Blood & Fur

Chapter Sixty-Six: The House of Bats

I breathed dust in a tomb of ancient stone.

A grand entrance hall stretched forth ahead of me. An aura of stillness hung in this room, even as my footsteps echoed across the silence. Layers of calcified sand covered walls that hadn’t been touched in thousands of years. Eye symbols flickered with an otherworldly glow on tall pillars. They provided a measure of light akin to a fading sunset; just enough to see, but unable to dispel the long shadows.

I felt like a man breaking into a crypt that had been sealed away since the beginning of time.

Though I sensed no enemies around me, I remained on my guard. I had sent my predecessors to scout the Fourth House of Xibalba earlier. This place fit their description of the ruins they encountered, but the creatures that slew them were nowhere to be seen.

I activated the Gaze spell and explored the room myself. No illusion recoiled before my sunlight stare. No monster broke the silence with a challenge. I was alone, as far as I could tell, with no lies to obscure my vision. The room seemed empty too, though I also noticed sets of corridors on each side of it.

My last trial started by lulling me into a false sense of security, so I erred on the side of caution. I first used the Doll spell to swipe away the dust off the walls and reveal what was hidden underneath.

Bats.

I scowled in annoyance as I found myself facing highly realistic carvings of great black bats all over the room. Scenes showcased these snarling beasts breathing out disease from their flat noses on unsuspecting villages on behalf of their mighty king.

Mother said I would find a hint about how the First Emperor ascended to godhood in this house. Was she referring to these carvings?

I studied the rest of them. While most of the pictures showed bats preying on mortals, one particular fresco caught my eye. This one appeared to show a story in a sequence. Two men—twins, from the way they were similarly painted—entered a dark house with blowguns, only to be attacked by the Bat-King. They both hid to protect themselves while waiting for the sun to rise again. One of the two dared to peek out to see the coming sunrise, only for the Bat-King to snatch his head off his shoulders and carry it away.

The fresco continued on to a frightful scene: the surviving twin was forced to play in a ballcourt against demons, with his brother’s head as the ball.

Quite the gruesome tale. The last scene turned into a terrible tragedy: the survivor was defeated by the Bat-King and decapitated, with his head hung from a tree. Is this referencing the First Emperor?

It seemed quite likely to me. These carvings probably represented the early days of the empire.

I noticed a white-haired woman praying at the tree where the second twin’s head was hanging from. My eyes narrowed when I observed a tiny, yet telling detail: the picture of a black bird perched on her shoulder.

An owl.

I stared at that picture for a moment, my mind furiously trying to make sense out of it. My eyes lingered at the end of the wall and the corridor beyond. Though it portrayed a grim tale, I had the gut feeling this fresco was incomplete. Perhaps the rest awaited me further inside this ruin?

I’m getting thirsty. Inhaling the dust made me start coughing as I walked through the corridors. A knot formed in my stomach too. Not from fear, but… something else. I checked myself with the Gaze, but didn’t see anything. Strange.

I doubted it was a disease, since I had already fought that fear in the house prior. Did the dust carry some form of poison? I summoned the Cloak by promising I would give money to the empire’s poor and surrounded myself with a layer of peaceful, floating winds.

My throat cleared of the dust, but that strange sensation in my stomach failed to abate.

With no other lead to pursue other than finding the other frescos, I walked into the hallway. It proved terribly cramped, with its ceiling hardly high enough for me to stand upright. My Cloak spell wiped up a small dust storm with each step. Although I knew Mother faced these trials before me, it seemed like no one had visited this place since time immemorial. I took a turn at one point, and then another until I reached the next room over.

The next vault was much smaller than the entrance hall, yet quite the sight nonetheless. Its arched, cracked ceiling was painted dark blue with tiny gems representing the stars. The statue of a great bat built from fossilized wood occupied its center, a ghostlight bonfire burning within its mouth. It stared at me with crimson ruby eyes.

I destroyed it on the spot.

“Slice,” I said, calling upon the winds of chaos to behead the statue. A blade of sharpened air, born of the last breaths of the countless people I had killed, surged from my fingers and cut through its throat in an instant. The head rolled off and onto the dusty ground with a loud thump, but the body did not rise to attack me.

