Blood & Fur-Chapter Ninety-Six: War of the Puppeteers

How much blood did it take to create a giant?

I shuddered to imagine the answer as I stared at the towering mountain of flesh and feathers Sugey had become. Over sixty feet of hatred now glared down on me with baleful eyes the size of houses. The Nightlord’s mace had become little more than a toothpick sliding through her fingers; her hands could crush me within their palms and her feet flatten me into the ground. Her wingspan blanketed the forest in darkness, blotting out what little light managed to pierce through the clouds shrouding the heavens.

The overwhelming pressure radiating from Sugey only increased further. I felt the weight of her stolen might and diseased corruption weighing down on my body and soul. My own blood stirred with the chill of fear and danger.

I was an ant facing a vulture ready to step on me.

The living world’s horrors paled when compared to the monsters dwelling below in the Land of the Dead Suns, but Sugey put many of them to shame in strength and grandeur. While she was no Tlaloc or Mictlantecuhtli, let alone her dreadful father, she eclipsed lesser dead deities such as Azcatlapalli like the sun shamed the stars. She was no pale shadow of what came before, no; she had become a monster of legends worthy of her Nightlord title. No other fiend or sorcerer walking among the living could rival her.

None, except myself.

“How…” I managed to blurt out while in the throes of awe and horror. “How many?!”

How many thousands of slaves nurtured by her blood had she harvested today for this power? How many centuries of careful breeding had now been wasted for the sake of empowering one wicked warlord? Sugey’s supreme race rhetoric now seemed about as empty as the Jaguar Woman’s delusions of godhood.

In the end, these parasites only cared about themselves.

“More than you think, Iztac…” Sugey rasped, her twin voices now a guttural rumble louder than a landslide, her eyes flickering with vicious glee. I could have sworn her beaks twisted into a bird-like parody of ghastly grins. “And more than enough!”

Her fist fell upon me like a shooting star crashing onto the earth.

It was true what they said; fear gave us men wings. I managed to fly out of the path at the last moment, the blow so terrible in its might that the very earth rippled with waves of dirt and debris.

I tried to gain altitude and escape into the air in the hope of using her gigantic size against her, but I’d miscalculated; her transformation hadn’t diminished her speed in the slightest. Sugey’s twin-heads lunged at me with bestial ferocity and forced me to fly closer to the ground to avoid being snapped in half by her beaks. She tried to stomp me next with her talon-foot, crushing trees as if they were mere twigs.

I can’t get away! I flew my way around vicious claws and swipes across the mountain, but Sugey’s immense reach and relentlessness prevented me from escaping. How am I supposed to fight a giant?!

“Stumble!” I shouted a Word.

The darkness swallowed my prayer.

Sugey’s oppressive power drowned out my Word the same way a mindless cacophony deafened soft whispers. Reality could not hear my plea piercing through the oppressive shroud of power emanating from the Nightlord.

The gulf in power between us had grown so wide I could no longer close it.

I tried to distract Sugey with a Veil and then with a blast of Blaze. My illusion shattered before it could even form, and my flames barely grazed her chest. Layers upon layers of flesh and coalesced blood protected her black heart from my attacks.

I sensed the pressure building up with each of Sugey’s swings. Every swipe and stomp missed by fewer than an inch, while her arms’ mere movement whipped up storms in their wake.

I only had one trick left to play. I snapped my hands together and called upon the fear lurking deep within my soul.

“Powerlessness.”

My Tomb expanded around me and devoured the world.

An unreal space born of my very soul expanded across the mountainside. It enveloped Sugey within its confines, changing the earth beneath our feet into a floor of whispering skulls and raising walls of skin to trap us within. Bars of bones taller than any pyramid rose from the ground and curved to join into a dome.

My Tomb was a birdcage fit for demons.

A terrible agony radiated from within me. My Teyolia flickered; my Tonalli shook; and my Ihiyotl grew short. Every fiber of my being fought against the almighty spell’s strain. I was fighting not only against Sugey’s primal aura and sorcery, but reality itself. I was a painter, and the world had become my canvas.

My sun-powered soul burned brighter than the stars within my chest. A new pressure pressed upon those caught within my birdcage, but this time it was Sugey who suffered the most from it. Her immense knees bent with the creaking noise of clashing rocks; the burns I’d seared on her skin ignited again; and the vile, crimson aura radiating from her lessened in potency. For the briefest of instants, it even seemed that she was shrinking a little.

My Tomb drained her very essence. It fed on Sugey’s ill-gotten sorcery the same way she stole from others to strengthen herself.

