Metztli watched the slow unspooling of London's night from a place older than empires. She hung between a distant star and the curve of the world like a memory of frost. When she spoke it was not sound so much as a shift in gravity; the old moon's cadence bent around each word.
"And Xochitl?" she asked, voice like the sweep of an obsidian blade. "What of the promise you made to her line? Will the debt be repaid?"
Tecciztecatl stood nearby, the pale god who had shaped himself into a whisper and then into a man. He had watched Marc rise, watched the mortal who had been given—willingly or not—the remnants of a divine will. He had stood in the corridor of choices and chosen less like a god and more like a father who feared his child's appetite.
"He will take revenge on their behalf," Tecciztecatl said at last. "Marc will carry what we cannot—memory, anger, the consequence of old debts. He will be the hand; I will be the hush behind it."
Metztli's curiosity was a cold thing. "You gift him wrath and call it balance. You spend yourself like coin. Do you think this is not a theft?"
Tecciztecatl's reply held no protest, only an ache. "It is theft," he admitted. "And a measure taken to keep worse things from coming. I have nothing left but measures."
Below, the city was a network of breath and sirens. The fight—an old thing, at heart as old as sacrifice itself—had become personal. Juarez ran through the streets with the momentum of a shadow given form. He carried the Eclipse Mantle like an argument; it clung to his flesh and drank from the night, from the favors of the stars that tilted toward William Lex Webb's will.
Moonveil found him beneath a streetlamp that smeared the wet cobbles into mercury. Juarez looked up as if he had been expecting the vigilante for days, weeks; his grin was the flat, bright smile of someone who thinks himself already made into the instrument of fate.
"There he is," Juarez said, loud enough for the alley to hurt from the sound. "The great pretender of peace. The one who yells about hope while hiding his hands."
Moonveil did not answer with words. He answered with motion—the discipline of training and the sudden arc of a demigod's intent. The first punch he threw struck like weather: clean, catastrophic, a man-shaped wind that took Juarez by surprise and sent him sailing, glass and plaster and a shower of tiny, useless light following him across a block of the city.
Juarez landed and laughed. A sound like someone hitting a throat with a bell. He pushed himself up, ripped at a jacket to wipe blood from his lip, and grinned with blood-stained teeth.
"You can throw me," he said. "You can punch me into other blocks. It changes nothing. The mantle teaches me to stand. It feeds on your anger and makes me steady."
Moonveil's eyes burned like moonlit steel. He moved again—faster, closer, a blur of limbs that wanted to obey muscle memory but were also guided by something older than muscle. Juarez's boon, he thought: invulnerability to weapons, immunity across day and night, immortality preserved until some graft is removed. Juarez wanted to wear that immortality like armor and then use it to wear the city thin.
Moonveil's hands found Juarez's chest and thumbed the graft—there, beneath the ribs, an aching knot of black glass and bone that pulsed faintly with internal light. Juarez's grin turned to a flash of anger.
"You lied," Moonveil said calmly, as if making accusations were a form of mercy. "I can tell when someone lies. The mantle does not make you unbreakable. It borrows from hunger and grafts it to your flesh. It stitches a crime into your ribs and pretends that stitch is a god."
Juarez shrugged, bravado and hubris braided so tight they became a single rope. "Fine," he said. "You caught me. If it helps you sleep, then let me clarify: I cannot be killed by weapons. Not by knives, guns, devices—no steel or alloy will finish me. I cannot be killed by striking in the evening, or in the day, or in the night—no time will make me fall. And I will only die when the graft is pulled from my stomach. And—" he lifted his voice with the old cruelty of men who have been made to serve an image, "and I will not die so long as that graft feeds my god."
He ranted like a priest reciting a creed. Moonveil listened like a student of damnation. Then Moonveil smiled, a small thing that was not friendly.
So the fight resumed.
They struck buildings like arguments. Moonveil's blows were lightning and calculus; Juarez's return was a mass—strength braided with something malevolent—an engine designed to shrug off hurt and to translate it into more momentum. He absorbed the hits and fed them into the Mantle; every crack in his flesh became data, and the Mantle learned.
At first Juarez had the advantage, because his boon taught him to be patient. He bore the violence as a smith bears hammering, letting each blow teach him where his own flesh bent and where his new armor was weak. He laughed as Moonveil drove him back, confident that the stars would not break him.
Moonveil, however, had a weapon beyond muscle and alloy—a knowledge that Juarez did not. He could read lies like maps. He could see the seam where the Mantle's promises met reality. Every graft had a seam. Every untruth carried an edge.
Anger nursed like a living thing in Moonveil's chest. But it was not the raw, flailing anger of someone who does not see; it was a cold, sharp construct—regret, memory, and the slow gathering of a man who had been given the duty to make amends. He steadied himself, breathed, and tightened his fists.
