They arrived without warning.
No wind.
No howling.
No flickering candles.
Just the silence of something that had already happened.
I smelled blood before I saw them.
Rotting blood.
Old, dark, thick as oil.
And then… the drums.
At first, distant—like thunder in the bones.
Then louder.
Closer.
Until the whole cemetery shook with their rhythm.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
I stepped out of the caretaker's house with the obsidian pulsing in my chest.
And I saw them.
A procession of heads.
Hundreds.
Maybe thousands.
Floating through the night, carried by invisible threads of air.
Their faces twisted in agony.
Their mouths open mid-scream.
Their eyes still moving, as if trying to escape their own death.
Some were old.
Others were fresh.
Many still dripped blood down invisible necks, leaving trails of red mist behind them.
They advanced in a perfect line, without ever touching the ground, as if led by a hand older than time.
And I knew immediately: they weren't the general's.
They didn't obey him.
They had no master.
They were looking for one.
⸻
I stood in their path and didn't move.
I let them surround me.
And when the first one stopped right in front of my face, I understood everything.
It was a child.
No more than ten years old.
His eyes were wide with terror.
His lips trembled, trying to say something.
I reached out a hand, and he leaned toward me.
I didn't hear his voice.
I felt it.
"Don't let him take us again…"
The others repeated the same phrase—each in their own way.
Some in Nahuatl, others in whispers, others with no words at all, only pain.
I saw women with braided hair and torn lips.
Men with war paint and broken jaws.
Teenagers.
Old men.
Soldiers.
Farmers.
Midwives.
Children.
All of them had been silenced.
All of them had been decapitated.
And all of them had come here, to me.
Because I was the only one left who could hear them.
⸻
The drums didn't stop.
They seemed to come from the heads themselves—as if their rage had created its own heartbeat.
I raised both hands and called to the earth.
The roots trembled.
The candles flared blue.
And I said:
"I am not your master.
I am your witness.
I am your voice."
The heads pulsed in the air.
They spun slowly, lifting higher.
"I cannot bring your bodies back," I said. "But I can give your rage a path."
The obsidian burned in my chest.
The child's head floated above my hand.
He stared at me with a look not of fear… but of trust.
I opened my mouth.
And I screamed.
Not with my voice—
With theirs.
⸻
A chorus of screams burst from my throat.
Thousands of voices.
Thousands of cries.
A scream that split the sky and turned the clouds to ash.
The cemetery shook.
The tombs cracked.
The trees bled sap like wounds torn open.
The general felt it.
Wherever he was.
He felt it.
Because that scream was his curse.
And now… it was hunting him.
⸻
The procession didn't vanish.
It didn't fade.
It followed me.
Behind me.
Beside me.
Above me.
A river of heads, endless, floating and moaning, each one whispering the name of the one who took their life.
The general.
Always him.
Always him.
And now I know where I must go.
Because they are leading me.
Because I don't need maps or roads.
I only need to follow the blood in the air and the drums in my bones.
⸻
Tonight, the procession leaves the cemetery.
Tonight, the sky darkens in warning.
Tonight, I am no longer just Citlali.
I am the scream they never let out.
The voice they tried to silence.
The death they denied.
And I am walking.
And I will not stop.
Until the general kneels.
Until he begs.
And until every last head returns to its grave,
not in silence— but in justice.