Black Eclipse (moment of silence before the sacrifice)

...Isca walked fourth. She was sixteen. The city judged that enough to offer her up.

Itzan recognized her not by her face—beneath the flowers, all faces grew alike, white, otherworldly—but by her hands. Even washed clean, even folded in rest, they retained at the wrists a faint lilac tinge from the dye-vat. His sister's hands. The very hands that in spring had held the mask by its edges, afraid of crumpling the petals that were not there—only wood.

She did not sing. Her lips were pressed tightly together, like someone holding a name in their mouth, afraid that if they released it, it would drown before they did.

The youngest walked last. She had barely reached the age the city deemed sufficient to call an adult. She was small and thin, with a neck that had not yet learned to bear necklaces. Itzan did not know her name. He only knew that on the list it stood tenth, and that her mother, they said, sold fish by the lower steps. The youngest did not look at the bay. She looked at her own bare feet, as if counting how many stones lay between her and the end of the world.

The people on the terraces closed their eyes in advance. Some whispered prayers to the East. Some—to the West. Some simply counted to themselves, so as not to hear the singing. Itzan did not close his eyes. He thought it was cowardice to look. Then he thought it was cowardice not to look. Then he ceased dividing the world into those two kinds and simply looked. At his sister. At the white linen. At how the city gave away the house of Kama the carver according to the fourth line....

The story is only beginning.
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The eclipse is coming.
The gods are watching.
And the world will never be the same.