I had the radio on, just to drown out the sound of rain plinking against Philomena's roof. Blue Oyster Cult telling me not to fear the reaper felt oddly appropriate, so I turned it up to an ear-damaging level.
It wasn’t storming yet, but it would be sooner than later. Unlike the other magically-driven storms Ahuizotl had conjured up, you could feel this one building even without the benefit of magic. It had started with a smattering of mist right as night fell, and in the span of the drive from my end of town to the opposite, it had grown to a hefty spring shower. The steady rumble of thunder trumpeted promises of lightning storms later in the night.
I had time. Something in the knowledge Fiddler had given me told me there was still time to save the kid. I didn’t know the specifics, because Fiddler hadn’t wanted to give them to me, but I knew that Ahuizotl’s ceremony was going to take some time to roll out. The slow start to the rain confirmed it. All the same, I dug my spurs into Philomena and rode her hard the whole way.
Even though the place I was going was at the other end of town, I’d decided it was faster to go around the city than through it. Going through the city meant dealing with traffic and cops and all manner of road rules. Taking the backroads meant those things were just suggestions, and any cop I ran into I could compel into escorting me the rest of the way if I wanted to. Heck, burning hot as I was, I could probably talk the entire C.C.P.D. into following me into the dankest pit of Tartarus if I had the mind for it.
I felt strong. Invincible. It was the kind of feeling I usually turned to the bottle for, but I was clearer of mind than I’d ever been while drunk. I hadn’t even needed to eat the whole apple – it was largely symbolic, after all, as everything with magic tended to be. One bite was all it took to pump me with enough magic to make me feel like I could wrestle the whole world to the ground, like Atlas suplexing his burden. Fiddler packed way more magic into that bit of fruit than I’d ever gotten from him before. It was a rare treat in the old days to get even sips of his power through the small gifts he gave me – like his inks – and this weren’t no sip, let me tell you. It was a dangerous amount, to be frank, and if I hadn’t been Sunset Shimmer, it would definitely be a fatal dose.
But I was me, and I didn’t die. So hooray for being me, for once.
Why had he added that much magic, though? Maybe he was just giving me a big hit since it had been so long? Probably trying to hook me again with a taste of the good stuff, like any good pusher might. It was suspicious as hell, but I wasn’t about to look the gift horse in the mouth.
I just kept one eye on the road and one on the juju I was fiddling with in my lap. The emergency kit in my car wasn’t exactly a treasure trove, but it had a couple of useful things, and thanks to Fiddler’s apple, I had the power to make them work for me. Whether what I was working on would actually be any use, that was anyone’s guess. At least keeping my hands busy kept me calm.
Funny thing – the place I was headed to was just past the spot where Ahuizotl and his big Irish dummy had set their little trap for me. I even slowed down a little as I drove past the access road leading to the farmhouse, just to rubberneck the scene of the crime. A couple of traffic cones wrapped with reflective police tape had been left in the muddy road, marking the path leading to the site of the fire. Whoever owned that waterlogged strawberry field had probably called it in.
About a mile down, past the ruined fields and removed from any living soul that might’ve been affected by the recent flooding, was a wide river with a concrete bridge spanning it. It was probably about twenty feet across – maybe a little shy of that – and practically screaming with the amount of water rushing under the bridge.
The knowledge stuffed into my head told me to drive over the bridge, so I did. It felt weird following Fiddler’s directions like this. It was in my head, but wordless, like intuition or muscle memory. I just knew that I had to make a right on the utility road on the other side of the bridge, with the same certainty that drives birds to fly south every winter.
Uncomfortable or not, I knew better than to second guess my newfound bird-like instinct, so I drove down the little strip of asphalt that followed the river on the north side. I followed it for about another hundred feet or so until I came to a sluice gate. There was a squat little concrete box next to it, with an official-looking seal stenciled onto the door that I recognized as belonging to the city’s municipal irrigation district – same as the one at the top of my water bill every month.
I got out here, stepping into the rain and frowning as I realized I wasn’t getting wet. The small traces of Ahuizotl’s magic in the rain seemed like it was repelled by the inordinate amount of magic in my body. It was an interesting phenomenon, and if I’d had time, I would’ve loved to play around with it.
I conjured some light in my hand, holding it out like a flashlight, and stomped off into the mud. A little bit away from the utility station, hidden behind some bushes and dangerously close to the river, I could just barely make out the sound of a tarp flapping in the gusting wind. Someone had set up a camp out here, piling up old appliances and refuse – shopping carts and old baby strollers and the like that had probably been fished out of the river – to make the framework of a tent around a dead tree. I’d seen setups like this when I was younger. Little slapdash shanties homeless people put together in rough approximation of a home. Folks driven to that kind of desperation usually built their shelters out of sight, where people were less likely to take offense and call the cops in for a good old fashion rousting. It was rare to see one this far outside of the city, though.
There was a pile of rags in the shape of a man leaning against the tree acting as the tentpole of the encampment. He sat bundled up against the cold, completely still, his face obscured by the brim of a dirty ball cap. He smelled awful, like sweat and urine and worse. It was a smell I was familiar with. When you were homeless, sometimes you didn’t have the opportunity for hygiene, and other times you just didn’t have the desire for it. Most people would assume the stink coming off the man was just that, but I knew better. He had another smell just under it all. Beneath the smell of neglect, he smelled like death.
“Go away,” the man said, his voice as rotten as the tree he was leaning against. The wind blew, and the tarp over his head snapped in the air like a whip crack, as if to punctuate his demand.
“Shut up and let me in,” I said, ignoring the warning and walking closer, until I was close enough to kick him if I wanted.
“Go away,” he repeated in the exact same voice, right down to the pitch. An automated response, like you’d get from a recording, which was basically what it was.
I looked down inside the pile of rags and flesh with a sorceress’ eyes, looking for traces of magic. I found what I was looking for, festering in the poor guy’s stomach like a parasite. I took hold of it with my magic and yanked it out.
“I said let me in.”
The thing in front of me finally moved, lifting its head to glare at me with empty eye sockets. The man had been long dead, the features of his face having either rotted away or dried up until all that was left was the mummified rictus of a scream. Darkness oozed out of his cavities, from his eyes and ears and nostrils, but it poured most unsettling from his mouth, like a statue vomiting water into a fountain in a fancy hotel.