For a short instant, the Nightlord tasted the bitter poison of powerlessness; and she hated it.

“Th-this place… is it the tomb of past emperors?” Sugey rasped as her body underwent sudden shakes. “I will not be buried in a dead puppets’ graveyard!”

The Nightlord’s twin beaks snapped open and let out a soul-rending roar. A noise louder than a thunderstorm resonated across my birdcage, its volume so high as to crack skulls and break bars.

My Tomb crumbled, and my hopes went with it.

My spell shattered into a thousand pieces. The blowback crippled all of my active spells as a cruel reality reasserted itself. Sugey’s roar rippled through my bonecrafted armor and cracked it. I briefly felt the impact of my back on the ground, followed by a blur of my vision and a numbness spreading through my blood.

Sugey had snuffed out the fire of my blood.

“I told you,” she said. “The strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must.”

I didn’t see her foot falling upon me, but I felt it. Oh gods, I did.

I’d promised myself that the Nightlords would never hear me scream; but as an immense weight pressed against my legs right below my manhood, my tongue betrayed me. A terrible pain I hadn’t experienced since Xibalba’s trials spread through every inch of my body and forced a cry of agony from my throat.

Everything below my knees went numb, my bones and flesh flattened into a puddle of steaming blood. Its caustic flames melted Sugey’s skin on contact, but she didn’t care. Her eyes glared down at me with the malicious cruelty that shone whenever she massacred helpless Sapa prisoners.

“Only now, at the end, do you understand the foolishness of your doomed ambition?” Sugey taunted me. “You never had a chance, Iztac!”

Her two heads leaned closer to the ground to better savor my suffering. I bit my tongue to swallow my scream and deny her satisfaction. My waist felt cold from the missing blood

“You have cost me much blood, Iztac; more than I have ever shed,” she said with empty praise. “You will have to work to the bone to compensate m–”

I blasted her right head with the Blaze before she could finish.

Many layers of stolen flesh and blood shielded Sugey from harm, but her eyes remained exposed. My fireball nailed those two eyes straight and boiled them within their sockets. Sugey shrieked her pain and pulled back her head, her hands covering her wounds.

If this fraud of a warrior had ever truly risked her life, she would have learned better than to gloat while the enemy still drew breath.

“When you fight to the death, Bird of Foolishness… it is to the death!” I raged with all of my hatred and courage. I dragged myself away, leaving my crushed legs buried beneath the Nightlord. “To the last breath… and beyond!”

Sugey shrieked with rage and raised her foot again. Its shadow now covered my head this time.

I barely managed to fight through the pain and cast the Doll spell before Sugey attempted to crush me like an insect. Talons of darkness materialized from my soul to stop the Nightlord’s own claw. I pushed back against a mountain’s weight with all the willpower I could muster.

Even so, I sensed my back sinking into the earth from the sheer pressure barrelling down on me. Sugey had taken my advice to heart and abandoned all pretenses of taunts or civility. She simply tried to squash me like a bug.

I can’t… hold… I heard Itzili’s roar in the distance, far away. I couldn’t tell whether he encouraged me not to give up or cried out in alarm, but it made no difference. My vision blurred and my strength wavered. It can’t… It can’t end like this!

All the trials I overcame, all this bloodshed, all those sacrifices, all the lives I took all to gain the smallest of fighting chances… It couldn’t have all been for nothing!

I looked up past the talons trying to crush me, at those twin-heads glaring at me with undying hatred. Sugey’s right head only had molten flesh and burns where the eyes should have been, but if anything, it only made the Nightlord look ghastlier and more bestial.

Her bloodthirsty gaze couldn’t be the last thing I ever saw. I refused that outcome!

Talons of darkness fell upon Sugey’s remaining eyes and slashed them.

The Nightlord’s thundering roar shook the earth and sky as a fountain of black blood surged from her wounds, blinding her. Sugey stumbled back in pain, but her surprise paled before mine. I looked up and spotted a flying, winged shadow hardly larger than a sparrow fluttering above us. I briefly thought Necahual or Lahun had taken the field to defend me, until I noticed the owlish face.

Mother.

She looked about as shocked as I was, the fear in her eyes so sharp and stark. I could tell from her body language that her mind fought against her survival instinct and all the cowardly impulses that had ruled her over the last decades. Every fiber of her being told her to run away, and yet… and yet she was here.

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Few things had left me speechless since I first began to delve into the Underworld, but this? This was one of them. I had saved Mother’s life before, and she returned to repay the favor.

