I was used to being scared.

I’d spent every moment since the Night of the Scarlet Moon looking over my shoulder, hiding behind a mask, lying to everyone, dreading the day this pyramid of deceit would all come crashing down on me. I knew that the feeble balance between rebellion and plausible deniability would inevitably tip the wrong way one day; that the Nightlords would learn the truth and corner me.

That moment had now arrived, and it terrified me.

What happened while I slept? Who spoke? Who dared? The Skinwalker? Eztli, Necahual, Ingrid, Chikal? So many people I’d trusted with sensitive information, so many potential suspects, too many who could have said too much or been caught!

Lahun warned me. ‘Betrayal with a friend’s face.’ She foresaw it would happen. Chindi was no more than a false alarm, a lull that destiny’s hand cruelly used to lower my guard.

No, no, no! The word rang in my head like the toll of ancient bells. The faintest flicker of hope burned within my chest. This is a transparent bluff! A trick!

Iztacoatl was clever. She set the stage and improvised a play to let me lower my guard, to trick me into confounding myself. I had to calm down, feign confusion, and make them doubt themselves! I could still turn this around, I could still–

“You think I’m lying, songbird?” Iztacoatl’s laugh reminded me of slashing daggers. “Have you nothing to say, sister?”

Sister.

Singular.

I sensed her approaching me from the east. Her feet produced no noise, and her lungs carried no breath within them. An aura of malice hung over her like how a cloud obscured the sun. Her pale skin shone pale in the moonlight under a pitch black sky.

Eztli.

But something was wrong, so terribly wrong. Her dress of woven flowers and her crown of bloodstained marigold stank of death and poisoned petals. She moved with a kind of grace and poise that my consort never bothered with. And her eyes… her crimson eyes burned with a familiar glint of madness.

It’s impossible. My panicking heart refused to believe the sight my eyes sent it. My blood ran cold with denial. Impossible…

My hopes died the moment Eztli’s lips stretched into that awful, maddened smile.

“I am truly disappointed, my child,” she said, so softly, so kindly.

Those were not her words.

Another spoke through Eztli’s lips, using her voice, using her lips, using her flesh and body the same way the First Emperor once voiced his displeasure through me.

This was a nightmare, a Veil, a feverish dream I had to wake up from. This couldn’t be real.

“You still doubt the miracle in front of you?” she asked me, her cold, frigid hands caressing my cheeks in what could pass for motherly love. “Do you not recognize me, my wayward child?”

I did. Every fiber of my body recognized the reborn vampire standing next to me, speaking in a usurped mortal shell.

Yoloxochitl.

Yoloxochitl smiled at me while reborn in Eztli’s flesh.

Betrayal with a friend’s face.

My body went limp, and all strength abandoned my feeble limbs. I sensed something wet at the edge of my eyes. Tears of utter defeat born from my deepest fears.

“Oh my?” Iztacoatl, ever cruel, narrowed her head to better taste my sorrow. “Are you going to cry? For that girl?”

Yoloxochitl shook her head in empty sorrow. “Do not cry, Iztac. My daughter wanted this. I gave her a true life, and she returned it to me.”

Tears of blood dripped down on me, colder than ice and fouler than tar.

“Have you ever witnessed,” she asked me, “a purer act of love?”

I had failed.

I had failed.

I had failed Eztli and her mother’s hopes. Once unshackled from her role as my consort, Eztli bore the full brunt of the Nightlords’ ritual. Centuries of occult power fell upon her cursed soul and forced her to fit the role she was intended to fulfill.

The lie had become true.

Yet my heart refused to surrender to despair. There had to be a way to undo the possession. I’d plotted Yoloxochitl’s demise once, I could do it again. If I destroyed Iztacoatl and the other Nightlords, the ritual would have to collapse.

It couldn’t have been all for nothing…

“My poor, deluded songbird.” Iztacoatl shook her head with a malevolent smirk. “There is no happy ending for the likes of you.”

She grabbed the edge of my stone table. I heard a click under me and movement beneath my strapped back. The table that held me rose up and forced me into a vertical position, my limbs impaled in a cross position. I saw the sky and moonlight, then the stone pillars holding flames to the blackened heavens.

