The air burned cold as flames licked the high walls of the ancient ziggurat. Priests chanted in melodious cacophony—an unnerving hymn to forgotten gods. Beneath the blood-red moon, Amaru knelt in the center of the elevated dais, her latex-like armor reflecting the firelight. The outfit was startlingly futuristic yet imbued with cultural flair: intricately molded material in shades of crimson and obsidian, etched with golden glyphs. Her voluminous pigtails—a cascade of dark and scarlet—whipped in the desert wind as if alive with purpose. This was not the attire of ceremony; it was the attire of rebellion.
“Amaru, hurry!” hissed a voice from the shadows. Xoatl emerged from behind a crumbled basalt column, his bare chest painted with luminescent streaks of white, glowing faintly as if infused with starlight. Clad in macuahuitl-wielding warrior garb, he was the kind of man whose presence commanded not with words but with a stare so piercing it felt like prophecy. His tawny bronze skin glimmered in the lunar glow. “The elders won’t hold much longer. They’re calling to Itzpakhu. Do you understand what that means?”
Amaru glanced at the sigils beside her boots—woven patterns resembling interlocking crosses—and spun the crimson-bladed dagger in her fingers. “The god of annihilation. Worst fanboy ever. Trust me, I know what it means, Xoatl.” Her voice was dry, yet her knuckles were white from gripping the weapon.
The backdrop was as cinematic as it was foreboding. Beyond the towering ziggurat, the Valley of the Moon stretched wide, filled to the edges with loyalists of the old regime, their torches forming constellations in the darkness. The night sky hung vast, ancient, alive with unnatural pulsations of auroras in gold and red. Above them, the asteroid belt shimmered faintly alongside the eclipsed moon—a stark reminder of humanity’s lost conquest over the stars. This world had long since fallen from future grace, regressing into forgotten medievalism infused with shards of techno-mysticism.
A shudder ran through the ziggurat like the gasp of a breathing leviathan. The priests paused their chants, their eyes gleaming with the ecstasy of a ritual near completion. The obsidian portal embedded into the platform cracked open, foul green light pouring upward like fog. A shape began to materialize within: multi-eyed, serpentine, incomprehensibly vast. Itzpakhu.
Amaru rose to her full height, her latex-like armor creaking softly. She wasn’t tall, but the way she carried herself made her seem larger than life. Her dark eyes sparked with defiance as she spun and threw the dagger. The blade carved through the air like a comet of scarlet and hit the nearest acolyte squarely in the throat. Blood sprayed. Chaos erupted.
As the priests screamed imprecations, Xoatl moved with panther-like precision, swinging his macuahuitl—a weapon of obsidian teeth—into the nearest robe-clad figure. The blow was as efficient as it was brutal, the priest collapsing soundlessly.
“This plan is insanity!” Xoatl barked through gritted teeth, parrying an incoming spear strike with wrist-snapping finesse. “You can’t fight a god, Amaru!”
“I don’t need to fight it,” she retorted, dodging a wide arc of eldritch energy radiating from the portal. Her pigtails swayed as she narrowly avoided certain disintegration. “I just need to distract it long enough!”
She surged forward, boots ricocheting off uneven stone with the reckless grace of someone both skilled and desperate. Grappling a ceremonial staff abandoned in the chaos, she flung it toward the glowing glyphs marking the outer edge of the portal. The resulting blast, a tangling of green fire and scorched stone, destabilized the summoning matrix. A shudder rippled through the would-be god’s form as it let loose a thunderous, otherworldly roar.
Flashback to two days earlier: Amaru stood in the ruins of the technocratic citadel, studying the damaged star charts etched into dying holopanels. Skeletons of satellite wreckage loomed in the skies above. She was covered in soot, her crimson-and-black combat suit dulled but still battle-ready. It was there she had discovered the truth—the elders had created their gods not through prayer, but through forgotten tech. It wasn’t divine intervention; it was human hubris. And she would stop them, even if it killed her.
Back on the dais, the enormity of Itzpakhu’s rage pressed into her consciousness like a tidal wave. Blood trickled from her nose as her mind reeled, but she held firm. She didn’t have to win today. She just had to survive long enough. Behind her, the few villagers who had joined her rebellion fought valiantly against the more loyalist acolytes. A scratch. A delay. Small victories in the face of apocalypse.
Xoatl reached her side, panting, a streak of blood—his or someone else’s—staining his painted skin. “Tell me there’s a part two to this insane stunt,” he demanded, slicing through another foe closing in.
Amaru held up a small, fist-sized device—a relic she had found in the citadel. “It’s a failsafe,” she said grimly. “It disables the technomatrixes. All of them.”
Xoatl’s eyes widened. “All of them? You’re not serious.”
“Deadly serious. You want to win, don’t you?”
A wet, guttural roar behind them sent a chill down their spines. The portal distorted, collapsing inwards on itself, but Itzpakhu’s half-formed mass lurched forward, still clinging to existence. Its voice wasn’t a sound but a pressure, reverberating in their skulls. It spat something in a language the world had forgotten, but they both understood the intent: wrath unending.
Amaru pressed the device’s activation sequence as the sky erupted in streaks of cascading auroras. Smiling faintly, she whispered, “Adios, god of annihilation.”
The explosion that followed was not of fire or force, but of silence. A void consumed the dying portal and the remnants of the technomatrix in a shimmering ripple. When the waves subsided, the valley was left in muted starlight, quiet except for the labored breathing of those who had survived.
Amaru collapsed to her knees, her armor dented and bloodied. Xoatl stood beside her, battered yet resolute. “It worked,” she said, voice trembling with exhaustion and triumph. “We stopped it.”
Xoatl offered her his hand. “For now.”
As she took it and rose, the blood moon began to wane. A new dawn was on the horizon, and with it, an uncertain but hard-earned future.
Genre: Dark Fantasy/Futuristic Mythos
The Source…check out the article that inspired this amazing short story: Harley Quinn Red and Black Latex Cosplay Costume: Iconic Ideas and Inspiration
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