The Sun God at the beginning of the seventh month sat high upon his divine throne in the sky, shining over the two-thousand-meter Mexica Plateau. Across the fields of the plateau's midsummer, corn seedlings already stood half a man tall, bean stalks as thick as a little finger twined around them, and pumpkin vines spread out like carpets.
Within the five-hundred-li expanse of the Valley of Mexica, the busy spring plowing had long since been completed, and the fields were lush with life. And the blood-red sun Royal Banner had swept through the three polities in the south of the Alliance, inspecting them for a full two months and sacrificing several dozen noble offerings... Only then, beneath the deeply terrified full prostrations of the three polities' nobles, did the Royal Banner set out on the road north, back to the Royal Capital.
When Divine King Avet returned to the palace in the Lake Capital seated atop a towering divine palanquin borne by sixty men, the first person he summoned was the newly appointed Alliance intelligence officer, Shadow Dagger Chiwami. And after he finished listening to Shadow Dagger's report, unexpected astonishment first appeared on his face, followed at once by surging fury!
"Go! Bring that fellow Xolotl to me! Now, immediately! No matter what he's doing!!..."
Faced with the Divine King's towering rage, a hundred-man unit of Shorn Guard, armored and carrying axes, hurried off. They rushed to the lakeside Temple of the Goddess of Spring, then returned just as quickly, bringing someone with them.
Very soon, Xolotl appeared among the returning guards, draped in disheveled priestly robes, his hair a tangled mess, half asleep and half awake. His whole body was stained with a rank musk scent, and his clothes were marked with many reds of rouge and fox blood.