The darkness crept along the ground, reaching out to me. I let it come, suppressing the urge to pull away as it moved up my body. It was quick, but not as quick as I would have liked. Soon enough it had covered my face, going in my mouth and nostrils – the reverse of the way it had come out of the corpse – and flowed straight down my very being. The primitive instincts in my brain sent my body into panic mode, kicking my heart into high gear and trying to move my hands to my throat to try and clear away the foreign substance. I fought those urges down with a sorcerer’s discipline, letting the slime do its thing. I could still breathe, even as the rank, viscous goop filled my lungs. It was a weird sensation, like all the warmth in my body was draining out through my feet. The process took less than a minute, and once it was over I was somewhere else.
“Necromancers,” I grumbled, shivering as I tried to mentally bury the sense-memory of slime filling my lungs. “Even their portals are disgusting.”
What wasn’t disgusting was the place I had ended up. I was standing atop the surface of a lake, the water beneath my feet solid as ice, though I could see clear through to the myriad schools of fish and other aquatic critters swimming about beneath me. All around me were floating islands, drifting on invisible air currents, with massive waterfalls flowing down, seemingly from nowhere and without end. And in the sky above was a single sun, glowing a vibrant, alien blue.
Tlalocan. This was the place that Caballeron had told me about, and the knowledge that Fiddler had stuffed in my head filled in the blanks on that explanation. This was an afterlife for victims of drowning, and sacrifices given to Tlaloc by Ahuizotl’s pets. They waited at the edge of the water, emerging from lakes and rivers to snatch unsuspecting people and drag them beneath the surface. I’d seen it myself the night I’d seen an ahuizotl jump out of that duck pond at the college. And Clavus had said that Ginger had pulled the same trick they had, popping up out of puddles. Water teleportation was a neat trick. If Fiddler hadn’t known about a secondary entrance – likely made to allow Ginger to come and go as he pleased – I would never have found this place.
It was beautiful, to be honest. Hardly the Hell of Drowning I was expecting. The water seemed to stretch on to infinity in every direction, and the roaring crash of thousands of waterfalls in the distance was better than any white noise machine I’d ever heard. Some of the little fish swimming below me had even gotten curious, coming to the surface to nibble at the mud on the soles of my boots.
It was awe-inspiring, like a mural on the side of some dude’s bitchin’ van. It was the sort of place you could just walk forever trying to find the edge of. Just walk and walk, until you couldn’t walk anymore, until you starved to death with schools of fish beneath your feet that you couldn’t reach and water you couldn’t drink.
“Oh, I’m soooo totally going to fall for this,” I said to no one in particular. “You think this is my first time popping into another realm or something?”
I took a step downwards, focusing my intent on moving forward and down and backwards all at once. The world twisted in place around me, and gravity pulled at the back of my navel like I was one of those talking plushies with a string on the back.
I went face-first into the ground, going in through water and coming out through viscous – almost mucousy – mud. Slick, grainy muck clung to my face as I dragged myself out of the ground. I clawed at the slime, trying to find enough purchase to haul myself up with. My hand brushed against something solid and I grasped it with both hands, pulling myself free, gasping for air.
It was easier to breathe now, and I was finally able to remember that I was a super powerful sorceress, jacked to all heck by demon juice. I swiped at my face with magic, scraping every bit of the mud off me until I no longer looked like I’d fallen out of Swamp Thing’s backside.
It sure wasn’t pretty, but at least I’d gotten in. That door hadn’t been left there for me, and coming in without the key to the door meant kicking it down, more or less. You don’t do that without getting a few splinters.
Yeah, this was more like what I had expected for the home realm of a crooked rain deity. I was in a swamp, surrounded by decaying… everything. What wasn’t pools of fetid, brackish water was mud and grass that grew in sparse patches that reached up to my neck. The sickly sweet smell of decay was a heady spice in the air, adding pungent notes to the earthy melange you’d expect in your run-of-the-mill swamp. All this water, and not a drop of it clean. Whatever this god’s protection had meant to the people who’d once worshipped him, this was all that was left of whatever grace Tlaloc might have once had.
First thing I was going to do when this was all over? Shower. I swore that to myself with everything in me. I wanted this stink, and whatever was growing in this rot-sodden swamp, off my skin and out of my clothes.
The solid thing I’d grasped in my panic had turned out to be a long, gnarled root that stuck out of the ground with no discernable source. The nearest tree was far enough away that I probably couldn’t even hit it with a rock from where I was, and the patch of relatively solid ground I was standing on was soft enough that I sank up to my ankles.
That big blue sun was here, too, but the light it gave wasn’t so quaint as it was in the other place. It tinged everything with a queer glow, like the blacklight in a headshop, but somehow… wrong. Unlike in the other place, the light it gave here did nothing to lighten the firmament, which was dark as night and dotted with countless unfamiliar stars. It was less a sun and more a hole in the fabric of the sky. The dim light it radiated was subdued enough that I could look directly at it, but I couldn’t do it for more than a few seconds without feeling the distinct gurgle of indigestion building in my gut.
A little tip from one of The Wise, you should always pay attention to things like that, even when dealing with magic. The living body is a fragile machine, and a rumbly-tumbly was usually the first indicator that something was having a bad effect on you – bad juju and bad pork had a lot more in common than you’d think.
That big blue star was just bleeding magic over everything its light touched, strong enough to corrupt, even change whatever it could reach. I couldn’t help but think of the story Fiddler had just told me. How the Aztec gods had fashioned themselves into suns to bring light to the world.
Was this what Ahuizotl wanted? To bring down the sun to replace it with one like this? To flood the Earth with Tlaloc’s magic? Maybe not to entomb his god within it, but perhaps make a crack between the dimensions so the light of this world could reach across the veil? If it worked, it’d be the largest portal I’d ever heard of, just pouring magic into a realm that had none of its own to fight back with.
It was ambitious, I had to give him that. End of the world villainy may have been Saturday morning cartoon stuff, but this was definitely a season finale plotline if I’d ever seen one.
Fiddler’s knowledge had gotten me this far, but its usefulness stopped once I was past the front door. Considering the little ahuizotls could teleport through water, that entrance had probably been there so Ginger – and only Ginger – could come and go as he needed. Breaking in meant I probably wasn’t wherever that door was supposed to take you, which could either be a deviation of a few feet or a few thousand miles. I was willing to bet that I was closer than I’d expect, though.
