I had been in Tlalocan, the paradise of the Blessed Drowned, only briefly, but this seemed very much like it. Verdant vegetation covering the land, flocks of white birds disturbed by our approach, and the small ponds we passed teemed with fish and newts. Acamapichtli grew heavier as time passed, his arms bearing down on my shoulders, his legs dangling closer and closer to the ground until it felt as though I were dragging mud. The sky, too, changed, the only thing that seemed to change at all in this endless succession of hills and lakes. Clouds slowly moved to cover it, and its blue darkened, the air turning as crisp and as heavy as that before a storm. The sun, though, never stopped shining. One step, and then the next; mud and grass and water, everything merging and blurring together. I felt Acamapichtli’s touch, burning into my skin like the jaguar fang he’d once given me, but it was far away, an inconvenience in some other world.
