Ixchel was once a weaver in the city of Copán —
her fingers stained with the colors of crushed flowers, her eyes wide as the full moon.
At sixteen, she was taken — not by war, not by plague, but by the Lords of Xibalba themselves.
Some said she fell ill and slipped quietly into death.
Others whispered she was chosen, marked by the gods of the dark waters.
They were all wrong.
Ixchel walked into Xibalba willingly.
The gates of the Underworld yawned open in the roots of a sacred ceiba tree, and she descended without fear, barefoot, her white shift clinging to her body like mist.
There, in the cavern where the rivers ran black and blood-smelling, he waited.
A man — or a demon — she could not say. His skin was the color of storm clouds, his hair a river of darkness. His mouth was cruel. His hands, when they reached for her, were warm and terrifyingly human.
"You," he growled, voice shaking stalactites loose from the ceilings. "You come where even gods fear to tread."
"I seek no gods," she said, lifting her chin. "Only you."
A smile like a jaguar’s flashed across his face.
And he was on her — lifting her, pinning her against the wet cavern wall, his teeth scraping the delicate skin of her throat. Her thighs parted instinctively as he pressed his body against hers, hot and heavy and urgent.
No prayers were spoken.
Only the language of breath and nails and desperate mouths.
Ixchel moaned into the endless dark as he filled her — not gentle, but not cruel either — a rhythm as old as death, as necessary as blood. Her body met his eagerly, savagely, hips rolling, fingers digging into his back hard enough to draw ichor instead of blood.
All around them, the waters of Xibalba surged and hissed, the gods of death watching, hungering, but not daring to intervene.
When she climaxed, it was not a peak — it was a plunge: a falling into a dark river of ecstasy that swallowed her whole.
Later, as she lay panting on the slick stone, he traced a mark over her heart — a jagged line of ash and bone.
"You are mine now," he said, voice thick with possession.
"Not dead. Not living. Something more."
And when she rose and returned to the mortal world, her village did not recognize her.
Her eyes burned too bright.
Her smile was too sharp.
And at night, when the winds howled through the ceiba trees, she would vanish into the darkness — back to her lover in Xibalba, where life and death meant nothing against the hunger of their joined bodies.