Disappointing. I would have expected a trick like enemies masquerading as statues. I checked on the head head, smiling at the clean cut that my spell left, and then scowling when I saw how it hardly grazed the wall behind it. I could behead a man with it, maybe cut a young tree, but it won’t cut through armor yet.

I checked the rest of the room for any trace of a trap or ambusher. I found none. Only my growling stomach broke the silence.

I put a hand on my chest as I felt bitter pangs of pain below my ribs. My stomach growled and my throat grew dry. I finally recognized the sensation, for I had spent so many years suffering from it.

Hunger.

I was growing hungry. Thirsty too.

This shouldn’t be possible. No one needed food or drinks in the Underworld. This place was doing something unnatural to me.

Was that what this house represented? Fear of starvation?

I guessed it was a primal experience common to all living beings, but I responded with a mere snort. I’d suffered from droughts and famines before. I’d spent my entire life until my imperial ascension being malnourished.

I’d grown up with hunger and wouldn’t let it distract me with panic.

Nonetheless, I took it as an ominous warning. Thirst and starvation sapped the body of strength. I didn’t know whether it worked the same in the Underworld, but this could be the House’s attempt to weaken me before it sent enemies to take my head. I remained alert for any threats as I searched the room for answers.

My eyes wandered to the walls, and the wind from my Cloak spell cleaned the stone in my wake. New carvings appeared, this time representing the woman from the previous room with two children of her own. Male twins; one crowned with the sun, the other with the moon, both born with white hair and blue eyes.

I recalled Queen Mictecacihuatl’s story of how the Fifth Sun and its moon came to be. I wondered if this fresco referred to the myth.

How does this all fit together? I glanced at the next picture in the sequence, which showed the two twins, now adults, venturing into the world. I noticed a strange artistic choice: similarly to their mother, who was always represented with an owl on her shoulder, both twins had an animal companion of their own. A golden bird for the sun-crowned brother… and a white bat for the moon-blessed one. Curious.

I wondered the meaning behind the animals’ presence until I reached the next picture. This one showcased the brothers in a reversed position: the sun-crowned one shot down a winged demon with his blowgun in the sky, while the moon-crowned one was shown with a scroll in hand and petitioning a great skull under the earth. I immediately recognized the latter.

King Mictlantecuhtli.

This carving had to represent Mictlan’s king, and the moon brother’s descent underground on a journey through the Underworld. If so, then the animals on the siblings’ shoulders most likely represented their Tonalli. Their totems.

A bat Nahualli crowned with the moon carrying a scroll…

A gnawing doubt formed in my heart, followed by the bitter pangs of growing hunger. I was too engrossed by the pictures to pay attention to the latter. The next one, which completed this room’s fresco, showed the brothers hunting catfish near a river while four women watched on.

Four women.

Not one more, not one less.

I stared at the picture for a very long while, knowing this couldn’t be a coincidence. I became so entranced that I searched for any tiny detail I may have missed. The four women appeared utterly unremarkable compared to the twins, like footnote characters in somebody else’s story. The artist hardly bothered to give them distinctive appearances. The way they sat behind the moon-brother though, like children listening to a parent teaching them how to fish, only strengthened my suspicions.

The pangs of my hunger only grew more bitter, with no tests nor enemies yet in sight. Something wasn’t right.

I rushed over to the next room to see the rest of the frescos. This hallway was even more cramped than the previous one, to the point I had to crouch to walk through it. My Cloak blew a cloud of dust ahead of me.

I soon crawled into a Nightkin’s tomb.

I couldn’t call it anything else. A layer of sand covered a cracked floor and withered stems of fossilized torches were held by carved sconces. A narrow staircase led to a raised dais and an obsidian altar on which rested the corpse of a giant bat.

I had fought lesser Nightkin last night, yet this long-dead creature put them all to shame. Even reduced to a withered husk with pale dry skin and moldy, yellow bones, the monster was easily thrice the size of its lesser kind. It lay on its back, its wings folded in what could pass for a funeral position. Its flayed head stared at the ceiling with empty holes for eyes, with a crown of horns sticking out of its skull. I’d never seen a Nightkin with those.

