Quentin Reyes (Quetzalcoatl) (featheredscales) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2010-05-01 23:27:00 |
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It was thrumming under his skin like a drumbeat. It was a strange, restless energy that made him nervous and excited in equal measure. It felt like power, like worship, something he hadn’t felt honestly in centuries. But it was also going hand in hand with his hunger.
Quetzalcoatl had never wanted human sacrifices, not even at the height of his power. He’d disapproved of it, even interfered in the rituals once or twice. He had eaten people before, since it was hard to be Aztec and avoid that, but he’d never hungered for human flesh the way he was now. Now it was like some constant pressure, tearing at him and making literally every person look like a meal. It was one thing to enjoy hearts from someone who was already dead. It was something else entirely to want to kill someone for their heart. It didn’t make any sense, and it was starting to scare him, especially considering what had nearly happened with his T.A.
He’d been lurking around his office, trying to get some pre-finals work done, when Danny had more or less barged in and started talking cheerfully about something Quetzalcoatl honestly couldn’t remember. He’d been too busy staring at the place where Danny’s jugular vein was pounding, hypnotic and pulsing. It wasn’t until Danny had gone still and said, in an oddly high voice, “Professor?” that Quetzalcoatl realized he had half-risen from his desk and was leaning towards the human. He’d made his excuses and left immediately.
So. He was on the verge of eating his T.A., he was so twitchy that he was a little worried that he was actually going to spontaneously start growing feathers, and he felt stronger than he had in years. Clearly, something weird was going on. Quetzalcoatl had never been particularly fond of mysteries, especially when they involved him, and he was getting angry. He headed off campus and into the city, intent on figuring out what the hell was going on.
The problem was that he had no idea what he was looking for. Unless there was a machine sitting in the middle of the city marked ‘Screw with Aztecs’, Quetzalcoatl doubted he was going to find an obvious solution. But he couldn’t go on like this, hunger gnawing his stomach and making him dangerous. What if he really did hurt Danny, or any of the other students? Or Coyote? Quetzalcoatl knew that Coyote could protect himself and would probably find his concern irritating, but the idea of putting him in danger was beyond worrying. So he was going to find a solution if he had to wander all over the city to do it, because whatever was changing him felt like it was somewhere near him.
Luck was at least partially on his side. The strangeness (he was still debating about calling it worship, since worship didn’t usually make him want to tear someone’s still beating heart out of their chest and eat it) was definitely stronger as he travelled east, working his way through alleys and pedestrians with increasing impatience. Someone really was going to get eaten if they didn’t get out of his way, and Quetzalcoatl found himself longing for the forest, someplace quiet and green and not filled people.
Finally, Quetzalcoatl came to a stop outside of what appeared to be a church, the steeple and the red stained glass windows standing out brightly against the grey and brown of the buildings around it. The strangeness, whatever it was, was definitely coming from here. He felt his hackles rise and he barely kept himself from letting out a hiss. If the Christians had something to do with this, then there was going to be a lot of blood spilled, technical pacifism be damned. Taking a deep breath and trying to keep control of himself, he shoved open the door and walked inside.
There was nothing particularly sinister lurking on the other side. He was in what looked like a lobby, with a small desk at the far end and several hallways branching away from it. It was entirely normal, from the beige wallpaper to the scuffed hardwood floors, and Quetzalcoatl felt a little ridiculous for having barged in. But still, the strangeness was definitely coming from somewhere inside the building. He looked around the room again, and his eyes locked on one of the pictures hanging behind the desk just as a woman walked in.
“Oh, sorry!” she said when she saw him. Her curly hair was pinned up, and there were a few spots of dust on her shirt, as if she’d been cleaning out a room. “I was in the other room, I didn’t hear anyone…”
She trailed off as she saw the picture Quetzalcoatl was looking at. It was a painting of Tezcatlipoca, drawn in the old, familiar style, all rounded edges and swirls of color. Seeing it was like a punch to the gut, bringing a thousand emotions all at once, and he only realized his eyes had shifted into their red, slit-pupiled snake form when he heard the woman gasp.
“My God,” she whispered, staring at his face in amazement. But not, he was interested to note, fear. Or even that much surprise. And suddenly it all clicked together.
“Yes,” Quetzalcoatl said, “I think I am.”
The woman’s name, as Quetzalcoatl found out when he was ushered into a small, cozy office facing the setting sun, was Elena Torres. She owned and lived in the building, and had converted it from an old church. She was thirty-six, had a major in Religious Studies, and had been planning on joining the clergy when she graduated college, until her life had taken an abrupt turn.
“I was thinking about going to Mexico and working there,” she said, watching him with interest from behind the desk. “My great-grandma told me dozens of stories about how beautiful the Sierra Madres are.”
“If you don’t mind the cold,” Quetzalcoatl said, distracted, staring at the small altar to Huiztilopochtli she had in the corner of her office. “It gets pretty chilly at the top.”
“You would know, I guesses,” Elena said, leaning forward in her chair. “Having flown through them.”
“How do you know I’m Quetzalcoatl?” he asked, half-curious and half-wary.
“I have a pet snake, I’d recognize the eyes anywhere.” At the look he gave her, Elena smiled. “And that was a very interesting look you were giving the painting of Tezcatlipoca.”
“Are you one of his?” Quetzalcoatl asked, leaning against the edge of one of the bookshelves. He felt too tense to sit down.
