Welcome back to another chapter of The Philosophy of Fear in which we meet the dying, one of the three goddesses that this part is named after.
On with the show.
Harry Potter, the caves below Paititi.
Harry kept his eyes on the man who had him at wand point, a frown etched on his lips as his eyes narrowed. The man was tall and lean with wide shoulders and a bright smile on his face, his skin was the color of tea and his black hair cut short and combed back and out of his face. He was dressed in muggle clothing of blue jeans and a black shirt with a golden grinning sugar skull on it. One ear was pierced with a ruby studded gold earring, along with his eyebrow and lip. A gold necklace hung from his neck with braided hoops that remained Harry of his own golden torc that would normally be wrapped around his bicep. His fingers were covered in rings that were set with precious stones of all kinds that glowed faintly with magic from small runes etched into the gold and silver.
But what stood out to Harry the most, other than the man's eyes, was how young he looked. He couldn't be more than a handful of years older than Harry. A picture of youthful recklessness and confidence danced in his eyes just as much as they shined with a golden light in the semi-illuminated chamber.
The man continues to look at Harry before raising a brow. "Well, Gringo? Are you going to introduce yourself or am I going to have to curse some nameless kid?" He asks with a cocky smirk, something that when combined with the hungry look in his eyes reminded Harry of a few of the older Slytherin kids he had seen in the corridors of Hogwarts.
It was a look of never settling with what they had, a greedy look that wanted more than what they were born into.
"Harry," he said, his eyes drifting down to the man's wand. "Harry Potter," the boy who lives, introduced himself. Harry was also pretty sure he could beat the man in a fight, even unarmed as he was, if it came to that. But the man just continues to smile at Harry, giving him a slight nod before taking a small step away from him.
"Well now, that wasn't so hard was it?" The man said with his grin never fading. "I'm Caíque. Caíque Benício de Almeida Barros," he said before giving Harry a short bow but never taking his eyes off of him. "And I take it you're a child of Viracocha seeing that you slipped past the Can't-Spell repelling wards, yes?" he asks.
"Yeah, I'm a wizard, whatever," Harry said as he eyed the wand in the man's hand. "Listen mate, I'm not here to stop you from doing whatever you were doing-" he said as the other person cut him off.
"Grave-robbing," Caíque said with a cocky smirk as he took a step back from Harry.
"Yeah, whatever. I'm just looking for the back entrance to Paititi, let me do that and I'll be out of your hair," Harry said, impatience and anger coloring his tone as he bends his knees in preparation for a fight.
"Back entrance to Paititi?" Caíque said, looking confused as his eyes flicked to the door across the room before they looked back at Harry, narrowed in uncertainty and distrust. "You do know going into the city is practically suicide, right? I mean, I've heard some Gingo's were crazy but normally when they die in the jungles it's due to ignorance not flat out stupidity," he said, throwing Harry a look like he really did think Harry had a few screws loose.
"Are you going to let me pass or are you going to do something that's gonna get you hurt? Because I am not in the fucking mood to put up with people," Harry growled out, his hand still on his hunting knife and very far from being in a good mood. But all Caíque does is chuckle at Harry's tone of voice with a twinkling look in his eye as if he found Harry's actions amusing somehow.
"As much as I would just love to let you pass, Gringo, I assure you that there isn't a back way into Paititi. You can go through the front gate and die, or climb up the wall and end up with the same fate," Caíque said with a shrug, keeping his wand trained on Harry. "And before you ask, the door isn't one that leads into Paititi, it's sealing a tomb, nothing more," he told Harry as he took a step to the left, placing himself between Harry and the door.
"Wrong move," Harry said in almost a whisper before he felt the Hunt flood his body. Caíque eyes widen at the sight of Harry's eyes morphing into cat-like eyes before he jabs his wand forward at the Boy Who Lived. The scarlet light of the stunning spell flew from the tip of Caíque wand, Harry merely brought up his free arm to take the hit on his jacket as he stepped forward faster than the other wizard could follow. One second Harry was six feet from the grave robber and the next he was in his face.
Harry drew his hunting knife and took a swipe at Caíque neck, the Grave Robbers molten golden eyes tracked the silver blade with surprising ease. With a twitch of Caíque wand, the Grave Robber deflects the silver hunting knife with a shower of sparks but as Caíque smiles and brings his wand down to aim at the opening in Harry's jacket, he isn't able to track Harry's free hand. Harry's hand wrapped around the Grave Robbers throat and with a choking sound, Caíque is swiftly picked up and slammed into the door on the other side of the room, knocking the wind from his lungs.
