(TWWM) (ART TRADE) [?]. Ixta

Do you ever wonder, even absently, if the world you call home is wrong in some manner?

You look around and everything is in its usual place. That item you gained, who knows how many years ago, that you kept around - the thing you can’t let go - maybe something a family member gave you. A picture you hold sentimental value for, even if the person, people, or place it was taken with is long gone in your past, you may never go back there. But is there something wrong?

That wasn’t there before. Where are my keys? Where’s my blanket? Has someone else been here? I need to find where they went. I need to find out why they were here, why did they mess with my home, my life, why did they-

---

There’s a volcano in Chiapas that has long gone dormant with the markings of the Mayans around the foothills. The spring there attracts the attention of tourists - and where there’s people, ancient civilizations, and a record of death, there’s bound to be spirits, or at the very least, rumours of spirits. Whether these accounts are real is an entirely different story for a different occasion, but Ixta would consider himself the farthest thing from a spirit. He didn’t really know what he was but those things the humans talked about weren’t him. The spirits they talked about were creatures of malice, they spoke as if they wanted to hurt humans. Well, Ixta didn’t really want anything to do with humans. Besides, he was the one who brought this place to life. When he arrived, the crater was barren. The trees, flowers, vines… all this life was because of him, this is the farthest thing he would call malicious. 

Some humans took more interest in Ixta’s work than any notion about spirits, but they spoke about strange things. A people called the ‘Mayans’ and something about ‘patterns’... 

“They’re talking about the way your plants grow.”

Ixta looked up from his perch, and up on the branches was - her. 

“What do you mean?”

“The way you grow the plants, they grow in patterns.”

“Well it’s not like I’d grow them randomly.”

“Yeah, sure, but you’ve been down the mountain.” The jaguar looked off to the side, looking down at the humans that were following the path of the feather grass. “What does it look like to you?”

Ixta followed her gaze, looking down over the large square patch of feather grass. There were varying shades of green to yellow, the plant at varying stages of growth right now, they would even out in colour soon, but the pattern was a large half circle with a smaller, hollow circle on top, and looping curls on either side of it. It looked a bit like a frog. 

“A frog?”

“Nothing else?”

“What exactly do you want me to see, Lia?”

“These humans are researchers, specifically, one is a biologist and the other is an anthropologist. They study plants and human culture respectively. Why would they both be interested in this strange patch of feather grass you’ve made?”

Ixta tilted his head and stared at the symbol once more, squinting slightly at it, then it clicked.

---

Ixta looked around the ruins with the excitement of a child at a candy store. Running around, looking at the various glyphs and statues - lots of them had been worn from wind and rain, and some of the statues were crumbling, but that didn’t mean they still didn’t spark something within the esk.

“You’d think someone gave you coffee.” A voice chuckled from the side.

Ixta whipped around and shot a glare at Lia. That blasted Jaguar - couldn’t she leave him alone for even one day?

“What does that even mean? What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here? Ixta, what are you doing here?”

“I saw this from the top. I wanted to explore. And get away from that accursed place.” He left the ‘and you’ out of it. He didn’t need an argument, he had already been harassed by her back in the crater and her pushing had sent him into another panic attack, he felt entitled to a break away from her. 

“This place has nothing to do with your so-called ‘mission’, I’m surprised this would even draw your attention.”

“You don’t know that.”

“And what if I did?”

“If you did, you wouldn’t care that I’m here. You just want me back in the crater.”

“Ixta, you can’t run away from your past forever.”

“How do you even know I have a past? If you had known me before, you would have told me who I was, what’s wrong with that crater, all of it. I know you would have. How about you? What’s your past?” As Ixta got angry, the white glow around him got more intense - the white flames that followed him intensified in energy, reacting to his own emotions.

“I don’t have a past. I merely follow you.”

“Obviously! You don’t have anything better to do other than mess with me!” One of the walls crumbled, and chunks of rocks floated up, each having their own glyph inscribed on it. The one that floated up past his view had a large half circle, a smaller, hollowed circle above it, and ribbon-like carvings on either side.

“Are you gonna throw that at me?” Lia almost sounded amused, mirth in her voice as she spoke. It only made him angrier. “Leave me alone!”

---

“The rock from the ruins…” Ixta looked away from her and the researchers, a bit ashamed of his behaviour that day. Fueled by strong negative emotions, he sometimes acted erratically, maybe even irrationally - that doesn’t mean he could stop it. What hurts even more than having a mental break and going off the rails is becoming aware of it halfway through and not being able to stop. When the paranoia builds up, it has a way of taking control of your every movement.

“Bingo. You were rather mad when you made that one, it seems you haven’t let that go yet. There’s a couple in the area, like that small flower field you made. They think a human did it.”

