The sky, everything, was white. Everyone was blinded and blinked away spots from their eyes. It had only lasted a second and there was no sound, but everyone within a ten mile radius of the source saw it and was afraid that it was a portend of awful things; like the first time the silent lightning struck a few days before. That first time, people in a small town called Borges, in Guadalajara, Mexico were seemingly stricken by possession, and the ones that were spared, worried that the second whitening would bring more evil.
But instead of bringing horrors, the second whitening seemed to set things back to normal. A small African American boy named Clay who had arrived in the town on the same day, smiled up at the sky, relieved that God had shown mercy on the people.
Away from the town center, in the desert still within the town limits, a boy named Ivan was standing solemnly in the destroyed home of his grandfather. There was a large hole in the flimsy tin material that made the roof, and Ivan may as well had been standing outside. The wooden planks that made the walls were scattered and charred, but there was no fire or smoke on anything. Amongst the rubble was the body of his grandfather, Don Luis Manuel Santana Nieto, a shaman in his prime, but dark magic practitioner as of late.
As a shaman, just a decade before his grandson stood over his dead body, Don Luis had presided over spiritual rituals for a group of Wixaritari indigneous peoples who made the sacred trek across their ancestral lands despite modernization; some, like the Don, made Borges their permanent homes. He was well respected for his commune with spirits only he could see, and the spirits always delivered on the promises that the Don communicated to his followers. The Don had the ability to commune with spirits, he was something of a medium, but the spirits only gravitated to him because of his incredible mastery of gifts he received from a being who appeared to him as a blue deer and called himself Koyu. This being allowed the Don to create fires and he could make them as hot as he wanted them to be. The Don was known to levitate, surrounded by a strong blue flame, though he rarely ever displayed this ability and only used it for emergencies.
And then the dead trees started to appear, the twisted, black ones, and the Don started to hear voices that beckoned him toward his darker nature. He had never been very close to the mother of his children, or his children for that matter, but he became even more distant than usual. He snapped completely when he started to consume the nightshade as a substitute for the peyote that had shown him a beautiful vision of the world and gave him tools to make the world better for the people he cared about. The nightshade made him hate the world that actively ruined the land he held dear and he wanted to make the world pay.
Koyu was alarmed by the change in the Don and he sought the help of his grandson, hoping the boy’s innocence would bring him back to himself. He manipulated Ivan’s family to trust the boy to his grandfather, but Koyu had underestimated the change in the Don. When his son and daughter in law showed up with Ivan on his doorstep, the Don saw innocence, but it did not snap his cruel streak. He saw Ivan as a tool to amplify his destructive intent.
Ivan had a natural ability like his grandfather and Koyu knew that he would grow to be more powerful than the old man, but not without guidance. The Don smiled as Ivan’s parents left him standing at a distance as they faced one another in front of the house. When the parents drove away in their car, Ivan cried silently to himself.
“You know what happens now?” the Don asked in Spanish, dropping the pretense of kindness he had mustered before his son.
Ivan nodded. He felt that he was in a bad place and he had a bad feeling that his parents had dropped him off in hell.
“Then get inside. We have work to do. You have a meal to earn if you want to eat tomorrow.”
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