August's pouring rains came down in sheets, drawing a vast curtain of rain amid the rolling mountains. The Rain God's tears became the Heavenly River, and the Fire God's roar became a wave of heat, tangling down from the sky and sweeping across the plateau earth. A blazing sun behind many clouds, damp heat and endless rain—this was the vibrant height of summer, the Mexican Plateau at the peak of the rainy season.
King Avet gripped the Divine Staff and ascended the walls of Tree Snake City, gazing north toward Cloud Snake Mountain City. His expression was calm, with a faint smile, yet also a trace of unwillingness at work not fully done.
Looking all around, the four fields were emerald, all things bursting with life. Flocks of birds soared through the sky, and American Vultures circled above the mountaintops. Lush forests undulated at the far end of the horizon, dyeing the northern mountains with a layer of blue-green. In the fertile fields beside the river, wild grass more than a meter tall grew everywhere, enough even to conceal a warrior's movements.
In the Tlaxcala Basin at midsummer, green vitality was everywhere. Yet beneath that surface vitality lay an icy cruelty. Across the vast basin, the teeming smoke of human habitation was gone, wealthy villages had burned out, and even the hope of continuation had vanished.
"The villages are burned out, the able-bodied men dead to the last, the fields all gone to waste. The northern Tlaxcalan state will surely face a great famine this year! And the nearly hundred thousand Tlaxcalan remnants who fled into the mountains must lack food. They can only abandon the old and weak, and devour one another down to the last man."
Gilim narrowed his eyes, looking at the northern mountains, and sank into