the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son;
⅋ on the earth before earth, beneath a dozen suns, the first Ōmeteōtl was born. as the bones of universes have transitioned through the ages and galaxies, so, too, has the Ōmeteōtl and all its inherent power. civilizations, empires, whole sentient species rise and fall and the title of Ōmeteōtl passes through them, quietly arranging its pantheons, gifting beings with power both great and lasting. some Ōmeteōtl live for lifetimes. some die young. what has mattered was not about the length of time of an Ōmeteōtl but that there is one, always, where there is nourishing life.
⅋ the earth known as now begins too long ago to count. the people known are gifted their first Ōmeteōtl six million years ago. he is a brave hunter, smart, and conquers not just the land but the sea, bringing tools and color to the people who learn to follow. they become gods of the land and sky and sea. they become life and death for the whole of the world they know — which is only a small portion but, for them, seems vast for so much power absolute. when he goes cruel, the process begins as it has always: a death, a rebirth of Ōmeteōtl power, and the new ruling hand.
⅋ pain has always been a summer storm. this truth is universal, caught in the tanglement of every land that breathes. just because there is a god beyond the gods, simply because there are heavens more than there are stars in the sky, it does not mean that pain is not real. and, too often, the heart of the living is too soft for anguish. this is the biggest ache of the Ōmeteōtl — especially on earth.
⅋ the first time an Ōmeteōtl meets another god, it is a whisper of catastrophe. the clouds break. the trees warp into beasts with fangs that drip. the land burns and drowns and dries and in the end, there is nothing left but the mountains who cry for a hundred years. this is not new. the lessons are always being learned. repetition, in this, has never lessened the storm.
⅋ language and civilization take shape, they change, they adjust. their names change and grow, their identity adapts. they do their best and harvest their lands, hearts and souls. they are leaders without crowns. they are men adorned in jade and given the right to move, to travel, through all the worlds that are and were. things try to stay good.
⅋ the first time an Ōmeteōtl dares to believe himself above cruelty, above the need for death, the storms end. they find a home in his chest. they make a nest of his soul. eternity begins here — with a darkness that founds a beast that will swallow the darkness that swallows the light at the end of everything. there will be no new earth. there will only be this.
⅋ xbalanque begins the curse this way: every descendent of him becoming something foul, dark, and twisted eventually. driven mad. as he bleeds into the beast he creates, there is a Miigis that walks the lands further north; Moonzoonsii feels the change of the gods in the warmer winds. so, the great, glowing beast begins a family on earth, a tribe that will harvest the light and learn to make use without their gods. the Zigwan Ziibi start here, 9,000 years before Mishigami becomes Michigan, before they spread through every Anishinaabe tribe known to man.
⅋ Lemlun o’Tanil haunts its own heaven for 7,000 years before it finally finds a way to break the chain of power. Sayil is the last time an Ōmeteōtl harvests and cultivates a real society. it is the last time an Ōmeteōtl is given any name that can last — only for it to be scorched from the Earth by foreign hooves that burn through all that remains after killing the boy-king. the blood begins to change and the flow starts to run north. by the time it reaches the first Zigwan Ziibi, the lingering spirits are already tired and yearn for more. the blood of the Anishinaabe flood it with new might.
⅋ the women never manifest the might of a god beyond gods, no matter the cirumstance. xbalanque yearns for men this way. for warriors in his old and tainted ways. they carry the spark, instead, to doom their sons into cycles time and time again. eventually, bloodlines try to split, do their best to pass on toward someone that is not their own. they want safety. it lasts, for nearly 2,000 years.
⅋ Arsenio Aparicio Ochoa was not an angry man when he met Morningstar Zigwan Ziibi. when her father met him, however, things changed. like a new summer storm, the land burned; the mad battle terrified all and Arsenio was justifed in killing Morningstar's father. he wouldn't stop coming, they'd say. he had a mad look in his eyes. he was possessed. arsenio would not understand it for years to come. he only learns to harvest his anger and darkness. he learns to make something powerful.
⅋ when the first vision of Lemlun o’Tani begins to haunt him, Arsenio ignores it. when he wakes to the creature in his bed, he does not hesitate. even when its face returns to being Morningstar's own, his fists continue to rip and break apart, until the whole house burns down. when the girls are brought home from a trip with their grandparents, they are told their mother died in the fire. everyone cries. Arsenio ignores the movements in shadows from afar.
⅋ unlike Arsenio, Hollis Nam was angry. a prince among paupers meant to live humbly, he rebelled every way he could. when he met Cherie Zigwan Ziibi, painted with her odd sorrows and tragedy, he felt seen. understood. someone who deserved better, who earned it, and was told to accept less. she gets pregnant. he steps up and marries her, much to her father's chagrin. Hollis thinks it's only that, but then the violence begins. Hollis, powerful enough to fight back, does not kill Arsenio the first, or second, or third time. but there is a breaking point for everyone. there is always a too much. as the world watches Apocalypse fall, Hollis kills Arsenio and feels power rise up in him.
⅋ years later, living off criminal money and what they can scrape together, Cherie and Hollis have their second child. they have this under control, they think. they know how to play the game of life. but there are complications always, and Cherie forgives Hollis all his abuse. he hurts himself, too, anyway. she's seen the scars. that makes it, somehow, all her fault.
the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly
☉ some people are born simply. no complications, no stress. others, difficult: a painful birth, an upside down labor. there are formulas that way — equations people can be broken down into. they are one part brave and two parts heart and a dash of sex appeal, or they are a teaspoon of nerves with too much smarts and not enough luck. they fit within their own lines, for better or worse. and then there are some who, somewhere along the assembly line, fell off the conveyor belt, stumbled into a vat of legos melting in acid and were air dried in the middle of a thunderstorm. there is no simple equation for those unlucky few. abraxas, sometimes, wishes he had a recipe because his feet still hurt from stepping on too many legos.
☉ like his elder brother, abraxas ochoa ziibi was born in his grandparent's home in yucatán, mexico — merida, to be exact, where his mother had been born and raised and there lingered comforts enough to make it through the difficult labor that waited for her. she was even able to manage the year after giving birth from each son — an insistance from Hollis, who did not want to hurt his children before they knew what the hurting was for. so, he was a boy apart, the way eleodoro had been. distance, it was the first constant he would learn in his life. but there were attempts at goodness. attempts at love. even in a home full of danger, there were the trials of the heart that make a family whole.
☉ we are more than the flesh we are born into. every person is a firestorm, a rainfall, a rising tide. every being, a beacon of light. because of this, abraxas' early power levels were no more a sign of his strength-to-come than a child speaking early is a sign of writing the next great novel of the world. they didn't question the flow of energy, the way he fused with his own essence and began to touch the things around him. this was a wonderful thing. a blessing in a world that all too often hoarded blights in the blood.
☉ hollis, in denial of his heritage, gave in completely to his new paths. to being cherie's husband, to being a father of two. to being the Xnuk Ek’ K’iin of the lands — the Evening Star Sun, a divinity that reached the highest stratums of power. his own name was lost to his chlidren and his parents were blocked from all views: the gift of the zigwan ziibi and the ochoa families was enough to keep even the might of mother earth and father sky from being able to find what did not want to be found. this only proved to make the curse more valid, and though hollis hurt himself most often, there were times when cherie's face looked too serpentine, too.
☉ eleodoro was like abraxas. some kind of vessel for nature and the divine above. to hollis and cherie this was a blessing, too. but to the Lemlun o’Tanil it was a sign of things to come. of pain. of agony. Hollis' divine blood was enough to try to find solutions beyond murder, in the habits that became abuse. he learned that pain could fight the creature back. that madness in parts was better than madness in total. even if he hated himself any time cherie suffered, he hated the idea of losing himself to wickedness that much more. this is the way he told it, the day abraxas killed him.
☉ the boys were taught to hurt themselves. to make things ache. this was a celebration of life and love, in a way. this was how you saw the good and how you kept the worst at bay. eleodoro tried to make it better, to take the brunt of it on days when hollis was feeling something crawl too close to whatever scraps of joy he had managed to string together with a family. but neither of them could escape it. no more than cherie could, in her timid and broken way.
☉ thankfully, hollis worked. in especially blessed weeks, he stayed at sea for days at a time. cherie, eleodoro and abraxas made the best of it each time. they learned to embrace the nature around them. they learned the names of birds and plants and trees. they made some friends. they cherished their home, no matter what had changed about it, or what continued to twist toward something darker.
☉ some days were good. a saturday in july when hollis had both his sons out on a small ship, casting their lines together and catching snappers and marlins, sailfish and mahi mahi. they had luck on their side and the sun high overhead and things were nice. but even the good days could turn bad, like a storm rolling in from too far away. even the best days could end up with abraxas under his covers, hands trying to mend the soft pain of having had to hurt himself. having had to jump from too high, or slam a door on his own arm, or take a knife where it shouldn't be. he was allowed to heal himself, at least. he was allowed to heal any of them. the little golden boy. the little ray of sunshine.
☉ when eleodoro went missing, abraxas cried for a week. but the way they'd talked about their futures together came trickling in. eleodoro just couldn't wait anymore. couldn't let his brother grow up. stupid child. stupid, stupid useless little kid. abraxas hurt himself every night for months, then. a young boy with a heart full of gold learning to rust and forgetting to trust.
☉ when the police show, abraxas is scared. when he hears what they say, he's angry. when hollis doesn't seem phased, his confusion nearly rattles. he screams and shouts and runs. after, when everything is quiet, he expects something of a truth. it never comes. instead, he hears cherie scream in pain and, imagining eleodoro as a body laid dead on a shore somewhere, he barges through. his tiny body bursts and burns, and instead of his golden light suddenly, he is changing hues and twisting the world around him. the door melts. the frame bends. and hollis sees only the worst that could come to be.
☉ hollis' pride gets the best of him. his arrogance and insanity drive him after abraxas like a beast larger than he is. the boy only needs one chance. he doesn't avoid everything — he loses and eye and his ankle shatters and he swears he is dying like his brother — but he doesn't have to. because, like elodoro, he has plans for the future and unlike him, he will not end up dead in water, eaten by crabs and sharks and fish. so, when hollis lashes and abraxas fights back, when tiny fist meets adult body, abraxas lets his rage twist. hollis falls to the ground instantly and abraxas moves with him, watches the way the impact bruises, then burns, the smell of it filling the room as cherie still cries and weeps, watching her son turn fists to stone as he pummels his father's skull in.
☉ life is one day after another. it deadens a man while he's still alive. death, too, is one day after another. but you learn to live again after cutting your father's body apart and burying it with your mother in different parts of an island you hope to never see again. you bury the ship, too, and watch as the water swallows the inferno like it's welcoming back an old and ancient lover. day after day, each one bleeding into the other, learning both to life and to die. mastering the nature of a boy in spades: everything in a balance of two directions.
☉ even if there is still light in you, not everyone wants to see it. michigan did not accept abraxas and cherie. the mitsubishi was home instead. every state line was nothing more than a new set of stories, a new secret to keep. abraxas learned to try to glow just to make up for all the worst of it. a charming, silly boy. a strange boy. a golden boy. whatever he had to be, he tried, especially when he started to have dreams about the heart burns repeatedly began to hum through his dreams in fire and chaos. a bit of pain here and there really was better than an apocalypse, and with new people to meet every few weeks, abraxas always had a reason to forget the scars as they faded away.
☉ secrets have a way of getting out. what life doesn't rally against its cages? what life doesn't find the light somewhere? by 2014, the nams find them. abraxas wakes in backseat, clammoring for the steering wheel so cherie doesn't take on more stress, but his grandfather stops him with the barest touch. no golden skin, no strange burns, just an empathy as his grandmother cries behind him. woohyun and avery nam, faces all over the world, huddled into a car park in nebraska just to find family and try to make good on it.
☉ from there, floodgates: abraxas is not quite interested in living with people he has never known. so, they strike a bargain, and auntie kinnie takes over instead, brings her sister and her nephew in. they make that work for a while. abraxas in new york, teaching his grandparents about what happened to their son. never having to admit the hard truth that he sees in their own eyes too often. they teach him, instead, about how to work within his powers. they teach him about goals and dreams. they teach him everything they have to, a thousand little things he always brings back to cherie even as marbles of memories begin to slip from her grasp.
☉ his grandparents and his aunts split guardianship over him when Cherie finally has to be admitted into a hospital. her mind is not one that can be fixed. there are years left, but maybe not many days in them. abraxas still tries what he can... and works, hard, to pay back for taking care of her. for room and board. for, well, anything, because he feels so useless otherwise that the voices are tremendously loud in his head.
☉ he hurts himself, still, until he doesn't have to anymore. he gets a shot at joining a team, a cazern group that fights. the pain from missions is more than enough. things... settle. they find a rhythm. and the balance that is struck, somewhere caught between life and death, between golden and blighted, is enough to get through the falling of the days.
the seldom seen historiesa lopsided crown of jade
☾ a demi-god from his nam lineage, but the subdue of his grandmother's own genetic into something recessive made it so that his gifts did not truly manifest until absorbing his Ōmeteōtl potential from his father. his pantheon potentials extend wide and far thanks to the variety of natures wrapped into his extensive and odd bloodline.
☾ the zigwan ziibi (his maternal grandmother's family) trace their heritage back to the Moozoonsii — that is, they are of the original tribe of the moose spirit that gave life and light unto the world, journeying across the lands to found several locations of what would become future tribes and clans. because of the core of his belief, their power to fuse with entities has always been accepted up to a point — even abraxas' mirror of the miigis was, originally, a phenomena of divine power (and his own demi-god status) before he became a Ka’an Xiikik instead.
☾ the ochoa (his maternal grandfather's family) trace themselves back to a lost land known now as Sayil. this civilization is the last time in the history of their bloodline that a Xnuk Ek’ K’iin was able to protect and cultivate a real society and world for the gods he made. as such, it is the last time the growth of heart and body beyond darkness was there, evident in the remaining fertility statue and symbols around the remains. their name for this is was Ōmeteōtl which is roughly treated as a demiurge of massive fortune, duality, fertility and proportions — a vessel for the quickening of life, the renewal of power and the concupiscence of pleasure under heaven.
☾ there are five suns of creation, nine levels of hell, twelve moon wives, thirteen stages of heaven, twenty counts of beauty, fifty-two years of fortune and four hundred gods to each day and each night worked through the power abraxas holds. he has yet to even scratch the surface of what he can imbue unto others, or what he himself is capable of.
☾ from his mother's side, abraxas is: Ojibwe, Diné, Maya, and Nahua. this makes him, give-or-take, ½ indigenous american, ½ korean — but his family is vastly mixed, and as such the accuracies are faulty.
☾ like his mother and aunt in their youth, abraxas spent a vast majority of time in Baraga, Michigan on the L'Anse Reservation/Keweenaw Bay community. though he is well versed in his Nahau heritage as well, it is the Anishinaabe mixture and blended bloods that he is most comfortable with.
facts of a muttthe always howling boy
☾ the indigenous teams of the universities share a communal farm land located at 184 Plattekill Road, Marlboro, NY 12542. there is also an area on it for an apiary run by hugo hwang and miles saint-bosse. special permission must be granted not just for access but right to grow, as the delicate ecosystem of the herbs, medicines and plants are rather easy to undermine.
☾ just finished his associate's degree in baking & pastry arts but in the fall will be continuing into his bachelor's degree in food management and culinary arts.
☾ his left eye sometimes closes a little slower than his right — mostly, it's not easy for the average person to notice, but others find it strange. it's lingering habit from serious damage done to his orbital cortex so young. occasionally, his eye gets weak, too, so he has to wear an eyepatch until the sensitivity is over.
☾ his ojibwe middle name, anang, means 'star' in the purest sense; it is the discussion of the lights of heaven that guide the hunters and the tides and keep the world safe. like most people, though, he just doesn't use it much outside of paperwork. it means his full name roughly phrases as: the magical star of spring rivers.
☾ love, love, loves the 70s as a musical era. disco? wow! the r&b?! sign him up! rock?! there has never been better. some of his personal favorites are the o'jays, kate bush, fleetwood mac, cheap trick, diana ross, the eagles, abba, santana, donna summer and jefferson starship. he also enjoys early 90s hip hop and lots of pop music in general!
☾ also, thanks to woohyun, enjoys a blend of folk music, though he'll dance to just about anything that comes on. his favorite artists include: mala rodríguez, madame recamier, flor amargo, mon laforte, natalia lacunza, kevin kaarl, ed maverick, los romanticos de zacatecas, tessa la, dora, zahara, tommy torres, sebastián cortés, phillip larue, david ramirez and çantamarta.
☾ was raised on the four medicines — ceder, sage, sweet grass and tobacco — but he's well aware of the physical benefits of various herbs and plants native to all of the americas and parts of western europe. he also reverts to old home remedies like seafood stews and shellfish meals as sources of nutrients and strength.
☾ smokes about a pack every three days, now that nicotine has no real impact on his supernatural cells and body. it's a habit, and it psycholigcally aids more than it does do anything for his system, but that's enough reason for him to upkeep the habit. when around others, he uses an aether filter to make sure the smoke doesn't bother or cancer them, and he does the same to keep it from staining clothes or furniture.
☾ a warrior more than a fighter, abraxas has no formal training in any single style of fighting. he has versatility in action and moves freely, all the same, striking with resounding force and swiftness that he has earned through years of moving, adapting, dancing and force. his style is mostly reminiscent of tlingit, haida, and chuluku techniques. his mastery over weapons is innate and absolute, so whatever he requires for a weapon to have peak function, his muscles know.
☾ sleeps like the dead — literally. his heart slows and calms himself and his breathing is subtle at best, leaving him no visible motion to the naked eye. it's a spiritual technique that keeps him well preserved and helps recover from those deep wells of absolute stamina he accesses now and again; he will never have to stress about it because every rest he takes is a total rest and restart for his system. he also sleeps absolutely naked because, well, it's comfortable.
☾ snaggletooth snacks is both his youtube channel and his catering business. abraxas markets it as "customized orders on cakes, candies and cuisine" and typically handles individual orders rather than big parties but! his channel does very well for itself, which keeps him busy and content as he finishes his studies. he calls his tooth his sweet tooth and focuses on building cakes, or confectionary constructions, based on submitted challenges!
☾ he does, however, have "one of everything" trays, which are either mini cupcakes or macarons he sells in little trays, and as far as actual sales go — they're his lifeblood. he doesn't get enough orders of them yet to be overwhelmed, but he does have to whip up pretty persistent boxes full of the little guys.
☾ an extremely hairy guy, abraxas has been waxing and shaving for years. he keeps clean cut, clean shaven and waxes his chest and stomach away, along with his legs in the summer. the less reason to let heat and sweat cling to him, the better!
☾ still owns his mother's old Mitsubishi L200, '04 which they had to live in for a few years. he doesn't drive it now that he lives in the city but he does work on it to keep it looking good. most times, instead, he drives the BMW X7 M50i, '20 that he recieved as a gift for getting his associate's degree. it helps him do his work and deliveries!