“Let me show you,” Iztacoatl said, “The cost of rebirth.”

I was held at a stone pyramid’s summit in the middle of a dark forest; this must have been the same temple in which I’d been held after the failed hunt. I noticed my consorts old and new tied to a stone pillar around me, their mouths covered to silence their screams. While Nenetl cried tears of fear and horror and Ingrid stared at me with pain and sorrow, Chindi stared at something at my feet with evil glee. As for Chikal…

Chikal was free.

She stood in front of the southern pillar, unbound, unbroken, and unsilenced. She faced me with the same stoic regality she adopted no matter the situation, though her gaze betrayed an emotion which I’d never seen her express at any point before.

Guilt.

Guilt and shame.

“I’m sorry,” I heard her whisper under her breath.

I stared back at her for a moment that seemed to stretch on forevermore. Her words cut me deeper than daggers and weighed heavier than stones. My confusion turned to shock and then boiling fury; but beneath all, the bitter dread.

I dared to follow Chikal’s gaze and see the most hideous crime of all.

A host of Nightkin surrounded me from all sides, their baleful eyes gleaming with malevolence. A few of them feasted on a corpse laying at my feet. Their fangs and talons had torn her apart by the waist and spilled her guts all over the stone floor, but her head remained intact.

My blood ran cold when I saw her face, forever frozen in an expression of terror.

“My daughter…” Yoloxochitl pressed her hands against her womb, as if she had carried Eztli to terms herself. “My daughter refused to accept her destiny at first. That woman shackled her. I tried to excise that weakness with my blood so many times… when the answer was that it was another’s which I had to shed.”

A Veil. It had to be a Veil. A cruel and elaborate illusion meant to deceive me into using my powers.

I continued to tell myself that, because the scene in front of me was too awful and sickening for me to stomach. My heart pounded in my chest so hard I could feel my pulse ringing in my skull.

“When my fangs closed on that whore’s neck and sucked her blood…” Yoloxochitl wiped away her tears of blood. “Only then did my daughter fully give herself to me. Only then did she fully return my love.”

Necahual’s head stared at me with two holes on her pale neck pissing blood.

The Nightkin feasted on my mother-in-law’s husk.

“It’s ironic, truly,” Iztacoatl laughed in my ear. “You did choose her the first time, didn’t you?”

I choked on my gag. My blood boiled within my veins, my horror suddenly replaced with overwhelming hatred and revulsion. I couldn’t accept this. I refused to.

It’s fake, I told myself. A replica. This had to be another of Iztacoatl’s tricks, a vicious Veil that played on my senses, an elaborate spell to break my will, or a fleshcrafted impostor like the false Sigrun.

But the gods were never this kind to me.

“I treated you like a son, Iztac,” Yoloxochitl said through my oldest friend’s lips, despoiling her flesh and voice with her loathsome, pathetic excuse for compassion. “I did my best to mend your wounds, and you rewarded me with lies. So many lies and so much ingratitude.”

She kissed me on the forehead, only for her nails to sink into my cheeks. Eztli’s face twisted into an inhuman expression of pain and betrayal.

“You were smiling when I died,” she cried. “You laughed. I know you did. You laughed at my death. It amused you, to laugh at the fire and destruction, at all these lives lost. How could you be so cruel, Iztac?”

This wasn’t a Veil. The Veil couldn’t conjure thoughts and information from nothing. It showed what the caster wanted the victim to see and gained strength from the belief. No one saw me laughing after the New Fire Ceremony.

No one but Eztli.

Then the raw, terrible truth dawned on me.

This was real.

“See this?” Iztacoatl chuckled, her fingers pointed at my face. “He finally accepted it.”

“I know not what spell you and your whore of a mother used to sabotage our ritual, Iztac Ce Ehecatl, but this shall not happen again,” the Jaguar Woman rasped, her cold dead eyes full of icy fury. “Your paltry schemes end here, pathetic child. Alongside the lives of those who dared to follow you into treachery.”

