Crossing the flint hills was like crossing the river: a journey stretched to the point of reality's distortion. I didn't lose track of time. I lost my whole sense of it. We could have been on that field for hours or days and I wouldn't have known the difference. Hunger, thirst, and weariness did not bother me anymore. I could not shake the feeling that this was not a good thing, but Jem and Emma and the gods were ahead. If creeping towards half-death meant I would get to them faster, I would take it.

We were some ways out of the flint hills before I realized the soil had lost its scales. I lifted my eyes from Tochtli's paws. We were at the edge of a field. A vast one, stretched out to the horizon and probably beyond in a way that cast me back to the desert back home. I felt like I hadn't walked that desert in years.

Tochtli's ears were back again. Their angle this time was nervous rather than scared, but I had learned it was better to trust her than not. She crept back to me and sniffed my snowpants all the way up my leg, then around the hem of my jacket. I moved my hand, and she flinched. When she had finished her investigation, she sank her teeth into my bag. I dropped it with a hiss. Was there something in it? Tochtli put it down and looked at me. Ready to burn anything that emerged, I pulled it back towards me. As soon as I opened it, Tochtli dragged out my sleeping fur and deposited it at my feet.

Was there something in the fur? I picked it up by one edge. Tochtli's tail wagged. In a motion, I whipped it up and shook it violently, like I would if I'd seen a spider crawl into its folds. Nothing fell out. Tochtli was still wagging. I started to reroll the fur, and the wagging stopped. I lifted it again instead. Like a game of guess-acting, I followed the dog's cues until I had the fur around my shoulders, then over my head. With a final wag, Tochtli trotted out across the field.

That was it? I wished Xolotl was here to translate his dog for me, then unwished it. Just thinking of what it would take to get him back right now made me panicky. I wished for Emma instead. The fur was hot, so I lowered it to my shoulders as an icy breeze licked my cheek.

I realized in that moment why this plain was so empty. A warm line felt its way down to my chin from the place the wind had touched. I did not need to touch it to know it was blood.

Another breeze was building. I yanked the fur over my head. Where were the dogs? If this fur was my protection, I had to protect them, too. A halo of calm enveloped me, and I looked down to find Tochtli at my side. She was immune to the cutting wind. Grifo shed bits of fur and kept his head down as the air whined around us, but it did not seem to harm him either. Would it damage my bedfurs? Gods, what was I even doing, worrying about that? I stumbled as a pushy gust threatened to rip away my cover. How did souls cross this field? Unless they were buried with blankets, none would arrive in Mictlan with anything resembling my bedfur.

Actually, 'buried with blankets' rang a bell. When I came to Mictlan with my bag and belongings, then, did that mean I buried myself?

Tochtli hovered around me until she confirmed I was safe, then trotted out onto the vast expanse. Gusts slapped me like irate hands as I followed. The field only got broader the longer we walked. Once, I thought I saw another figure in the distance, but Tochtli steered us in the other direction. The horizon and the flint hills stood at equal distances when her head twitched up. Her tail sank, and her whine drifted back to me on the whining wind.

"What is it?" I said, not sure she could hear.

Tochtli dropped her head and wove off at an angle. There was something on the plain ahead. A rock? Gods, I hoped that was a rock. We had barely started towards it when we crossed the faint imprints of tracks on the ground. The other gods had also moved towards the landmark. Tochtli held herself lower and lower to the ground as we followed.

I stopped cold when I saw what lay ahead.

The rock sat on top of the soil, like it had not been here for long. In a two-meter radius around it, the grass grew green and untouched. It was a perfect circle like the one on that lakeshore in Tlalocan, only instead of salt or ash, the grass here was sprinkled with the tiniest of flowers. Tochtli threw back her head and loosed a keening, heartbroken howl.

Three objects made a triangle around the rock. One was an arrow, the second, a length of coloured thread. The third was a dead butterfly.

I sank to my knees. Xochi?