Still, I was going to need more than hunches if I was going to save the kid in a timely manner. What I really needed was a guide, and I knew just how to get one. All I had to do was gather some magic in an outstretched hand, pucker my lips, and give a whistle.
Dozens of little blue motes of light immediately flitted out of the grass all around me. They floated right up to me, darting in and out of my hand, blinking and twinkling with playful gaiety.
Experience told me that places like this were full of spirits, and I definitely hadn’t been let down. This place was full of water spirits, born from the surplus of a rain god’s power, which had soaked into the very ground and diffused in the air. The little bit of demon magic I was holding was quite the novelty to them, and they all took turns to sip at it, like curious hummingbirds lapping sugar water from my palm.
Back in the human realm I would’ve required a summoning ritual, live sacrifice and all, to call even a quarter of this many spirits. This place being what it was, they were so in abundance that such things weren’t necessary. All it took was a whistle and a taste of magic they’d never seen before.
A particularly brave spirit decided to stay a little longer than the rest, perching in my hand and practically wallowing in the small measure of magic I was offering it. I cupped my hands, holding it gently as I would a butterfly, and fed it some more.
“Hey, little guy,” I whispered to it. The sound of my voice made it wiggle and flash affectionately. “You want to help me find someone?”
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a Swiss Army knife I’d grabbed out of the mambo kit in Philomena’s trunk. The spirit in my palm flew up, temporarily cowed by the presence of cold steel, but didn’t stray far. The rest of the swarm of spirits, all far less brave than he was, hovered around me, winking curiously as I cut open my palm.
Spirits are really particular about the kind of offerings they like. Blood is the thing they like best, but sometimes you can get away with empowered trinkets – Taoist prayer slips and the like. Lacking such trinkets, and finding myself further lacking in live chickens for sacrifice, I was going to have to give up some of my own blood to make a temporary pact with this spirit.
The spirit came back as soon as it saw blood, sipping daintily at the flow. It pulsed as it sucked at the wound, and every sip made it grow just a little brighter. I let it have its fill and licked my palm clean. The wound was already knitting, thanks to how jacked I was on magic.
“Okay, Blinkie, I’m looking for a kid, can you help me find her?”
The little ball of light trembled gleefully, happy to play this new game where it was asked to find someone. Spirits weren’t really alive, they were just clumps of condensed magical essence that had gained a small measure of intellect. It was like if plankton was smart enough to do chores, and spritely enough to enjoy it.
It spun around me, as if it was sniffing to try and pick up my scent. It was trying to discern my will through the ritual connection we’d made. I helped it along by holding an image of Twilight in my head, remembering the way she smiled and the way she made me feel, my memories of how she smelled – everything I had on file in my head that could help the spirit. The feelings were the most important bit. Spirits were big on emotions, and concentrating on my attachment to Twilight made the spirit bounce and shimmy in excitement.
It seemed to have found whatever it wanted, and sped off into the marsh.
I took off after it, sprinting to keep pace. Magic was the only thing keeping me from slipping in mud as I ran. The spirit didn’t really seem to care about how easy it was to follow, since it could fly and all. All I could do was cast a spell that would help me keep my footing and hope I didn’t run into a pit or something.
At first blush my guide didn’t seem like it had anything like a heading. It was seemingly just running, doubling back and veering off at random, like a dog that had slipped its leash and was chasing invisible squirrels. Its behaviour was worrying, but I knew better than to distrust a native resident in a strange land, so I followed, hoping this wouldn’t end up as a waste of time.
It was about five minutes into the run when I realized that there was some method to the thing’s madness. It had just made a sharp one-hundred-degree turn to the left, and I followed it, stumbling as the mushy ground became firm in the span of a single step.
I managed to slow myself down without getting hurt too bad, but I still slammed shoulder-first into a tree and practically bounced off the trunk and onto my back. I laid there, alternating between moaning and gasping for air as I massaged the ache in my shoulder. Fiddler’s magic may have kept me from getting tired, but it didn’t magically fix decades of smoker’s lung. I could sprint all day long without needing a break if I had to, but it would be a miserable time if I tried.
Stop me if I sound like a broken record, but man, did I need to quit smoking.
My brief respite was cut short as the spirit bobbed up and down in what I could only assume was anger, getting right in my face and twinkling its displeasure in strobing bursts of light. I brushed it aside and got to my feet to take stock of where we were.
The little spirit’s path had taken us from bubbling swamps into a lush and vibrant jungle, all in a matter of steps. This was one of those non-Euclidean space deals, and that realization settled on my brow in a scowl. This sort of thing tended to happen when undirected magic was thick enough to affect the space around it, and it was never a good time when you were caught up in it. It was like a house of mirrors, but the mirrors were actually potentially deadly pitfalls into molten lava, or right off of a cliff.
To make matters worse, the jungle didn’t look all too friendly. The trees were growing strangely under the influence of the blue sun. Trees in a forest, or jungle, or what have you, would always try to outgrow one another – the taller they were, the less they had to fight other trees for sunlight. It was the closest trees came to having intelligence, to reach upwards and out, to spread their leaves to the sky to selfishly take as much sun as they could.
These trees didn’t seem to care about all that mess. They grew in winding, twisty ways. Some of them had trunks that curled around like a corkscrew and plunged straight back down into the ground, while others were round and fat like they had been rolled into place, rather than grown. Trunks as thick around as a man wound together, braiding like lengths of rope and knotting with others into impenetrable walls of tree flesh.
The little spirit bobbed in my face again, flashing to get my attention as it zipped off, weaving between gaps in the trees. I took off after it, doing my best to keep up. It was hard going, cutting down vines as thick as my bicep and burning anything that looked like it might have a taste for meat. Thankfully the spirit was mindful enough to do a few laps around the trees periodically, giving me the time I needed to catch up before darting off again.
We actually didn’t need to go all that much further, but the undergrowth had made it slow goings. My water spirit guide had halted the chase at the end of the treeline, spinning in circles like a dog chasing its tail as it waited for me to join it.