Why would a vampire be buried in Xibalba? How could it even leave bones at all? The Nightkin I’d killed turned to dust when slain.

Though my Gaze spell detected no sign of magic, I immediately prepared to cast an offensive spell should the corpse begin to move. I saw words carved onto the altar as I stepped up its stairs, and quickly recognized the language as the same ancient dialect used in the First Emperor’s codices.

I am no mortal bat.

I am Camazotz.

I am a god.

Camazotz?

“Camazotz?” I muttered to myself and instantly regretted it. The thirst turned my throat so dry it hurt to speak.

I’d never heard of a god with that name, let alone a bat one. Besides, I had met true deities in the past. I had cowered in the First Emperor’s shadow, stood in the presence of King Mictlantecuhtli, and seen the true face of Queen Mictecacihuatl. I would expect one of their equals to look more impressive in its demise; or to enjoy a more prestigious resting place than a dusty chamber in Xibalba’s Houses of Bats.

I gazed into the monster’s chest and found no flame, no embers of a dead sun, not even dry blood. If there ever was any spark of divinity contained in this old shell, it was long gone. This well had dried up.

Dried up?

I didn’t know why these words echoed in my mind at that moment, but they rang in my skull for a while. Something about this oversized Nightkin’s corpse felt disturbingly familiar to me. The way its calcified skin shrank into a husk of itself, without a single trace of dried blood filling its shriveled veins, reminded me of far too many other people.

Could it be? My questions found their answer when I checked the monster’s throat: two familiar, fang-shaped holes in its dry skin and calcified flesh. A chill traveled down my spine as I realized how this creature perished.

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This Nightkin had been preyed upon by another of its kind.

It didn’t make any sense. The Nightkin had no Teyolia for their kind to feast upon. Their blood was as black and rotten as those of diseased corpses. The only reason I could see for them to cannibalize each other was for the sake of a gruesome execution.

I was missing something; a key piece of a puzzle whose solution I knew was within my grasp.

Dust fell upon my shoulder and glided off the Cloak’s barrier of wind. I looked up at the ceiling and found myself staring at the remaining frescoes. I bore witness to a cracked landscape of disparate pictures forming a coherent whole.

I saw the twins facing the Bat-King in battle, only for the moon-brother to fall. His sibling cried over his corpse while their foe laughed. His prayers were answered, but not in the way he would have expected.

A red-eyed shadow arose from the dead twin’s remains, dark and hungry.

My skin crawled at the sight of its all too familiar crimson gaze. The Bat-King cowered in the face of the great darkness, but it was no use. The shadow feasted on his heart while the surviving twin fled into sunlit mountains.

The final picture sent shivers down my spine.

The Bat-King lay dead and shriveled, his chest empty and his throne shattered. The four women from the previous fresco knelt before the darkness, which had now taken on a form of its own: a great winged beast crowned in the glow of a scarlet moon, whose crimson, shining eyes stared at me with the untold malice of endless hatred, and a vile hunger that no flesh nor soul could satisfy. Their malevolent glint filled my vision and mind in a sea of red and screams, the malicious glare tightening the chains binding my soul and casting dust upon my face–

A foreign sensation jolted me out of my trance.

Dirt hit my face, with no barrier of wind to keep it out.

My Cloak was gone.

“What…” I coughed dust and a terrible pain seized my chest. A slight shakiness took over my body the moment I recovered from my hallucination, my hands trembling. “Wha…”

I looked at my shriveled fingers and saw the bones through my withered skin.

My arms had shriveled until my flesh had all but vanished. I hadn’t noticed it disappearing; in fact, I hardly felt anything. My hands had grown numb and the mere act of moving them demanded extraordinary effort. Dust covered my skin in so many places, as if I had stood in place for days.

How much time did I waste watching that nightmarish picture?

“Cloa…” My withered vocal cords couldn’t even complete the word. More dust fell upon me from above. When I managed to stare up again, I saw that the frescos had grown larger… no. Not larger.

Closer.

The ceiling had buckled, with large dents in the stone pushing down. Its corners bent and twisted under a crushing weight. A great pressure pressed on the room from all sides.