He punched again—this time with the kind of motion that turned cities into wind. Juarez flew, tumbling end over end, skidding across the asphalt for four blocks until the world reclaimed him with a force that should have pulverized bone. He rose again, breath working, but not yet afraid.
Moonveil repeated—over, and over. Each strike was an effort to test the Mantle's learning, to push it into a corner where it could not simply drink the blow and become more whole. He was relentless and clinical, a surgeon on the edge of frenzy. The streets became a sonar map of impact and return, glass and concrete registering the mathematics of two opposing wills.
Juarez's confidence frayed where the baser things of him met inevitable damage. He staggered often now, the pride of the Mantle bending like a brittle reed. He cried out at one brutal strike—Moonveil's hand turning him like a figure on a lathe—then laughed as he recovered.
"You fool," Moonveil muttered at last, iron in every syllable. "I know when you lie, Juarez. The Mantle teaches you to survive, not to be whole. It is a false god. Your boon is only a mirror of hunger."
Juarez hissed. "You cannot remove the graft without a sharp object." He spat the words like a challenge. "You cannot kill me while the stars smile."
Moonveil heard the stars in Juarez's voice and the old rhythm of bargain and barter. But he also saw the seams—the places where the Mantle learned, where it stored the strikes that would one day teach it to take whole cities as food.
The fight became a choreography of inevitabilities. Moonveil struck with everything he had, then at a certain moment when dawn crept like a pale hand across the horizon he did something nobody expected: he laughed.
He threw the axe aside.
It was a small, sacramental act. The weapon that had sung with Aetherian hunger—one made to shear through divinity and armor alike—was no longer necessary. He wanted rawness now. He wanted to be no instrument of gods or tech. He wanted to be simple and terrible.
Juarez panted, each breath a chain. "You've gone mad," he spat, but Moonveil only tightened his grip and then, with a motion cold and fast as a blade, he lifted Juarez and hurled him through another bank of buildings. The city groaned around them as bricks fell like teeth.
When it seemed his adversary could not move, Moonveil allowed himself a longer look. The sky had shifted to the color of a wound healing—neither night nor day, the hour between, when the stars have not yet folded and the sun is not yet whole. Dawn and dusk and day are human categories; the stars count in angles and favors and laps. The distinction Juarez had boasted of—"evening or day or night"—was brittle as glass compared to the actual sky's geometry.
"You fool," Moonveil said softly, holding Juarez by the throat like a parent holding a wayward child. "Look at the rising sun. It is not day or night or evening. It is dawn. And my hands—look at them. They are not your kind of weapons."
The mask on Moonveil's face shifted then, as if responding to the world's need. The veneer of his hood cracked like glaze. The white crescent on his chest flared with an intensity that made the asphalt flicker. The mask took on the contours of an Aztec death symbol—skeletal, carved with teeth and hollowed eyes—and for the first time Juarez saw fear. The sight of it fixed into a moment that would become memory for whoever was left to remember.
Juarez stumbled. For a man who had boasted of immortality, his gait became clumsy, the armor in his mind loosening in places. He tried to run, but Moonveil laughed—a sound not of triumph but of something older, colder, intended to break will.
He threw Juarez into the air and let him flip end over end like a thing with no center. Moonveil's voice followed into the arc.
"You asked for proof," he said. "You asked the stars to make you safe. You made a bargain with a god. But you forget: gods are not your owners. They are creditors. Your graft is not your body's armor. It is its debt."
Juarez's lips drew back in a snarl. "You will not remove the graft. You have no blade. You—"
Moonveil interrupted by driving his fist like a piston into Juarez's chest, knocking him into the cobbles. He scooped the man up and flung him over his shoulder with a strength that was less about muscle and more about memory—memory of blood on foreign sands, of old promises, of Xochitl and the women who'd been given away.
He took Juarez down to the tube—the place where the devoured had fed. The stairwell was slick with ancient grime and newer blood. Moonveil carried him like an offering and laid him on the table where the abominations had once been sewn.
Juarez coughed, blood bright at the corner of his mouth. "You fool," he whispered, "you think you can play god? The stars—"
"The stars," Moonveil said, cutting the word like a rope, "favor William. Not you. Your benefit is ephemeral, a shadow of prayer. You asked to be honored in return for being used. You are the instrument of a pact. Instruments break."
Then Moonveil did what Juarez had presumed impossible. He summoned hands that were not flesh. They were made of memory and moonlight—astral constructs that took shape like gloves. His suit grew claws along its fingers; material woven from the old world's loom and the new god's temper. He leaned over Juarez's belly and felt for the graft.
Juarez screamed because the hands were cold and because hope is always the sweetest thing to slaughter. The graft was there: a shard of black glass and living stitch, sunk into flesh and fed by a river of corrupted blood. It pulsed in slow time, impervious to the light elsewhere but not to this proximity.