I managed to catch little glimpses of what had stalled the spirit, but I didn’t believe my eyes until I was finally clear of the trees and got a good look at the first artificial structure I’d seen since I got here. There, looming tall in the sky, was one of those step pyramid deals. I’d seen one on a postcard at a South Of The Border gift shop during my time out Southwest. The only difference was that this one lacked the busty Mexican girl straddling the pyramid like a titan in her one piece bikini and Wishing You Were Her.
The whole structure seemed to sit smack dab in the middle of another marsh, clear of anything but mud and pools of filthy water for at least two miles in any direction. I had to squint to see it in the awful shine of the blue star above, but there was more jungle on the other side of the clearing. It was like the trees were afraid to get any closer, and a streak of movement out the corner of my eye told me that the trees weren’t alone in that sentiment.
I glanced over my shoulder in time to see my guide abandon me. The little puff of luminescence was speeding away, and the kaleidoscope of colors it had previously been flashing was now a static danger-indicating red as it disappeared back into the jungle.
“Gee, I wonder if this is the place,” I murmured to myself as I watched a tendril of smoke rising from the top of the structure – a good indication that someone was home.
Something splashed in the water near me, close enough that I flinched in reflex. Tendrils of fire licked the air from my fingertips as I looked for the source of the noise. I saw nothing but eerie blue light reflecting in the muddy water.
The splash came again, small, but startling for the lack of any other sound. It was only a few feet away, and I craned my neck to peek over a rotting log that had fallen out of the thicket and into the mud. Something was crawling over it, trying to hoist itself out of the muck with clumsy, jerky movements, while another creature was mounting it.
The creatures were leathery and bulbous, like fat little toads, with stout maws like a crocodile’s, and manes like tiny lions. The one on the back – the larger of the two – jerked, and it didn’t look like an act of mating. The toad-thing trying to pull itself onto the log got yanked off, and the other one scrambled to try and take its place atop the perch.
The smaller creature had its teeth sunk into the fish-like tail of the larger one, while the big one was desperately trying to dislodge it. Little guys didn’t even seem to notice me, locked as they were in their insignificant game of King of the Hill.
Were Ahuizotl and I any different? Fighting over Twilight and the human world like they were the best perch in the swamp?
Yes. Yes we were much better than some monstrous toad-beasts, and that was a stupid corollary to draw. I clearly needed to get Twilight and I needed to get out of here, being alone with myself was making me pathetically ponderous.
It did make me wonder, though, just how many living things had been hiding in that jungle I’d just traipsed through. I wouldn’t do Twilight much good as a rescuer if I had to hobble up to her because some demony water moccasin took a bite out of my ankle.
Another splash pulled my attention back to my surroundings, one far larger than the tiny ruckus created by the toady turf war. A pair of massive jaws erupted from the water, snapping closed on the pair of frogs like a trap. The besotted wood they’d been fighting over did nothing to slow the lightning-fast clamp of teeth. Bits of wood and mud filled the air like flak, smattering against my face.
My hand went instinctively to the small leather pouch tied to a belt loop on my jeans. The grisgris inside was what I had been working on during the drive over from my meeting with Fiddler. I held it tightly as I watched one of Ahuizotl’s golems fling itself out of the muck like a seal sliding onto an ice floe. It laid there on its belly, chomping with steady, clockwork efficiency as it ground up a mouthful of splinters and bloody frog gristle.
The monster turned its head from side to side, its gory snout wrinkling as it sniffed the air and the snap of its jaws never stopping. Cilia had said they tracked by smell, and the charm at my waist was my own version of a druid trick meant to mask the scent of hunters from sharp-nosed prey. I figured that if the spell worked on living animals, it would work just as well on something made out of dead ones.
The spell didn’t let me down. The beast didn’t catch wind of me even after a good sniff at the air, and lowered its head to root around in the mud for more intruders into its territory. Little bubbles burbled up whenever it huffed, and it might have been cute if the thing wasn't just a big zombie.
Most of the golems I’d seen so far had been huge, but their size had been anything but natural. The method of their creation involved jamming pieces of smaller beasts together like big Lego towers made out of meat, so that even rats could make for a good guard dog if you got enough of the things. This one though, It looked like it must have once been a bear, and a big one at that, maybe a grizzly – definitely something from further up North than Canterlot, let alone Mexico. Of the abominations I’d seen bearing Ahuizotl’s name, this one looked the least Frankensteinish. There were a few places where the skin had been sewn up with hides from other beasts, like a big leathery patchwork doll, but otherwise it looked close enough to pass as a living thing if you were very far away.
The jaws just kept working, even as it rooted around in the mud for something else living to fill its maw. What it was doing couldn’t even be called eating. Everything just seemed to fall out of its mouth, mangled and punctured by yellowed fangs.
I was about to walk away and leave the thing to its business, but an idea tickling at the back of my head made me stop. I turned to look at the golem again, with less surprise and more curiosity than before. The hide was a little mangled, but otherwise in decent shape, and the way it moved led me to believe that the insides weren’t too dissimilar to what they would be in a living animal.
I had a plan. It was a crazy plan, but this whole thing was crazy, so I figured it might be worth a try.
I took inventory of the things I would need, and of what I had on hand. I had the pocket knife, a small bag of salt, a bit of string woven from my own hair… I could do this if I was willing to sacrifice the scent-masking charm. It was a big gamble with the only trinket I’d really had time to prepare, but it would be worth it if it worked. If push came to shove, I could recast the spell without a focus. It wouldn’t be as reliable, but it would do the trick.
I reached out with my magic and took hold of the monster, just like I’d done with the first one I’d come across back at the college. This one weighed a lot more than that one did, but boy did I have a lot of muscle right at this moment.
I flung the zom-bear back into the jungle, smashing it hard against a tree trunk. Meat slapped against wood with a crack that almost assumed was from the tree, but from the way the flesh golem was folded around the tree, I realized it was the zom-bear that had broken.
Even with a broken spine, the construct was flailing its limbs around, leaving four-inch deep furrows in every bit of wood it could reach. Its jaws were clicking faster now, the head thrashing as it tried to find something to bite. Ahuizotl hadn’t given his creatures the ability to vocalize, so the only noise it made besides that interminable clicking of teeth were great whuffing gasps as it tried to find the scent of whatever was attacking it.
I pushed a little harder, pinning its limbs back so it couldn’t move.
“Ya jus’ hol’ still now, Yeller.” I moved closer, one hand outstretched to touch the thing’s belly. “Yer my dog and I’ll put ya outta yer misery.”
