In a Vulture's Shadow

Obsidian knife felt my hand speed was not up to snuff. To fix this, he gave me one simple directive. In the space of the next five minutes, I was to touch the tip of his nose no less than ten times.  He pointed to my hands and said, "You are an immobilizer; you latch on, rip, and shred, like your namesake (Gila Monster). You don't care if you must eventually let go or if your prey luckily wrenches free. The damage is done. You stalk it down and finish it."  "This is fine, but I don't want you to get too firmly stuck in that modality. You may one day need to stay fluid and detached physically and emotionally; let the cut and thrust of your knife be the fangs of a snake; hide your body behind it." He lunged and nicked me on my forearm with his knife.  "Blood makes for a great exclamation mark for the points of my teachings."  It was a smarting pain. The wound was topical and superficial, but the hot desert air and salt from my sweat mingling in my wo...

I first heard about him while I was in Las Cruces. He was an old Apache knife fighter and Brujo, still honing his edge and blooding his hands in the desert. Based on a rumor, I spent a week trekking up and down the Rio Grande searching for him but learned from his friend in Mesilla that I'd missed him by a few months. It was in Lordsburg that I caught up with him, a short and round man with eight or nine rattlesnake heads circling his hat band.  He flatly denied he was who I was looking for. I wasn't buying it, so I lunged at him after a couple more protests that I should go away. He had a knife as fast as a rattlesnake's strike, the tip pressing firmly into the skin under my chin. I smiled as he rolled his eyes. He'd blown his cover.  That evening, we shared a pack of Pall Malls and a 12-pack of Modelo in the alley behind his house while candles to Jesus Malverde and Saint Jude flickered in the darkening shadows. We told stories about hunting down our common enemy when...

The stories of the sorcerer Don Juan had carried me this far. I set the spirit of his apprentice free, helping him escape the inorganic beings. Within the tale, there was truth, no matter how small or skewed. I would enter the non-ordinary reality or die trying.  When the desert grew its darkest and I was sure death stalked me, the world exploded with color, and fear fell to its knees before me.  -Kevin Wikse. 

"Follow my footprints for long enough. You will discover sun-bleached bones, blood-stained sand, and animal-gnawed remains —each a demarcation in my evolution of human predation—milestones in my journey toward Heaven and Hell. Irrefutable proof that the desert is a magical place to do awful things to evil people." -Gila Monster Kevin Wikse

"All warriors are hunters of power. They are like wild, starving dogs relentlessly stalking the whereabouts of their next meal. They are forever hungry, not for the accumulation of power but for the amassing of the necessary energy to fuel and sustain their continual advancement. Around every man and woman, there is a field of energy—a luminous cocoon in which a tremendous alchemical transmutation is either taking place or laying dormant as etheric pupa trapped between phases due to insufficient power. Most humans' etheric double resembles undeveloped fetuses within their luminous cocoons. They lead half-lives with little to no awareness. They dream weak dreams, possess frail influence, and are kept as slaves by masters they don't know exist.  The warrior, however, is always hunting for power and fighting for his or her liberation. Warriors undergo many progressions and advancements within their luminous cocoons. They experience numerous cycles and evolutions, the massing ...