“We will not let you run free again,” Sugey warned me. “We have tightened the chains on your soul so much, you will never slip through our grasp.”

I didn’t move. I didn’t blink. I didn’t struggle. The only place where I could retreat was the confines of my own mind. I turned inward, frantically trying to figure out a way out of this situation.

The situation had degenerated beyond words. If Yoloxochitl had access to Eztli’s memories, then she knew about my spy network. And Chikal…

I looked at her in disbelief, hoping—nay, praying—that I had misunderstood it all. That she didn’t do the unspeakable.

Instead, she didn’t even bother to deny it.

“It was you or my homeland,” Chikal said in an attempt to justify herself. “I warned you I would pick my own over you. They forced my hand.”

I choked on my gag in frothing rage. Had Lady Sigrun’s death not been enough of a lesson? She’d betrayed her only hope of saving her city for an empty promise which the Nightlords would never keep!

Chikal scowled at me and matched my glare. “Do not look at me like that. You weren’t yourself in that forest. The First Emperor was possessing you. His bats devastated Chilam and preyed on my subjects.” She shook her head, her voice more bitter than ever. “I would rather see my people live in slavery than die in a god’s gullet. That sorcery of yours couldn’t control him.”

Sorcery?

No, no, she wouldn’t have dared. Even if she had forged a deal with the Nightlords, this would have been her last chance to stab them in the back. She had no reason to reveal that information.

But doubt wormed its way into my heart. The Jaguar Woman mentioned my mother and I using a spell. If Chikal told them… if she had told them…

I activated the Gaze.

At this point, I might as well try to use it. Should I be wrong and tip my hand, then I would go down fighting.

Terrible pain surged from my chest and an invisible spell halted my own magic.

No sunlight poured out of my eyes. The magical power, the cry of my soul and the wellspring of my hopes, remained out of my reach. A veil of agony had risen between my mind and the divine energies dwelling within me.

My eyes lingered on my smoking chest and gazed upon steaming ink. A ghastly tattoo of a chained owl burned on my skin, its painted chains of blood-tainted tar seeping into my bones and caging my heart-fire.

The Nightlords had sealed my sorcery the same way they bound Nenetl before me.

I fought back nonetheless. I tried to summon the Doll, the Veil, the Blaze, even the Tomb. I knew almost a dozen spells, and yet none worked tonight. My efforts were answered with chest burns.

The Nightlords’ mocking laughter echoed around me, sharp and deadly. It battered my broken spirit far worse than betrayal’s sting, Necahual’s murder and Yoloxochitl’s return. All my allies had been outsiders and our alliances borrowed power, but my sorcery was mine.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“No more magic, songbird,” Iztacoatl taunted me. “You were given the chance to rule in our name, and now, you will serve.”

My magic, my only innate gift, the one power that the gods blessed me with, was gone.

I felt a great emptiness within me. A void of numbness beyond fear, denial, and acceptance. Yet somehow, I did not despair. I had been denied my greatest asset, the one power that truly belonged to me, but my mind was filled with clarity rather than fatalism.

“Worry not, songbird.” Iztacoatl, as always, never missed an opportunity to pour salt on my wounds. “Your struggles have touched my heart, and I did promise you a reward.”

Iztacoatl whispered in my ear with the smug satisfaction of a sore winner taking her revenge.

“Once Chikal’s unborn child comes of age, I will personally claim the child myself,” she promised with cruel glee. “The best part of you shall endure forevermore.”

I answered her joy with a glare of pure, undiluted malice.

So baleful was my murderous hatred that it briefly startled Iztacoatl. Her smug glee turned to fury. Her hand slapped me with such force I felt a tooth crack within my jaw, yet I continued to stare at her in vicious defiance.

Even while denied my sorcery, I refused to submit.

I would not give up on my revenge, and I would never stop fighting the Nightlords.

Even if I were to fail today, even if I were to die and join my predecessors in silent suffering, then I would do everything in my power to ruin whatever I touched. I would not beg for forgiveness nor meekly waste away. I would give my captors nothing but ashes and curses.

If it came to it, I would call upon the First Emperor and do his bidding. I would see the Nightlords cower in fear no matter the cost. I would gladly bear the burden of eternal suffering if I could drag these bats down along with me to our shared doom.