“Oh?... Well, at least that keeps them off my trail, I don’t wanna deal with them…”

“You don’t wanna deal with anyone, much less yourself.” Lia chuffed, shaking her head, then caught a whiff of what one of the men was holding. “Mmm, you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“Smells like a good morning to me.”

Ixta raised his snout and sniffed, and suddenly a strong smell hit him. Part of it was similar to the smell of the fruit he’d seen by the ruins, but the other part… it felt so familiar and yet not, nothing he had ever smelt before but something that felt so… was right a good word for it?

“What… what is that?...” Ixta was taken aback, his mind was racing but not in the good kind of way - the kind of way that spurred on another panic.

“Smells like coffee to me.” Lia chuffed, and nodded down to the researchers.

“Damn, that smells good. What is that?”

“A new coffee shop opened up just down the mountain. They’re probably trying to profit off tourism, but hey, coffee’s good.”

“What is it?”

“I think they called it Barbajada. Italian, probably. Doesn’t sound like something from around here.”

“Is it good?”

“It’s basically a mocha. You should try one the next time we come up.”

“Same time tomorrow?”

“Hey! I’m not paid that much!”

The two men started laughing off in the distance, and Ixta felt his legs shaking as he backed up, his fur standing on end. 

“You… you joked about that… you’ve smelt this… before?”

“Sure. Plenty of people come up here with coffee. Granted, a lot of the time it’s iced, since it’s so hot out. Iced coffee doesn’t have much of a smell, but that hot coffee - wakes you right up. I’m sure you’ve smelt it before too, considering I have.” She laughed. “What, are you scared of coffee now? Along with cigarettes, sunrises, and lenses?” If she had the features for it, she’d look just like those smug tourists when they smirked at their companions after doing something mean. 

Ixta’s vision blurred a little, her confusing spots became a bane to his sight, her laugh a bane to his hearing, her mocking-playful tone one for his mind.

“You- why did you draw my attention to that?! Why do you hurt me every day? Just one day-!”

“All these strange things that you hate, these human things, they’re always the ones that you react like this to. Why?”

“I- I-I don’t know! It hurts-”

“Why does it hurt?”

“W-Why would I know?”

“Ixta, think for more than two seconds. Why do you not like the smell of coffee? Cigarettes? The shine of lenses?”

---

He sat quietly in the underbrush. The smell of the ashes from his smoke break lingered in the ashtray, which he quietly covered so the scent didn’t scare the animals. There was a family of tapirs that had been spotted near the river, now all he had to do was wait for them to come out of the water. 

He made sure to pick a spot where the sunlight wouldn’t catch his lens and shine and scare them. The problem though is that they liked to stay in - and under - the water for extended periods of time, and he had to be patient. As he looked into the screen of his camera, he quietly untwisted the cap off of his thermos, being careful with squeaks, and then took a sip of the contents. The smell of chocolate, cinnamon, and espresso filled his senses, and he felt his body relax. It was still hot, even though he’d got it hours ago, and he was thankful to the barista who had put the whip cream directly into his thermos when they saw him pouring it in from the cup. It was just the pick-me-up he needed. 

He hoped his cousin was doing okay. He warned her he may be gone for several days and couldn’t take his phone. He hoped the next few days would be boring - boring was a blessing in their world. He reached into his pocket and gripped the small carving he kept with him, closed his eyes, made a quiet wish, then resumed his work.

---

Ixta didn’t know what these memories were. They weren’t his - he didn’t know half the objects in this imagery that filled his mind, he didn’t understand them or their purpose. The smell of chocolate and cinnamon and coffee filled his senses again - a smell he recognized though had never smelt before, a smell that both set him at ease and made everything feel inherently wrong. 

That familiar feeling of suffocation came back. This whole place was suffocating. This crater, no matter how many plants one put inside, would never provide enough oxygen for a spirit that had no lungs to fill. The air around him became warm, especially around his face as he felt tears threaten to fall. An invisible force had placed a boulder in his chest, the weight of love for an entity he didn’t know felt as if it was threatening to drag him down directly into the Earth itself.

The Earth it wanted to pull him down into the crater. The crater was a bird cage holding the most paranoid cockatoo inside, one who felt personally offended by the fact that its caretaker had put him in there. His caretaker… Did Ixta have one of those? Lia certainly would take pride in such a title, he was sure of it… But would Lia keep him here in this crater? She certainly dragged him back a lot but she never stopped him from leaving. Something else was keeping him here.

That’s right, the curse. He was looking into the curse.

Ixta turned away from Lia and began to walk away, which made the large cat perk up in alarm and stand up. 

“Ixta? Ixta, where are you going?”

“...” The spirit was quiet as he walked off, his pendant floating, tugging him away, and he followed it diligently. Every step he took, flowers sprouted up from under his feet, and decorated the trees that stood within range - morning glories sprouting out from the sides of trees they didn’t belong on, sprouting and blooming rapidly - in the middle of July, when it didn’t bloom.

