Chapter Text
From the clouds above falls a light brighter than any star. He dives straight for the arms of his partners.
With gleeful whoops, two newborn divinities topple over with him. Amid a curtain of wings, three partners embrace. They rejoice in laughter and tears and worshipful kisses. Their people are safe from horsemen and heaven's wrath. In their hearts they shall live forever (or at least for untold centuries.)
"Is-Is it over?"
His partners pull away, ever so slightly. Grief dims their eyes.
"Oh, Miguel," Tulio sighs. "It's..."
Chel presses a kiss to his brow. "It's only just beginning."
Even while Spain is still digesting its islands in the Caribbean, its conquistadors hunger for that vast, uncharted continent to their west, another New World after the polish had worn off the last one. Their horsemen will not always ride behind them.
Like ripples in a pond, their influence will spread. Desperate refugees will flee down once-prosperous trading routes and carry pestilence with them. They will come in ever larger numbers, until the original peoples of those lands push back, and wars will rage. Crops will be abandoned to rot in the fields or trampled underfoot. Where Pestilence and War and Famine go, their brother must always follow.
There will never be more tempting a prize than El Dorado, golden king of cities.
"They'll never reach this place," Miguel vows. "Not now, not ever."
Obsidian wings blot out the new morning light. The world falls silent as the grave. Once Miguel shivered under such oblivion, but he is alone no longer. He and his partners stand shoulder to shoulder, the air around them resonating with all the joyful prayers and celebration of their people. His wings blaze with all the brilliant shades of dawn. With a thought he, Chel, and Tulio could summon weapons burning with the faith their city now puts in them.
Instead they stare unblinkingly into fathomless dark eyes.
"Lady Miskitli," Chel says levelly.
The goddess stares her down. "Lady Chel."
Together the three of them have softened Manoa's ties to the physical world. Neither Spain nor Portugal nor any of the empires that come after them shall ever find the city of gold if deep in their hearts they also truly believe it unobtainable. Lady Death is not so easily swayed. Miskitli is the name Manoa gives to the force that shadows all babies born in this valley. She existed long before them all. One day she may yet return them to oblivion.
Chel's eyes narrow speculatively. Even now, she is human in a way Miguel and Tulio can never be. They were not born with finite days. They have never suffered the agony of all their loved ones robbed from them one by one.
If she wanted, her partners would gladly raise up beside her, and vault El Dorado into true immortality. Like Antillia and the Land of Youth and all other paradises before it, it will become a realm not mortal can ever reach.
Not while still alive.
"Do you truly think to stop me?"
Miguel chews his lip. He speaks before the thought finishes forward. "We can definitely... delay you. For weeks. For years." He flashes his teeth. "For decades."
"Until people are old," Chel grinds out. "Old enough that they might want to welcome you by name."
"Maybe you'll come for them in their sleep," Tulio demurs. "And carry from them dream into another."
Chel squeezes their hands. "From one life into the next."
She and Miguel brim with possibilities. Beyond this plane is one Tulio has already ventured into. Lady Miskitli forces souls from one world down into the next, she is not the reason Xibalba is called the Place of Fear. There is so much to for them to do above and below.
The Lady of Souls laughs. For a heartbeat her wings are not black at all, but too brilliant to gaze upon. Then her form dissolves into a golden cloud of butterflies.
Miguel holds out a reverent finger. A butterfly alights, delicate as a soap bubble. He jolts from its touch, a freedom beyond words.
With a gleeful laugh, too high for human ears, the soul takes flight. The swarm briefly stops to mob the jaguar skulking in the jungle shadows. He growls in consternation but doesn't bat a paw after them when they all finally vanish into the western horizon.
"Good riddance," he grumbles.
Miguel perks up in recognition. "Oh, hello! You're Balam Qoxtok, right?"
The Jaguar God flicks his tail. "Only to my enemies." His face puckers. "To my... family... I am Siwabal Koyopa."
"Your dad's known my mom for years." Chel grins, sweet and ruthless. "I think we're overdue for a reunion."
Siwabal Koyopa puckers further.
"Hah!" Tulio guffaws. "Didn't I say we were gonna be a seeing a lot of each other from now on?"
The Jaguar God smirks. "As a matter of fact, Mom expects you and your partners at dinner tonight."
"'...M-Mom?'"
"Of course, little brother." Siwabal Koyopa smirks. "We're family, right?"
Leaving him a sputtering wreck, the Jaguar God bounds back into the darkness of his domain. Tulio's partners pick up the pieces.
"Lady Eupana is the goddess of everything by Lake Parime," Chel consoles. "She's just like that with everyone."
"H-How come I always wind up the baby of the family?"
Miguel rubs his shoulder. "Look on the positive side, Tulio, you've got better brothers this time around!" A family Miguel can't wait to meet, just like the relatives Chel speaks so lovingly of. Briefly he even ponders the secrets his own family whispered to him, a forest of towering cedars somewhere between Heaven and Hell ruled by those who belong to neither.
But that's an adventure for another time.
Tulio looks plaintively to their partner. "Does there happen to a map to divinity?"
Chel shrugs. "You tell me."