The Grave Robbers eyes shoot open wide with shock as he's slammed into the door, the world was a blur of movement and G-forces when Harry had grabbed him. As Caíque tried to refill his lungs with air, he watched Harry pull his other hand back, the silver blade held tightly in his grasp. The Grave Robber quickly shuts his eyes before activating the passive magic in one of his rings, and with a soft crack, the chamber fills with a blinding white light.
"Ahhh!" Harry screamed in pain as he jerked back from the harsh light that emanated from the Grave Robbers hand. "Motherfucker!" He cursed as he stumbled backwards right before he felt a battering ram strike him in the chest. Harry is lifted off the ground before being slammed into the wall behind him.
"Ha! That jacket and knife of yours are gleaming like beacons even when I'm half blind!" Caíque said with a mad laugh. "After I knock you out, I think I'll be taking them for myself!" He said with a wide grin that Harry couldn't see but could very much hear in his voice. Harry stood back up with a growl, trying to blink the darkness from his eyes, he couldn't see the Grave-robber and he couldn't smell him thanks to the foul odor filling the cavern but he could still hear him. The sound of shifting cloths, of rocks moving below his feet, and the puffs of air leaving Caíque gave away right where he was.
But as Harry crouches, preparing for a charge, he's stopped by another voice speaking. "Are you two quite done with all this postering?" A high female voice asked, deadpanned and a bit angry.
Harry cursed in his mind. "Of course there would be two of them!" He thinks angrily, trying to figure out where the second voice had come from. But the voice echoed around the chamber, unable to pinpoint where it was coming from had Harry reaching for the tap in his mind to call forth more of the Hunt.
"How about no, Carbby? This kid almost took my head off," the Grave Robber said as Harry heard him shuffle around like he was blind as well.
"And such a shame that would be, losing such a pretty head. But, it would also finally shut that smart mouth of yours so I'm fifty fifty on if that's a good thing or not," the snide voice answered back in a teasing tone of voice. "Besides, the boy can help you open the door, you moron," it said in an exacerbated sigh.
"How is he- you know what? Fuck it. Hey kid!" Caíque yells across the room, causing Harry to freeze for a moment. "Quick question, but what do you know about ancient Aztec warding techniques?" He asked, his voice full of resentful anger.
"Mate!" Harry said, bristling back in his own anger. "Does it fucking sound like I'm from around here!?" He said back at the ridiculous question.
"Now how is he supposed to help?!" Caíque snaps back at the other voice angrily.
"Maybe if you weren't so quick with the threats and he wasn't such a hot headed fool, you would have seen he has the same mark on his forehead as on the door," the female voice said deadpanned.
"What?" Caíque asked in shock as Harry stiffened. The only mark on his forehead was his scar, it was in the same shape as the memorial on the wall at Urqupa Llantuynin but that was a coincidence more than anything else.
"Wasn't it?" Harry asked himself, nothing but a pit of growing unease answered him back however.
"Okay, okay! Pause, time out, cease hostilities, truce!" Caíque calls out before Harry hears the Grave-robbers footsteps come closer. "Now, I'm going to walk over there and lift the blinding curse on you, I'm going to ask you nicely once; do not swing at me or we will go back to square one, comprende amigo?" He said, stopping a few feet from Harry.
Harry takes a few deep breaths, considering his options for a moment. He could either try to fight the Grave Robber blind and unable to follow his scent, or he could stuff his anger down and work with him.
-Slam-
"Fine, just lift the fucking curse," Harry says in a dead tone of voice that causes Caíque to pause before he muttered a few words and the white light begins to bleed away from his eyes. Harry blinks rapidly, clearing his sight from the curse with a sigh before looking around the carven. To his confusion, Harry only sees the Grave-robber and the Golden Cat. "Where's the girl who was just talking?" He asked quickly.
"Oh, I'm sure you'll find her if you look hard enough, Amigo," the female voice said, filled with amusement as Harry slowly turned to the cat now sitting on a rock by the door. Harry watched it smile, large and mocking, as he figured it out. "Bingo Gringo," the cat said with a Canary eating grin.
