The Headless Coquito: Vol. 1

A woven scroll of the Masters of the Night-Wind. The story it tells is said to be older than the Masters' birth—yet truth is hard to verify.

The weavers of the Masters of the Night-Wind know every river of the Night Realm; they know stories and poems come from Mictlan's black great river. Night-flying raptors are servants of the Broken-Faced One; from their master's hand they take moonlight condensed into three strands of silver thread, cross the mist of night, come upon the land of spirit-fire, and bid the blind weavers weave it into colored tapestries. The tapestries hang in human dwellings, sanctuaries, and places of war; stories and legends become known, and as the weave lengthens, it becomes history.

But as the wandering sage "Child of the Sea" Ropal—driven from every tribe—said: "I accept chaos, yet know not whether chaos accepts me." In ancient tales and riddles dangerous secrets always hide. Therefore the Lord of Night blinded every weaver of stories, that they might fix on the tale and not see the present, that they might feel needle-cold moonlight yet never witness with their eyes the death of the three moons. Thus the great master of riddle and fable, upon the tapestry, is forever ungraspable, indescribable smoke.

The story the weavers next wove came from the murmur of the Broken-Faced Lord of Night. Legend says among the Masters' early people there was a warrior named Coquito. The homeland of his soul was a far midnight land where a cold sun hung. He bore a stone club called "Makana," walked the earth by covenant with already-dead cold gods, and spent life in war and chaos. It is said that on a stormy night he sealed a wordless pact with the spirit of Dog-Sun, and from then mortgaged his fate to the Kame twins of the plague-land.

The Dog-Sun spirit ordered Coquito to chastise those mad visionaries who had forgotten death, and to bring cold smoke and dreams down again from the starry sky to distribute among the people. So Coquito used "Makana" to deal irreversible death, reclaim masterless souls into Mictlan's deep black river, and return them to the Lord of Night's sleep.

Coquito's fingers forever clenched "Makana," walking through blood knee-deep. After countless days and nights of battle and slaughter, the mad vision that tore the starry sky was finally stilled. Companions followed behind him; one named Nagual was a cunning shapeshifter from a far scorched land that still burns without end.