I looked around in realization, my blurring eyes staring at the hallway I had used to enter. I remembered how I had to crouch to travel through it. I thought it had been smaller than its predecessor. I was wrong.

They had both shrunk.

The entire tomb was closing down on me like a great beast’s fangs.

I tried to call upon the Doll spell, so that my talons of darkness would break through the ceiling. My sorcery, the very power that kept my hope alive in these dark times, failed me. A wave of agony surged through my throat and my chest the moment I tried to summon my spell. Even my Gaze had flickered and died.

I looked down at my ribs in panic.

My raging heart-fire had shrunk into pale embers.

Dread seized me as I finally understood my mistake. The supernatural hunger within these walls didn’t feast on nutrients; it fed on my magic. On my soul.

I cursed my foolishness. I’d been so focused on the threat of hidden enemies, so starved for answers, that I failed to pay attention to the real danger. No monsters would come to kill me. They didn’t need to.

The closing walls would simply crush me to paste with no spell to stop them.

I looked around, my weakened neck creaking when it turned. I saw no clear exit except two hallways: the one I used to enter this room and another fast shrinking. With no other option, I ran towards the latter in search of an escape route.

My weakened knees failed to support my weight. I collapsed when I tried to climb down the dais’ staircase, the sickening noise of bones breaking echoing into the crumbling chambers. My left leg had twisted into an unnatural angle. I had so few muscles remaining that I hardly felt any pain.

Pushing past my growing exhaustion and weakness. I crawled into the corridor like a worm into a closing mouth. I was getting desperate, and panic let me tap into hidden reserves of strength. I entered the darkness, breathing dirt and sand, seeing nothing but a veil of dust. My skull burned with the strongest headache I’d ever felt.

The walls cracked and twisted around me. I knew they would give way any second now and bury me in a blanket of stone. I understood which other fear this place represented besides famine now.

The fear of being trapped.

Of being buried.

I crawled ahead even as the ceiling started pushing down on my back. Dust had long replaced air, and darkness swallowed light. Yet I didn’t falter. My fingers hurt with every inch of dirt they sank into.

Then I hit something.

A smooth layer of stone stood ahead of me and pushed me back.

I’d hit a dead end.

No, no, no! I tried to move back and escape, only for the ceiling and floor to trap me in a tight embrace. The pressure had warped the walls into a coffin of stone keeping me tightly bound. Neither my weak kicks nor pushes would make them move.

I couldn’t turn anymore.

I would have raged and fought back if I had the strength and space left; as it was, I could hardly move my hands. The walls pressed on me from all sides into a crushing hug. The earth wrapped me in its fatal embrace, slowly grinding my bones together.

Was this how my tale concluded? Crushed to death while powerless, and denied any answer while I was on the verge of obtaining the truth?

I won’t allow it!

But what could I do? My strength was leaving me, and I had only seconds left before the walls crushed me. The hunger sapping my heart deprived me of my strength. What else would renew it?

An idea crossed my mind.

I had something to feed the fire with.

I squeezed my arms close to my chest the best I could, my shoulders cracking as the walls pushed against them. I slipped my fingers through my ribs and put them into my heart-fire.

Then they burned.

The pain proved stronger than the numbness which had overtaken my limbs. My soul feasted on my own flesh in an act of spiritual self-cannibalism, consuming my body to fuel its sorcery.

I called upon the Doll.

I’d traded away my two hands for a dozen talons. They pushed back against the walls with all of my strength and determination. The stone wept at the pressure from within and without.

The otherworldly strength forcing the tomb to close on me did not let go. A battle of wills ensued as the earth tried to push me into its crushing embrace. My talons could crush rock and tear men apart, but they had to push in all directions to keep me from getting crushed.

Clenching my rotting teeth, I shoved my arms into my Teyolia. I coughed and hissed as my flesh and bones turned to coal and ashes in the furnace of my soul. My starved heart-fire consumed indiscriminately. Yet I would rather feed myself to the flame rather than give this place the honor of killing me.

My talons pushed, and pushed, and pushed until pieces of stone collapsed on my neck. Streams of sand began to leak from the cracks and slowly filled what little space I managed to scrounge for myself. This only hardened my resolve. I growled while directing my talons to exploit any weakness in the closing walls I could use to escape. My claws dug into rifts and widened them until the earth screeched.

