Chapter Text
The night was warm and still, with the soft sounds of the jungle permeating the night air. Isabella and her sister, Rocky, had wanted to do this for years. Isabella, being 20 and in her sophomore year of college, could admit that she was a bit too old for an adventure like this one. Rocky, however, had no such compunction. Rocky was 15 and a tomboy, and, like her sister, fond of the local history and myths. Rocky stuck her camera around her neck with a strap.
Perhaps it was not the brightest idea for two young women to sneak off in the middle of night and wait on a deserted beach in the middle of the night. After all, there were jaguars and snakes aplenty in this part of the Yucatan peninsula. And predators of other kinds. But the girls had heard a legend from their cousins and carried their curiosity with them for years. The Kukulkan. The feathered serpent.
The girls had grown up in a small town which was now called Tulum. It was the home of many maya, though, in recent times, its’ population had swelled to include expats and foreigners. Tulum now boasted several schools, one of which her father helped run. Her father was a local, a man of maya descent. Mama was an American doctor with Irish roots who had come to work in a local clinic, fallen in love, and never left. They had two daughters, the elder being Isabella who sometimes went by “Isa” and the younger named Raquel who they nicknamed “Rocky”.
Isabella paused and wondered what the appropriate attire for was meeting a god on the beach. Or for spying out a god? She opted for a pair of jeans because it was more comfortable to wear jeans while slinking around the sand dunes at night. Jeans and flip flops, along with a short-sleeved shirt completed her ensemble.
Isabella and her sister left their house several minutes later, with Rocky hastily pausing to grab her camera.
“Remind me again why we’re doing this? Why did I agree to spend the first night of my summer break at home getting up in the middle of the night in the vain hopes that we might see a god? A fairytale?” Isabella asked.
“Because we finally get a chance to spend some quality time together?”
“No, because we’re both idiots who never lost our love of fairytales or ghost stories. C’mon. Let’s hide behind that rocky outcropping and those dunes over there. That way we can hide when the local drunks see us, or worse, our cousins because this probably a practical joke from them!” Isabella suggested.
Isabella adjusted her clothes and found a comfortable place to lie down. And they waited. It was close to midnight when they saw the figure rising from out of the water. Isabella saw him first and heard the fluttering of his wings as he rose from the water and flew towards the shore. She drew a sudden intake of breath and heard her sister do the same. He was, in all truth, beautiful to behold. The moonlight danced off of the ornaments that were made of gold, well, gold and something else, but it was a metal that she had never seen before.
His wings fluttered as he immediately faced the shore and began walking, with a purpose, right towards where the girls had been hiding. He suddenly stopped and sat, right in front of the outcropping, dug a small hole, planted several seeds, and walked away.
“He’s sitting right in front! What if he sees us?” Rocky whispered.
“He will hear us first. Shut up.”
Kukulkan, mercifully, did not, in fact seem to hear them. Isabella surmised that their voices were somehow drowned out by the sounds of the waves crashing against the shore. Isabella saw him pace around the shore and sit down. Astonishingly, she saw him sit and weep for a few minutes, staring up at the land rather than at the sea. He looked more like a lost man, and more accurately, a lost child, rather than a god. His sobs, quiet though they were, seemed to pierce the night through. He seemed to be looking at something beyond her and it was the most heartbreakingly beautiful thing she had heard. When he finished weeping, he sat in silence for a while. It was at least one hour before Kukulkan left, silently as he had come. Rocky’s camera lay on the ground beside her. In all of their excitement, it had been forgotten.
“Darn. Not even a picture!” the teen complained.
“Well, perhaps it’s best then. Something tells me that we need to keep this to ourselves and not tell anyone. If mom and dad ask where we’ve been, tell them that went out to practice taking pictures with a flash on your new camera.”
Rocky had received a new camera that was her pride and joy.
“Ooh I like that one. Except we do not have any pictures.”
“Take a picture of that pyramid over there! And of those flowers. The flor de mayo would look stunning with a darker background.”
Once Rocky had finished taking a token amount of photographs, they set off for home. They said not a word but woke up later that morning to find the sun filling their house and their mother cooking a late breakfast. It was Saturday, which meant that their father, who was a schoolteacher, and their mother, who was a doctor, were taking some rare time off.
When Tomas and his wife Catriona noticed how often their daughters yawning over breakfast, they did not question it the first time. Tomas merely thought that they had stayed up late talking; the girls were like that. Two peas in a pod. He was so proud of his little family and how close they were to one another. Tomas kissed his daughters on the head and ruffled his younger daughter’s hair, which earned him a light smack on the arm.
“Mijas, your mother and I are going to town for a bit. Why don’t you two take the day for yourself and enjoy the beach?”
He was grinning happily at his older daughter. He was proud of the fact that she had gotten a scholarship to attend university in the United States but missed her terribly when she was away. Tomas was never completely at peace unless he had his whole family under his roof and safely accounted for. Even so, he still had errands to run and did not want the girls to waste their summer vacation. And so, the girls did just that. They went down to the beach and decided to hike around the dunes. It was nearly an hour later when Rocky finally decided to break the silence that they had been under since the events of last night.
“Do you think he was real?” Rocky asked.
“I know he is real. But at the same time, he is a dream. I cannot explain it. But it is like I’ve known him before.”
“Do you think we’ll see him again?”
“I do not know. Maybe not but I have a feeling that he will be a part of our story for a long time to come.”
Rocky frowned at that. Her sister was known to now again make these odd, dreamy remarks that made no sense.
“Why was he crying, sis? What would a god have to weep about?”
Isabella shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
Rocky seemed ready to move on to the next topic, and they spent the next few minutes taking interesting pictures of flowers and the pyramid in the background. Meanwhile, down in the depths of the sea, a different conversation was happening.
Namor had managed to return to the caves below the sea and was now resting in his hammock when one of the handmaids knocked on the door with an announcement that Namora was ready to speak with him.
“All went well in my absence?”
He knew that nothing of importance would happen tonight anyway. Attuma and Namora kept the warriors sharp and disciplined. A few hours’ absence would not cause any major alarm.
“It did, Kukulkan. How was your trip to the surface?”
“It was, the same as it always is. But there were two surface-dwellers who saw me.”
“Did you dispose of them?”
This was a blunt way to put it. However, Namora had a habit of referring to surface-dwellers as things rather than as people.
“They were children, Namora. Two sisters who heard the local legend. And what harm can there be in adding to the local myth?” he remarked.
Except that they had not seen him merely dancing through the ocean or flying above the waves. They had seen him weeping. And that seemed so much worse. One of them had not been a child though. She had been a young woman with a beautiful voice. And one that he had a funny feeling that he would meet again.