Moonveil paused a breath and then, as if reciting liturgy, shut his eyes. He thought of every stolen thing—every ritual, every altar, every mother who had reached for a child that would not come home. He thought of Xochitl as a brightness in a long dark corridor. He thought of his own death, the cold flash of nothing, and the voice that had given him return. The remembering steeled him.
With motion that was both human and not, he ripped his hand through meat. He did not look away. He pulled intestines and organs free by hand, deliberate and methodical, drawing each piece out and laying the living things aside, leaving the graft untouched at first. Blood ran like quick ink. Juarez screamed in a way that sounded like glass grinding.
Moonveil cradled each organ in his palms like a sacred object. He did not shred and revel; he extracted and cataloged, as if the act itself was a necessary accounting. He showed no horror—only a terrible, quiet compassion for the lives that had been consumed. Then, with his free hand, he took the graft.
It was heavier than it looked, warm and pulsing, a reactor of stolen faith bound in sinew. He held it up. Above, in the sky that had been watched by god and goddess alike, a thin pale line of dawn pulled itself over the city's rim.
Juarez's eyes rolled white. The Mantle's learning stuttered as the graft was wrenched free. The thing that had been feeding him, that had been stitching him to the god's protection, was a thing of artifice and hunger. Without it, Juarez's arrogance had nowhere to anchor.
Moonveil did not hesitate. He rose, lifted Juarez with both hands, and hurled him down the tube, sending the man like a discarded puppet toward the place he had made his altar. The graft flew from Moonveil's fist and shattered on the stairwell's lip with a sound like crockery breaking in a temple.
Above, Metztli inhaled sharply—the sound a thousand knives. Tecciztecatl's breath stopped; whatever language gods use had no word for such a violent reparation. They had watched favor and balance, but not the crude human finality of a demigod's justice.
Across the stairwell, Juarez convulsed as the Mantle failed, as the graft's absence left him raw and finally mortal. His eyes widened, not with terror at death but with the shocked disbelief of a dog whose master has struck it for the first time. He tried to rise; he could not. Bone and blood and the human architecture of the stomach no longer offered invulnerability. The eclipse that had bedded him unstitched itself like rotten cloth.
Moonveil set his palm across Juarez's chest, the gesture not of mercy but of end. He thought of the women and the organs and the hill of the devoured in the tube. He thought of Xochitl's line, of ancestors who had never been avenged, of gods who owed debts.
The last thing Juarez saw before the light left him was the death symbol mask looming over, the white crescent like a compass on the god's chest. Moonveil's voice, when he spoke, was not loud. It was simply the name of a verdict.
"You fed the god who would not feed you," he said. "Now the balance is paid."
He stepped away. Juarez's body sagged and turned still. The stairwell smelled of iron and raw dawn. Moonveil stood at the edge and watched the sky burn the last of its night colors into day.
Metztli spoke then, the word brittle with, perhaps, a hint of awe. "You have gone beyond what I expected," she said.
Tecciztecatl's reply was a whisper that held the weight of a man who had given away his light and had yet to regret it. "He took what we could not remove from the past," the moon god said. "He returned the tally. In doing so, he did what I feared and hoped in equal measure."
Below, the city stirred. Cameras had caught fragments—images that would be replayed and analyzed and turned into narrative. But the truth, the full unvarnished truth, was locked in a stairwell and in the hands of a man who had learned how to be more than a soldier and less than what gods would demand.
Moonveil walked out into dawn with the graft's shards clenched in his fist; the sky opened up and for a moment the world seemed to whisper the outline of new vows. He had torn a bond that had fed on the living, and in doing so had become something closer to what Metztli had always warned: half-hallowed, terrible, and ultimately human.
He carried the weight of the graft's pieces not as trophy but as evidence—proof that bargains could be unmade, that sewn things could be cut. Tecciztecatl watched him with an expression that could not be read for pity or pride. Metztli, above, turned her face away from the rising sun and cleared a throat that sounded like the fold of continents.
"Xochitl's debt is stamped now," Tecciztecatl said softly. "But so is another: the city sees a god who will not submit to bargain. That changes the math. William will not sleep easy."
Moonveil did not answer. He walked back through the streets, the mask dissolving into the man beneath, the world turning to ordinary things—delivery vans, street sweepers, an old woman buying milk. He checked his hands; they were bloody and human. The limiter at his chest hummed and, for the first time in many nights, it felt less like shackles and more like a watchful restraint.
The dawn edged higher, and somewhere in a place older than memory two gods stepped away from a gamble that had become too costly for comfortable divinity. Below them, a man who had once died and been given new breath had paid a debt the way mortals sometimes must: messy, necessary, and final.