Ticmotlatlaz (Momento Morí)

What is the value of anything. 

If you trade one thing for another, does the original lose worth to you?

Life is the same way. 

If you take the life of something else, for your survival. 

Are you more valuable than everything else?

Obviously not, yet selfishness stems from the ego. 

A need to perceive our survival as the greater good. 

So reflect upon the lives taken everyday for you to continue to exist. 

Even the air you breathe is given to you by our brothers, the trees. 

Thank the ground beneath your feet, cause one day you be buried 6 feet deep. 

Life doesn't ask for permission to be cruel.

He passed out again, if only for a blink in time.

The world didn't stay silent.

It shivered beneath him.

A tremor.

Low at first. Then another.

Like something ancient stirring beneath the roots.

Like a beast breathing through the bones of the land.

He jolted awake, coughing dust.

Gasping. Heart pounding.

The world around him was dust and stillness.

The sky was no longer crimson — just pale, dry, and uncaring.

He didn't remember falling asleep. Only the drought. Only the silence.

But the ground had begun to dream again… and it would not let him rest.

Behind him — nothing.

A sea of sand, grain swallowing grain, lifeless and endless.

Ahead — something. All around him, the Tetechos loomed —spiny titans, giants frozen in surrender,their arms lifted as if still reaching for gods who never answered.

And beneath them, scattered nopales twisted like burned tongues.

Cenotlatlacatl rose slowly, throat parched, body aching, eyes tracing the towering cactus silhouettes against the dead sky.

And then came the thought — bitter, sharp, familiar:

"Is this just another curse of the gods?"

"To bring giants to their knees… and turn them into cactus?"

Observing his surroundings, he can to the conclusion that it was all just…

Desert. Drought. Death that hadn't finished its work.

He blinked, lips cracked and bleeding. The words clawed their way out:

"Cacti means water…"

It came out broken, a whisper wrapped in dust. His skin pulsed — tight and aching, like a tomato left too long in the fire, ready to split.

He started forward — staggered, slipped, caught himself. Then again.

Until the ground rose up and threw him into a spined skeleton of a nopal.

A gasp. A grunt.

Dry thorns pierced his skin. Not green, not fresh — brittle, ancient as curses.

Their needles crumbled against him, breaking like splinters of ash, some lodging beneath his skin, others snapping under his weight like forgotten bones.

He growled, yanked a splinter from his arm.

"Tītzonketl… tlahtōl axtlen." (You greasy-headed bastards… your word means nothing.)

The curse came low — not shouted, but spat like a bone shard.

As if the gods could hear it in the tremble of his breath.

The curse spat through bloodied teeth, half-mad with thirst, half-mocking the heavens that had sent him stumbling through yet another trial.

He yanked a needle from his arm with a wince, tossing it aside.

"All this… for what?"

But when he looked again — he saw it.

A droplet. A ghost of water. 

A single bead of moisture, pale and trembling, slid from the wound in the cactus.

And before he could think, before he could pray or curse again—.

The cactus wept where he had struck it. And his skin drank it in.

A rush.

Faint. Subtle. But real.

His body surged with but a mere flicker of life — not hope, His skin had taken it in like memory, like a thirst that went deeper than the body.

There's more.

A flicker of urgency — not divine, not heroic, but instinct.

He looked down.

His limbs bent differently now.

His elbows, low.

His tail dragging behind him.

Gills twitching. Skin thirsting.

He was on all fours.

With trembling claws, he reached for the next withered cactus.

The flesh was thin, cracked, but still held a trace of green beneath its skin.

He pressed his hand against it — his palm, his wrist, even his cheek.

And as his claws sank into the pad, the cactus shivered, and the moisture moved again — into him.

Slow at first. Then surging.

Like a secret being shared without words.

He exhaled — not with relief, but with understanding:

This is how I keep moving. 

This is how I survive.

He crawled.

Half animal, half ash. Cenotlatlacatl on all fours, dragging himself from one withered pad to the next. Sometimes lunging. Sometimes just falling forward.

The sand bit. The wind mocked. The sun watched.

But he moved.

His mind couldn't hold onto anything but one truth: the next nopal.

Not gods. Not meaning. Not curses.

Only survival.

He dragged himself forward — bit by bit, inch by inch, his body moving with a mechanical madness, no grace, just grit.

The sand bit into his chest.

His gills rasped with each breath, dry and twitching.

Every movement peeled skin, tore scabs, cracked calluses.

The sun never moved.

The wind howled dry — a mockery of relief.

One cactus. Then another.

He bled from his hands, left pieces of himself on the sand.

But each one gave him just enough to go on.

Until finally— he collapsed beneath a towering Tetecho,

its arms high above him like a prayer frozen in time.

At its base, another nopal. More shriveled than the rest. Still clinging to life.

Just barely.

He clawed toward it, too tired to be gentle, too thirsty to hesitate. He pressed against it. Drank.

"I'm like this nopal… dried out, bleeding, and barely clinging to life."

After a moment beneath the towering shadow, his breath slowed.

His heart no longer raced — it pulsed, steady now, like it remembered its rhythm.

His gaze lingered upon the Tetecho that had sheltered him, and without a word — he dug his claws in.

The thick, fibrous skin resisted for only a moment, then gave way.

Moisture rushed into him, not with gentleness, but with need — a flood of life, stolen rather than given.

The great cactus shriveled before his eyes.

Its arms sagged. Its towering form buckled, as if its soul had been siphoned, its body folding in on itself as he drank its final breath.

And in that moment— his eyes returned.

No longer cloudy. No longer broken.

The spark was back.

He could see again.

Not just the desert. Not just the cacti.

But the path forward.

He rose — not with grace, but intention — upright, bipedal again, shoulders wide with instinct.

His skin pulsed with stolen water.

His limbs surged with stolen breath.

And so, he moved forward.

He turned toward the next Tetecho. He moved on.

Each cactus he touched fell.

Each titan he drained withered.

He no longer hesitated.

Cenotlatlacatl became the storm.

The path behind him was ruin — nopales split and collapsed, Tetechos reduced to husks.

A trail of destruction in the name of survival.

Finally… he stopped.

He looked back. And what he saw was not triumph. It was a trail of sacrifice.

Not to the gods.

But to him.

He took a moment, taking it all in. He stood in the heat.

Looking back.

The destruction stretched far behind him — his own path of consumed life.

He looked to the sky, and proceeded to ask the gods — not with reverence, but with cracked voice and open wounds:

"Is this how the gods see us mortals?"

"Will we ever be able to have value in their eyes?"

"Or will we forever be but sacrifices to their need for blood?"

And the desert did not answer.

Only the wind.

Only the silence.

Only the weight of what he had taken, trailing behind him like a shadow stitched in sand.