Father… Father had been right.

In the end, Mother did come for me in my hour of need.

Nonetheless, she was little more than a sparrow picking a fight with a jaguar. A blinded Sugey tried to swat away Mother with her arms, but the Nightlord could not detect her easily the way she could pinpoint my cursed heart. Mother flew out of the way, slipping past our enemy’s grasp.

Itzili’s roar grew louder, closer, more intense. I saw his shadow charge across the mountain from my left and then lunge at Sugey in a jump he should have been too heavy to accomplish. My feathered tyrant barely reached up to the Nightlord’s waist, but he hit her stomach with enough momentum and weight to throw her onto her back. She stumbled back and fell upon the mountain’s flank, triggering landslides while Itzili’s jaws sank deep enough into her stomach to draw blood.

An equally large spineking followed after my feathered tyrant, this time leaping at Sugey’s right throat to tear it out. I recognized the skin Chindi once used to prey on us, but the creature’s eyes now belonged to Eztli alone. She struck with a ferocity that matched that of the Nightlord herself, biting and gnashing until she ripped out her vocal cords.

Sugey attempted to throw them both off her, but fire and lightning struck her in the face before she could do so. Twin-winged figures circled her and rained sparkling flames from above. They resembled women at first glance, except they had wings for arms, talons for legs, and borrowed my magic.

My Mometzcopinque had come to defend me.

After fighting monsters alone for so long, I finally had allies willing to battle on my behalf.

This realization would have warmed my heart if it wasn’t already a struggle to stay awake. I crawled away from this brawl the best I could, my vision wavering from the blood loss. I used Bonecraft to close my wound with skeletal plates.

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I need… I need to focus. My allies lacked the strength to put Sugey in her grave where she belonged. They would only distract her for a moment, until she recovered her bearings and strike back. I have to find a way to kill her before then…

But what other option did I have left? Sugey had negated my Tomb spell with a single roar and silenced my Word. What path to victory could I use besides exposing her to the sun—an impossible feat if I couldn’t dispel her dark cloud blotting out the sky?

I only had one other weapon left.

“Mark that which you despise with your blood and utter their name,” the Lords of Terror had taught me in their dark dominion. “The House of Fright shall receive your offering with gnashing teeth and an endless fall.”

How much blood would it take to sacrifice a giant?

Someone landed at my left, and I looked up to find Mother leaning down next to me in owl form. Her Doll-powered talons immediately grabbed my shoulders with a mix of clumsy gentleness and frantic panic.

“We must flee, Iztac!” she told me while attempting to carry me away from battle; a difficult task considering how heavy I weighed while strapped with the ossuary armor. “Let’s fly away while we still have the chance!”

“There is nowhere… to go…” I rasped back. Besides the fact that I refused to abandon my allies, Sugey could track me anywhere I went and we would never have a better opportunity to strike her down than this one. It was victory or death now. “Blood… I need… blood.”

I meant mine, but Mother reached the wrong conclusion. I saw her hesitate for an instant before biting her own chest with her beak. Her blood poured into my throat, warm and potent.

Mother and I had both tasted the same dead sun’s embers, and our lifeforce was connected by a bond as tight as the one I enjoyed with Nenetl. I didn’t require Seidr to draw strength from her offering. My pain faded away instantly, replaced with a terrible thirst and hunger awakening from within the shadow of my soul. I sensed my wounds close, and the flesh of my severed legs reforming from nothing.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one recovering. Sugey’s hand grabbed Itzili by the throat and lifted him up in the air like a man seizing a dog by the collar. The Nightlord then let out another earth-shaking roar that threw Eztli off her and repelled my Mometzcopinques.

“You won’t go anywhere!” Sugey roared to the earth and sky upon rising to her feet, each of her steps shaking the ground. Itzili raged against her grip, but not even a feathered tyrant’s strength could match that of a god’s daughter. “I will hunt you all to the ends of the Earth!”

She raised Itzili above her two heads, grabbed him by the throat and leg with each hand, then tore him apart.

Only a single moment separated the living from the dead, and I sensed it rippling through me. Itzili’s final roar was snuffed out in an instant, but his pain struck me like a wave of pain through the link we shared. I felt his fear and agony, his final flash of terror before Sugey extinguished him like a candlelight.

Some said animals had no soul and lacked feelings, but what I experienced now proved them all wrong. Itzili’s last thought was one of all-too-human terror.

