Pattering raindrops fell from the sky by the sea. Acrid black smoke rose from the broken walls and ruins. The last embers that had burned for ten days atop the pyramid finally died out on the charred, shattered Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Rain fell among the ruined thatched huts and gathered on the muddy streets, and wide patches of dark-red, congealed blood slowly spread apart, merging into winding streams.
The pale-red streams followed the streets east, passing snapped arrows, ragged strips of cloth, and clumps of severed black hair as they flowed all the way down to lower ground. They flowed out of the unwalled Ancient Feathered Serpent Holy City, past a newly dug and refilled burial pit, and finally, at the gray-white tidal flats on the shore, followed a depression trampled out by the crowd and poured into the boundless Eastern Sea.
This depression trampled out by the crowd was the legendary place where the Feathered Serpent had boarded the Snake Raft and set sail for the Eastern Sea. It was also the sacred place where, during the Feathered Serpent festival each year, tens of thousands of Totonac prostrated themselves in prayer, and more than a hundred Feathered Serpent priests made offerings to the god and released the Feathered Serpent statue and raft!
Now, the piety and splendor of the Feathered Serpent festival from several months ago had been utterly and mercilessly erased by the power of bronze and flame. The revered Feathered Serpent priests, the noble Totonac aristocrats, and the tribal warriors and Militia who had dared resist had all been turned into layered corpses in the burial pits. And the ancient, sacred Feathered Serpent Holy City had, from this moment on, been conquered by the legions of the Main God!
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