I would never be powerless, because I would never surrender.

I was far from defeated yet. Mother remained free. Though it was a long shot, she might find a way to assist me. She had endangered herself to save Astrid; perhaps Father was right and she would finally make the right choice. Ingrid still had the First Emperor’s Codex stashed away too. This knowledge could tip the scales, whether for me or a successor.

Don’t look at Ingrid and Nenetl, Iztac. Don’t look, don’t involve them, don’t look at them! My hatred and my overwhelming desire to torment the Nightlords in any way I could gave me clarity. Keep the Nightlords’ attention focused on yourself! Focus, focus!

I forced myself to stare at Necahual’s corpse rather than my other powerless consorts. Here was a woman who I had hated and desired in equal measure, who had sacrificed so much for the feeble hope of saving her daughter, only to be murdered by a monster possessing her own flesh and blood. She had suffered the cruelest of deaths; enough for me to pity her and vow revenge on her behalf.

Guilt stirred within me beneath the anger and the bitterness. If I had undergone the Mometzcopinque ritual with Necahual and imbued her with sorcery, she might have been able to escape somehow. The odds would have been slim, yet I couldn’t help but wonder what could have been.

I glared at the viper I’d foolishly allowed into my inner circle. Chikal returned my stare with a blank expression, the same she always wore to hide her unease. Did shame and regrets overwhelm her? Or did she realize what kind of relentless enemy I would become?

Whatever the case, she had burned her bridges tonight. I swore I would rip out my unborn daughter from her womb and burn her to death for her treachery.

We conceived a child together. That promise sounded so hollow in my head. My relationship with Chikal had always been an alliance of convenience, a mere exchange of services. Our bond was only as strong as my promises to defeat the Nigthlords. My weakness cost me her faith…

My anger burned those thoughts away. Chikal was the weak one, to accept servitude over hope and lay down her weapons in exchange for false promises. She would rue this foolish choice.

A knot formed in my stomach. A seed of a doubt.

Something… Something didn’t add up.

Chikal wasn’t weak. My own mind struggled to accept otherwise. I had seen her fearlessly fight Nightkin, keep her calm in tense situations, and bet on the hope that I, a puppet emperor and aspiring sorcerer, would one day help her overthrow a six-hundred year old vampire dynasty. She bet everything, from her own life to her pride, on the faint possibility that I would succeed.

She was like me; a person who would never give up the fight.

So why would she fold tonight of all times? Especially after our great victory during Astrid’s hunt?

I glanced at Yoloxochitl and her fair face. Eztli was stronger than this. She had resisted her vampiric sire’s influence in the past, though she was force-fed her blood. I couldn’t imagine her turning on Necahual and then giving up in despair. Losing her mother would inflame her spirit, not weaken it. My suspicion only grew stronger.

Something about this treachery didn’t add up.

I closed my eyes and looked into myself, ignoring the vampires’ taunts and their victims’ cries. A shroud of shadows obscured my Teyolia and blinded my spirit to magic, yet I continued to sense its baleful light shining behind it. It appeared when I woke up, I was certain of it.

When I woke up…

The truth struck me like a bolt of lightning.

I woke up right after the Lords of Terror touched my heart.

I opened my eyes and faced a vision of nightmare: Yoloxochitl playing with Necahual’s head while in her daughter’s body; Ingrid praying for my salvation; Chikal observing it all with the detached composure of a heartless politician; and I, powerless to change anything.

This wasn’t a Veil, I was sure of it. This was no illusion meant to deceive my senses, but a play with real props and actors.

All of this was my fears made manifest.

“I never left the House of Fright,” I muttered in realization. “I’m still asleep.”

The words flowed out of my mouth, even though a gag bound it shut.

The shroud of darkness around my heart dispelled immediately, and my baleful heart-fire erupted in a mighty Blaze.

Purple flames surged from my body in a flood of fire. The Nightkin were vaporized in an instant alongside the wooden stakes keeping me bound and my consorts. The Nightlords were thrown back to the ground, their robes burning off from the heat.

