Pain devours up the numbness inside me; the shock is almost electric. I choke out a cry.

“The anaesthetics are probably... don’t move. Just don’t move.” He swallows, trying to calm himself. “It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.” He slurs the words as though they were a litany. Fleetingly, he seems again that priest who taught me how to read, how to pray and how to drag a rope of thorns through my tongue.

My eyes flutter shut, but through the angry, mechanical rhythm of the thing inside me, I hear the clink of glass and metal. I hear the needle and syringe rather than feel it. Raw, wild colours roar through my vision before subsiding again into the black behind my eyelids.

When I reopen my eyes, the shapes in the dark seem sharper and cold, more keen.

“She hears us. Every day.” I mouth to Itztli. “If She allowed this. Then this is. This is Her plan.”

He closes his eyes. His face contorts; more emotion than I have ever seen him show in our years together. “We should keep moving.”

I say nothing and he carries me down the corridors. I imagine we are in the disused underbelly of the ziggurat, but I do not do so with certainty. Itztli picks his way through increasingly twisted passages.

The outside is nothing more than shadows and shapes at the edge of my blurring vision. Itztli presses me close to his chest. I can hear his heart beat against me now. It is a closeness that I had previously hungered for.

The street corner speakers declare the hour. I guess it to be late given the colour of the lights. Judging from the quality of the speakers, we are in a rough quadrant of the city. I allow my eyes to drift shut and the pain to claim me. If I think only of the pain, concentrate on its myriad shades stretching and clenching inside me, I can keep from crying out. It hurts more when he sprints, but thankfully he does not do that often.

Itztli pauses several times before continuing. Each time, I hear his voice through the haze: “It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”

Leaning on an archaic door to open it, we enter into a building. Voices greet him. Frantic, heartfelt concern melts into indistinct congratulations and curiosity.

“Is that it? That why you joined us?”

“I thought she’d be –”

“It’s not as though the Goddess Herself is a looker.”

That got a laugh from the others, though I can feel Itztli’s grip on me tighten at the blasphemy. He sits but he does not put me down. I feel a wall against my back, but his arms are still around me.

The voices around us plan and plot. I follow more the cadence of the voices than the substance of their plans. There will be a new world and a new age, one without light and without a sun, watched over by no God.

•

Days pass. I am bundled in the corner of the room, half-forgotten by most of the heretics. Itztli has been playing surgeon for them and he tends to me. I remember little but for a certain warmth of arms, a constant constricting pain and thin soup against my lips. I remember choking on blood and vomit. I remember needles and colours too bright to be real.

I also remember this:

“Are you awake?” Itztli whispers against my ear. I am still. I try to speak, but my throat contracts. The beat of the thing inside my chest feels odd and alien.

Distantly, I can feel fingertips following the angles of my face, stroking my hair, the line of my lips. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I never told you, Yoltzin. But until I did what needed to be done, we could not speak the plan aloud. I know you believed. But She... The count of days is wrong. We are not the sixth age. We are but the death throes of the fifth. We are part of the catastrophe of the age’s end. We are not living in a new and glorious age, we are merely the last of a dying one, needlessly dragging out the pain of our people. I am just ending what needs to be ended. I am just saving you.”

Every word of his is heresy. I try to force open my eyes, but I do not have the strength. I breathe in shallow, swift gasps. I manage a low whimper of pain, but not words. The journey has been more taxing than either of us anticipated.

“The others will build a new world without the need for endless sacrifice. There will be no part in it for a priest old before his time, a priest with this much blood on his hands. There will be no part in it for an old sacrifice either, an old sacrifice who still believes. But I had to. I had to save you. I just...

“I killed the Goddess. I won’t be able to tell you when you wake, but I need to say this now. I killed Her. I slipped a knife into Her heart when I stapled shut Her chest. She will bleed.”

