Mesoamérica Magic

The jungle ate sound before it ate people.

Dr. Simon Cinder had learned to listen to what it chewed. The leaves whispered their wet arithmetic; cicadas sawed the afternoon into equal parts ache and heat. Somewhere beneath the green glass canopy a slow breath rose and fell, as if the jungle itself were a sleeping lung.

Cinder paused at the crest of a limestone knoll and lifted a hand for quiet. Behind him, four students froze in a jangled line of bright packs and eager faces. They were third-years and seniors from Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World—on a school-funded field season in the Guatemalan Petén.

The grant called it “a pedagogical immersion in ritual architecture.” The brochure just called it an adventure. Cinder called it work.

“Eyes open,” he said, not turning. “We’re crossing an old sacbé—white road. See it?” He pointed with the blunt end of his towel. The green swells were barely visible, a rumor of geometry under centuries of rot. “Raised, compacted, lime-plastered. It hums if you look long enough.”

Francis Moreno, who always looked the longest, shaded her eyes and nodded.

“Linear ridge line. Slight crown to shed rain. The plaster’s gone, but the curve’s right.”

“Good.” Cinder allowed himself half a smile. “Moreno’s grid sense is why your ankles are still your ankles.”

Marco “Mace” Acevedo adjusted the drone case on his shoulder. “I resent that. My ankles are self-made men.”

Giselle Park, whose canteen clinked with solvents and brushes, murmured, “Show-off,” but grinned.

Jack Still tipped his red Phillies cap back. “I resent that I resent things in this heat.”

“Drink,” Cinder said, and drank himself. The water tasted of sun-warmed hose and metal cap; he swallowed that memory like medicine.

Two men watched from the shadow of a breadnut tree. Don Mateo—lank, weathered, shirt patched at the elbows—rested his weight on a machete whose handle had been smothered by palms. Luis, young enough to pretend this was a dare, flicked bullet ants from his socks.

They had guided teams into this maze for years, speaking little and seeing much.

“Hasta aquí, doctor.”

Mateo’s voice was low and final. He planted his machete in the soil and folded his hands over the handle like a man at prayer. Luis stood behind him, eyes wide.

“No, Don,” Luis whispered. “No… aquí no.”

Francis slowed. She was close enough to hear the change in breath: Mateo’s steady, Luis’s fast. Cinder came up a beat later, glasses fogged, patience cinched tight. Mateo didn’t look at the students or the map. He stared at the ground, the way some men listen for trains.

“Dios bendice los caminos limpios.”

Luis lifted a trembling hand and pointed—not at anything visible, but at the air a few paces ahead, as if a thread were stretched across the trail.

“Se siente... como si la tierra quisiera cerrar la mano.”

Giselle came up smiling, because that’s what you do when you don’t understand a language and don’t like the look on people’s faces.

“All good?” she asked, bright as tinfoil.

Jack hovered behind her, Marco unzipping and rezipping the drone case as if that could undo something larger.

Mateo drew a small wooden cross from his shirt pocket—two twigs bound in twine and faith. He touched it to his lips, then held it outward, the way one offers a lantern to a dark room.

“Hay santos que no son de Dios, y manos que piden sin mostrar heridas.”

Luis made the sign of the cross so fast he nearly poked out his own eye.

“No quiero ver la mano, Don.”

The forest made a new sound—nothing. No saw-edge of cicadas, no brittle clatter of lizards—just a round, padded hush. A gust came and went without touching any leaves. The guides felt it pass through them and flinched.

“Barometric dip,” Cinder said automatically, thumb worrying the empty groove where a ring used to sit. He clicked his pen once. Twice. Three times. “Happens before rain.”

“The sky’s clean,” Jack muttered. “Like… aquarium clean.”

Mateo’s gaze moved to Cinder. “Usted es maestro. Llévese a los muchachos.”

“No somos niños,” Francis said before she could stop herself.

Mateo didn’t soften. “Los que no ven el peligro son los más niños.”

Those who don’t see danger are the most like children.

Luis took two backward steps, boots sinking noiselessly into leaf litter.

“Yo no paso. No voy a pasar.”

