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Elders and criminals.
The drugged fear of children.
And always the blood.
Bodies piled in the darkness. The glass whispered its truths.
Above, the city thrived. Sparks of wisdom branched out from it to light up the forest with threads of influence that shaped other peoples as they rose, blossomed, fell, and transformed themselves into something else.
Priests wrangled the dark eye like a powerful, dangerous beast, understanding how easily the thirst for more could grow… how quickly terrible it could become.
Then the pale-skinned foreigners arrived, dragging disease in their wake. The desperate push for a solution. So much blood spilled, the most precious and terrible offerings made, only for answers that came in visions of impossible machines, slender points of metal, and fragile tubes of translucent glass.
All of it rippled too far ahead of them—too strange and distant to comprehend and replicate.
Panic. Flight. A civilization crumbling into death and smoke… and then the silence of corpses and the green, relentless life of nature creeping over all that they had built.
Ellie slammed back into the washroom of the Rio Nuevo. She was sprawled on the floor of it. Her head pounded in time with the twisting of her stomach.
How long had she been here? How much time did she have?
Her brain pulsed with knowledge—with dynasties and games, parenting techniques, artistry, engineering, laughter, song, mistakes…
How they built. What they ate. Why they worshiped. How they loved…
It was too vast—too much. Ellie felt as though she would burst from it.
She couldn’t. Not yet.
Ixb’ahjun—priestess and blade, queen of Tulan’s final hours—stood over Ellie as she pushed herself to her knees.
“There was never just one of us.” Ixb’ahjun’s voice rang out through a space far larger than the washroom. “Not until the end when all the rest were dead. There were always more, so that if the wrong desire crept into one of our hearts, the others could see the path to stop it and keep the balance.” She closed her eyes against the pain of remembering. “We all knew of the time in the earliest days when one blade controlled the stone—a time of burning, conquest, famine, and death. All that had been here before was devoured by it, leaving only scattered fragments. The founders of Tulan overcame that at terrible cost, and it was their wisdom that the stone could only be used safely with the balance of a council.”
Ellie thought of the majestic portrait in the ravine—the assembled figures that reminded her of the gods of Mayan and other Mesoamerican myths. Not one but many, all different, each with their own strengths and flaws.
It was… quite brilliant, actually, she thought with a quick burst of admiration.
Ixb’ahjun knelt, bringing herself to Ellie’s level, and fixed her with a serious, challenging gaze.
“Are the men of your world capable of such balance?” she demanded.
Ellie raised an eyebrow at the question. The answer was obvious.
“The men?” she retorted. “Goodness, no.”
Ixb’ahjun cocked her head as a flash of humor brightened her eyes.
“The women?” she prompted.
Ellie considered it more seriously. What the mirror could offer to women…
They could find the path to their emancipation. To equal treatment—equal rights. All of it could be within their grasp…
Padre Kuyoc’s voice echoed through the back of her mind.
It showed me the way to what I wanted in my heart… and it was a path paved with death.
The mirror was an arcane force fed with blood—a force thatrequiredsacrifice.