The floor collapsed under me.

I fell into a narrow shaft so long and sinuous that it felt like I was on my way to hit the earth’s bowels. I tried to catch a grip on anything with my talons, only for the walls to turn into brittle sand at my touch.

I landed on a floor of soft mud in a dark expanse.

For the first time since I set foot in this place, I breathed air instead of dust; a foul miasma filled with a nauseating stench of rot, yes, but air nonetheless. A single, bright torch cast a bubble of light in a sea of shadows. My blurring eyes struggled to acclimate to it, and when they did, I saw that I was no longer alone.

A monster sat behind a dinner table, watching me with two jackal heads and four hungry eyes.

The monstrous beast was the size of a house even while seated on a throne of jagged stone. Its body was that of a thin, starved man with petrified bones and withered, oily black skin. Two necks stood atop its uneven shoulders; the right one was a skull filled with darkness, the left one a statue of cracked stone. Both studied me with a mix of compassion and malice.

Two Lords of Terror in one body.

“Are you hungry, child?” the right head asked, its voice akin to the raspy rattle of a starved soul. “Are you thirsty, child?”

My dry lips failed to form words, so I nodded slowly in response.

“Then feast with us,” the monster’s left head said with a voice deeper than a cave’s echo. It waved a clawed hand at the table and a seat of bones appeared out of nowhere to welcome me. “You must feed to grow big and strong.”

With a broken leg and burning stumps for arms, I had to use the Doll spell’s limbs to force myself onto the seat. A gruesome feast was set for me on the dinner table: a vile assortment of rancid milk cups, plates of diseased meat, and baskets of rotten fruits sweetened with ashes. This meal was about as disgusting as Chamiaholom’s diet of human flesh.

I gorged myself on it nonetheless.

I was so starved, so consumed with hunger and thirst, that I consumed indiscriminately. I fought against the nausea of drinking poisoned milk and crunched maggots infesting the flesh with ravenous exaltation. I cleaned the plates in a minute, my disgust drowned in the sweet, sweet release from the bitter pangs of starvation.

“We are Ahalpuh and Ahalgana, the buried and the starved,” the stone head introduced itself. “Many hungers go unsatiated. Love, wealth… knowledge.”

“What will you do to satisfy your appetite?” the other head asked.

By now, I had recovered enough strength to answer through a mouthful of food.

“Everything,” I rasped without fear or hesitation.

“Is that so?” the skull head asked. I noticed that this one asked questions, and the other spoke with statements. “Shall you show us?”

The monster presented me with another plate, one of my size that appeared out of thin air.

A woman lay on it.

A pale, gaunt woman no older than thirty, who had gone bald from starvation. Her mouth was sewn shut, her hands and legs bound like a stuffed turkey. Her skin was seasoned with rotten sauce and her back served on a bed of rot.

Her weak, milky-white eyes remained wide open though. They stared at me with fear; whether she begged me for salvation or the sweet release of a true death, I couldn’t say.

She was still alive. I could hear her heart beating in her chest.

Was she another of the Lords’ illusions? An imitation of life, or a genuine victim abducted and denied death’s salvation?

“Mourn her not, for men are pitiful beasts condemned to starve,” the stone head said, its voice so sweet and soothing. “They hunger for so many things. Food, wealth, knowledge, love, yet a human’s appetite is never satisfied. They are born hungry and die starving. Only in death do they know satiety.”

“What else are you, other than a devourer?” the other head asked me. “Have you not done worse?”

I would have hesitated once.

But neither did I fold.

Instead of feasting on the woman’s flesh as these demons expected me to, I used the Doll to slice her open. The woman whined as her blood stained the plate and then cried when I shoved my bloody, burning arm stumps into her wound. Our blood mixed the same way mine and Nenetl’s did last night. This time, I did not give anything.

I took.

The woman’s Teyolia was starved and weak, but mine was hungrier. I drained her of her wavering lifeforce and vitality in an instant. Memories flashed through my mind as I did; brief and bloody remembrances of gnashing teeth closing on her flesh and screams haunting the darkness.