He had been my companion since the early days of my emperorship, and a reminder of my late father through the name they shared; and Sugey took him away from me. She murdered a beautiful creature who had barely begun to live in an instant, without hesitation nor remorse.

My horror and sorrow did not last long, however; not when drowned in unyielding rage.

Sugey showered herself with Itzili’s blood in an attempt to regain her strength, which proved to be a fatal mistake. Instead of healing her wounds, my feathered tyrant’s fluids caught fire. The Nightlord’s roar of triumph turned into a shriek of surprise and pain matching that of her victim. She tossed Itzili’s halves aside far too late, her skin melting from the light within my familiar’s blood.

My eyes widened with hope.

Itzili’s blood was my own. I had fed him my sun-fueled fluids until he grew big and strong, his very soul intertwined with mine the same way Sugey had bound her thralls to her will. Not even death could sever our bond; in fact, it had only reinforced it. I became more keenly aware of the spiritual kinship that connected Itzili’s blood to me without the barrier of scales and skin to keep us apart.

By anointing herself with the blood of my follower in a foolish display of empty dominance, Sugey had cursed herself. Itzili would have the last laugh.

I sensed my chance and seized it.

Mother tried to grab me and flee, but I pushed her back. I instead chose to stand on my two newly regrown feet, join my hands, and face my foe.

“Sugey!” I shouted as loudly as my blood-filled lungs would allow me to. “I, Cizin, Fear of the Gods, sacrifice thee to the Pit!”

I offered her to the fears dwelling beneath the earth, and Xibalba answered its thirteenth lord’s call.

The blood Sugey had sprayed herself with rippled like a raging sea at my command, its form morphing into an eyeless face beckoning the essence of evil itself. The wind—nay, the entire world—shuddered in dread.

The House of Fright’s jaws opened beneath Sugey’s feet.

The earth snapped open into a dark chasm wide enough to swallow giants. Its edges were sharp like teeth, their surface covered in black and slippery obsidian, and from its depths echoed the wails of the House of Fright’s damned guests. Sugey fell through all the way to her waist until she managed to catch herself, her claws sinking into the earth.

I was too far away from the edge to see what awaited inside the chasm; but from the ghostly light and tortured screams coming out of it, I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.

“What… What is this?” Sugey snarled; and for the first time since our battle began, I tasted the edge of fear cutting through her wrath. “I hear… I hear the dead!”

“No,” I replied as I poured all of my strength into the spell. “You hear your fears.”

Sugey expanded her wings to take flight, but Xibalba’s hunger was not so easily defeated. Thousands upon thousands of corpselike hands arose from the chasm in a vile and rotten mass eager to claim her soul. Their fingers grabbed the Nightlord’s shoulders and wingspan in an attempt to drag her down to her doom.

She resisted, of course. Fear had given me wings, and Sugey had plenty of might to spare. She raged and snapped at the hands with her beaks while her mighty arms slowly pulled her out of their grasp. Seeing this, Lahun and Necahual struck her with fire and lightning, but no flames of theirs could make the Nightlord flinch.

She recoiled only from the sun.

“Clear!” I shouted to the sky, who would not answer my plea. My power remained insufficient, especially since I had to focus on maintaining the Pit spell too. “My strength isn’t enough!”

I sensed Mother hesitate behind me, likely because she considered running. A look at Sugey’s desperate struggle quelled those doubts.

“Then take mine,” she said as she applied her bloody wing to one of my remaining wounds, feeding me her lifeforce. “Use my strength to prevail!”

I fed on her blood and will, and through them, I sensed her hope and desperation. It had finally hit her that this was her final opportunity to avoid death and slavery; her only chance to free herself from the monsters which had haunted her and her family for so many years.

At the root of her selfishness and cowardice lurked the same desire for freedom that animated me.

“Blood!” I then shouted to anyone who would listen. Mother’s strength was welcome, but still insufficient. “I need more blood!”

My coven answered.

Necahual landed at my side first, bit her wrist without hesitation, and then applied it to one of my wounds; she didn’t spare a glance at Mother, and neither did Ichtaca. Lahun followed her example soon, and I heard the rumbling of Eztli’s steps as she rushed to join us in her spineking form.

“Clear!” I shouted to the heavens above.

Sugey had stolen the strength of her servants, but my witches gave it to me willingly. Different things bound them to me—love, blood, ambition, sorcery—yet their gift was freely offered. This sacrifice had not been forced upon them.

And that made all the difference.

My Word, carried by my power and my allies’ trust, pierced through Sugey’s veil of stolen power. My will reshaped the cosmos and cleared the clouds to let the Fifth Sun shine upon us all.