Harry blinks twice before turning to Caíque. "Your cat is talking," he said dumbly.
"Oh? Really? I guess I'm not going crazy after all," Caíque said with a roll of his golden eyes and sarcastic tone of voice as he crossed his arms over his chest. "That's Carbúnculo, or as I like to call her; Carbby," he said before turning his back on Harry and began to walk over to the door that dominates the cavern.
"And if you wish to keep those pretty green eyes, you won't call me that," Carbúnculo said from the rock she was sitting on while shooting Harry a glare. Harry looks back at the golden cat with a frown growing on his face, if he was any other animal, he would have probably brushed it off as a coincidence but the words of the King of Cats come crawling back into his mind. "Oh, we are many things, Harry Potter. A fea is just one life to us, a god another," Whispers into Harry's ear as he looks at the cat.
"Oh, you little fuc-" Harry mutters under his breath as the cat looks back at Harry with a smile growing on its face with its eyes of precious stones twinkling in the dark cavern.
"Hey! You gonna come over here or what, Gringo?" Caíque asked as he turned back to look at Harry with a frown, cutting him off from his own thoughts as he eyed the cat. Harry sighs before walking over to the Grave Robber, putting his hunting knife away as he did. As Harry approaches the door, he inspects it. It was formidable looking, as ancient stone doors went, made out of the same tarnished type of stone the columns and floor are made out of. Like the walls, images were etched deep into the stone, the first and highest, as it sat near the top of the door, was a skeleton figure sitting on a throne looking down at Harry with shining obsidian eyes. Below that seemed to be other figures, some humanoid and some animalistic, all arranged below her as if they were sleeping or dead.
But it was the depiction below the first two that caught Harry's attention. It showed the same figure at the top of the door, but now showing a side view of it sitting on a throne on one side of the door. While on the opposite side was a man kneeling with one hand pressed to the slit with blood dripping from his palm with his other hand covering his heart. The heart was shown in all of its gory details, but it was what was carved into his heart that was the most interesting to Harry; a lightning bolt shaped mark.
"Fuck," Harry whispered in equal parts wonder and anger. Wonder at the sight of the lightning bolt mark, one he had once thought to be wholly unique to him on the other side of the pond. Angered because he had no idea what it meant, Hermione had once mentioned that his scar looked like the Sōwilō or Sól in both Elder and Younger Futhark. But Harry was pretty sure he had nothing to do with the sun, unless you count his relation with Apollo. Hermione never brought it up again, maybe because she hadn't found anything else that looked like it.
"Noticed it, have you?" Caíque asked while looking at Harry with a grin before turning back to the memorial set into the stone. "I've asked around to a lot of people in my field of study, but no ward breaker or master could explain why Futhark showed up in an Aztec temple. I personally think a squiggly line isn't too hard to carve into stone, so it was more than likely artistic flare," He said with a shrug, his eyes bubbling at the humor he must have felt as his own musings.
"On a whim I took a picture of this to someone who studies the magical culture of the Aztecs, he told me it was an image of something called Otlamatoka imikistli in Nauatl. But roughly translated it means touched by-" Naíque explained but Harry already knew what it translated into, he knew in his bones and the burning of his scar.
"Death," Harry said breathlessly, cutting off the Grave-robber with a grin tone of voice.
"Heard of it before?" Naíque asked, turning to look at Harry with narrowed inquisitive golden eyes.
"Once or twice," Harry said vaguely as he continued to look at the door. "Do you know what it means? The whole touched by death thing?" Harry asked while turning to look at the Grave Robber.
"Not really," Naíque says with a sigh before dropping his hands. "The Aztecs were infuriatingly vague about it, like they were afraid of it or something. Which is pretty ironic if you think about their whole religion," he said with a dark chuckle. "But I did some checking around, just to see if it pops up anywhere else in the world and it shouldn't be surprising that it pops up in a lot of necromantic hermetic orders. But they call it something else, they call it Chosen by Death. But that just brings up more questions than answers," he said with a frown as he scratched the back of his head and turned back to the door with a frown on his lips.
"Chosen? Chosen for what?" Harry asked, getting angry with all the stupid vagueness and superstition surrounding the subject.
