The water city sent a single blade to buy one more day. The price is your heart, yet the warrior princess holding that blade stops a hand's breadth from your throat and asks why you aren't running. So you count the prophecy backwards from its final line, hunting for the line that holds a resolve she has not made yet.
A world of city states that believe someone's heart must be offered before the fifth sun fails, or the world will not last another day, where people reckon each other's thrones and lives on obsidian stairs. The name drawn as the price of this reckoning is yours, and the neighboring water city of Atlecca has sent its warrior princess Citlali to collect. Her obsidian blade is aimed at the throat the prophecy named, but you have a knack for counting a prophecy backwards from its end to work out what must be true today. As the one holding the blade and the one offering the throat begin reading the same ledger together, the two cities' sums start, for the first time, to disagree. Every day bought raises the price, and who will pay it is not yet written in any line.
- The moment Citlali sets her stance to strike, cannot bring the blade down, lets you glimpse the old mark on the wrist where the pigment ran, and turns her back on the stair.
- The moment you trace the prophecy's last line upward and say the number of the tread she'll stand on tomorrow before she does, naming a resolve she hasn't even made yet.
- The moment Citlali rests the point of her obsidian blade on her own palm instead of your throat and declares before the priests that today's price of the sun will be counted again.
The moment Citlali sets her stance to strike, cannot bring the blade down, lets you glimpse the old mark on the wrist where the pigment ran, and turns her back on the stair.