Then there was light.

Sugey caught fire, the heavenly rays that gave this world life searing her skin and flesh. Her resistance wavered for an instant, long enough for Xibalba’s jaw to drag her further down. She fell all the way to her shoulders, with only her arms and heads desperately peeking over the chasm. Her snarls of rage had turned into what she had always condemned others for.

Panic.

“You don’t deserve a warrior’s death, Sugey!” I snarled with all of my hatred and contempt. “I deny you this honor! Fear and torment shall be your afterlife!”

The Nightlord screeched with desperation, her beaks inhaling air for one last attempt at freedom. She exhaled out a breath of ruin at us: a bloody crimson miasma of screaming souls trapped in her gullet and hungering for death.

I blinked at the tidal wave of death rushing in our way, only for a wall of scales to arise in our defense.

Eztli had leaped in the path in her spineking form and shielded us.

My heart skipped a beat in my chest as the atrocious fumes melted my lover’s scales off her flesh; but Eztli neither screamed nor faltered. Chindi’s unnatural resilience had allowed her to survive the Nightspawn’s life-draining touch once, and her successor matched her in willpower. Necahual clenched her jaw in concern, but continued to focus on lending me her lifeforce.

She knew her daughter endured for our sake; and that breaking concentration now would mean our end.

Forced as we were to focus on the spell, there was only one thing I could do for her.

“Live, Eztli,” I said, my Word heavy with power. “Live.”

I had no idea whether my spell made a difference or not; but in the end, the sun proved the decisive factor. Sugey ran out of breath before Eztli could lose all her flesh. Our enemy coughed smoke as fire melted off the flesh of her skulls. Meanwhile, Eztli’s naked human body slid out of the rotten spineking carcass she inhabited, the same way Chindi once shed it after the Nightspawn nearly killed her. To my relief, she looked tired but unharmed

“You were right, Sugey,” I said. “The weak suffer as they must, and you are no sun.”

The Nightlord had no one left to save her. Her vile sisters were too far away, and she had sacrificed all of her remaining thralls for power’s sake. She had lacked the strength to trust others, and none would come to rescue her in her final hour.

“You fool!” Sugey rasped back, yet beneath the anger, I sensed a plea for mercy. “We… are your protectors! Those we keep away the night! You will not survive without us!”

“We can,” Necahual replied at my side. “And we will.”

“If you are as mighty as you pretend to be, then you will survive this.” I gathered my breath, then uttered one last Word filled with both venom and satisfaction. “Fall.”

The Word spell could work wonders, but it did not distinguish between its targets. My Mother and concubines all hit the floor at the same time. Dirt and smoke descended upon the ground instead of floating within the air. My allies and the world itself did not resist half as hard as Sugey.

The power of my will clashed with her own. Even when exhausted from our battle, even when burned to a crisp, even when struggling against the grip of Xibalba itself, Sugey fought back. My order hit a wall raised from misplaced arrogance, hunger for life she did not deserve, and greed for power she never earned. She was a ravenous beast playing pretend; an appetite justifying its own diseased existence through lies she told herself.

One thing was for certain: Sugey was no true warrior.

When facing her moment of truth, she faltered.

Her claws let go, and she fell screaming into the chasm. The hands of the damned dragged her down into a place of eternal torment that matched the atrocities she inflicted on so many others. The rift’s jaws closed and the earth swallowed her up.

I had no idea how Sugey died in there, how Xibalba ripped out her soul from her rotting body to feast upon both; but I felt it happen. I heard her final wail ripple through the chinks of the chain she bound my soul with. I smelled her fear, her last moment of primal and timeless terror that preceded the final silence.

One of my leashes snapped.

Lightning coursed through my chest and my heart suddenly grew lighter. One of the bonds holding it—the awful link that once connected me to Chikal and Sugey—evaporated in an instant. I felt the disbelief of Mother, Necahual’s glee, and Lahun’s shock rippling through the blood that we shared.

I had a taste of freedom.

It was such a strange sensation; a moment of pure weightlessness of the spirit. My world became a bliss of whiteness shared by over six hundred ghostly emperors sharing my relief and joy. I became one with the fire of my soul, a flame unshackled burning bright in the shadow of a great and primeval terror. For a brief instant, we shared a laugh he and I; the first and the last, the darkness and the light, united in shared triumph.

We had done it.

Through will and sacrifice, we had slain a Nightlord by our own hands.

And I knew, deep within the fortress of my doubts, that this world would grow a little darker for it.