Cinder put up both hands, calming. “Está bien. Ustedes regresan al campamento.”

Mateo’s stare flickered to Francis, the one who had spoken, and gave her a small, sorrowing nod.

“Lo siento.”

He turned, crossed himself once more, and walked down the sacbé without looking back. Luis followed, stepping lightly, as if afraid of waking something sleeping just under the leaf skin.

When they had gone twenty paces, a bird cried out—a single, ordinary note—then thought better of it and went quiet.

Giselle was the first to speak. “What did he say?”

When Francis didn’t answer fast enough, “Like, all of it—what was that?”

Before she could translate—or decide which pieces to break gently—Cinder herded them a few yards off the trail into a pocket of shade that smelled like wet rope. His voice was brisk and quiet, the field voice.

“They’re superstitious. Happens. No one likes old stones except people who’ve made a life of them.”

“That’s not all he—” Francis started.

“Moreno.”

The syllables were sharp, like a small bell.

He took off his glasses, cleaned them with the square of shirt reserved for hope. “Guides go as far as they go. It’s their jungle. We respect that and move on. We’ll be careful. Redundancies for everything.”

He slid his glasses back on, not quite meeting her eyes.

“Great,” Marco said, relief spilling out as chatter. “We love careful. We are care-forward.”

Jack nodded too many times. Giselle forced a laugh.

A smell of molasses drifted faintly through the green for the length of a heartbeat and was gone, sweet as rot.

They walked in single file now, their talk stripped to breath and bootsteps. The sacbé narrowed into a corridor of strangler figs, the trunks knotted in a way that disturbed Francis. The vines above were so tight that sunlight broke into slow, floating shards. Dust motes drifted like golden spores.

“It’s weird, right?” Jack said finally. “How quiet it is?”

“Pressure drop before a storm,” Marco muttered, though the sky beyond the canopy was mercilessly blue.

Simon said nothing. He moved steadily, almost feverishly, boots cutting through vines, his face flushed, breath heavy. Francis followed, notebook clutched to her chest, watching sweat roll down the back of his neck. She thought of Mateo’s warning and how certain his voice had been.

They walked another hundred yards before the jungle began to tilt upward. The soil turned pale, chalky, littered with pottery shards that crumbled underfoot. It smelled like wet iron and old rain. The trees grew farther apart, giving the impression of a clearing, though the canopy was still too tight for sunlight.

Francis stopped first.

A cool draft slid across her knees. It came from nowhere—or everywhere—and it carried a scent that didn’t belong. Not the rot of leaves or the mineral musk of limestone. Something dry, almost sterile. The smell of a museum case sealed too long.

She turned to speak, but Jack was ahead, waving at something half-buried in the slope.

“Dr. Cinder! Come take a look!”

Cinder brushed past them, moving faster than he had all day. The trees gave way to a rise of rock marbled with vines and moss. Here and there, geometry emerged—cut stone, squared edges, the hint of pattern. The air grew colder, dense enough that they could see their breath fog faintly.

It was an entrance: wide, low, half-eaten by the earth. The jungle hadn’t grown over it so much as around it.

Giselle whispered, “Is this it?”

No one answered. The space before them seemed to breathe. Wind—or something like it—whispered from within, pulling the heat out of the air. A faint shimmer rolled through the green around the edges, like movement underwater.

The smell hit next. Metallic. Sweet. Faintly sulfuric. Francis had smelled it once before on a dig in Belize—the residue of burned resin mixed with mercury pigment. Her pulse quickened.

Cinder stood at the edge of the shadow, shoulders squared, the line of his jaw caught in a trembling half-smile.

“Beautiful,” he said.

The word was wrong in its tenderness.

“Beautiful?” Marco echoed. “Dr. Cinder, it’s—what even is that?”

He ignored him. He bent low, brushing the stone with his palm. His fingers came away streaked with red dust. The grit glittered in the light.

“Cinnabar,” he murmured. “They sealed the joints with it.”

“Why?” Giselle asked.

“Because cinnabar lasts longer than blood.” His voice was steady, clinical—but his eyes, Francis noticed, had gone somewhere else entirely.

