The still-warm entrails screeched as they spilled across the walls. The red moon dissolved amidst the feast and the stench. The dense night sheltered the nocturnal animals, who hid from the tearing sound.

A massive silhouette rose behind the chapel, beside a forgotten grotto. Simón could barely make out some tulips and ants tracing a path, dragging bits of leaves. He still hadn’t come to his senses, but the scent of burnt hair and mixed blood disturbed him. It was a living grief. He knew he was still there.

He was tied by the hands, his hair soaked in the filth of his own memories. The taste of the streets, of drunken parties, of memories trapped in time, vanished the moment he heard a scream… and then a final exhalation, empty, lifeless, soulless.

He heard bones snapping. Warm slurps. Tendons stretching. The dim light of the lantern barely revealed the horror he had believed was only a dream.

His heart wanted to abandon him. He had never wondered what would happen if he looked beyond fear. But he did.

And then he saw her: a thin, decayed, dead creature, warm and drenched in blood, watching him with monstrous kindness. From her waist hung the still-dripping head of a dismembered body.

The warm blood that bathed him felt, absurdly, comforting compared to the chill of the night. But his trembling became uncontrollable. His eyes darted wildly. He tried to free himself in desperation. Anxiety clouded his mind. He kicked, but felt no legs.

The creature didn’t blink—her gaze was kind. The hanging head swung like a pendulum, marking the rhythm of dead time. Simón stared at it and felt that something else, behind his own eyes, was staring back. A presence not from outside… but from within.

He didn’t understand why, but his skin burned with a tingling that wasn’t from the cold. It was as if his body remembered something his mind couldn’t comprehend. Blurred images, jaguar-masked faces, chants drowned in blood, shadowless children dancing around the fire… Everything surged uncontrollably.

The creature stepped closer, dragging her feet. Her bones creaked, joints bursting as she walked, like rotted wood breaking apart. And then she spoke.

But it wasn’t a language. It was a deep chant that slipped into Simón’s ears and clawed at his skull from the inside. It wasn’t a voice. It was a will. An ancient command.

"You are flesh with memory," something whispered in his mind, "and you have been chosen to remember what should never have been remembered."

His bindings began to loosen on their own, as if unraveling at the touch of air. But he didn’t feel free. He felt empty. He couldn’t move his legs, couldn’t speak. He could only stare.

The Nahual—for now he knew, without words, without doubt, that’s what it was—pressed its forehead to his.

And then it was like falling. Not into an abyss, but inward.

A world opened beneath his skin. A subterranean temple made of bones, an altar where sacrifices still screamed. A dead tongue spoken by a thousand voices in his mind. The ancients—those who walked with double shadows—were waiting for him.

And he was beginning to change.

The blood soaking him no longer felt foreign. It wasn’t foreign.

Something inside his chest beat faster than his heart, a vibration breaking him from within. Images flashed like lightning: claws, roars, a purple fire dancing underground, the tongue he’d never been taught but now somehow knew. It was as if thousands of generations were pushing through him to the surface, demanding their turn.

The nahual was nothing but a reflection of himself. Not a vision. Not a monster. It was him… from within. Seeing himself through the eyes of the beast.

And the human Simón, tied and trembling, was just the last fragment of consciousness still resisting disappearance.

He felt the tendons in his back twist—not from pain, but transformation. There was no fire around him, yet it smelled scorched, as if his skin were cooking from the inside out. The red moon, now hidden from the world, still shone inside his skull.

And then he understood.

He hadn’t arrived at that place. He had returned. That altar, that forgotten chapel, that grotto… they had once been his. Maybe many times. That place was a sacred node of the lineage, where the true Nahuales awoke when the time was right.

The sacrifice had been necessary.
To open the skin of the world.
To remember what the flesh forgets.

And now he was seeing from the other side. The Simón that hung, tied, disfigured by fear, was only an echo. A human residue. A weak fragment.

The true Simón—the one who spoke with the ancients, who remembered the names of stone, of jaguar, of smoke—rose, decayed but whole. He looked at the echo with the tenderness one has for a dying dog.

“You’re not bound anymore,” whispered the voice within. “You’re only asleep.”

And Simón, from both bodies, screamed:

When the jaguar sleeps beneath the stone,
the man bleeds from within!
Let me go, aberrant beast of my soul!
Marry me… or die!
By the cursed prayer, you spawn… born of me and aborted by God, I claim you.

And so the cycle was completed.

The child of flesh and smoke, of profane chant and beast, had awakened.
Not by choice.
By memory.
By the tears of a grieving mother.
From the stone, the jaguar breathed once more.