He groans. "Don't look at us. We just used to be where instinct said we should be. And when instinct brought us here we all told it very loudly to screw off. There's a world difference between death and... and..."
"Life," they all murmur wonderingly.
Something that spits in the face of all maps and plans mortals might try to chart it out with. Why should their gods be any less lost? Each new day might bring unfathomable loss or terror. Or maybe they yet again succeed in dancing their city around certain disaster. With the chance to fail comes the chance to grow, to change, to thrive.
The kind of freedom even the stagnant spirits of death might yearn for.
The freedom they gladly seized by tasting life's first fruits.
It's a choice Miguel will make every day, from now into eternity.
"Well?" Chel asks. "You don't wanna stay here forever, do you?"
She tugs them along. Laughing, they take wing beside her, and flit for home. Whatever tomorrow may bring, today is a day to celebrate.
Where life takes them, they go together.
Forever and always.
Some twists in the trail are easier to tell than others. When three newborn divinities must endure the first of many divine dinners in Xibalba, they know they must go looking their best. Chel is resplendent in a red gown trimmed in white, a high priestess ascended into divinity, while in turn her boys favor deep blue and emerald green. They proudly wear the gold gifted to them, warm and gleaming with the faith of their people.
The rulers of the Fifth World must look the part. Their temple has golden crowns and elaborate headdresses of quetzal feathers. Instead all three of them stride into Lady Eupana's hall with smaller crowns of dawn-colored feathers lovingly gathered from Miguel's wings. This time his plumage grew back immediately.
They are not the only new guests at the dinner table. Altivo has once more donned his human guise, long-faced and broad-shouldered. He wears his golden horseshoes as armbands. Down his head is an elaborate headdress of horsehair woven with flowers. Beside him sits a man in radiant emerald garb and a massive plume of rainbow feathers.
Altivo and Lord Ayau are polite, but neither talk much. Mostly they sit basking in their own inside joke. (And not even the gossipy Parrot God dares ponder how a Horse God and a Feathered Serpent are... um, connected.)
While Tulio now knows what he is not, who he is now is still up in the air. He must discover more of himself as he must new parts of Chel and Miguel.
Lady Miskitli is no more considerate with dropping souls into Xibalba than she was before his arrival. He and Altivo continue escorting the newly diseased down through Xibalba, stopping at the many homes along the way. With more... protective outlets in the world above the Lords of Xibalba are genial hosts. Their souls readily join Lady Iztaya's endless feasts or lay down to rest in Lord Tlilihui's fields. Most aren't satisfied until Lady Eupana's floating isle.
Tulio's work is not relegated to the spirit world alone. In the world above are no shortage of lives fleeing the the horsemen. Chel keeps the flame of the golden city, one where conquest can never reach, burning bright. Siwabal Koyopa is as awkward toward the newcomers as he is fearsome toward the enemies at their heels. So he leaves up to his little brother and his partners to guide the lost down those strange, winding trails to Manoa.
Miguel keeps things closest to home. He heals the sick and flies beside the Owl Goddess at night to ward off nightmares. No disease or nightmare creeps into Manoa under his watch. Tulio is the middle man, but Miguel welcomes all newcomers with open arms. In a hundred shapes he walks among them to ease their transition into this new world and weave Manoa's tapestry of peoples a little more vibrant.
Chel, who first led her partners home by charging for the world outside Manoa, ventures furthest of them all. She is the whisper of intrigue that spreads their legend across whole continents. Conquistadors seek their city in vain among arid mountains and the darkest jungles. In centuries yet to come she'll adapt their tale as maps fill in, to ancient treasure troves and archaeological finds waiting just for those adventurers brave (and foolish) enough to search for them.
So too does Chel look elsewhere, trade routes to Antillia and Atlantis and a dozen other lands fluid as their own. Humans will always dream of better things, after all, and even a valley paradise may feel like a cage to some born inside its walls.
With the grand cosmology comes the little things. Tulio will never stop being a reaper, not when the Maize Goddess took one look at his scythe and got ideas. His dark harvest is far more literal these days. Miguel never loses his song. Sometimes the music sweeps Tulio away and those around him will eagerly fall into a dance god's rhythm. Con artists and bald-faced liars have a little of Chel in them.
But these are just the first steps, the earliest days in their new life. Even after Tulio learns the Manoan concept of marriage, it is years before he even thinks of asking them... um, how their partnership might evolve even further. It takes even longer for Chel and Miguel to blurt out their proposals to him. At the exact same time he does.
What comes after that....
Well, there's no rush. Not when all their families are immortal as they are.
In a dark jungle, the Jaguar God sleeps. These days his hunts are few and far between unless he feels up to stalking the underworlds past his father's.
...At least for hunts in which he is the predator.
Siwabal Koyopa's ear twitches at the flutter of wings. He steadfastly ignores it. Some voyeuristic little souls fly around as hummingbirds instead of butterflies.
A giggle splits the air.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Siwabal Koyopa goes still. He doesn't dare open his eyes. Sometimes they'll let him 'nap' and go pester Itzli or Tzinacon instead. Down here they have no shortage of family.
Today is not that day.
"Uncle Siwabal!"
With delighted cries, the spawn of the Life Gods pounce upon him.