The others unpacked notebooks and cameras. They knelt in the dirt, tracing lines, whispering notes. Marco joked halfheartedly about getting a drone shot “before we’re eaten by mosquitoes.”

Francis couldn’t focus. She kept glancing at Cinder, who hadn’t moved from the threshold. He wasn’t studying anymore. He was staring—into the dark, into the cool breath that seemed to come and go in pulses.

Then she saw it.

At first she thought her eyes were adjusting. But the texture of the stone was wrong—too smooth, too deliberate. She stepped closer.

An open palm. Imprinted.

It sat on the stone just to the right of where Cinder stood, darker than the surrounding rock, as if scorched there centuries ago. The fingers were long, almost jointless, the palm narrow, angled upward.

When she turned to look at him again, he was holding something small in both hands—a laminated photograph, old and worn. She couldn’t see the image, only the gesture: his thumb stroking the edge of it once, twice. Whatever it was made him tremble.

“Francis?” Giselle called softly. “All good?”

“Yeah,” she lied. “Just taking it in.”

She crouched again, sketching the outline of the wall, pretending to work. The sound of graphite on paper seemed too loud.

A drop of water fell from above, cold and clear, landing on the page. Then another.

She looked up. No rain. The canopy was still, yet beads of moisture clung to the vines, trembling before falling one by one. Each drop hissed faintly as it hit the rock. The smell of iron thickened.

Jack stepped closer, camera raised.

“I’m getting nothing but black,” he said. “It’s eating the light.”

“Maybe your aperture’s off,” Marco muttered.

Cinder didn’t turn. “That’s not the aperture.”

Francis felt the absence pressing against the edges of her sight. She looked down at her boots and saw that the soil beneath her had changed—crushed shell and something finer, something that gleamed faintly in the dim light. She scraped at it with her finger and saw the shimmer of bone.

“Dr. Cinder,” she said carefully, “shouldn’t we—”

He raised a hand without looking at her.

“Listen.”

At first there was nothing. Then a vibration ran up through her boots, through her bones, through the soft tissue of her chest.

Cinder smiled faintly. “There,” he whispered. “You feel it? Air moving through the vault system. It means the interior’s still intact.”

Behind her, the students went on working, the scratch of pencils and clicks of cameras brittle as insects. But all Francis could hear was the faint breath exhaling from the black ahead of them.

They entered.

The sound changed first—a low internal pulse, as if something enormous dreamed beneath the stone. Each step stirred a faint vibration that climbed from their ankles into their ribs. The walls sweated dull red minerals that ran through the limestone like veins, giving off their own exhausted light. When Francis brushed one, it was faintly warm.

Giselle covered her nose; the air smelled of metal and something sweeter, like rot braided with perfume. Marco kept flicking his headlamp on and off, trying to prove the darkness wasn’t moving between blinks.

Cinder led them on, muttering about airflow and stratigraphy, his voice a steady ritual of control. The photograph was still in his hand. Francis lingered a few paces behind him, half listening, half watching the way he occasionally whispered to himself.

They reached the inner threshold and stopped.

The chamber was vast—larger than any map Cinder had shown them, too large to fit inside the hill above. Columns rose like ribs, twisted and bowed. Between them, reliefs of hands—thousands upon thousands—overlapped until the wall became a single crawling surface. Some were smooth and clean; others had been worn to bone.

The smell arrived before the sight: a stench of sulfur and hot copper, of graves exhaling. Giselle gagged, Marco pressed a sleeve to his nose, Jack swore softly. Only Cinder breathed deeply, eyes half-closed, as if the air were wine.

They stepped through the archway. The ceiling disappeared into red haze, and the walls bowed inward like claws. At the far end, on a throne of fused bone and metal, sat a giant.

It was not alive, not entirely. Its skull brushed the unseen beams above, and its spine curved like a cathedral arch. What flesh remained hung in ribbons from a lattice of bone; one arm was stripped to tendon, the other bloated and slick. The torso gaped open, ribs warped outward, and something black and wet pulsed faintly inside. The smell was unbearable—old graves and hot iron.

