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Three identical points of light that might have been cold, distant stars appeared in the eternally gray sky that hung over the land of the dead and dropped down from it, like phosphorescent spiders descending on unseen webs. Smoky, wispy skeletons on the ground scattered like herds of cattle spooked by aircraft as the falling stars converged upon the mountainous step pyramid that was always visible on Mictlan’s horizon. The Temple of Mictlantecuhtli. The trio of swift sparks funneled themselves into the squat, square structure that topped the pyramid, shooting in under its doorway’s carved limestone lintel.
Lyssa and Nyx were waiting inside. They were amongst the King’s elite creatures, conscripted from one of the all-but-forgotten pantheons he’d conquered in his campaigns. Each of them was intimidating to look upon, with curling tresses, full red lips, and a haughty expression on her exquisite, angular face. They were each clad in sleek, dark, twenty-first century business attire, and Nyx wore an enormous pair of black butterfly sunglasses over her eyes. Lyssa was sprawled across what now appeared to be a mahogany desk, even though it normally looked like a large stone altar.
As soon as the three formless Tzitzimime arrived via the doorway from Mictlan it disappeared behind them, becoming a plate glass window-wall that offered up a kingly view of the Angels’ City. LA’s clumped-together business towers draped elongated shadows over traffic arteries that glinted and sparkled in a wash of warm, westering light. The panorama and the executive office were both illusions arranged for the group by their King: images he’d laid over the inner sanctum’s flickering torchlight and bloodsoaked stone as an example of the era he wished them to go out into and hunt. The door between his Chambers had been left aligned with the very moment in time they saw mirrored in the office’s big glass wall.
Insects began to crawl from the illusory woodwork as soon as the realworld’s sun began to set. Then they boiled out, pouring from the walls and dropping from unseen cracks in the ceiling. The bugs lumped up around the floating points of light into three semi-feminine clouds that writhed and churned as they worked to solidify (although they wouldn’t be able to manage it until after the realworld’s night had fallen).
Nyx took off her eyewear as soon as the sun’s upper arc dipped below the horizon, revealing eyes as black as the night she embodied. They were all pupil, devoid of either whites or irises. She looked over at the others. “It’s time,” she said.
Lyssa sat up from the desk and nodded her assent; then she, Nyx, and the incomplete Bugwomen headed for the exit door, en masse.
As they crossed into the outer office, passing through the barrier between the worlds of life and death, they changed. Everything that passed through there did, in one way or another. The two chambers were something like an air-lock between realities, one room in either realm.
Nyx became a flattened, two-dimensional outline of herself that filled up with stars and swirling galaxies when she stepped through the portal, while Lyssa changed into a similar silhouette containing only mad static and twitchy silver flickerings. The unfinished bugwomen finally came together into their distinct, hard-shelled, long-limbed avatars: a Wasp, a Mantis, and an Ant.
Nyx threw open the door to the wider world-the door that read ‘Miguel Caradura’ on the outside-and the surreal quintet strode down the hall, toward the elevators, looking like danger and glamour personified.