I walked free on a floor of searing stones and my wounds no longer bothered me. Black feathers grew over my skin. I was a Tlacatecolotl again, the owl-man who danced among chaos’ flames.

I looked at my ‘consorts’. Their skin had gone up in smoke, revealing the props hiding beneath their false flesh.

Dolls.

Ceramic dolls with knives for fingers and faceless masks for a face. They burned like kindling against the pillars, and soon only ashes would remain.

“How have you freed yourself?!” the Jaguar Woman snarled in cold fury. “You will regret this, insolent slav–”

I crushed her throat with a talon of darkness. My Doll spell grabbed the four false Nightlords and lifted them up above the ground. They struggled pointlessly, cursing and shouting. This confirmed it. The real sisters would have easily broken free, but these props only wielded as much power as my mind allowed them to.

“Do you believe yourselves to be real?” I asked these imitations. “Are your masks so well-crafted that you mistake them for real faces? Do you have their memories too?”

From the Jaguar Woman’s snarls of impotent rage to the abject fear in Iztacoatl’s eyes, I assumed they were indeed unaware of their true nature. Good. So very good. A cruel smile stretched on my lips.

“Then it means your pain will be real,” I said, my heart overflowing with joy. “I will have some fun then.”

I had a lot of anger and frustration to vent out.

I couldn’t tell how long I spent torturing these props. Hours? Days? Time meant little in Xibalba’s bowels, but I was sure of one thing only: it ended way too soon.

I was naked and drenched in vampire blood by the time I was finished, my feet walking on a carpet of guts and ashes.

Sugey ended up impaled atop a burning pillar. The Jaguar Woman had been torn into so many pieces I doubted anyone could reassemble them. Iztacoatl bore the brunt of my cruelty: she died strapped to the stone table after countless humiliations, her body gutted from chin to groin. Only Yoloxochitl got off lightly with a snapped neck, mostly because I couldn’t bear to torture someone wearing Eztli’s face.

All of them became dolls bound by unbreakable strings.

For a very long moment, I basked in the sound of cracking embers and smoldering ashes surrounding me. I only had to follow the puppets’ strings to face the hidden playwrights floating above the stage.

A pair of Lords of Terror descended from their fake, painted sky.

The first of them was the most pitiful picture imaginable: a limbless, castrated torso of a humanoid with a stitched mouth and empty eyes. Its raw flesh, which merged a woman's breast on one side of the chest and torn nipples on the other, was a canvas of scars and mutilation. This thing could hear nothing, see nothing, and say nothing. It had been denied every freedom and suffered through every torment known to mankind.

Strings bound this Lord of Terror to an amorphous, limbless mass of hands and fingers floating above its head. They wove a web of puppets connecting this entire stage in a grand procession which only my flames freed me from. A single, immense eye protruded out of this quivering flesh. It gazed at me with otherworldly light that pierced through my skull and judged my very soul.

“What is this place?” I asked them.

The hand-mass wove its strings. Subtle vibrations resonated in an omnipresent symphony that echoed within my own mind

“This is the Razor House, where puppets gather and sharpen their knives,” it said. “I am Ahalmez, the sweeper of souls, the one who manipulates. I am the puppeteer’s strings and the invisible hand. I am the hangman and the judge. I am the faceless state, the cruel destiny, the deceiver, the slaver. I am hierarchy and domination.”

Its eye looked down on me in judgment.

“I am that which you fear most,” it boasted. “I am control.”

The torso held within its strings gargled and struggled in a pitiful display of powerlessness.

“This is Ahaltocob, the shamer and backstabber,” Ahalmez said, who denied its counterpart the right to speak for itself. “He is betrayal, shame, rejection, impotence, and humiliation. The puppet and the toy, denied even the right to cry.”

The fear of humiliation and the fear of abuse. The ego’s destruction and the loss of one’s autonomy. The dominated and the dominator, the slave and its master. A codependent pair as old as human civilization. No wonder their trial worked so well and so insidiously.

They were the twin terrors who ruled my heart.

