[center][color=6ecff6][h2]Ixhun[/h2][/color][/center][hr]
Cuauhtl knew the way to the next closest city, for he had traveled it several times in his earliest years with the [i]teopixqui[/i]. The priests would go on and on about the Turquoise Prince, babbling away for hours and days as they debated the finer points of creation, sacrifices, the favor of the gods and the beyond. He had found it fascinating, truly, but he had only had a short attention span for such intense theocratic debate in those early years of apprenticing with the holy men. So, instead, as the old men rambled on, he’d count the octagonal pillars that marked every count of five miles on the path, and try his best to estimate their arrival time to Ocotopec based on the position of the Sun.

Now, far enough from his own home to no longer hear the screams of the tortured and dying, but still close enough to taste the acrid burn of ash in the air, he began to count once more. All the while, the girl strode at his side in silence.

He had exclaimed that they should avoid the road at first, reasoned that the Easterners would be watching for those that were trying to escape the death throes of their city. Yet the strange girl had simply laughed at the thought, shrugged lightly and motioned him down the road with a blood stained hand. He hadn’t tried to reason with her again after that. Not for a few days worth of mile markers.

On the third day of traveling, Cuauhtl spoke to the girl once more.

“I’m hungry,” he admitted, still so rattled by the horrors of the night he had met her that he hadn’t stopped to think about his hunger in the slightest. He’d stopped and drank from streams and puddles on occasion, but never once had he found the time, or the will, to face his stomach.

The girl stopped walking, a quizzical look gracing her too-beautiful features.

“I can fix that,” she answered, the first words she’d spoken to him since his rescue, “Wait.”

Cuauhtl was about to question the command when the girl simply stepped off the path and into the dense forest off to her right. 

“Wait!” He yelled as he began to follow, only to catch himself at the threshold of the jungle. He wanted desperately to follow, to stay with her, but he found his body unable to move. His legs refused to take another step as his eyes locked on the jungle just ahead. 

Darkness consumed the jungle. The dense tree cover and plants smothered out much of the light that the Sun Above offered. His vision began to tunnel as he stared into the dark. His hands became clammy as he looked on, his breathing shallow and quick, and his ears rang. He could smell the charnel house of his temple, the priests’ innards assaulting his nostrils as he found the landscape shifting before his eyes. He was back in the temple, back in that hall of carnage, back with the Easterners. He startled, turning suddenly at the Easterner at his side, only to find himself back on the path to Ocotopec, staring at the strange girl from an uncomfortably close distance. 

She was smiling at him. It was a predatory thing, a disturbingly close mimicry of the real warmth of a smile. It made his heart ache with longing, even while that little animalistic part of his brain screamed in protest to run from this facsimile of a human girl. His eyes followed her movements and he felt his mind begin to run as she offered up the carcass of a small child to him. He gagged, wretched, and vomited onto the path as the realization of her offering processed in his mind.

He staggered back from her, the false smile on her lips exchanged for confusion as he did, “I can’t eat that—” he caught his words. He took in the thing in her hands once again, tears welling in his eyes as bile burnt at his throat. The child’s limbs were too long, covered in fur, its head too round, and she held it by the tail.

“You can not eat [i]ozomahtli[/i]?” She asked him, “I have seen [i]you[/i] people eat this regularly.”

Cuauhtl found himself relieved as he took in the body of the monkey-like animal. The shifting iridescent colors of its fur were a relief as he dispelled the image of the child the girl had held before.

“I—“ he struggled for words for a moment, before finally finding his thoughts beneath the confusion, “I was mistaken. I can start a fire?”

“No fire,” the girl answered quickly as her hands ripped the monkey in half down the middle. Cuauhtl gagged again as the animal's insides sloshed to the earth in a hot mess.

“Eat, we must continue,” the girl commanded as she grabbed the heart and tore it free from the surrounding structures, “time is short, and we are close. The city is loud.” she added as she motioned toward the sun above them with a bloodied finger.

Cuauhtl, disgusted and terrified, felt compelled to eat. His legs carried him to the ground beside the offered meal of their own accord. His hands reached at the carcass that had been offered and grasped at the dripping meat. Tears filled his eyes as he ate, but he could not stop himself. The pit that was his stomach made itself fully known now, and Cuahtl found himself reaching for parts of the ozomahtli he had never even thought of eating in the past.

Above him, the strange girl simply watched, seemingly satiated by the heart alone. Her predatory eyes studied Cuauhtl, and though he felt them boring into the back of his head he dared not turn from the food before him.