The vision broke.
"So that was how we got our world and a sibling who wanted us dead," said Chal, her head resting on the back of the couch. I risked a glance at Tezcat. He had procured a half-bound knife handle and taken on the task of finishing it. He wasn't looking at anyone.
Emma's limbs maintained their knotted arrangement. "You said she's alive. You said she knows we're here, and they said she found a village today." She tipped her chin at the gods on the opposite couch.
"I do wish it ended there. All that plus a few thousand years of Huitz chasing the Centzon Huītznāuhtin across the sky brings us to a hundred and three years ago."
I sat up straighter. "That was right before Fuego."
"Three years before. We didn't know it, but Coyol wasn't dead."
"That was one hell of a spell," muttered Tezcat. He threw the knife handle on a side table and leaned back.
"Kept alive by a spell, even with her body cut to pieces." Chal pulled her head off the couch and drew her hair over her shoulder. "We didn't know it, but she was alive and gaining strength—and that, not stubbornness, was why the Centzon Huītznāuhtin kept fighting. Every time they injured Huitz, they collected his blood, and any life essence spilled by a god or a human is power. It's why sacrifices made us so powerful."
"People made sacrifices to you?" said Emma, aghast. "Like, human ones?"
Chal gave a tired smile. "We can't control what humans do. The deaths gave us power, and we had to use that before it burned us. They liked the rivers and rain that resulted, so they kept on sacrificing."
"Until they were decimated," growled Tlaloc. "By the visitors."
"Quet's still ripped up about that," said Tezcat. He tried to smirk, but something hurting showed up instead. He let both fade. "Especially now that it's happened again. He still protected their descendents."
"Anyway," said Chal. "The Centzon Huītznāuhtin gave everything they gathered to Coyol. She regained strength, then a hundred and three years ago, a consciousness. That was both luck and timing: we have two calendars that intersect once every fifty-two years, and that intersection is a moment of immense power for all of us. On top of the gathered strength, that gave Coyol a moment in her own mind. She didn't have much time, and she didn't have a working body, so she sent her spellcaster to find a god named Chalchiuhtotolin. The god of disease. Also... of turkeys."
I set down my mug as my stomach turned over.
"She gave him a task," said Chal. "To make something that would let her harvest enough life force to get her body back, while cutting off that same source for us. Because it's not just blood or life returning to the earth that gives us strength. It's also belief. And there's no belief or death if there are no people. So the world burned. The Tlachinolli is a magic that acts like a disease. It destroys its victims and draws on their power to propagate itself. It was Coyol's idea, and Toto made it happen. The spellcaster then tapped into the excess life force from the deaths and channelled it all back to Coyol, and she got her body and full consciousness back."
I didn't know who to hate most now: Coyol, the spellcaster, or Chalchiuhtotolin—Toto—the turkey and disease god. Coyol was clearly the driving force behind all this, but I had a bone to pick with the turkey.
"Why fire?" said Jem.
"Because fire wipes out the sun." Chal gestured to the windows behind Tlaloc. "Tlalocan is a garden, so it's dying like the rest of the world. She is, literally and figuratively, trying to smoke us out."
Those windows looked out on Tlalocan? The paradise garden? It was indistinguishable from the world below.
"We held out for the first fifty-two years," said Chal, "thanks to a village that escaped underground. We appeared to them and they believed in us, so on the first calendar intersection, we asked if they could do a blood sacrifice. Non-lethal, but enough to let us defeat Coyol that year. But our strength made her suspicious, and we had an insider. Cihuacōātl, goddess of motherhood. Our little sister."
The one who had helped Quet bring his people back. Her name, in the gods' language, meant Snake Woman. As for the underground village part... I didn't like where this was going.
"She was the spellcaster who'd kept Coyol alive," said Chal, "stealing from our power using hers to maintain the spell. We didn't catch her that time, but she told Coyol where to find La Cueva. The village."
The gods dropped their gazes in a moment of silence.
I'd known I would be angry when they confirmed it, but I was not prepared for the seething heat that reared up inside me at those words. Were there not few enough villages left in this world already? For a hundred years, Grillo Negro had trudged down the continent, camping where there was food, searching the horizon for any sign of other people. They'd been so close so many times. Knowing that there was a person—a god—behind all that destruction focused my fury like a fire-starting ice lens.
Coyol and her subordinates were the reason Grillo Negro had lost its roots. The reason I had never met another person outside the village. And they were still doing it, picking off the survivors one by one. Robbing the world of its history. Robbing me of any chance to ever know what we lost the day the world burned.
Diez madres. Would there be any left in a year? A decade? Another hundred years?
Chal sighed. "And with La Cueva gone, we didn't have enough power to go around. We started to lose siblings. Outside of the underworld, Coyol's allies, and Quet, the gods you don't see here have fled or faded. They won't wake up again until there's power to support them. We here were the strongest back in the days of the Mexica, so you could say we had the most reserves." She looked down at her hands, then around the room. "And you can see what state we're in now. Most of us can't even shift an object without a trigger motion."
She snapped her fingers, and mine and Xolotl's mugs switched places. She switched them back.
"And even those reserves are running out," rumbled Tlaloc. "Xolotl is managing to delay it for us, but sooner or later it will just be myself and Quetzalcoatl left."
"If Quet doesn't get himself killed in the meantime." Chal sank her fingers into her hair. "Switching to spirit form to keep fighting after getting shot. Just to keep Coyol from landing a scratch on his beloved humans. That's Quet for you."
Emma had uncrossed her arms at some point. At the mention of us, she recrossed them. "So where do I come in?"
"We made you."
Emma blinked. My still-fuming attention got slapped back to the conversation like I'd been hit by a mudslide. I gaped like a landed fish, not comprehending yet.
"You're our little sister," said Tezcat. He snapped his fingers, and Xolotl's abandoned mug appeared on the table beside Emma. "Touch that and pretend it's Cōātlīcue."
The image of the earth goddess's grin flashed across my vision. Emma's face hardened as she put a finger to the mug. Its contents froze with a crackle.
I could not move my eyes from the mug. I thought I'd heard Tezcat wrong. I thought this was a joke. An extension of the vision. Emma couldn't be a goddess. Diez madres, if fifteen-year-old Emma was a goddess on top of all this, I was going to freak out and scream.
Jem's hand found mine. I squeezed it so hard, my knuckles cracked.
"Snow, ice and cold," said Tezcat. "We had new elements to deal with, and we needed someone who could use that to survive. One of us who could go out and find people."
"And why couldn't you find them yourself?"
That's what I wanted to know.
Tezcat gave a dry smile. "Well, we had to do that in the end anyway, didn't we? But teleportation's hard, kiddo. Most of us can only do it a couple times a day, and if we do, we're not doing anything else. Not great for saving energy."
"Xol managed. With five of us."
"Xol's the only one with heavenly fire. He can take guests. And it burns the hell out of him long-distance."
That must have been the ring of golden flame Xolotl sent around us to bring us all from the fire-cave. I noted that he had even shelled out the energy to bring Grifo with us. I liked him even more now. I hadn't thought that was possible.
"That aside," said Chal. "We needed someone to find people, and we'd never say no to a new sister. So we got together to bring you into being. The problem was, we hadn't realized yet that Cihua was our traitor. She hijacked the bringing with a spell and sent you down pretty much human. A powerless goddess. We caught her that time, but she escaped with Coyol's help. We couldn't sense you anymore, so we set up that cave with a memory spell responsive to a charm on the necklace Xipe had made for you. Then we just waited and hoped."