathers.
Yells and bows' twangs ricocheted and reverberated through the cave. Dogs barked, and a huge one snarled like thunder. Jem and I dashed to Emma's side as our feathered walls spun by. They tightened around us until we were huddled at the room's center with our barrier a body's length away. A feathered, dragon-headed snake as thick as Rosa was tall coiled on itself until a warrior would have had to climb to the ceiling to shoot at us. I hugged Emma, who had squeezed her eyes shut.
We were going to die. We were all going to die, by a bow or a dog or this... I didn't even have a word for it. Why! Why was it here? Where did it come from? And why were its feathers the same colours as the ones in Quet's hair? Did he summon it to protect us?
The fight was as brief, bright, and violent as the flames. The cave went silent a second before the snake vanished. Arrows with bloody tips clattered to the floor. A second man caught the feathered one as he collapsed. Three Xolo dogs darted anxiously around them.
"Take them with us," gasped the feathered man.
No—
His companion threw out a hand, and Emma screamed again as gold flames whizzed around us. When the ring closed behind its caster, the world flashed white.
A/N: Looking for more epic Fantasy with a friends-to-lovers Romance and a strong female lead? Look no further!
Bearheart by MMicheleWilly