[center][color=6ecff6][h2]Ixhun[/h2][/color][/center][hr]
Word had traveled quickly through the great city of Ocotopec. The cityfolk, those who didn’t toil the fields and hunt the jungle by day, were beginning to clog the streets, each pair of eyes morbidly curious to witness the girl and the boy who had slaughtered the city's sworn protectors.

The guards with the Jagr faces had brought them through the city with haste. The main thoroughfare, as far as she could tell, was choked with onlookers. Thousands of people lined the edges of the road, many had their faces painted in brilliant turquoise patterns, others possessed piercings of stone and ivory-white bone at their septum, ears, and cheeks. She took in the sight as she followed close behind the guards. She had seen people with such embellishments before, outside of the great walled cities she had stalked, and most recently inside that burning maelstrom of death and desecration, though the faces there had been far less curious and far more afraid.

She turned her attention back to the Jagr guards, noting the urgency in their pace, the tensing of their muscles as they led them onward through the growing crowds of Ocotopec. She could smell their fear, taste the metallic tang of cortisol on her tongue as they radiated sweat and heat just steps in front of her.

“There,” the boy, Cuauhtl, whispered to her as he motioned with one hand, “the heart of Ocotopec, the [i]Hueyi Teocalli[/i].”

She had never heard that phrase, but she understood it intuitively, [i]The Temple of the Sun[/i].

It had been slowly growing over the tops of the two-story rectangular clay construction houses that had surrounded them since entering the city. At first, it was a vague outline of a half circle, but her eyes had picked out the ornate filigree carved upon it, and the stonework reminded her of the beams of the sun rising at the far edge of the horizon. Then a roof had revealed itself, and a squat stone structure with an opening facing them had become visible beneath it. She had thought it stood atop a hill of considerable height to have been visible over the flat roofs of the personal dwellings and merchant shops surrounding them. Still, she had been surprised when they were finally free of the city blocks to find it mounted atop a mountain of stone.

The [i]teocalli[/i] was massive, a four-sided pyramid rising above the city with all the majesty of an indifferent god too large to be concerned with the matters of the small folk. She quickly understood that this structure was the work of thousands of laborers and hundreds of talented stonemasons and artisans. A reflecting pool stretched the length of the way to the teocalli, flanked on both sides by well-worn roads of stone and choked by tens of thousands of people jostling for position to watch her be escorted to the [i]Quetzalcoatl Totec Tlamacazqui[/i].

At the foot of the teocalli, two statues twice the height of a fully grown man stood sentinel. Jagrs, their mouths agape to reveal rows of killing teeth of emerald, greeted them as they began their climb up the brown-stained steps of the teocalli. She could smell the chemical makeup of the stain, taste the iron on her lips as they climbed. There were few things she knew as well in this life as blood.

“It is far larger than yours,” the girl commented on the now fallen teocallis of Apaxco to Cuauhtl.

The boy looked puzzled a moment before he responded, already becoming out of breath as they climbed the steps.

“Apaxco was not so grand as Ocotopec; this place has stood defiant of the Easterners for fifty generations before my Grandfather's forebears walked this plain, and, Sun Above willing, for five hundred more.”

The girl did the math quickly in her head, and though she did not understand [i]why[/i] she was aware that a generation equated to roughly twenty trips around the local star, she knew it all the same. If Cuauhtl’s knowledge was correct, though she doubted its accuracy, the city of Ocotopec was over 1500 standard solar years old.

[i]Solar.[/i] She weighed the strange word in her mind. The importance of it was immeasurable, the worth of that unknown place priceless to her. She had never heard it spoken before, even Cuauhtl with his studied knowledge and embellished words had not placed it in her mind. She put it away, determined to figure out its origin soon enough.

The Jagr guards stopped, and the girl's mind came back to the present. They must have been some two hundred and fifty meters up the teocalli now, with about as many steps left to the top. But they were on a small plateau of sorts, cut around this central part of the staircase as an entrance to some chambers within.

“Do not speak unless spoken to, do not make eye contact unless addressed, and do not insult the [i]Quetzalcoatl Totec Tlamacazqui[/i].” [i]The Priest of Our Lord[/i], again, she knew the meaning of the strange title immediately, and a well of something warm began to grow in the center of her chest as she pondered the knowledge. She rolled her tongue as if tasting the meaning buried deep within the thought. There was providence in this moment; she could feel it.

Cuauhtl spoke cautiously as they left the bright lit sky outside the teocalli for the torchlit interior, “They will have your heart if you offend them,” he finished, though the girl knew without having to ask that he had left out words at the end, [i]and mine too[/i]. She admired his selfless courage in that moment, in the same way a mother might admire a loyal dog placing itself between her child and a beast of the jungle.

The entryway was sparse, a smooth stone passage leading directly toward the center of the teocalli. As they walked, torchlight began to give way to sunlight once more. They exited into a sun-bathed circular chamber that was far too large for the structure it was built within. She retraced the steps that had taken them here in her mind, cursed her inattention on the comforting warmth spreading from her chest down to her fingers and toes. She could see it now, in her mind, the interior layout of the teocalli, the subtle downward slope, the turns nearly imperceptible to a normal human that wound them further and further down with every ignorant step. The creators of this teocalli had taken great care in their deception, care no simple plumb or square could have crafted measurements so exact; they had been aided by means beyond her comprehension, by powers no longer present upon Ixhun itself, of this she was sure.

