The World Ends

There were three hundred of us in the city when the ships came. Not three hundred of any single school or tradition. Three hundred who knew what the dead could do, who had learned to use that knowledge, who were called by one name or another depending on the neighborhood and the era and the grandmother who taught you.

By the time I left there were six.

I am the only one I know of now.

I could tell you what it felt like to watch a world end. But I have been watching worlds end since then, and the feeling becomes - not numb, not that. More like the smell of rain, which is also the smell of decay: something you can identify with absolute accuracy and still cannot prepare for, because you forget what it does to you in the body until it arrives.

They came with iron and with what followed the iron. The what-followed was harder to fight than the iron. Iron I could work with. My dead knew iron. Iron is just the bones of the world heated and shaped; I could call the metal in a man’s sword and find the memory of the ore it was and the hammer that struck it, and if I had been alone and facing one man I could have done something with that. But the what-followed was an ontology. It was a whole understanding of the dead and what the dead can do, and in that understanding what I did was not service - it was desecration, necromancy, the devil’s work. They could not see my dead. They only knew that the dead should stay dead and I was not letting them.

For two years I fought the only war a necromancer can fight.

I went underground, into the bones below the city. The Templo Mayor’s foundation is laid on layers - Tenochtitlan on the lake was built by building on what was there before, and what was there before was also built on something, and I had spent a decade learning those layers. I knew the names of the dead in each register. I called them up.

The bones danced at midnight. The outposts found at dawn with no living enemy in sight - only small carved figures in the dirt, only footprints going in and no footprints going out. The soldiers who dreamed the same dream on the same night and refused to march in the morning. I did what I could. I was not without power.

I was losing.

Here is the thing about an army that does not believe in your dead: they are not afraid of what they cannot see in daylight. The fear has to find another path. For my people the dead were acknowledged fact - you could terrify a soldier by making the dead visible because the dead were a real category in his understanding of the world. For the men with iron, the dead were nothing. What I made visible, they called delusion. What I sent into their camps, they prayed away. I was fighting in a register they had decided was not real. You cannot win a war in a register the enemy has evacuated.

The last of the three hundred died in the burning. Not all of them were killed by the soldiers; some burned with the libraries, with the knowledges that had been accumulated for centuries, because there is a specific kind of death that comes for the practitioners of a thing when the books of that thing are ash. They become the last copy of something that now has only one copy left in the world. When they go, the thing goes with them.

I did not burn. You know that. I am speaking to you from five hundred years in the future, which tells you how this ends. I went north with six skulls in a bundle on my back - six of the three hundred, carried for the next two decades until I could find a place where the earth could hold what they were. I did not take them to Mictlan. I took them north. That is the form my grief took: walking, and not putting them down until I found somewhere worthy.

The world ended. The walking was what came next.