"Beats me Gringo, but then again I don't care all that much. All I want is what's in the tomb, not to deep dive into weird ass necromancer world views," Caíque said, shrugging once more as he turned back to Harry, his golden eyes crawling up his face and to his forehead. He blinks once, twice before a third time before a look of complete surprise crosses his face, as if he was just blindsided by something. "Oh, fuck! You're that Harry Potter, aren't you?" He asked as he adopted the look of a goldfish.
Harry drew in a deep breath before closing his eyes and sighing. "Fuck" he cursed under his breath as he turns away and quickly covers his scar with his bangs more out of habit then anything. "Yeah, I'm that Harry Potter," he said with another sigh and a pinched look on his face.
"Neat!" Caíque said with a small grin. "I learned about you in my Arithmancy class at Castelobruxo," he noted before turning away from Harry and back to the door. Harry waits a beat, waiting for the thank you's and it's an honor to meet you that he normally gets from people in the magical world. But to his surprise Caíque said nothing to that effect before turning back to Harry.
"So, I'm pretty sure you need to bleed on the door," the Grave Robber said, completely the opposite that Harry was expecting from a wizard who had just figured out who he was.
"Huh, not what I was expecting. But I'll take it," Harry said gobsmacked before looking back at the door. "Great, just a bit of blood and I'm through, right?" He asked before pulling out his hunting knife.
"What were you expecting? To have to cut out your heart or something?" Caíque asked with a raised brow and lazy grin.
"What? No, that was more to you not doing the whole hero worship shite most people do when they meet me. They tend to think I'm special or something completely insane like that," Harry said with a shrug of his shoulders before placing his blade at the palm of his hand.
Naíque just chuckles at his words. "Yeah? Didn't your mom blow up some dark wizard or some shit like that? Or that was what my Arithmancy teacher thought at the time," He asked and Harry snorted before nodding his head and cutting into his palm. "Well, if you think that's weird, try being born as a Zaori," he said absent-mindedly as he took a step back from the door.
"A what?" Harry asked, turning to the Grave Robber once more with a confused look on his face.
"Oh, wow. Talk about a culture clash, huh?" Caíque said with a sharp grin that reminds Harry of -Slam- a time on the Quidditch pitch. "Well, a Zaori is a child of Viracocha born on Good Friday, we're born with a denser than normal magic core and the ability to find treasure of all kinds," Caíque explains before a large grin crawled across his face. "And I happen to be the first one born in over a hundred years," he said with pride and greed in his voice.
Harry frown deepens. "But Good Friday is a Christian holiday, isn't it?" he asked, completely lost at the statement.
"Yeah, so?" Caíque asked, sounding just as confused as Harry felt.
Harry blinks, trying to make sense of what he was just told. Most extra abilities that a witch or a wizard could get was from either bloodlines or blessings from the gods. He never thought that God with the capital G had anything to do with magic seeing that the witch trials were a very real thing, and one of the main reasons why a lot of Magical Communities didn't follow the muggle faith. Did the Christian God even exist? It was honestly not a question Harry wanted answered if even there was an answer to the question.
"So, how the hell does that work?" Harry asked, still confused.
"I don't know. Magic I guess," Caíque said with a shrug before turning back to the door to glare at it.
"That's not an explanation, that's a cop out," Harry said flatly as he rolled his eyes. "Is that why your eyes are like that? The Zaori thing?" He asked as Caíque looked back at him with a grin.
"Yup! It's the tell-tale sign of being born a Zaori, golden eyes," he said with a grin. "They let me see through all things to the treasures hidden within, like how I can see the silver blade you have on your belt, the gold ring on the silver chain hanging from your neck, and that weird ass jacket you have on," Caíque said as he wiggled his eyebrows while Harry blinked in surprise.
"Then what's behind the door you want so much?" Harry asked as he jerked his thumb to the large stone door.
"Honestly, no idea," Caíque muttered more to himself than to Harry. "I've always been drawn to Paititi, more than likely because of all of the gold, but then Carbby showed me this door and I just knew I had to get what's behind it," he said as he gestured to the cat waiting on the rock by the door looking at them. "I've tried damn near everything I can think of to get through the stupid door short of doing a sacrifice of my own, because I rob graves, not put people in them," he said with a frown.
"Right," Harry said as he turned back to the door, not sure if he wanted to know what Caíque meant by sacrifice and just wanting to get this over with before he placed his bloody hand into the stone door. For a long moment, nothing happens, no click, no burst of magic, not even a pop of sound. "Did it work?" Harry asked out loud with a furrowed brow.