I regained my strength by consuming her own through Seidr. By the time I removed my stumps from her corpse, I had grown new hands and she breathed her last.

I gave this woman the quick release of death.

“Do you think it is nobler to kill a woman than to devour her?” the skull head asked me. “Is it not cruel to kill a beast for sustenance and yet waste its meat?”

“I am cruel,” I replied coldly. “Animals hunt to feed, but I only kill for power’s sake.”

The stone head let out a chuckle akin to crumbling rocks. “Your mother ate her meal.”

I suppressed a shiver of disgust and answered the taunt with silence.

“Your will is stronger than her own,” the demon said. “You are right. Your hunger for power shall guide you well, for that well is truly bottomless. A mighty demon you have become, and greater still you shall rise.”

“Will you ask your question?” the other head asked. “Do we not sense thy curiosity?”

A question was indeed burning on my lips.

“What was that creature in the tomb?” I asked. “Was it truly a god?”

“Have you not guessed Camazotz's identity yet?” The skull head let out a sinister laugh. “Surely you must have seen the broken statue outside our city, have you not?”

“There was once a man who hated the shadow of his soul as much as you despise your captors,” the other head said. “He hungered for justice and happiness, but in the end he too starved and devoured himself. The hungry became hunger.”

I meditated on their answer for a moment. I recalled that statues of totems stood outside Xibalba, with the bat one being the only one shattered. The shadow of the soul… a bat standing on a man’s shoulder and guiding him through the Underworld… and that crown of horns…

The shadow likely referenced to a Nahualli's totem. The First Emperor was a Tzinacantli, a chosen of the bat. If he loathed his own reflection, then...

“This Camazotz was the story’s Bat-King,” I guessed. “He's linked to the Tzinacantli’s totem somehow; he must have been its incarnation on earth or close enough. The First Emperor consumed and usurped him during his godly ascent, taking on his form and duties.”

I understood it all now. The First Emperor had consumed his own totem, his soul’s reflection, in a cannibalistic feast. He had usurped his mastery over bats the same way his daughters attempted to steal his own divinity.

The Lords of Terror smiled at me in silence. They had dangled the answer in front of me, and then rejoiced in denying it to me.

My hunger for answers would go unsatisfied tonight.

“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “I will find the truth on my own.”

My resolve pleased the Lords of Terrors. The skull headed-one nodded in appreciation. “Shall we bestow a blessing upon you then, son of chaos?”

“We gift you with the Pit, the earthbound fangs of Xibalba,” the other head declared. “Mark that which you despise with your blood and utter their name. The House of Fright shall receive your offering with gnashing teeth and an endless fall.”

I sat still as they caressed my Teyolia with fingers of bone and stone. Knowledge flowed into the fire of my soul, opening my mind to a new secret–

Then someone yanked my chains.

A pain greater than anything I’d ever experienced seized me with such suddenness that I fell over my chair. My soul ached and howled in agony, my chest burning and bursting at the seams. I held onto my ribs, unable to do anything other than scream.

The Lords of Terror looked upon me with what could pass for concern. “It seems your time has come to an end.”

“Was it too early?” the other half of the duo giggled cruelly. “Shall we see?”

I was yanked out of the House of Fright and back into the waking world.

Something was terribly wrong.

I had gone to the Underworld and back so often that I could sense any change in the shift. This time felt different, and not in a good way. My sorcerer’s instincts told me that I had woken up from a nightmare into a different one.

The pain in my chest was only matched by the one in my hands and feet. Spikes of wood impaled them, and my back was strapped to a table of stone facing the night sky. I had been stripped naked and my mouth gagged.

“Have you slept well, songbird?”

Iztacoatl’s face loomed above me, alongside Sugey’s and the Jaguar Woman’s. That alone would have been cause for alarm, but their expressions immediately filled me with dread. Iztacoatl was smiling; Sugey glared at me; and the Jaguar Woman was filled with the same cold fury that possessed her when she ordered Lady Sigrun’s execution.

Something happened while I was asleep.

“Don’t make that face,” Iztacoatl mocked me. “You knew this would happen one day.”

She leaned on me to better whisper into my ear.

“You’ve been sold out, Iztac.”