The eyes. I felt the eyes stare directly into my soul, tearing through flesh and drilling through bones, until they reached the end they had sought with such vigor. Nearing their elusive quarry, the thin layer of teal blue skin began to march away from the eyes in conquest of his face, and from those eyes his most full and unbridled rage was unleashed upon me, a manifestation of Hell itself. My skin seemed to be ablaze, scorpions burrowing into my organs, and acidic poisons raining down upon me, seeping into my eyes. There felt to be eons of writhing torment compacted into each second, splintering my perception of linear time. But ten seconds was all it took for the twisted scourge to complete his bewitched process; it had ended with my bedeviled essence clutched within his gnarled, turquoise hand.

It is a curious sight, to observe your entire being, everything you had come to be and were destined to become, all compressed into a sphere no bigger than a man's fist; even more so to see it torn from your body and extinguished in so violent, yet so tranquil a nature. After a brief lull of awe, the most excruciating pain one could possibly imagine was laid upon me, an ordeal I would wish upon no one, even my eternal tormentor, simply through the tightening of the a fist.

I was the first of the many thousands of Aztecs that Tezcatlipoca would visit upon his intemperate wrath, displaying for all to see the ease with which he could smother a human life. A sadistic evil of the magnitude to ward off his Eastern rival in Hades, the bloody god of enmity, war, strife, and sorcery had begun his tyrannical reign over the people of Mesoamerica.

Tezcatlipoca, Tloque Nahuaque, Necoc Yaotl. Lord of the Near and the Nigh, Enemy of Both Sides.