I went to the cemetery before dawn.
I carried the codex under my arm, the engraved stone in my pocket… and a lit incense.
The oldest tree awaited me.
Its branches dry as bones.
The crack pulsing as if it had a heart.
I laid out a mat in front of the crack. I placed copal, dried marigold flowers, stone salt, and three clay figures: the moon, the serpent, and the jaguar.
The gravedigger was already there.
His presence was not a ghost. It was an echo.
A guardian.
—"Do you still want to close it?" he asked, without moving his lips.
I nodded.
He looked at me long, then knelt before me. He placed his stumps on the ground, which began to steam with earthy vapor. The earth recognized him.
I took the engraved stone and put it at the center of the altar.
Then I traced an ancient symbol in the soil: a circle split by a lightning bolt, like the crack.
I covered it with red earth and my own blood, cutting my thumb.
And I began to chant.
"Tloque Nahuaque…
Huehuetéotl, lord of the old fire…
Ticitl, mother who heals the world's cracks…"
I sang words I didn't know I remembered.
My voice was not mine: it was theirs who came before.
The incense burst into flames without burning.
The codex opened by itself.
The letters changed, taking the shapes of serpents and hummingbirds. An ancient language.
The gravedigger began to strike the ground with his forehead, marking a rhythm.
I repeated every name, every invocation, feeling the crack begin to tense.
Then I placed my hands on the earth and spoke my true name.
Not "Citlali."
Another.
One I knew and didn't know, carried before I was born again as a girl.
The wind stopped.
The crack vibrated.
A tremor ran through it.
The clay jaguar broke.
"Close, Mother Earth. Seal what I was."
"Close, with the blood that calls me."
"Close, before what we forgot wakes."
For a moment, it closed.
For a single heartbeat.
But then, from inside…
someone screamed.
It was my voice.
It was me.
Something—a shadow or a reflection of me—pushed from inside and threw me backward.
I fell among the graves. The codex burned. The stone split.
And the crack… opened wider.
Ashes rose from the hollow.
And from the ashes, an arm.
Covered in symbols.
My symbol.
The gravedigger knelt beside me.
—"You can't close it yet," he said.
—"Not until you remember who you were when you opened it the first time."
The crack calls me.
And this time…
I answered.