You want to know why I was exiled. I will tell you, but not the way they tell it.
A fictional character Telling. Meet Tlahui.
You want to know why I was exiled. I will tell you, but not the way they tell it.
They say I protected a mortal family. That I hid them from the harvest, altered records, stood between my faction and its feeding. They say I chose sentiment over order.
What I actually did was refuse to believe that blood belongs only to the one who takes it.
Where I come from, blood is an agreement. The priest cuts his hand over the altar and the sun rises. The gods are fed and the world continues. Everyone in the exchange understands what they owe. This is not primitive — it is the only cosmology that is honest about what power actually costs. The Spaniards arrived with a god who demanded nothing and promised everything, and within a generation the temples were rubble and the rains stopped coming on schedule.
Children of the Night has the same problem. They feed without returning. Rank upon rank of old predators who have forgotten that something is supposed to grow from the taking.
The family I protected had blood I recognised. I had known their ancestor — a man who came to the temple voluntarily, who understood the covenant, who gave what was asked and went home alive because the priests knew the difference between sacrifice and waste. Five centuries later his line was still carrying that quality in the blood. I could taste it. A faction that simply ends that lineage to fill a quota is not maintaining any kind of order. It is just eating.
They cast me out for having an opinion about what the blood is for.
I have no argument with the Lodge. These are people who understand that some things outlast the structures built around them. They work in stone and shadow and do not pretend the work is clean. Neither do I.
My blood remembers the temples before they were ruins. I remember what the covenant was supposed to produce. I am still waiting to see if anything in this era is capable of honouring it.
Visual
Sharp-featured Aztec woman with obsidian-dark skin and angular grace, black hair bound with jade and feather, eyes like volcanic glass, layered mantle over ritual garments carrying scents of copal incense and industrial smoke, moving with a priest's deliberate precision.
Faction: Children of the Night · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook