The Gods Who Fade 15 - Fifth Sun Sets

Two worlds are about to collide and shatter. Above them, gods older than History are already pulling the strings. Hernán Cortés has nothing left to lose. In debt, disgraced, hunted by the vengeance of a betrayed governor, he sails from Cuba with eleven ships and five hundred men toward a land whose true scale he cannot begin to imagine. He believes he is conquering a kingdom for his king and his God. He does not know he is merely the visible blade of a far older war. For atop the pyramids of Tenochtitlan, Huitzilopochtli is no idol of stone. He is a living power, ancient beyond memory, sovereign over a continent the Christian Heaven had never known existed. To the archangel Michael, this discovery is an outrage that permits only one response: total erasure. So, in the shadows behind human chancelleries, an alliance is forged between the Most High and the defeated gods of the Mexica's enemy peoples, a glacial coalition no mortal will ever perceive. Cortés believes he serves God alone. Xicotencatl believes he invokes Camaxtli alone. Moctezuma searches the omens for the will of gods who already know exactly what awaits them. None of them will ever learn they are pawns on a celestial chessboard, and that the promise of being spared, murmured by the archangels to their allies of convenience, will be honored no more faithfully than conquerors' promises ever have been. From the lightning collapse of an empire to the silent death agony of its gods, The Blades of the Sun weaves together grand History and a theology of shadows, where the conquest of the Americas becomes the stage for a Last Judgment that no one asked for. A story at the crossroads of historical fresco and cosmic fantasy, for anyone who has ever suspected that behind the world's great upheavals, something was watching, and calculating.