I reached into the thing with my magic, just like I’d done with the guard at the entrance to this dimension, and tried to find whatever keystone Ahuizotl had used for the animation spell. I would never have even tried this if I didn’t have Fiddler’s power cranking my magical senses to eleven. Eventually I found what I was looking for at the base of the thing’s skull – a big fat knot of filthy, greasy magic that spread throughout the body like tree roots burrowing into rich soil.
Breaking the spell only took a few seconds, and the flailing monster ceased its struggle, hanging limp against the tree in my magical grip. I let it go and it fell to the muddy jungle floor. It wouldn’t get back up. Now it was just taxidermy.
“Wait for me, kid,” I said as I started putting enchantments on my pocket knife. “Just gimme a couple minutes and I’ll be right there.”
* * *
A lifetime ago, I was just a little girl stepping through a mirror containing a portal leading to another world. I didn’t know where it led, only that it would take me far away from fears and worries that I thought otherwise inescapable. I had no way of knowing I would step out the other side a completely different animal, in the most literal sense.
The transformation had been subtle. Just a twist in the guts and a shift in the center of gravity. It was like that first big dip on a roller coaster, but without the rush of wind and with a lot more strobing lights. Sort of like tripping over your shoelaces walking backwards. I’d barely even felt the way my bones shrank and stretched, the way my heart and other vital organs schlorched around to fit my newly-vertical orientation.
Skinwalking was nothing like that.
To the People, skinwalking was amongst the worst of bad medicines. It was an evil craft that stole the essence of a beast to change the body in unnatural ways. It was an affront to the ancestors that had gifted their mortal form to their descendents, and the resentment the old fathers held against such sins were part of the framework for the spell.
Such an unnatural transformation couldn’t exist without pain. It was the cost you paid for this particular power. You felt every bone snapping, every tendon tearing, every sinew of your heart rending and knitting. You felt your very being being stretched and squashed to fill a vessel it was never meant for. Your flesh became as smoke, shapeless, ephemeral, existing only to suffer for the brief seconds the shapeshifting took. Sometimes the pain of transformation could even twist the mind of the skinwalker, driving human rationality from their minds and leaving only a shadow of a man twisted by the memories of the beast whose shape they had stolen.
It was a good trade, though, if you were strong enough to keep your sanity. The skinwalker that had taught me had shown me the way and impressed on me the many benefits. With age and practice the pain was manageable, and a good collection of properly maintained skins gave you choices – the most valuable thing to a sorcerer. Some practitioners, he said, had even begun to love the pain of transformation. I wasn’t among that group of masochists who got off on it, but the pain was never a deterrent to me.
Admittedly, I felt a strange sense of melancholy as the suffering of transformation took hold of me again. My teacher had told me how tightly the spells were tied to the land of his people, and so would never work without drawing upon the land’s power.
But he’d never drunk as deeply from a demon’s well as I had this night. I didn’t need ancestral lands to power this spell, not when I could just as easily burn what Fiddler had given me.
I ran through the swamp with a loping stride. A bear’s body wasn’t exactly as nimble and graceful at a gallop as a pony’s was, but I had been born to move on all fours. A few steps was all I needed to figure out my new gait, and then I could run, full tilt across the marsh. The bear’s huge paws were wide as snowshoes and surprisingly suited to the soft mud.
This form wasn’t fully a bear’s, though. Bits of Ahuizotl’s influence were still in the pelt where he’d taxidermied bits of other hide to fill the gaps, making the shape of his spellcraft apparent to anyone so intimately close to it. I now knew why Ahuizotl’s pets were blind and mute. Their sight, their thoughts, their voices – by his design, all of it was for him. These things he made were bodies built for him to use as he saw fit. Caballeron had said he’d spoken to the necromancer through one of his monsters, and the truth of it was clear in the form I now inhabited.
They needed no sight but his. No voice but his. No will but the one he gave them. It was no wonder these creatures came to bear his name, because they were no more separated from him than his own hands.
But now I was the one in the driver’s seat. Turning such a ratty pelt into a proper skin had been the most painful part of the transformation. Ahuizotl may have been in my weight class as a sorcerer, but the artistry in this craft had left a lot to be desired. It was almost disappointing to see, given how beautiful the storm he’d whipped up had been. Although, maybe that said something about how much he cared about these guard dogs of his.
The preparation had taken longer than I would have liked, but I still had time. I could tell from the charge in the air that things were heating up, but I wasn’t completely worried just yet. If he’d done anything to Twilight then it’d be pretty obvious.
I was fast as a bear, and the time I’d lost prepping the skin was more than made up by four strong limbs. I was just a stone’s throw away from the steps leading up the side of the pyramid when a sharp noise, like a shrill note from a flute, pierced the air. It came from the top of the pyramid and seemed to roll across the land with the presence of a thunderclap. Before I could ponder what that sound might mean, another of Ahuizotl’s monsters popped up out of a pool of water right in front of me.
I slid to a stop, my paws sinking into the mud as I skidded across the marsh. I only just barely managed to stop before I slammed into the other beast. Then another burst out of the muddy water, and then another, then dozens. I was surrounded.
I rose up to the bear’s full height, claws ready and fangs bared. There were more of them, but I was bigger, and I could still use magic from inside this body.
My challenge went unanswered. I stood before them, locked and loaded, ready to throw down, but the misshapen things didn’t even seem to notice me. They only seemed to have eyes for whatever was at the top of that pyramid. With singular purpose, the shambling mass made their way up the structure, some by the stairs, others awkwardly pulling themselves up the massive stepped sides. More of the ahuizotls had appeared, with the sound of dozens of mismatched teeth clicking with steady, asynchronous clicking until the air trembled with it.
There were humans mixed among the abominations. Their forms weren’t so grotesque, but their bodies were in various states of ruin. Men and women of all ages shambled amongst the beasts, in various states of undress. Some of them wore little more than ratty loincloths, others wore nothing at all. The freshest of the lot were dressed in fairly modern clothing, and if it weren’t for the unmistakable stench and the pallor of death on them, these zombies might have passed for living humans.
This was an odd development, but I was a roll with the punches kind of gal. I dropped back to the ground and joined in the procession. I didn’t have the juju bag with the scent-masking spell in it anymore, having cannibalized it for the preparations for the skinwalking spell, but the disguise seemed like it was holding up. As long as I kept my cool, I could just blend in with the crowd as they moved to… whatever we were headed to.