She brought her attention back to the chamber before them, the length of her pondering shorter than a single beat of Cuauhtl’s anxious heart. The chamber stretched for some one hundred meters in what the girl could only infer to be a perfect circle. The roof above was a dome, the center of which was an oculus open to the sky far above them. She had no doubt it ran directly through the center of the teocalli itself and provided the light that so bathed this innermost sanctum.

At the center of the sanctum, arrayed beneath the oculus, was a mechanism so foreign to the space it occupied that there could only be one explanation for its presence. Like a [i]tocatl[/i], eight limbs of burnished material reached up into the ceiling and buried themselves into the stone roof of the chamber. The metallic limbs all reached down toward the base of the chamber, and all but one of them ended in several lenses. The closest lenses to the oculus measured some ten men across, while each subsequent lens grew smaller and smaller. The limbs holding them were clearly articulated, with many joints allowing the movement of the lenses to focus the sunlight from above in whichever direction was necessary for the contraption's function. 

She turned her attention to the final articulated limb, the end of which was not a lens but instead a cylindrical device of silver and bronze. What function the entire contraption had originally been created to perform was not immediately clear, but its current use was more than evident throughout the entire sanctum.

Thousands of the stones of the sanctum, from those Cuauhtl and herself tread over now, to those lining the walls, or those making up the raised dais beneath the mechanism, were inscribed with finite text and miniature murals. Her eyes picked out cycles of the sun as timekeeping stamps on every stone, cataloguing thousands as she swept her gaze across the chamber.

“It is a record?” she asked, the answer already clear to her.

Cuauhtl, for all his composure thus far, seemed caught off guard by the girl's words. His nearly mute companion had finally spoken, and were her voice not as sweet as honey, he might have run from the creature galavanting as a curious girl his age at his side.

“It is more than that,” he began as he pointed toward the dais at the center of the chamber, “it is the entirety of our history, as far back as can be remembered, it is the story of our people,” he stated with a quiet reverence, “every stone, painstakingly cut to chronicle our greatest triumphs and our worst defeats. Our most abundant of harvests and desolate of seasons. These stones hold the keys to many of the problems we face, and the Priest of Our Lord deciphers them day and night.”

The girl turned her gaze to the center dais, to the man seated amongst heaps of scrolls and an arcane device that she knew controlled the spider-mechanism clinging to the ceiling above them.

His face was hidden behind a mosaic mask of turquoise tiles, only the whites of his eyes showing through as the two interlopers on his sanctum approached. His head was adorned with a conical hat of jagr, and his chest was bare but for a large breastplate of curved obsidian glass. He stood as the two began picking their way across the raised stones that crossed over the water that surrounded the dais.

“Tlein quihtoa moyollo?” [i]What says your heart?[/i] the masked priest boomed from atop the raised platform.

“Noyollo moticpan, huan moyollotzin?” the girl responded immediately. Cuauhtl, for all his learning, was dumbfounded as the girl from the jungle rolled through the formal interaction with ease. He pondered a moment her answer, [i]“My heart is in order…”[/i], he was not sure why she had answered in such a way, but he dared not ask her in front of the [i]Priest of the Lord[/i].

“My heart seeks yours,” the Priest answered from atop his plinth. He began to descend the steps, his arms raised wide out to his side, a wicked blade of obsidian brandished between the fingers of his left hand as he approached, “I have dreamt of you,” he admitted as he took each step with ponderous inevitability.

“Of me?” the girl asked, surprise evident in her voice for the first time since Cuauhtl had met her.

The Priest nodded, pointing the obsidian blade up to the oculus and the sunlight streaming in above, “The [i]Sun Above[/i] blessed me with your likeness, I have [i]seen[/i] you.”

The Priest stopped only a few steps from the pair of outsiders, and Cuauhtl knelt as tradition demanded. But the girl remained standing in opposition to everything proper.

“What did you see, Priest?”

The masked priest stood still a moment before beckoning the girl to follow him up the stairs.

“Come, both of you, the Sun Above demands it,” he stated with the assurance of a true believer.

Cuauhtl rose and took a hesitating step behind the girl and the highest priest of the land.

“What did you see?” the girl asked again as they made it to the top of the dais. The priest was working the arcane control system of the spider-mechanism now, chanting prayers as his hands worked diligently.

The articulated limbs moved above their heads, reaching around and spinning lenses as the mechanisms redirected their focus from a stone in the ceiling to the girl at the top of the dais.

“A name,” the Priest said as he worked. The lenses began to slot into place from largest to smallest, light bathed the dais, and the temperature rose considerably.

“I saw a girl sent from the Sun Above, protected by his work just as we were gifted with it,” the lenses began to focus now as the articulated arms jittered and clunked into position, “I saw a warrior like none ever seen,” the final cylindrical device slotted in place in front of the smallest of the lenses, “a woman, branded and condemned to a life of violence.”

The cylindrical device began to glow red-hot, and Cuauhtl noticed with trepidation that there was an iris at the end of the cylinder.

“I saw a savior, and a destroyer in one soul,” the priest affirmed as the iris opened and a beam of concentrated sunlight cut through the space between them.

“No!” Cuauhtl screamed as he lunged forward to save the girl. He was stopped where he stood, an outstretched arm from the strange girl holding him in place without the barest hint of effort.

“Do not interfere,” the girl commanded calmly, even as the laser beam of sunlight worked across her upper body. The air stank of burning flesh, and scraps of smoldering clothing and embers floated around them as the beam etched an intricate rendition of the Sun Above across her chest. 

“I saw a girl,” the priest stated with a wavering voice, “[i]I saw Nelchitl.[/i]”