“Me personally?” Elena asked, smiling a little wider. “Or the rest of us?”
“The rest of us?”
“I was having what you might call a crisis of faith when I got out of college,” Elena said, leaning back in the chair and crossing her arms. “I wanted badly to believe in a higher power, that there was more to this world than what humanity seemed to offer me. But I couldn’t see it. My family encouraged me to simply have faith, but it was hard to do. And so I prayed and prayed for God to give me a sign. I got nothing in return. I was researching Mexico at the time, still planning to go there, and I began learning about the Aztecs. The more I learned, the more interested I became.”
“Most people tend to get stuck at the human sacrifice and never quite move on,” Quetzalcoatl said, tilting his head and unsure what to think.
“I wasn’t horrified,” Elena said. “I saw what it really was. Human blood and human hearts, they kept you all alive, and you kept the universe turning. You didn’t pretend to be gods of peace and love then demand that your followers slaughter anyone different. The Aztecs were honest. Deaths had a purpose. There were no threats of damnation and eternal torment to keep people in line. That appealed to me, and it gave me the ability to start questioning the things that had always bothered me about Christianity. So as I was praying to God, I also sent a prayer to the Aztecs. And one night, as I was walking back from the library, my prayers were answered.”
“Tezcatlipoca,” Quetzalcoatl said, because he knew how this story went. He hadn’t heard it in at least two centuries, but he knew it by heart.
“Yahweh never gave me the time of day,” Elena said. “But Tezcatlipoca was there. He showed me magic, showed me the things he was capable of. He inspired me and showed me the world as it could be, instead of the dreariness of what it was. I worshipped him.”
“And when he left?” Quetzalcoatl asked, because that’s the way the stories always ended. Tezcatlipoca would never let himself be tied down.
“I didn’t resent him, if that’s what you mean,” Elena said. “I understood that he was a god, and that mortals meant very little to him. But my life had a purpose. I found other people like me, people who wanted to believe in the old gods of the Americas, the ones that had existed before Christianity was brought here. I wasn’t the only one who had met Tezcatlipoca, or other Aztecs, or even the Native American gods. And so many more people were interested. There are hundreds of us now. I just came to New York to begin, well, preaching, I suppose you could call it.”
“And if you learned that the Christian god was as real?” Quetzalcoatl said. The office was dark as the sun set, and it was hard to make out her expression. “Would that change things?”
“Is He?”
“Tezcatlipoca never mentioned that?” It didn’t surprise him in the least.
“He kept his secrets,” Elena said. “But it wouldn’t change my opinion at all. For some of the others, maybe. We get some teenagers that hate their parents, bitter Christians, things like that. But I have my faith.” She leaned forward and turned on the desk light. “Could you…”
“Yes?”
“Could you do that thing with your eyes again?”
Quetzalcoatl had to laugh, and in that moment, he lost some of his instinctive suspicion of Elena. She wasn’t Tezcatlipoca, and it wasn’t fair to treat her like she was. Though speaking of Tezcatlipoca… “Sure. But if I could ask, what was it that Tezcatlipoca told you about me?”
Elena looked puzzled. “He told me some of the stories about you two, with his own annotations added, of course-”
“Of course.”
“-and not much else. He said that the stories about you never accepting human sacrifices weren’t true, though.”
Oh, that son of a bitch. Well, that explained the sudden cravings to eat people, if Elena had been telling everyone she preached to that story since she’d come to New York. Grimacing a little, Quetzalcoatl said, “Ah. Yes. He was lying about that.”
“Wait, really?”
“He has an odd sense of humor,” Quetzalcoatl said, and strangely enough, he felt some of the hunger lessen immediately. It both reassured and worried him. Elena, without knowing it, apparently wielded some considerable power over him. This wasn’t exactly encouraging. “But no, I never wanted human sacrifices. I was against it. I even lived as a human for a little while.”
“He said that was something the Spanish told everyone to make you seem more like Jesus,” Elena said, head tilted curiously.
“Considering Tezcatlipoca was the one who ended my stay as a human, I’m not surprised,” Quetzalcoatl said, trying not to let Elena see how much he wanted to punch Tezcatlipoca in the face. He decided to change the subject and hope that her telling the rest of her followers the truth would make the hunger for people go away. “Anyway, here. I’d hate for you to say that I was disappointing.”
Quetzalcoatl dropped into the chair in front of the desk and leaned forward into the light. He let his eyes shift again, the change in his vision making all of Elena’s movements seem a little sharper and more noticeable. Curious about just how much power his newfound worshippers had given him, he concentrated on his skin and his hair. Sure enough, he felt feathers sprout amongst his hair, golden-colored and bright. He glanced down at his hands and saw that the pattern of his scales had spread all across his skin. He could help but grin a little.
Elena was grinning too, an expression of wonder on her face. “Are there others in New York? Other gods, I mean?”
“A handful of the other Aztecs are here,” Quetzalcoatl said. He remembered her comment about the Native American gods and added, “Coyote’s here, too.”
“Coyote?” She had a distinctly star-struck look in her eyes. “Really? Could you—I mean, would you-”
“I’ll tell them about you,” he said. “I’ll bring them back here to meet you.”
He didn’t add that it might be dangerous for him not too, considering the effect one lie of Tezcatlipoca’s had nearly had. There was no particular reason for Elena to know the power humans could potentially wield over them. Everyone would be happier that way.