At the top of the stairs was a massive door leading into the pyramid. The parade of animated corpses had funneled into the building, and I let the herd thin out a little before heading in myself, just so I wouldn’t be jostling against the crowd. We were at least a hundred feet up, and from here I could see out over the jungle around it, stretching off seemingly into the infinite. Before I headed inside, I gave a silent and sincere thanks to Blinkie the Water Spirit for getting me this far.
I was glad that I had waited a little bit before going in. The massive door at the top of the pyramid had funneled the corpse cortége into a wide hallway that barely contained the assembly. There were other paths branching off every few feet, leading to torch-lit chambers filled with piles of gold and other, less-savory, treasures that would only hold value to a practitioner of direst arts. Beyond the throng I could see the bright glow of fire silhouetting the misshapen bodies. There were pictograms carved into the walls that looked like Tlaloc’s symbol – that ugly, fanged visage was unmistakable even by torchlight. Colorful murals depicting the previous mythological eras that Fiddler had told me about were painted on the ceiling, with the beginning, middle, and end of each sun given a panel.
I scanned the murals with a curious eye, looking for one scene in particular. This Tlaloc jerk had been nothing but trouble to me from day one, and according to Fiddler, there should be one depicting him getting cucked by another god. Sadly, the artist had conveniently left that depiction out of the record.
The slow march to the end of the hallway finally ended, and I found myself standing among the gathered zombies in what was clearly a temple. Gigantic fires burned in enormous braziers along the walls, the smoke rising up to an open ceiling that revealed that eerie sky. And at the far end of the temple, at the foot of a gigantic statue of some kind of coiled serpent, was a simple, unadorned altar.
An altar with Twilight laying atop it. She was still as death, and an almost blinding white light surrounded her body, nearly drowning out every other source of light around us.
My heart stopped, and didn’t beat again until I saw her breathe. The steady rise and fall of her chest meant she was still alive, but otherwise motionless, as if sleeping.
I opened my mouth to shout her name, but the lingering influence of Ahuizotl’s design on the beast whose skin I was wearing had left me unable to speak, unable to even growl in frustration at my inability to call out to her. And it was a good thing that I couldn’t yell, because standing behind the altar, toying with a knife with fetishistic worship, was a man that I could tell with a single glance was the necromancer that had taken her from me.
He was wrinkled and pale, looking exactly how you would expect of a man who'd lived for hundreds of years longer than any human had any right to. He was wearing nothing but a long skirt made of thin, gauze-like cloth, and a mass of gold chains that hung from his reedy, bird-like neck. The chains clinked with every movement he made, scraping against a fist-sized golden medallion that looked like it had been affixed to his chest. Even from this distance it was noticeable that skin had grown over the edges of the golden trinket, grafting it to his body.
I recognized the knife in his hand from Caballeron’s description. The corona of light surrounding Twilight gleamed off the blade of sharpened volcanic glass with every movement he made – and boy was he moving around. Ahuizotl was waving the knife, muttering to himself in the half-melodic singsong of ritual chant. Try as I might, I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying as he hummed out his incantation, and I couldn’t sense magic being moved by the act, so I could only assume it was just prayer.
Suited me fine if he wanted to pray. I moved along the edges of the crowd, nudging aside the other creatures as I went. As badly as I wanted to just run straight at the bastard, I couldn’t risk it with him holding a weapon over Twilight like that. No, I needed to get close enough for one good lunge. This body was fast, way faster than anything its size had any right being. If I could get close enough to get teeth into him, I could maul him before he got the chance to hex me, or worse.
Still wasn’t sure how I was going to get home from here, but I was only dealing with one problem at a time. Kill Ahuizotl, get Twilight, step three, success.
Ahuizotl’s prayer reached a literal high note, his raspy voice holding a sour note like he was trying to scream a wine glass into pieces. One hand lifted his chains aside, the knife in the other traced a line across his chest, from shoulder to shoulder, releasing a stream of blood as thick and dark as crude oil. The blood seemed to ignore all pretense of gravity, flowing from the self-inflicted wound into the medallion in his chest.
I crept closer, shoving the flesh golems aside in my haste to close the distance while he was still distracted. The things didn’t resist me, and none tried to stop my approach. They all stood transfixed as Ahuizotl performed his ritual. Magic was practically buzzing in the air, tickling the fur of my stolen skin like a static charge. I was close. Close enough that a bit of magic and one good leap would get me over the altar and put me at Ahuizotl’s throat. I tensed my back legs and squared my forepaws, readying myself to leap.
Ahuizotl screamed something in that weird Aztec language, and bodies started hitting the floor. It was a weird noise, like a dump truck full of potatoes being upended into the mud. I knew immediately that the moist smack of thousands of pounds of half-rotting meat hitting stone all at once was another one of those things I’d probably never forget.
The constructs were coming undone all around me. I could feel with my sorcerous senses that the magic empowering them was flowing out of their bodies and into the medallion in Ahuizotl’s chest, leaving nothing behind but meat, bone, and the thread holding it all together.
It was such a shock that I, for just a moment, forgot what I was doing. When I looked back up to the altar, Ahuizotl was looking right at me. The look of rapturous fanaticism on his face was gone, replaced by utter confusion.
We stayed that way for a tense moment, eyes locked, each unsure of what to do. And then just as suddenly, I remembered, and he remembered, and everything kind of happened at once.
The dagger in Ahuizotl’s hand sliced at the air, cutting the space between us with a shimmering aura, like a heat haze. I rolled to the side to avoid the attack, but my larger-than-usual frame made it difficult to gauge the amount of space I was taking up. The attack nicked my side, but the pain I felt wasn’t the pain I expected. My entire body twisted and heaved, shrinking back into itself with elastic violence as my skinwalking spell was undone. Ahuizotl’s attack had dispelled the charms on my stolen skin, leaving me squirming in pain beneath a smelly bear pelt.
In a fight, inaction means death, so I willed myself to move despite the pain searing every fiber of my being at being forcefully shapeshifted. Moving back to human was usually a lot smoother and way less painful, but I’d never had the change forced like this.
I scrambled out from under the disenchanted pelt, and Ahuizotl growled out a painfully graveled, “You! The witch from the farmhouse!”
