Words from a Tahtah, to his grandson in a storm
"Toma mi mano mijo.
Solamente es un tornado hijo.
Está muy lejos de nosotros.
No te pueden llevar, chin, oviera tomado foto.
Para la próxima te acuerdas.
Si tienes miedo te amarramos con cuerdas.
Pues ya pasó.
Pa dentro mijo, hazme caso."
They woke together.
No words. Just a slow inhalation of pain that stirred the water around them like a ripple echoing from two broken hearts.
Cenotlatlacatl's gills quivered—feathered, alive, trembling with a shimmer of sickly green and black ash. Across from him, the ahuizotl blinked with moon-silver eyes, his body still dripping with shadow-born water. But something had changed.
Where his leg once was, now there jutted a skeletal limb, carved from obsidian, each sharp bone joint etched with the orange sigil of the cempoalxōchitl, glowing faintly as if still burning with sacred fire.
His gills had appeared at last.
But they were not like Cenotlatlacatl's.
They were woven from white bone, but each extension was tipped with obsidian feathers, black blades that shimmered in the darkness like razors—beautiful, dangerous, unholy.
They stared at each other across the whirlpool, hearts pounding with something ancient and unfinished.
Then they lunged.
But neither reached the other.
Their bodies stopped mid-motion, caught—anchored—by something unseen. The water thickened, and then they felt it: spider silk, invisible but unbreakable, wrapping around their limbs and torsos, suspending them between strike and surrender.
The ahuizotl snarled and tried to snap at the spiders silk, but it only allowed him to move a certain range of course.
With no other choice, they turned their eyes upward.
And saw… The Milky Way.!
It did not shine—it shimmered, like water rippling in a sacred cenote. A thousand thousand stars spun above them in a spiral of impossible depth, each one breathing in rhythm with the silk around them.
Their rage faltered.
Their breathing slowed.
And for the first time in their cursed dance, they were still enough to feel.
Still enough to see.
And then, finally—Cenotlatlacatl spoke.
His voice cracked like dry obsidian.
"I never meant for you to be born like that…"
He couldn't meet the ahuizotl's eyes—not at first. He kept looking at the bone leg, the sigil that glowed like a wound.
"You were born in grief. In filth.
In the blood I spilled.
That was never your burden to carry…"
Silence. Not rejection, not forgiveness—just silence.
He glanced at the leg once again, and said:
"At least you were granted a beautiful replacement, unless all your bones are made of obsidian. If they are then you're at least beautiful on the inside."
The Ahuizotl looked at him repulsed and shocked by his words.
Until the silk trembled.
And from the deep, a shadow began to rise.
It made its way silently overhead, melding perfectly with the starry sky. Impossible to really tell what it was.
The silence lingered. The presence they felt fly over them was too much.
Neither spoke.
The gills of both beings swayed gently in the pull of the water—feather and bone, shadow and ashlight—matching rhythm, matching pain. Something had shifted.
The whirlpool had not stopped. It simply... continued.
Guiding them.
Below, the waters thinned, spiraled faster, and soon they were no longer trapped, but carried—not struggling, not resisting.
The stars overhead blurred. The silk dissolved. All that remained was motion.
The spiral turned into a slide of shadows and stars, a celestial drain pulling them downward through a dream of silver and silence.
Then they saw it.
The end.
A massive waterfall stood before them—not above, but beneath. A vertical horizon of foaming white that poured endlessly into nothing. There was no bottom. No crash of water. Just a smooth vanishing, as if reality had torn open.
Cenotlatlacatl stared at it.
This was it? This was how the gods ended their joke?
He let out a small, bitter breath. Then looked over.
"You want a leg for your last meal?"
He motioned toward his own, smirking, as if daring the thing to try.
The ahuizotl didn't hesitate.
"Yes."
Deadpan. No hint of humor.
Cenotlatlacatl blinked.
Then the edges of his mouth started to twitch.
And then—it broke.
A laugh. Sudden, hoarse, like a cough through smoke. It took him over, and he bent forward, clutching his stomach, laughing not because it was funny, but because it was the only thing left to do.
The ahuizotl watched him for a heartbeat, then tilted his head. A smile broke across his cracked obsidian mouth. Then the laughter spread—ragged, gasping, wild. Madness made room for joy, or something like it. The water howled around them, but they didn't stop.
"Since I didn't get to enjoy the meals of Tlalocan," the ahuizotl declared between laughs, "I'll never have to know what it's like to miss out on them."
He pointed a broken claw at Cenotlatlacatl.
"So for a last meal? You weren't too bad."
They howled. Together. Two cursed reflections—laughing at the edge of a god's teeth.
And then they fell.
Their laughter echoed into the endless drop as they fell, spinning through sheets of silver and shadows, through the roar of the waterfall that had no bottom.
For a moment, they were weightless.
Two souls cursed and bound.
Two bodies broken and reborn.
Falling, falling, falling—
Then everything slowed.
Not the water. Not the stars.
The fall.
A hush blanketed them like mist, and something vast and shadowed moved against the stars.
Above them, the moon rippled.
And from that ripple, she emerged.
She glided without sound, wings outstretched like woven light. Her feathers shimmered in hues of lunar bone and deep marigold shadow, blending with the stars so seamlessly it was as if the cosmos had shaped her from regret and grace.
Her eyes reflected not their faces— but a scene of the ahuizotl serving Tlaloc in Tlalocan. Cenotlatlacatl sat upon a throne of gold, jade and obsidian. The peculiar thing to him was that he wasn't dressed in the fashion of the tribe he had been enslaved to.
She said nothing.
She only reached out a wing, gliding closer to them. Talons extended, she enclosed them around the two of them.
The water vanished beneath them. No crash. No death.
Only sky.
A sea of stars surged upward as she pulled them from the river's grasp, each wingbeat bending space and silence around her.
They floated, stunned, surrounded by galaxies that moved like breath. For the first time in their cursed journey, they were not sinking. Not fighting.
They were held.
Then she turned.
She angled her wings downward, toward the waterfall's throat—but she didn't return to the river.
No.
She dove faster than they had fallen.
They screamed.
Not with rage. Not with grief.
With terror.
The kind that comes when you realize the gods are not done with you—they're just getting creative.
Their bodies convulsed mid-air, clinging to the last breath of freedom.
And then they heard it.
Laughter.
Not theirs.
Hers.
Soft, rich, and haunting.
The same laugh Cenotlatlacatl remembered hearing in the tunnels of the cenote, when he followed the cursed trail of sickly green cempoalxōchitl, alone and half-mad.
Back then, he thought it had been a hallucination. A fever dream born from guilt.
But it was her.
It had always been her.
The sound danced between the stars now, playful and cruel, echoing through the bones of space and water alike.
Even the ahuizotl looked horrified.
"She's laughing…?" he hissed.
Cenotlatlacatl didn't answer.
He was staring downward.
They could see it now.
The waterfall poured into something vast—not empty space, not death.
A lake.
But not like any they had known in the world of men.
It was huge, unfathomably so, stretching out like a mirror to the stars, but alive with color and breath. The surface shimmered in hues of silver, deep blue, and soft purple, each wave cresting with a faint glow—as if moonlight and ancestor's breath were woven into every ripple.
Above it, a vast moon hung behind the mist, bigger than it should be. Radiant. Watchful. Patient.
The realm of rebirth.
The sacred water.
The place where even cursed souls might find their names again.
They fell toward it.
Not screaming anymore.
Just watching.
Breathing.
Waiting.
Tsïrunhanti — the waters of returning.