Francis covered her mouth, eyes watering. Marco retched dryly. Jack’s camera stuttered with a mechanical whine, flash carving thin slices of white into the red. Each burst revealed new detail—the folds of gray skin, nails like yellow glass, lips split and blackened.

Cinder stepped forward until he stood at the base of the dais.

“What the hell is that thing?” Jack whispered.

“The wish made flesh,” Cinder said, voice reverent. He lifted the photograph to his chest. “Do you see? Do you see what I’ve brought you?”

The red veins in the walls brightened, painting their faces blood-colored. Heat thickened.

“Doctor—” Francis began.

He ignored her. He was speaking now in a language that didn’t belong in any human throat—liquid, glottal, wrong. The floor trembled. Dust rose in lazy spirals.

The giant exhaled. A sound like a dry wind scraped from its hollow lungs. The temperature dropped until their breath steamed. Its jaw unhinged with a crack that shook the columns. The stench of decay rolled over them, dense enough to taste.

“Dr. Cinder!” Marco shouted. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Cinder didn’t hear him. The photograph trembled in his hand; the edges began to blacken. “She’s coming,” he murmured. “She’s almost here.”

Jack’s camera went off again—once, twice.

The flash caught the giant’s face in perfect focus: a rotted grin stretching ear to ear. Then again, and again. Each burst showed it closer.

“Stop taking pictures!” Giselle screamed.

“I can’t—it won’t stop!”

The strap around Jack’s neck tightened, jerking him upward. His legs kicked as an invisible grip hoisted him off the ground.

“What the fuck!”

The flashes stuttered, reflecting off wet stone. The giant’s mouth widened, splitting to the jaw hinge. From its throat came a rush of air—half laughter, half screaming. The strap snapped tight. So did Jack’s neck. The camera fell, firing one last blind flash.

Giselle’s scream followed—a sharp sound that ended mid-breath as her feet left the ground. The red light rippled outward like heat above asphalt.

“Giselle, hang on!”

Marco grabbed her wrist, and the moment his skin touched hers the air bent. Both of them lifted, caught in a silent vortex. Papers and tools spun upward like insects in a flame.

Francis felt the pull on her spine, her bones straining, her blood turned to current. She clawed at the floor, fingernails skidding uselessly across glass-slick stone.

“Please!” she cried. “Dr. Cinder! Help us!”

He looked at her then—only for a heartbeat. His expression wasn’t cruel. It was radiant, as if witnessing a miracle.

“It’s working,” he whispered. “Do you feel it?”

The chamber convulsed. The red glow folded in on itself, the heat pressing them flat. Cinder stood unmoved beneath it all, the photograph in his hands burning without smoke, curling to gold ash.

“Take them!” he shouted, voice cracking. “Take them and give her back to me!”

The giant’s mouth became a void. Air rushed outward—hot, sweet, putrid. The students’ bodies arched backward, folding inward, pulled through a point of nothingness too small to understand. Their cries thinned, stretched, and were gone

Then silence.

The red light guttered. The smell thickened to syrup. Cinder stood alone before the throne, sobbing, ash sifting through his fingers.

From the haze, a shimmer began to gather. At first, a figure of dust and heat—then skin.

She was there. Jolyne.

Her hair hung in dark ropes. Her skin was gray and thin as parchment, the veins beneath shining like rusted thread. The air around her steamed, carrying that same sweet, rancid perfume that filled the chamber. Her eyes were hollow but bright inside—two coals watching him.

Cinder fell to his knees. “I missed you,” he whispered. “My sweet girl.”

She reached out a trembling hand. Smoke followed where her fingers passed. When she touched his face, the flesh on her palm slipped like wax, yet he leaned into it as though it were the gentlest caress.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, his voice shaking into laughter. “You’re still so beautiful.”

Behind her, the giant stirred again. A sound rose from deep inside its ruined chest—slow, resonant laughter, like a collapsing mountain. The walls trembled; dust fell in gray curtains.

The laughter thinned to a breath, then to nothing, and as the giant settled back into its endless sleep, the chamber fell silent again—save for the sound of a man whimpering in the embrace of what he’d mistaken for love.