He raised the knife and cut the air again. I took the bear pelt, enchanted it, and swung it around like a matador catching a bull’s horns. The pelt billowed out, engulfing Ahuizotl’s spell and swallowing it up. The fur crackled with an electric charge and the skin dried up, until the pelt crumbled away in my hands.
I drew out my own magic, reaching out with my power to take hold of Ahuizotl like I had his pet – anything to get him away from Twilight. The real Ahuizotl was a better brawler than the dummy he’d left back on the farm. A widening of his eyes was the only feedback I got before his body became momentarily intangible, slipping through my magical grip like I was trying to grasp the wind. His form blurred and moved like a shadow, around the altar and away from Twilight.
I conjured a flame in my hand, glad that the kid wasn’t between us anymore. A flick of my wrist and the fire crossed the distance between us, licking at Ahuizotl, trying to wrap around him. The medallion in his chest glimmered with more than firelight, and a bit of the shadowy magic that had bled out of his creatures spilled from the fetish’s mouth, wrapping around him protectively and sparing him from my attack.
Ahuizotl had a couple of fire tricks of his own, it seemed. He pointed the dagger at one of the massive fire pits, and the flames rose up at his command.
Fiddler’s magic was humming away in my bones, searing every nerve in my body and tingling every synapse in my brain. I was fighting for my life – and Twilight’s – and yet the joy of indulging in magic without reservation was taking hold of me with frightening alacrity. It was always like this at first. It was so easy to love this, to love how deeply into magic I could sink before I needed to come up for air.
I hated how much fun this was… but by the devil’s balls was I good at it.
I could already see what he was doing. I wouldn’t let him. I took a step forward, a step to the side, one foot behind the other, then gave a little spin and a bump of the hip. It looked silly, but I ignored the look of confusion on Ahuizotl’s face even as the flames rose to an inferno, washing over the temple like a wave. The dozens of rotting chimaeras were swept up in the fires, burning to ash instantly. I could feel the heat burning against my skin as I gave that bump of my hip, and the minor cantrip of my dance, fueled by the boundless wellspring of demon magic surging through my body, rent the air with a massive pop!
The sound, like a balloon overfilling, pushed away the flames and threw aside what few of the stringless puppets had been left untouched by Ahuizotl’s spell. The twinkling aura of darkness surrounding Ahuizotl made a sound like thin ice cracking underfoot, and fell away. With the protection gone, my counterspell hit him at nearly full force, knocking him off his feet and against the base of that massive statue behind him. He howled in pain, one hand gripping his hip, the other pointing the knife at me.
He didn’t get a chance to attack back. My mind was racing at a thousand spells a minute. I drew sigils in the air, delicate as silk thread, glowing with rainbow-colored light. My fingers danced in an arcane cat’s cradle, and then I spread my hands out, casting the threads of light like a net. They wrapped around Ahuizotl, pulling taut with an audible strain. His knife glowed with light of its own, but a twitch of my left pinkie finger tugged at his bindings like a marionette’s strings, throwing the knife from his hand.
The dark thing in my chest groaned in pleasure at the look of fear in the necromancer’s face as I took away his precious ritual blade. I lifted him up by the strings, swung him around, and slammed him to the ground.
The sound he made was far, far more satisfying than what I’d heard as I was abusing the fake-Ahuizotl in that basement. I pulled him closer, the bastard keening in pain as I dragged his broken body across the stone floor. I gave him a hard kick in the ribs, just to be sure, and he yelped like a wounded animal.
“That’s what I wanted to hear,” I cooed as I lifted him up, hanging in the air by his bindings. I reached up and wrapped my fingers around the edges of the medallion in his chest. “You don’t need this.”
The trinket seemed to have a mind of its own and tried to burn me, to resist, but I cowed it with a show of my own power and sunk my fingers into his chest. I yanked the ugly thing out, leaving a bleeding abscess in Ahuizotl’s chest. There was so much bad juju in the thing, and all of it was directed at me. It tried to get into my head, to scratch and bite at me in any way it could, like I was picking up a feral animal. I paid it no mind. There was massive amounts of power in this thing, but it was nothing that scared me. I tossed it across the temple, leaving it to deal with once I was done with Ahuizotl.
“You should’ve walked away,” I said, looking Ahuizotl straight in the eyes. “As soon as I broke your storm, you should’ve known there was already a queen bee in Canterlot City. That should have been your clue to scram.”
“Meddling whore,” Ahuizotl spat back. “Because of you, the ritual had to be changed. The purity of the Sun Child’s suffering was nearly at risk.”
“Fuck your ritual! Because of you she lost her family.”
Ahuizotl shook his head slowly, chuckling to himself over some thought so morbid I couldn’t even begin to fathom it. “As she was always meant to! The only shame was that one of my hands had to do the job that should have been left to the father.”
A feeling came over me like ice water pouring down my back. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded, twisting one of my threads to emphasize my question. “Explain!”
The reply came through gritted teeth as Ahuizotl bit back the scream over his newest broken bone. “She had to be steeped in true grief, born of absolute betrayal from one she loves. My curse should have slowly taken hold of his mind, driven her father mad and made a terror of him within his own home. Pushed him to take their lives and then his own, sparing only the chosen girl. It should have been by his hands that she be made the apotheosis of their bloodlines.”
The howling thing in my chest quieted, silenced by the reality of what I’d just been told. There was no reason to disbelieve him, but the very thought sickened me, even through the haze of battlelust.
Good-hearted, kind, fatherly Night Light… was meant to be driven mad by the cursed tattoo I’d drawn out of his back. To lose his mind to the point that he would begin to abuse his family, ultimately killing them in a fit of magically-induced psychosis. That good man, who kept an extra pair of glasses for his daughter and a spare retainer for his son, in his desk at work, was meant to kill his family.
And Twilight would have been left. Sitting alone in that closet. Not hiding from monsters, but from her own father.
A grin filled Ahuizotl’s ancient, wrinkled face. “Ah, so you cared for them,” he said, seeing the naked grief that was probably written all over me. “That’s what drove you to protect her. And yet she still came to me soaked in grief.” His smile widened, showing rotting teeth and drawing blood from his cracked lips. “Tell me, what betrayal did she suffer while under your aegis?”