“We are the fears that have followed you since you first drew breath, Iztac Ce Ehecatl, and you…” Ahalmez glared down on me. “You have disappointed us.”

I bristled. “I have passed your trial, demons.”

“By putting your misplaced faith in mere humans?” The eye contemplated the ashes of my rampage. “We have shown you more than your fears. We have shown you your future.”

I clenched my teeth and glanced at the doll that used to be Yoloxochitl. This fear was born of my mind, but I wondered if it was grounded in reality. “How much of that was true?”

“This will be your story’s end, should you fail to avert destiny,” Ahalmez warned. “The endless procession will resume on the Night of the Scarlet Moon, with that girl living to fit the role granted to her. Such is the pyramid’s nature: to grind the weak into pillars on which it may forever stand.”

My jaw clenched tightly. I hoped this fear of mine had been misfounded and that she would be able to resist the ritual, but if the very embodiment of control said otherwise, then Eztli would likely become Yoloxochitl reborn in the next cycle of dead emperors.

Still, my instincts told me the Lords of Terror kept details from me. Something about their insistence bothered me.

“That vampiric consort of yours will inevitably turn on you, as well that amazon queen once she receives a better offer. Do you believe that the Winland princess’ loyalty is any more secure? Once the Nightlords bring back her sister in chains, and they will, what would she do then?” Ahalmez’s eye glowed brighter. His power delved into my mind and read my thoughts like a book. “Heed the seer’s prophecy. Betrayal with a friend’s face. The only thing a sorcerer can trust in this world of deceit is themselves.”

“What do you have to gain from telling me all this?” I asked with growing skepticism.

“Such is the Razor House’s purpose. To cut away your human weaknesses, so that a sorcerer may be reborn as a pure demon free of fear and doubt. A lesson which you have failed to learn.”

This smelled like a half-lie. I had rattled the Lords of Terror in a way none of my previous trials had. My insistence on trusting my consorts and drawing strength from it annoyed them to their core.

I finally guessed what bothered me so much.

“Yohuachanca oppresses countless people,” I pointed out in skepticism. Of all the Lords of Terror I’d encountered, these two benefited the most from the world’s current state. “Why help me topple the institutions that fuel your existence?”

“Because it is the duty of the strong to rule over the world and oppress the weak,” the lord of control replied. “It does not matter to us who sits at the top or languishes at the bottom. Only the pyramid stands eternal.”

Its mutilated counterpart whined in what could pass for a moan of pleasure. They would delight in humiliating Nightlords and humans alike. Much like the Yaotzin, these fiends were the enemies of all sides.

They would exist so long as human society endured. An act of abuse within a family would nourish them just as much as the Nightlords’ daily oppression.

A new tyrant would sustain just as well as the old.

King Mictlantecuhtli’s words echoed in my mind like a dire warning. “Do not become what you fight against.”

“You are not neutral at all,” I realized.

These two had struck me at the perfect moment and played on my deepest fears. They had dug up my subtlest insecurities, sharpened them into knives, then used them to stab my very heart. They gave me a taste of what I dreaded most: betrayal.

They were trying to poison my faith not only in humanity, but also in everyone I loved and trusted. They wanted to break my friendships and affections until I saw treachery in every shadowy corner. They wanted to turn me into the enemy of all sides.

“You are trying to turn me into what the Nightlords failed to become,” I guessed in horror. “A dark god who shall oppress mankind and let you feast on the chaos.”

“A glorious destiny that will slip through your grasp, should you continue to sink into naivety.”

“My destiny is mine alone to seize, as is my freedom!” I glared at these arrogant fiends. “I place my trust in who I want and I do as I wish!”

Ahalmez’s single eye squinted at me in utter disdain. “How disappointing. We place such high hopes in you, and in the end, you lack the strength to shed your humanity.”

“And yet, what would you be without us humans?” I countered. “You are not gods who helped create the Fifth Sun, not even the Fourth, or the Third. Instead, the world created you. You are born from our human fears; parasites and carrion feeders sustaining yourself on our pain. King Mictlantecuhtli will endure long after mankind has disappeared, but your lot?”

I chuckled in disgust.