She couldn't be gone. We had been talking just days ago. She had been there in the couch room with Xipe, laughing over pottery. With me as she gave me my final tattoo seals. With us in Tlalocan, smiling when Emma made flowers bloom just like these.

These flowers in the grass weren't from Emma. The ones from Emma grew close to the rock, bright and colourful like Xochi had always loved, but frosted at the edges like Emma's other magic had manifested her grief.

My mind flashed to the couch room. To Xochi, first sick, then near-fainting and ghastly pale, supported by Chal and Quet. Emma's quiet voice, saying the goddess was fading. Had she faded here? Collapsed, or gone to sleep and never woken up? There were no signs of a fight. How must this have wrecked her siblings?

But Tezcat had held off Xochi's weakness with a spell the first time, hadn't he? The second time, a jar of matzin, the gods' soul-water, had been enough. They had helped her twice. Why couldn't they do it again?

I should have been with them. I should have been here. What was the last thing I had said to her? I couldn't remember. Had it been something worthwhile, or another petty quip about how much better the gods' home was than mine? I shouldn't have left. If I had never left...

If she was gone, how long until the rest of the gods faded?

I dropped my face to both hands, not caring that the wind curled around them. It did not cut. Xochi was gone. Until the world reincarnated or people regained their belief in the gods, she would not come back. My tears ran down into the bandages I had not yet removed from my wrists. I pried off their pitch-sticky ends and unwound them slowly. The beautiful designs underneath were the last thing Xochi had given me.

Now I really couldn't stop the tears.

I stayed by the grave long after I finished crying. An impulse squeezed me harder and harder until I upended my bag. The detritus of my life in Grillo Negro and the gods' house in Tlalocan scattered across the short-cropped grass. So many useless things. What good did pitch glue or an extra pair of socks do against this? Against the end of the world?

I pulled a small bottle from the pile. It was the honey my parents had sent me, still corked, too bitter with guilt to taste sweet. I popped the cork and let the first daub hit the rock. The thick, golden liquid left a graceful pattern as I swirled the bottle in a spiral like Xochi's brush over the glyphs of the Mexica language. I corked the empty bottle and tucked it back in my bag. That was the best I could do.

I let myself fall back in the lush circle of grass, wishing now that it was me, not Emma, who could gather magic that had soaked back into the soil. Wishing for that slightest chance that it was a wavelength compatible with mine, and that I had the means to take it with me. Xochi's magic didn't deserve to dissipate here. It deserved a garden: a place to rest where she would have been at peace, until the right person or bird or butterfly came to collect the lingering traces and turn them back into something beautiful. Would the magic in this circle ever join the world above again? Or did it go to Mictlantecuhtli and his wife now?

At least it wasn't to Cihua. Of all the things I couldn't bear, the most sickening was the thought of the snake woman siphoning off Xochi's last trace to feed Coyol's means.

That was still a cold consolation.

I rolled over and buried my face in my folded arms, not really caring if there were enemies on the field who might spot me. No magic seeped from the ground into my body. Had Emma taken some? Did she and Xochi match wavelengths? No, Emma absorbed ice magic, and the spellcasting earth magic we still could not identify. Xochi's was so different, bright and light and colourful. It belonged in a painting or tapestry or field of flowers. Not here.

It was all so far over my head. I let the sweet scent of the grass soothe me while the wind curved around this little circle of calm. Like silt in a shaken river, my thoughts slowly settled. The water they left behind was steady and clear.

The gods could fight their own cursed war. I would stay, but only until they won. Until the world above became safe enough for me to walk wherever I wanted without fearing for mine and my friends' lives, or tossing at night in anxiety that Grillo Negro would be reduced to a black stain while I was away. I would help, but only because I was not about to let a sibling squabble raze the village I grew up in, and the all the places I hadn't yet visited. The other people I hadn't yet found.

And when this fight was over, my friends and I weren't just leaving. By my presence or by my sealed-in, uncontrolled excuse for magic, I never wanted to dip a finger in the gods' affairs again.