"Well, only one real way to find out," Carbúnculo said with a purr as both Harry and Caíque turned to look at her. "Don't just sit there looking at me, put your backs into it," she said as she nudged her head toward the door. Both Naíque and Harry turned to each other, Naíque rolling his eyes and Harry sighed before both of them placed their hands on both sides of the door and began to push on the door. The door was created to be heavy and sturdy, even when pushing with all his strength Harry couldn't get it to budge and as he tapped into the Hunt he still couldn't move the door. And he almost hopes he wouldn't be able to.
But before long, and with one mighty heave from both Caíque and Harry, the sound of cracking stone echoed around the cavern and the door began to open. The grinding of stone on stone set Harry's teeth on edge, as the pungent putrid smell becomes even worse as the door finally gives way.
As Harry, Caíque, and Carbúnculo stepped into the room beyond the door, Harry couldn't help but to feel…disappointed at what he saw. With all the grandeur and skill it took to create the previous room, Harry expected a lot more out of this one without realizing it. The room was large and looked to be nothing more than a large carven set inside the mountain. No carvings or idols, no decorations or symbols of power, just blank dark rock that stank of foul rot. The only thing that stood out in the room were the bones, innumerable in count as they laid in a large slanting pit. Harry paused, frowning at the sight of the bones, some were as small as humans, others as big as giants; one set even reminding Harry of a larger serpent. They were covered in a gray filth that filled the pit along with the bones, so much so that some of the bones jutted out of it.
"Jackpot!" Caíque said excitedly next to Harry before, without pause or hesitation for what he was about to intrude upon, runs right into the pit of bones. Jumping in, the man immediately starts to shift through the filth that came up to his knees. Pulling out bands of gold that were inlaid with precious stones, headdresses of rainbow feathers and polished ivory, necklaces and large gold earrings like he knew exactly where they lay. Caíque laughs with joy as he pulls out his spoils and tosses them out of the pit of bones, even going so far as to wrench them off of arms and misshapen skulls. "Oh man, this is a score!" He said with a laugh as his arms were loaded with his ill-gotten gains.
Harry just shook his head at the grave-robber's antics and tried to look for another way around the bone pit, sighing when he found none. He muttered a curse under his breath before wading into the pit, maneuvering around and through the bones littering his path, grimacing at the feeling of the gray clay like filth as it crept into his boots and clung to his skin. Cursing, he stumbled as something caught his foot in the obscuring filth, but managed to keep his footing somehow. Curiosity piqued, he probed carefully with his foot boot hitting something as well as a muffled scraping sound, like metal on stone, with his eyes narrowed Harry reached into the sludge.
It feels hot to the touch, and leaves his hand feeling odd, as if it was covered in lotion, or grease, or… "Fat," Harry whispered to himself as he looked up and around the chamber.
Horror dawned on Harry as he fully realized what he stood in. He pulls his hand from the sludge, it clung to his hand in a thin film that makes his stomach twist. He was standing in the ash and rendered fat of the divine, the bones of them scattered around him and with a Grave-robber pilfering there lost forgotten gold. Harry felt sick at the realization, his stomach turning as he saw the mixture of fat and ash bubble as if it was still cooking. He now knew where the putrid smell that overtook his senses was coming from, in his horror Harry turned to look at Carbúnculo. But the gold and silver feline merely looked back at him with a look of mocking amusement as if she had known all along of what they would find behind the door.
Something in the mixture of ash and rendered fat moved, causing Harry, in his horrified state, to jerk back and lose his footing completely. He slipped and fell backwards, landing in the God-sludge with his head below the surface.
Harry heard them, He heard them screaming, he heard them begging for an end that would never come.
Harry felt them, grasping and clawing at him, they tried to pull him in deeper so he could hear them better.
Harry sensed them, he felt their anguish and their pain, their desire for an end to the torment and the pain they were in.
After what felt like a decade of listening to the tormented voices of the gods suffering a painful death that would never end. A firm hand grabs his jacket before it pulls him from the sludge. "And up you go Gringo," Caíque said as he hauled Harry to his feet, as they both almost slipped in the process.
Thankfully, the impervious charm on his glasses held against the sludge. Harry looked at the Grave-robber with a sickened look. "Do you know what this stuff is?" He asked, the horror he felt coloring his tone as Caíque gave him a small sad smile.
