Revolutions

172 - Saxina

Are you there? Are you listening?

I can never tell if you're there, or if I'm only speaking into the darkness of this prison.

It's funny, in a way. I used to talk to the dark when I was a boy, whispering into the deep caves outside of Pichaqta. I'd eagerly wait for my voice to come back to me. I liked the way my own words sounded when they returned—distorted, stretched, like they belonged to someone else. I thought if I spoke long enough, the echoes might become another person entirely, someone wiser, someone who could tell me the things I needed to know.

I thought I heard the dark here answer back. Maybe I'm mistaken.

The silence presses down like a hand over my mouth. I've tried measuring time by the torches outside my door, by the distant murmurs of my captors. But the light never moves anymore. The voices never change.

Either I've lost track of the days, or there are no more days left to lose.

The last time I saw the sun, it was bleeding.

Sinking behind the jagged cliffs of Pichaqta, it bled in great strokes of dark orange and crimson, swallowing the sky in its ruin. My lip had already been split open from the backhand of the one they call Qliato. I could taste the raw copper of my own blood as I watched the sunset from the palace steps while I was being dragged away.

I had thought, then, that this was temporary. A setback.

I suppose I was wrong.

I became The Tempered because I was the only one who knew what Qiapu trullyneeded to prosper. I was the only one who saw what was coming.

I was the only one who understood that power is a wheel, and if you don't break it, you get crushed beneath it.

The fool that he was, Limaqumtlia thought himself immovable. He thought the old ways would hold. That our people would stand behind him, no matter what. He thought being just was enough.

It wasn't.

Achutli knew it. The Eye in the Flame knew it. I knew it.

They came to me with their offer, and I said yes before they had even finished speaking.

A new era. My era.

The first chasqui arrived in the dead of night. A shadow moving swift-footed through the mountain pass. His arrival was signaled by nothing but the quiet shift of wind against the palace banners.

I remember the way he knelt, barely out of breath, holding out the bundle of knotted cords—Achutli's words twisted into fiber. The message itself was brief.

The Tempered will fall.

The sun will rise anew.

Stand ready.

And I understood.

Limaqumtlia's reign was already over. He just didn't know it yet.

It was not the first chasqui, nor the last.

Achutli's voice wove through the mountains on the backs of men who ran with the wind. His instructions were always careful, precise.

Hold your ground. Watch for signs. Stand ready.

I was not his first choice. I knew that.

In his mind, the Qiapu were a stubborn, divided people, too tangled in tradition to serve his grand vision.

It's why, I'm sure he believed, we became enslaved to the Timuaq in the first place.

But he needed a hand to steady them, a voice to speak where his could not reach.