“Ixta, your growth patterns - they’re going crazy, they’re not supposed to do this, what’s going on?”

“...”

Ixta remained silent as he walked out into the open, towards the spring in the middle. The tapirs - they were going towards the water, right? Was the vision here? No, it was at a river. He needed to leave, he needed to find that river. If he could find that river, maybe there was some sort of clue there, something to let him fix this place, something to make him feel whole again-

“Ixta!”

The voice of the Jaguar snapped him out of his stupor, his eyes focused on the large cat, with her confusing patterns, and a tone that almost sounded worried. 

“Lia?” He echoed her name back at her.

“Oh thank goodness, you scared me! What are you doing?”

“I’m going to go find the river.”

“The river?”

“The one I saw… maybe it has some sort of clue to the curse, it has to… why would I see it otherwise?”

“You saw a river?”

“Just now… did you not see it?”

“Did you see a memory?”

Ixta paused. Was memory the right word? No, it couldn’t be. Could it? No. He didn’t know what any of that stuff was, if it was memory he would recognize it. No, wait, he did recognize it, in the moment he did… he knew it’s functions, but now, even if he imagined it in his paws, he didn’t have the foggiest idea as to how it would function. Was he going mad? 

“No, it wasn’t a memory, it was… a vision.”

“What did you see in the vision?”

“I was sitting under some bushes and vines, the smell of ashes, and… whatever that coffee was that the man had, staring at a river with a strange device. I picked that spot because I was waiting for something… a tapir, whatever that is.” He murmured. In the moment, he knew it was an animal, he knew what it looked like - he could still kind of make it out in his mind now, but it looked nothing like what any of the animals in the crater looked like. Maybe they held the clues to this place, despite not existing here. That’s it, maybe their absence was what offset this place. It certainly felt like something was… missing. 

Something had always felt like it was missing.

He’d heard tourists remark about leaving something often. 

Aw, I knew I forgot something! I left my extra lenses at home!

Darn it! Forgot the telescope again.

Hey man, are we forgetting something? I feel like I… oh my god, my water bottle!

Maybe that was it. He needed to bring something back here that had left this place when he arrived. He just needed to find it, maybe the tapirs were a good start-

“Hey, hey, your mind’s going everywhere at the moment, I can see it happening, you need to chill out. Whatever you’re thinking, it might not even be the real reason, let’s just talk it out, okay-?”

“Something’s missing.” He blurted out. The white flames floating around him brightened, the tourists all around them suddenly seemed uninterested. The spring really wasn’t that cool, the plants, well, yeah, it was weird they were there, but they weren’t really as interesting as the papers said…

Lia paused, staring at him, surprised. As they continued to stand there, as the tourists that lingered began to leave, the spirals of growth grew larger and larger. Even if Ixta was having a mental break, he wanted to feel okay - he wanted everything to feel okay, he wanted everything, for once, to just be boring. So he made it feel boring, even if it was unconsciously. A stretch of nothing but grass around the spring, maybe a couple weeds, nothing interesting. He looked up at Lia, feeling the tears beginning to pool again. 

“Something’s… something’s missing. I just know it is. I need to find… I need to find what’s missing. I need to do something.”

Lia paused for a long time, staring at Ixta, who stared back at him. She slowly circled him, sitting down next to him, and curling her tail around his form. 

“Ixta… what happens if there isn’t anything missing?”

“Th-There has to be something missing. Something left when I got here, I have to bring it back-”

“But what if it didn’t leave when you came? What if it left a long time before you got here… what if it’s something you can’t fix?”

“I… I…” 

“Ixta, you need to rest.”

“No, I have to go-” he stood up, moving away from her, barely an inch-

“Rest.”

Ixta paused at her sudden firmness, and slowly sat back down, and Lia gently rested her head on top of his. 

“Your wisps are making the tourists leave.”

“They shouldn’t be here… they… the curse… it might hurt them…”

“Your moment of compassion is nice, it truly is, but they want to be here, you know.” She teased. “And using your wisps will only tire you out more. Relax, let them come back.”

Ixta stared down into the spring, and slowly let himself relax. His shoulders, his eyes, his back, until suddenly he slumped down onto the ground. The tourists slowly started filing back around the crater, exploring with renewed curiosity, and Ixta covered his face with his paws. He felt awful. Everything felt awful. He wished he could just curl up and sleep and never wake up.

“You okay?”

“No…”

“Think you’ll be okay later?”

“... I don’t know.” 

“How about we hang out in the trees? Laze around a little. Stop fighting the world for a few hours.” Lia’s voice had a smile behind it, not her usual teasing or mirth.

“... Alright.”

“There’s a good Ixta. Come on, get up, let's relax for a while, alright?”