"Primitive soap, I'd imagine," Caíque said before producing his wand and levitating something from the slurry of ash and rendered fat. It was a poleaxe, almost as tall as Harry with a wide flat head, it dripped with the divine soap before with a twist of Caíque's wand, it was cleaned off.
It was a beautiful, if a crude, weapon. The weapon's handle was wood inlaid with gold, but the grain of the wood was dyed black, as black as the sludge of divine bodies melted around Harry. The axe head was polished copper with designs etched into it the wide flat head and spiked back end to punch through armor. It had bands of gold with precious stones set into it wrapped around both the base and near the head. Harry smiled a bit as he reached out to snatch the floating polearm from the air, it wasn't a spear, but it would have to do.
But as his hand wrapped around the haft of the weapon, the Grave-robber speaks up. "Hey, now! I call dibs on this stuff!" Caíque said with an edge of anger to his voice.
Harry turned to him unimpressed. "Finders keepers," he says with a slight glare as the Grave-robber frowns.
"Yeah. I found it so I'm keeping it," Caíque said right back to him with his own glare.
"Without me you wouldn't have been able to open the door, and all I want is this. You can have the rest for all I care," Harry told him with a sharp tone, he wasn't about to let go of a weapon he could use when he didn't have his wands or spears with him.
Caíque looked as he bit into a lemon and started to grumble under his breath. "Fine," he said with a long drawn out sigh before letting the poleaxe go from his magic, allowing the full weight of the weapon to fall into Harry's hand.
"Thanks," Harry said before he turned on his heel and began to march through the sludge to the other side of the cavern.
"Where the hell are you going?" Caíque calls out as he follows behind Harry. "I told you this is a tomb, not a back way into one of the most cursed cities in the Southwestern hemisphere," he said as he caught up to Harry, putting his hand on his shoulder to stop him as he began to climb out of the pit. "Look at yourself, Gringo. You've covered in primitive soap, you only have a Inca war axe, and if by some miracle there is some back way into Paititi, you're more than likely going to be torn apart by the Cropo Seco's. It's not worth it, whatever you want into the city for, you'll die because of it," he stressed to Harry.
But as Harry opened his mouth to rebuke the Grave-robber, he watched as Caíque froze and fear entered his eyes. Harry swiftly turns around, swinging the war axe to bury it into the threat behind him but stops at the last second when he sees who it was.
"Two legsssss! You made it passsssssst the door! I can show you the ressssst of da way now!" The black scaled serpent that had led him to the caves in the first place.
Harry sighed at the sight of the serpent as it slithered and wrapped around the axe head before Harry lifted it to look at the serpent in the eyes with an unimpressed look. "You vanished before we even made it to the door, how did you know I was gonna make it through?" He asked the serpent, his tone full of annoyance.
"Oh, shit. You're a snake-tongue," Harry heard Caíque whisper behind him and turned to him with a raised brow. "I mean- it's a cool ability, useful too here in South America. Heard the ability is basically revered in India, but that's less important than the fact you're talking to a Mikiskoatl," he said as he nodded his head toward the pitch black serpent as he stepped back from Harry.
"A what?" Harry asked, confused at the words.
"Roughly translated, it means Death's Serpent in Nahuatl and it's not without good reason either. Their bite kills in seconds, their symbols of death for a lot of cultures in South America, hell, they're even invisible to anyone who hasn't witnessed death before," Caíque explained while giving Harry and the serpent an odd look.
Harry blinked before shaking his head, now wasn't the time for this. "That's fine and all, but it seems well behaved and I've got to go," he said before stepping completely from the pit and walking further into the cavern.
"If you're right, and there is a back way into Paititi, you're gonna die," Caíque warned him one last time as he watched Harry walk into the darkness of the tomb.
"Don't worry about me," Harry called back over his shoulder. "Just take what you can and seal the door behind you. If those things you talked about are so bad, I don't want them to escape through here," he said to the Grave-robber, who cursed at him in return before Harry disappeared from the light of the room behind them completely.
Harry, once more, thanked his ability to see in the dark, if not he would have stumbled and fallen down a flight of stairs that had been carved into the cavern. The walk was short and quiet as Harry made his way down into the dark of the cavern with the serpent whispering into his ears. He felt the sludge slide from his face and from his body, his horror and disgust of just what it was, was buried deep and shunted from the house in his mind in a cacophony of slamming doors. He tried not to think about it, he tried not to feel it, and he tried not to think of the smell or what he felt in the pool. He pushed it all down and repressed it all, he didn't have time to think of it, Harry was on a Hunt and he wasn't about to let anything stop him.
