I was in the house again, and the girl was back at the window, watching the night outside. She was older now, fourteen or fifteen, and her white hair had fallen past her shoulders and halfway down her back. There was something in her eyes that made me shrink towards Tezcat's corner. He wasn't there.
The girl reached out and touched the invisible field in the window. Gold energy radiated outwards from her hand, but she did not move as it crackled, up her arm and over her shoulder. A door thumped shut and elephantine footsteps advanced down the hallway. The girl removed her hand.
Her mother entered the room, smiling. Too widely. Her appearance—timeless, it seemed—had not changed, but the curve of late pregnancy pushed her snake-skirt into a downward arc. The girl's eyes slid to the bulge with a flicker of something nasty, but it was gone before I could confirm it.
Pregnant?
Oh no... oh gods.
My hand found my mouth of its own accord. I knew this story. I knew this myth. I knew who the girl was, now, and how this was going to end; I'd seen it carved on a rock facing a temple the last time I'd been locked in a vision like this. Inside the mother's womb was the future sun god, destined to be given everything this girl and Tezcat had been denied. I could not fault the girl for the poisonous glances she kept sending it.
Oh, if the Mexica had known even half of the backstory.
"It's time," said the mother. "Are you ready?"
The girl dragged her gaze away. She nodded.
"Turn around and let me see you."
She wore a white dress, simple, but stunning on her slender, maturing frame. Her mother looked satisfied in a sickening kind of way.
"A proper young woman. Coyolxāuhqui, goddess of the moon. See? Your mother was right. You grew into your role after all. And your brother. He loves the shadows. He loves the night." She gave a toothy grin. "You will all work well together in the world my boys are building. Light their way when they try to fight that monster at night."
"Tezcatlipoca isn't light," said the girl in a voice like glossed ice.
Her mother waved her hand. "Oh, no, he's just night. Your older brothers will help you. The Centzon Huītznāuhtin. They've been training while I taught you here." Another grin. "This whole time. We'll have two little families. One loving the sun, the other the night."
She manipulated her children to play roles in the world she had dreamed up. This girl was the moon goddess. Her older brothers were the stars, four hundred strong—clearly the earth goddess was not bound by the usual bodily restrictions of pregnancy.
But why? Why the split house; why the violent treatment; why the walls and confinement that kept the siblings from ever seeing each other? Did the mother want passive obedience from these ones, and thought this was the best way to get it? I grappled with the question, playing out every option in an attempt to make sense of such a senseless act. Abraham's deep, honeyed voice could calm any tormented person as he recited bible verses, saying God—the one, all-seeing, almighty God—had a reason for everything, even if we did not understand it. That no death or act was outside his plan.
My shoulders slumped. And then I did. No, I crumpled, right to the ground in the house, my face in my hands. If these were the deities that ruled the skies, there was no plan. These were people, capable of as much love or cruelty as we were. They were people, and sometimes people did things that simply couldn't be reasoned with. And now I had to live with that.
"It'll be lovely," said the girl, her voice emotionless.
"Are you ready?"
The girl held out her hands. Her mother took them. Gold crackled around them, encasing first mother, then daughter, then beginning to flow into the daughter's hands. Where the threads of energy touched her, they turned silver. More and more built up until the pair faced each other, each wreathed in living, snapping light of two different colours. The girl's white hair flickered. As the energy kept flowing, it took on a silver glow. It lifted from her back as the last burst of gold flashed across the distance between the two of them and went out.
The mother released her daughter's hands. "Go light the night."
"Thanks," said the daughter. She lifted her hand, and the house exploded.
My arms whipped up to protect my head. The rip of thatch and thump of smashed adobe swelled around me. Another flash blasted the roof off. A wall tipped backwards. When its pieces finished rolling, we were left in a ring of rubble under the clear night sky. I scrambled over the wreckage to open ground.
The mother's face had slipped from pride to confusion, then a slow, smouldering anger. "You disobedient brat."
"I don't have to listen to you anymore."
Silver and gold exploded against one another. I staggered backwards, shielding my face. This was a vision. Just a vision. That didn't convince my thundering pulse as lightning snapped from mother to daughter and back, and from them to the ground, the house's rubble, then farther and farther: the grass, the trees. The whole clearing was a spider's nest of deadly magic.
Coyol's grew faster. Silver ate through the network, and fear sparked in the mother's eyes. She pushed harder, but her daughter forced her back a step, then two. Gold flared as a ball of silver lightning flung her off her feet. Her gold shield winked out. She scrambled up, and before the silver flash from Coyolxāuhqui's fingers hit her chest, she vanished.
"Find her," said the girl.
A star drifted in the sky. Another followed, then another: the Centzon Huītznāuhtin, four hundred strong. Hidden by their mother, they had lived and trained in the upper levels of the night sky. They spread out among the inanimate stars to search.
"And the rest of you," said the girl.
They crouched wide-eyed in the grass as their sister stepped from the wreckage of a house split in two. Crumpled rugs and wall hangings lay limp over the rubble in one half. Beneath the other was nothing but a shattered wooden bench.
"You." The girl stopped and stood before them. Tears made tracks down her cheeks, and her eyes were on Xolotl. "You could see me. Why didn't you do anything?"
Silence was her only answer.
Her voice trembled as she raised it. "And the rest of you. Why didn't you listen to him?" She spun around, and her hand froze, aimed at Xolotl. "I hate you," she whispered.
