“I’ve made one hell of a lot of bad choices when it comes to you fucking gods. I’m gonna make a hell of a lot more. But this isn’t one of them. So tell me what you know, or shut up.”
He opts for the latter and disappears. At least I don’t have to listen to him whining at me anymore. But it doesn’t solve my problem. And then it hits me. I’ve got the perfect thing to get me out of here. I just have to ask it.
I close my eyes and open myself up to Mictlantecuhtli’s power. I’m really not sure this is a good idea, but if it’s a secret passage not only do I need to find it, I need to open it. I’m betting I’ll need the door to think I’m him.
The power floods through me, a great wash that pours through my limbs, into my mind. Throttling it back is like trying to tie a knot in a running firehose.
I wrestle with the power until I can get enough of a handle on it that only a little is available to me. The rest of it is hammering on the walls of my psyche, trying to break through. I grab that power and channel it into a location spell.
“All right,” I say, gritting my teeth from the massive pressure in my mind. It feels like it’s going to split me open any second now. “Show me where the passage is and let’s get this show on the road.”
The pressure focuses on one side of my head, a sharp migraine that bursts inside my skull, driving me blind for a fraction of a second before receding. When my vision clears I see a wide, glowing line running along the floor, out through the doorway, and down the hall.
“Much obliged.” I follow the line through a dozen rooms, the maze-like route leaving me lost in a matter of minutes. Every room looks the same. Every grinning skull grins in the exact same way.
Until they don’t. The line stops at a tzompantli larger than the others. The rack takes an entire wall, the skulls twice the size of normal. The rack lights up and I feel a tugging in my hand.
I remind myself that I need this. That I asked for it. That there’s no way to get from here to there without doing this. Then I press my hand against one of the skulls and Mictlantecuhtli’s power pulses through it. The rack and wall behind it disappear into smoke, revealing a wide staircase heading up.
That’s when the pain kicks in, my vision goes green and I pass out.
___
When I wake up I take a few seconds to marvel at the fact that I can wake up at all. Everything has a green tint to it. The jade’s engulfed the rest of my head and progressed all the way down my right arm. The only piece of me that’s still me are the last two fingers on my right hand.
But on the plus side I got the door open. So, yay me?
I pull myself up from the floor and stagger through the doorway to a staircase. The wall seals up behind me. I take the stairs two at a time.
“Kinda dicked yourself there, didn’t ya?” Alex says, appearing in front of me. I walk through him, ignoring him. He appears a few steps higher, an annoyed look on his face.
“I could have saved you all that trouble,” he says. “Now look at you. You’re—” He cuts off as I walk through him again. “Oh, come on.”
Funny, I’ve never really ignored him. Even when he was actually Mictlantecuhtli and not this seed of his personality in my mind. I kinda like it.
“Will you just stop for a second and fucking listen to me?” I give him my answer by walking through him again. I hear an exasperated sigh behind me. He doesn’t reappear again.
Dim, gray light shines through a doorway ahead of me. I can hear raised voices. Santa Muerte and Mictlantecuhtli. They don’t sound happy. I suppose that’s to be expected. From what they’ve both told me they can’t stand each other.
I stop a few feet from the entrance, something else from Darius’s message leaking into my mind. Not memories, not even words or concepts, really. Just this strange feeling that I’ve said something wrong. I listen, straining to hear. There’s a background noise of wind whistling through the doorway making it hard to catch what they’re saying. I give up after a few minutes and keep going, pausing only for a moment at the doorway before stepping out onto the roof of the Bone Palace.
The sky has opened up. Rain comes down in sheets, the wind buffeting me, tearing at my clothes. A heavy, stone altar, red from all the blood, sits in the middle of the roof, a prone form lying on top of it, soaked through from the rain.
Santa Muerte and Mictlantecuhtli stand on the other side of it, arguing loudly, though over what I can’t tell. Santa Muerte holds the obsidian blade in an overhand grip. A shitty way to hold a knife if the person you want to cut can see you coming. It’s a stabbing grip.