"We are heresssss," the serpent whispered to Harry, causing him to be pulled from his thoughts as he looked up from the ground. Before him, on a raised dais, were two thrones, carved from black rock of either slate or obsidian with very little detail to them. On one throne sat a simple golden headdress set with jets, it was a large and elaborate headdress made for a king. It seemed lonely to Harry, set up as a memorial of the one who once wore it. But it was the other throne that caught most of Harry's attention, for on this one, someone was sitting on it.
Harry could tell from the way the body was dressed it was a female, but all other identifying features were stripped away. For the woman resembled a flayed corpse, her muscles, ligaments, and veins were all exposed for him to see but dried out and resembled jerky more than anything else. She wore a simple dress of leathers wrapped around her body, whether it was her own flayed skin or someone else Harry could not say. An elaborate headdress sat upon her brow, feathers of long dead avians sat in a dull, listless, and dead stand straight up behind her head but it had undoubtedly lost most of its luster over time. She was hunched over on her throne, leaning off to the side as if she was in pain, one arm curled against her chest while the other dangled over the side. Her head leaned to the side and onto her shoulder while facing down, almost as if she was resting.
As Harry took a step forward, to step around the dais and the thrones, uncaring for the body or what it was doing here, as he heard a sickening pop as the body moved, he stopped to look at the body with narrowed eyes. His hands gripping the polearm tightly as the pops continued. Harry watched detached from it all as the woman straightened in her throne to look at him with {Fathomless Black Eyes}.
"So, you've come," She said in a hoarse whisper, her voice straining from exertion she must have felt as she leaned back into her throne. As she did, Harry's attention was drawn where her heart would lay. "You've come at last, to end this, haven't you? To end my suffering?" She asked, her voice echoed with pain, with exhaustion, and a bone deep weariness.
Harry stuffed his reaction down, his fear, his anger, everything. Keeping his face blank and his heart and mind empty of everything that felt like a ghost of emotions over him as he looked at the single true wound on the woman that leaked golden blood.
"Hate to burst your bubble, but I don't even know who you are," Harry said, his voice coming out dead even to him. "I think I saw you in a dream once, but I don't really care right now. I'm just passing through," he said, nodding his head toward a large black door sat behind the thrones.
The woman pushed herself up and off her throne, the sounds her body made paled in comparison to the pain that flashed through her eyes. "Names are meaningless to me now," she said, her pain echoing in her words as she stood. "Once they were great titles given to us by the mortals we watched over, whom we taught, but now? The names are almost as dead as we are, as I am soon to be," the skinless woman said as she stepped down from the dais.
She was taller than Harry, almost taller than Hagrid. As she walked closer to Harry the putrid sweet scent of rot and decay became more apparent to the Heir to the Hunt. But still his eyes didn't leave her heart, where the lightning bolt wound rested, bleeding golden ichor.
"But if you must have a name, Nopil. You may call me Mictecacihuatl," the watcher of bones introduced herself with a sad smile and even sadder eyes. "And you are my litechtlahtololie se tlami, my death that I welcome," she said as her shoulders sagged with relief, for after so long, her watch would finally end.
Chapter done!
Oh boy, this chapter was a bitch to write. I had gotten about half way done with it when I felt like something was off with it and as I was rereading it felt like it was a side quest and Harry wasn't acting like Harry. So I had to delete the whole 4k words and rewrite the whole fucking thing.
Moving on.
The Grave-robber was kinda fun, doing some lore drops and such. Also got to add Carbúnculo, one of Cait-Sith's other lives, but the Grave-robber is an OC I promised one of my most prolific commenters that I'd put in. He might show back up before leaving Paititi, who knows.
But yes, we finally come to the dying goddess, Mictecacihuatl. She is the wife of Mictlantecuhtli who is the ruler of the dead and the lowest releam of the Underworld in Aztec Mythology. She is often depicted as a skinless woman with a wide grinning smile, and said to watch over the bones of the dead.
Fun stuff, huh?
Most of the words in this chapter that you can't understand are in Nahuatl the Aztec language.
Kingsaxcul, Out!