Tlamatine did not have words for the terror as he crossed the stream on Xolot’s back. The dead and damned swirled about him in a scene taken from Dante’s own Inferno. The lost and helpless wandered about and Tlamatine foolishly looked each in the face to be sure it was not his Iiusticia. Suspicious of every passing soul, he began to hum to himself a hymn of divine love and grace, a song not composed by the gods, but by his own hand and mind. As the river bank encroached, he realized how grateful he was to have had Iiusticia, who would sometimes hum along with him in order to keep his spirits bright. Iiusticia knew that it was a reaction of anxiety, and his reaction was to give Tlamatine calm. Iiusticia was nowhere near, and Tlamatine realized that with a shiver down his spine.
On shore, Tlamatine dismounted Xolotl and continued to walk the way of the damned, his path set before him as clear as the sun on a rainy day when the deer gives birth. He made his way down the beaten path, unsure if the wailing he heard was real or imagined. He could not understand why such a place would be so dreadful, except that it was not life. He was headstrong, but even he understood that the world was a temporary place for the souls of his people, the Mexica.
But perhaps it was those very souls that did not understand that were wailing. As Tlamatine considered this he realized that the geography was changing quickly. There seemed to be a dense fog that was only broken by two hills in the distance. The fog was a noxious, thick, and choking thing that made it difficult for Tlamatine to breathe. He wondered how others survived here, but he realized as he reached the foothills that it was not designed for survival except for by the fittest. With a determined expression he nearly walked the path between the two hills when a divine voice gave him pause.
He looked up to see Xochipilli materialized, and just in time, as the hills began to yawn and groan and, with an incredible force and magnetism, slammed together. They crumpled and crumpled until what remained was just a bit of earth, a spire in the middle of the path as homage to Mictlantecuhtli and his divine wife, Mictecacihuatl. The hills began to separate and pull apart, Tlamatine realizing their full size once more as the spire of earth expanded and divided. Tlamatine picked a stone off the ground and tossed it between the two hills only to watch the event unfold once more, the stone nowhere to be found.
Xochipilli looked down at Tlamatine and smiled. “It seems my grace was aptly timed,” he said and watched as Tlamatine pulled out the conch shell ocarina and blew cursory low notes. As the music began to swell from the ocarina, the hills started to pull apart and then disassemble themselves, or perhaps reassemble themselves, into a liquid pool of blackness on the ground. The hills whispered trickles as Tlamatine passed through unharmed, his notes perfectly punctuated by the hills as they began to spring from the well of the puddle on the ground.
Tlamatine turned to look incredulously at the hills. “Did you see that?” he said to the divine god of love, and Xochipilli nodded. “Your gift is your redeemer here, but it shall not help you on your next quest,” Xochipilli said. The darkness in his voice made Tlamatine nervous, an ethereal droplet of sweat beading and running down his temple.
“You go to the obsidian mountain from which sharp arrows are shot.” The god said as they continued their path. It was as Tlamatine was dreaming of his love Iiusticia that he heard the first whizz of an arrow. He heard the shaft deepen in the earth with a heavy pluck. The next arrow was aimed for his heart, and would not miss.