At the mention of blood, my mind turns to the red flowers and the blossoming bruises on the Goddess. In more ancient times, they called such human sacrifice a flowery death. It was said to be the most noble way to die. I remember the pictures we were shown as children, the men and women sprawled out in bright blossoms of blood, each splatter uncurling like a petal from their heart.

“She will bleed under Her skin,” whispers Itztli. “The blood will clog the parts that are inside Her. She will lose too much. She will die before they notice.”

“She...” The immensity of the realisation pushes me to form words. I croak them out despite the pain. “She wanted you to...”

Itztli recoils.

“She wanted you to. I saw Her. She showed me.” I keep my eyes closed, but I fumble a hand towards Itztli. I stroke a finger down his jaw. His skin is cold, too cold. Instead of the suncoils and the skyrail, my mind returns to the smile I saw in my dream of light. It dawns on me, colours unravelling endlessly in my mind like all the sunrises I have only ever imagined, pressing grubby fingers on yellowing picbook pages. “She hears everything. She hears everyone. Even those who fight against her priests and her enforcers. She can only bear our sorrows and suffering for so long. She wanted you to end it. She wanted a new age.”

“No.” His voice is thick and warm against my ear. “This is not yours to forgive.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

He does not believe me, but he holds me tighter, probably too tight. It barely matters through the drugs and the pain.

I try to focus on the way he and I fit together: my head on his shoulder, the tangle of his hands, the twinning hold of his legs. I want to think only on the way his cold skin and the knot of his scars feel against me. I want desperately for this to be the only thing that matters. He has torn out most of his augments and he smells of old blood and sweat. I wonder if he sought to flay off his skin this way, in a penance of sorts. He does not carry his crime lightly.

Pain cuts through these thoughts and the erratic beat of the mechanical heart consumes me; I hear it echo in my ears.

I cannot forget.

•

Look above, child.

The sun you see today is not the sun that shone above the first people. Five ages and five tyrant suns have risen and fallen. Ours will one day fall as well.

The first was the Lord of Near and Nigh. But his brother, the Feathered Serpent, was envious of how the once crippled god shone, so he knocked him from of the firmament with a stone club. Without the sun, the people were lost to darkness and in that darkness they turned on one another. They consumed each other and in their barbarism, they became jaguars.

The next age was ruled by the Feathered Serpent. He died in wind and rage, with its people clinging to trees and becoming monkeys.

He Who Is Made of Earth ascended as the next sun but his wife was kidnapped and thus he wallowed in narcissistic grief. Besieged by prayers, he destroyed the world in a rain of fire. To escape, the people became birds, soaring above the flaming sea.

The fourth age ended with its people becoming fish as the goddess had a heart too soft, too kind and too broken. She flooded the world with her black tears. A man and woman survived, hiding in a hollow tree, but found themselves being turned into dogs by the gods. We do not live in a time of just gods.

The fifth sun, Left-Handed Hummingbird, demanded unending sacrifice of hearts upon his altars of blood and bone. But the moon, She whose Face is Painted with Bells, knew this to be unjust, so she made war upon him night after night. But war was a stalemate and unable to witness the suffering of the people, she poisoned her own brother.

Then came the time of blood and burning. We have lived in the shadow of the fifth age, in its final breaths. As with the end of every age, the trials made us into beasts as we cling to survival. The Goddess with the Human Heart could not bear the suffering any longer and the Last Priest killed her in an act of mercy, ending the time of sacrifice.

And so dawned a sixth age. There is a new sun and a new people, but tyrants do not live forever. I hear the Last Priest and the Girl with the Divine Heart wander the wastes. I hear they are near.

The wheel of the heavens will turn again.

Jeannette Ng was born in Hong Kong and now lives in Durham. She designs and plays live roleplaying games, makes costumes and writes speculative fiction. Her debut novel Under The Pendulum Sun is published in October 2017 by Angry Robot.

These Are the Ways

Premee Mohamed

Art: Mark Toner