“You will fade away,” I said. “Like ice in the sunlight.”

“We have witnessed many sunsets,” the lord of control replied with the Jaguar Woman’s voice. If it thought it would rattle me, then it failed. “You fathom not the power we possess.”

“Oh, I think otherwise. I have read the First Emperor’s codex. ‘The lords of Xibalba are a cruel lot, both masters of their realm… and its prisoners.’” I waved a hand at this house of lies into which they had tricked me. “You rule over reality within these dollhouses of yours, but you cannot escape this city’s confines. You are slaves to laws stronger than you will ever be.”

“Yet I have enthralled your very soul and forced it to dance on my stage!” Ahalmez boasted. “Men believe they can take refuge within their mind, and I have proved them wrong time and again. I show them that a master’s grasp extends into the slave’s mind. Humans are never safe, not even inside their own heads. To violate this final refuge, to deny a victim this final dignity, is the ultimate act of conquest.”

“Then why did you fail to break me?” I replied with newfound pride. “You showed me my greatest fear and I burned it away. You tried to poison my mind against my consorts, but my trust in them proved stronger.”

I extended my arms and dared the Lords of Terror to strike me down.

“Go ahead,” I dared them. “Break my will, if you are so powerful. Shatter my mind to pieces and make me your slave in the waking world. Go on, try!”

A tense, terrible silence followed my challenge.

“Just as I thought,” I replied as I lowered my arms. I had a feeling about this. “It is not that you so-called Lords choose to give a spell to those who pass your trials; it is that you are compelled to. You are thralls to this cursed city’s laws. Now that I have passed this test, you can no longer harm me.”

I took Ahalmez’s frustration as confirmation. “Your arrogance will be the death of you, feathered fool.”

“And your ignorance blinds you to who I am, carrion-feeders,” I boasted. “I am Iztac Ce Ehecatl, the emperor who shall destroy Yohuachanca and dance among its ashes! And if you think you can control me, then let me give the same answer I once offered the Nightlords!”

I crossed my arms and faced the Lords of Terror with the same defiance I showed false gods once.

“I refuse,” I declared boldly. “Now give me that spell I am entitled to, so that I may be on my way to my final House of Trials. I am growing tired of this farce.”

Ahalmez glared at me for a while in impotent rage, only for a soft sound to shatter the silence between us.

Its prisoner Ahaltocob let out a sinister rattle from its bleeding throat. The stitches binding its mouth shifted just enough to free its lips.

“We shall teach him the Word,” it moaned pitifully.

Ahalmez seemed genuinely confused. “The Word?”

“A single word the weak will follow,” the humiliated one whispered. “Sleep, burn, love, obey… Die.”

Ahalmez pondered its cohort’s proposal, before acquiescing to it. It made me wonder which of these two was the true master.

“You alone, of all of mortalkind, shall know this spell,” the lord of control declared, albeit with clear reluctance in its voice. “Use it to quell your fear to rest. Strip your slaves of their ill-gotten free-will so that they may never betray you. Build your own pyramid, one broken back at a time. Only then will you absolve yourself from Fate’s decrees.”

I could recognize a poisoned gift when I saw one. The offer was as generous as it was insidiously corruptive. I had spent so much time earning the trust of others and cajoling their cooperation through services or favors. A spell that compelled obedience, even if it was limited to a single word, would let me force it without fear of betrayal. It would become so easy to rely on this spell, to grow dependent on this tool of oppression to secure my peace of mind. I wouldn’t have to fear Chikal turning on me if her mind bent to my will; same with Eztli.

Since the Lords of Terror failed to crush my trust in my allies, they offered me an easy way to neglect it.

I would have to avoid falling into their trap and use the spell with parsimony. Loyalty compelled by force was more fickle than it looked, as my captors taught me, and abusing the Word would only play into the Lords of Terror’s hands. Not to mention the danger that would befall the world should the Nightlords ever learn of it.

The Lords of Terror gave me a chain to strangle myself with. A leash that would bind me to its victims.

I would have to prove myself the master of my own fate.

Only a single trial stood between me and those cursed city’s gates.

My time in Xibalba would soon come to an end.