For maybe the first time in my life, the anger that took hold of me was truly righteous. With a snarl I filled my hand with power and shoved into Ahuizotl’s stomach, taking hold of his liver. His innards smoked as the sheer amount of magic I was channeling cooked the meat inside of him.
“I’m going to enjoy making you feel every ounce of pain you caused her!” I screamed.
I expected Ahuizotl to cry out, but he was a sorcerer, just like I was. When he needed to, he could hold at bay petty things like physical pain. His jaw moved, and I could feel his insides squirming around my hand as he tried to take a breath with my knuckles pressed against the underside of his diaphragm. With a spasm he spat, and something flew over my head.
I squeezed harder and was rewarded with a scream. His mouth opened wide, thick black blood issuing from where his tongue should have been. He’d bitten it off.
I paid it no mind as I kept squeezing at his innards. I prepared a hex in my hand, ready to flay every tendon in his body from the bone, but the firm feeling of living meat in my hand gave way. My fingers sunk into Ahuizotl’s body like he was made of mud, and the bindings holding him likewise slipped through his flesh. His body melted like ice cream on a hot summer’s day, and the spell binding him winked out as its captive was lost.
My brain was still in overdrive, and I puzzled out what had happened almost immediately. I spun on my heels to find an exact duplicate of Ahuizotl, his wounds healed, kneeling on the ground over his medallion. He placed it to his chest, and it sunk into his skin like a hot iron branding a bull.
My fingers were moving again, ready to recast my net. Ahuizotl wasn’t going to waste any time either, apparently. He thrust out his hand and summoned the ritual blade from across the room.
“You will not stop me!” he howled.
He lifted his knife, but not against me. Shimmering darkness filled the blade, and with a grimace, Ahuizotl sliced off his left arm with a single movement.
The space around us twisted, physically wrenching in multiple directions at once, like the whole world had coiled up and twisted and then uncoiled the opposite way. This was orders of magnitude more violent than the pathways that Blinkie had led me down – those had been like turning a corner, while this was more like taking a tumble in a washing machine.
When my head stopped spinning, the first thing I could sense was the roaring sound of falling rain. I looked around, and the whole temple had been moved. We were standing on the stone floor of the temple, but the walls were gone, revealing a vast empty marshland like the one I’d come in through.
Ahuizotl was standing there, grimacing at me, trying to stop the seemingly endless gush of blood from his new stump by searing it with the flat of his magically-charged ritual blade. It was too much to hope he’d bleed to death, though. One of the few things I knew about necromancers was that they had a lot of blood in them – like a magically impressive amount – for spellcasting. An old cuss like him could probably sling enough blood to fill a kiddy pool out of that emaciated body.
A flash of worry struck me like lightning from the sky, and I looked over to where the podium had been. Twilight was still there, still surrounded by that bright white glow. If anything, the light had grown stronger. It was interacting with Ahuizotl's rain the same way the magic inside me was, repelling it so that not even a drop fell on the kid.
The relief I felt was short lived as I caught sight of movement behind her. A lot of movement. Or, more precisely, one really big movement.
The statue that had been behind the altar in the temple was moving. Stone had become scale, glistening with all the colors of the rainbow in the rain. It uncoiled, rising up into the air – twenty, forty, a hundred feet up. Part-way down the body was a mass of feathers and scales that shook and shivered, like one of my birds airing out its wings. And that’s what they were – enormous wings that put a 747 to shame.
“Kill her!” Ahuizotl commanded.
The plumed serpent didn’t need another word. It lunged at me, maw agape, ready to swallow lil’ ol’ me whole.
And the darkness inside me let out another roar of near-orgasmic glee.
All the power I’d been holding back for fear of hurting Twilight, or of killing Ahuizotl before he’d gotten a taste of her pain, came flooding out of me at once. I held out my hand and a glimmering mass of light as solid as steel formed between me and the snake.
The plumed serpent slammed into my protection, bouncing off it with a hiss that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard in my life. I took all that magic and wrapped it around the thing’s massive head, slamming it down hard enough to crack the stone. The tremor it sent through the ground would have taken me off my feet if I wasn’t so amped up.
“You think this is enough to stop me!?” I said, cackling with glee as I felt the snake struggling in my grip. I still hadn’t touched the bottom of the well. There was so much more I could still do. “I’m Sunset the Goddamn Fucking Shimm—”
The rest of my declaration died as all the wind left my lungs with a bang. For a moment, I stood there in confusion, wondering where my breath had gone. Time seemed to stretch on for an eternity without moving even an inch.
I looked down to see the red splotch of my own blood soaking into my shirt, pouring out of a ragged tear in the cotton. I touched it, and all the space in my chest that was meant for air was filled by pain. It brought me to my knees, gasping and desperately trying to swallow the blood burbling up into my mouth from somewhere deep inside me.
I looked around, wondering what had happened. A few feet away, just in front of me, the barrel of a shotgun was sticking out of a puddle of rainwater that had pooled in one of the many imperfections in the ancient stone flooring. A head popped out, cautiously, like a meerkat checking for danger.
Caballeron’s former partner, his betrayer, flashed me an Irish smile as he pulled himself out of the water like a big potato-eating seal.
“Sorcerers ain’t hot as all’at, eh?” he said, laughing as he stalked closer. He pressed a boot against my shoulder and kicked, throwing me onto my back. “Mighty scary when you've your wits about, but looks as buckshot does the job just fine when ya don't see it comin’.”
I reached up a trembling hand, able to move only by the grace of my own hatred of this smug piece of garbage. The magic in my body was freaking out, trying to repair the damage of being gutshot. It wasn't even stable enough to keep the rain off me anymore. I tried to bring it back under control, but every attempt to think of a spell, to imagine some way to hurt him, slipped through my grasp.
A fresh wave of pain lanced through me as he stepped on my chest.
“Thought you was real funny back in the hideout, eh?” he asked, malice shining in his eyes. “Well, I like a laugh meself.”
I watched, squinting through the rain pelting my face, as he reached behind his back and pulled out a gun that I recognized immediately as the one I’d taken from him that night.
I tried to fight as he shoved the barrel into my mouth, but I had no strength to put up even token resistance. The most I could offer was to weakly spit up the blood pooling in my mouth. My consciousness was already failing. I was drifting away, sinking into darkness.
I was already gone before he pulled the trigger.
* * *