Quet stood between his brother and the attack.
"I hate you," said the girl again. "Why didn't you do that for me?"
Without warning, her other hand whipped out. Silver blinded me, and Tezcat screamed. When the light went out, he was coughing on the ground in front of the rubble. The girl hit him again, then again, then advanced like a predator. He managed to half-rise, and scrambled backwards, raw terror in his eyes as her hand lifted.
A wind blast slammed her back, and she fell to her knees.
"Don't touch him," said Quet. He stood behind her, both hands out. "I'm sorry we didn't know. But Xolotl doesn't hide things without a reason; not from me. And we can protect you now. You can both come with us."
The offer hung painfully, achingly hollow now: too little, too late. The girl remained on her knees. Her head hung so her curtain of hair hid her face. At that moment, a shooting star flashed overhead.
"They're calling me," said the girl. Her voice was steady. "When I've found her and killed her, I'll be back for you. And your precious world, too."
She jumped up. Her hands shot silver at the ground, and she vanished like her mother had.
Tezcat had dragged himself into the shadows and shut his eyes, his breathing ragged. He flinched hard as a dog nosed the back of his neck. Xolotl slipped in beside him and gently took his hand.
Again the scene changed. The gods were teenage; we had skipped some ten years, or whatever the god equivalent was. What had happened in the meantime?
Tezcat had stayed with the other siblings, clearly. He and Quet were the only two in the scene, quarrelling in a sky-level over a giant, oceanic ball. What even was that? It had water, at least. Was it another sky-level, or the world their mother had said her sons were making? I didn't see any land.
What I did see was a stirring beneath the water, soon revealed to be a giant crocodile that the two were baiting. They caught her and turned her into what I recognized as continents. One of the two gods was injured in the battle, but who it was, and how, was blurry.
The land became habitable, and the gods joined forces to create younger siblings for themselves. Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of rivers and lakes. She wore a green skirt, even then. Xōchiquetzal, goddess of art and beauty. Butterflies followed her in swarms. A goddess of motherhood, who lived with the siblings like she was one of them. I didn't recognize her, but something about her made me nervous.
A god and goddess whose names I didn't know were placed in charge of Mictlan, the underworld. It lay below the land, while the levels of the sky lay above; the gods stayed in the lowest one, but I sensed more beyond it. Tlaloc and Chal took over that lowest level, named it Tlalocan, and cultivated it into a lush garden. In the next level were the moon and stars, just far enough to lend a tenuous sense of safety.
Tlaloc began to make rain. Chal gathered it into threads and pools of water across the land. I'd known Tlaloc was the name of the Mexica rain god, but seeing his giant frame bent over, earnestly sprinkling flowers, brought a smile to my face. My hands were still shaking. I dug them into my pockets. I could sense the answers to some of my questions ahead, but I had to see out the rest of the vision.
The new world's first inhabitants were giants, human in form but larger than anything alive today. They walked by starlight. The world had no sun god yet, and thus no sun. A fight broke out between Tezcat and Quet over which of them would take the role. Tezcat seized it, but as a god of night, he could only create half a sun. Quet knocked him from the sky. Who put teenagers in charge of putting the world together? In a fury, Tezcat sent jaguars to destroy the giants and the rest of the world.
A new world was made—they made it look easy—and Quet took over the sun role, hiking across the sky each day. He also created new people, these ones human. They grew rebellious, though, and in a streak of revenge or hatred or both, Tezcat used his newly discovered sorcery powers to turn them into monkeys. Quet was heartbroken. When he could not turn them back, he cleared the world with a hurricane and stepped down from his role as the sun.
Fed up with petty fights, Tlaloc made himself the sun of the next world. A bitter, harsh Tezcat responded by ravaging Tlalocan. The rain god shut out the world below while he repaired the damage to his garden and home. The humans grew desperate, and their pleas drove him over the edge. He sent rain, but it was fire rain, and the world was again destroyed.
Diez madres. If Coyol was behind the destruction of the world today, she was following in the family business. At least her siblings had gained control of their tempers since then.
Chal became the next sun, but Tezcat told her she was faking her love for the people she shone on. The taunts continued until she cried, and the world flooded. In a desperate attempt to save the people's lives, Chal turned them into fish.
While the groundwork was laid yet again on barren stone, Quet and Xolotl snuck into the underworld together. Quet was not willing to give up on the humans he had created three suns before, and together the pair stole those people's bones and bolted. The lord of the underworld, powerful now and abysmal at sharing, attempted to stop them. He failed. Back on the surface, Quet recruited the motherhood goddess to help him shape the bones back into his people.
The new earth stood finished beneath a night sky when the stars began to move.
"She found Cōātlīcue," said Quet. Their mother. I saw Quet rub Tezcat's back as the night god hugged himself and looked away. The siblings stood together on Tlaloc's favourite mountain and watched the stars fall.
The next day, a new sun rose.
Xolotl hid at the edge of the underworld and waited for it to set. It was not one of the siblings, nor one of the Centzon Huītznāuhtin. And it was not Coyol.
Cōātlīcue had carried her child to adulthood, then could carry him no longer. While she gave birth on a mountain, she could no longer run. Huitzilopochtli was born fighting. When he saw his sister and her army kill his mother, he attacked.
The moon in the night sky was no longer a young woman, but her head. The people in the world below saw it in visions and engraved her dismembered body on a monument. Coyol was dead.