There were three.
      No others dared come near. These most powerful needed no companions but each other. To insure that their sorcery would be hidden they kept psychic shields in place that covered the surrounding mountains. Certain well-trained animals brought food and maintained the circle, streams flowed uphill and over rocks to get to them, but no human could observe. 
      The stones had been melted magically and formed into thousands of images, sculptures of monstrous heights. As they thought, the environment around them changed. It moved from the center to an outside perimeter of hardened figures both intensely beautiful and absurdly grotesque. In the canopy of air that enveloped the mountains the clouds and atmospheric anomalies were also printed with the phantasmagoric subconscious memories of these three brujos. 
      Gim was the strongest. To shadow the sun and have something to admire him he pulled a sphere from space and gently left it gleaming in the night sky. In a rage he caused colored snakes to fall from the sky until the sphere came around again. Gim could fly and would teach the others eventually. 
      Ah and Why feared Gim and dreamed of his death. They had traveled across the planet to find the source of an emanation that had haunted them as children. They met as boys and were drawn to Gim. From the first, they found him childish and mean. They could learn from him and gain tremendous knowledge, but now they plotted his death. They found their path in the observation of lower energies. The animals would come nowhere near Gim in his perpetual rage unless they were under his spell, but would come easily to Ah and Why. They saw the nature of predatory beasts and sought the ferocity of these hunters to work the magic. 

        On that last day the landscape was emblazoned with flowing earth, stone, and foliage, like a moving cinema. It was captured by the terrible telekinesis of Gim as he toyed with the world on the atomic level. He was seated on a large rock, his waist-length raven hair crackling with light. His skin was white as snow and transparent, the internal organs rippling with blood, the heart racing in his chest. Patterns of energy and the pathways of nerves were clearly defined under the layers of flesh. At times Gim was like a glass vessel through which they could see the sky. 
      He spoke,” Come for a lesson, my brothers?”
      “We come to be with you again only for that,” Why said, taking a seat in the eye socket of a huge head. 
      “We love you Gim our brother,” said Ah.
      “You have in your hearts the need to kill me,” Gim sang not with his voice but with all his command of their minds. 
      “We fear you at times, yes,” said Ah. “You can make the world cease to exist any time you please. You can send it back into darkness.”
      “I can.”
      “My brother and I want to live this life, such as it is, without fear,” Why said.
      “Why do you fear, Why,” Gim said to the sky. “If I decide to close in with the bowels of the white-hot earth you cannot resist me. It will just be.”
      “You are angry, we are not,” Why responded, as he built a city out of the pebbles at his feet. The small stones rolled and moved and were cemented together forming buildings and walls. He was being childish, an act much like wringing his hands or pawing the earth with a toe. 
      “I have considered this…anger. As a child my father in his zeal to teach me the ways laid the lash each day. I became what I am and I am angry I love to be angry.”
      From within Gim’s chest a crimson flame wavered and exploded painting the landscape with a false sunset. Below in the forests and valleys the tribes cowered in their huts. They told their children that the gods were going to kill them all. They were sure that they had done something to cause the bloody light that came from the mountain. But it was only Gim angry with his father. 
      Why placed his hand on Ah’s shoulder and felt the love between them. “The tribes wail in their sleep even now fearing what you might do. Have you no compassion for the people?”
      “Compassion?”  Gim breathed a ragged exhalation full of feces and dead tissue. It was a subtle breeze that wrapped around the two magicians. “Compassion!” 
      Why screamed. His arms shook and he bit his tongue. His hands began to bubble and then were gone and in their place were bleeding roses. Flesh folded back like petals, dermal layers of raw nerves. The pain was excruciating.
      “What have you done with my hands?”
      Ah coughed and a finger appeared between his lips. 

      Years passed and the three co-exhisted in a form of harmony. Gim continued to control the world and never allowed the brothers to stray too far. He guided them and thought as much as he could without giving them enough to do him harm. They had learned the onion. This was the discipline of entering into higher, finer bodies. Their coarse bodies that lived on the earth had begun to become clear as Gim’s.  Blood bubbling through veins and miles of capillaries danced like tiny rivers through their arms and legs, through the brain, which was fibrous and gleaming. 
      As the onion began, the head would develop a knob, which would be topped with another. The bulge would split making a sound like the tinkling of bells and a new head would emerge. This head was of a different texture and shape than the human head. It swirled with color and was washed with dream images. Gim referred to this body as the hide. It would immerge until the human husk had folded in the shape of an orchid, pink and pulsing with open flayed flesh. It stood erect in the middle like an orchid.      Overlapping scenes of the birth of mankind and the subsequent spirals of incarnations were falling and rising to the surface. The light from within this body illuminated the multitude of transparent scenes like a painted lantern. It stood a full head taller than the first body. Gim told them that if an untrained human were to see it they would be filled with madness, which would spread to all men. 
      Next came the rind. The vivid dome of projected images on the neck of the hide was pared as cleanly as the cut of a razor. It separated with an almost metallic perfection, the morning sun glinting off its edges. From it protruded a pair of talons that gave way to wings. They were covered in miniscule scales, which were a thousand shades of blue. The colors ranged from the color of pale sky to the deepest ultramarine. As the wings forced back the crackling flesh of the rind a female form rose colored the same many shades of blue. She was the source of all desire, her beauty the culmination of all women to come. This body, called the pulp was the genetic model for all that was beautiful in nature. It continued to rise from the rind and floated above it attached at the shoulders. The wings unfurled and wrapped around the others as a ballooning membrane.  From her mouth, upon her tongue lived a snail the size of a fingernail. 
      This body was called the taste. The mouth widened and fell back allowing the snail to swell and grow.  It’s hard shell un-coiled and reached upward sprouting a human eye here and there along its quivering slug. The slug was earth colored, and covered in a fragrant slime. The eyes began to sprout on stalks until there were hundreds of them. Human and animal, all species were represented. Clear intelligent orbs gazed at the world, the souls of every creature gazed from these windows. 
      A halo, a bright oval of gold sprang from the top of the taste. It formed a cylinder, which contained the history of the universe. As the panorama revolved within it moved gracefully from a deep endless blackness to the formation of particles and forms. It sang with a chorus of beings that would later be called angels. As it made its music, planets and stars formed from the particles around the mystery of gravity.  It was called the breath. It was half the size of the blue female below.  In its center a ruby filament glowed. This hair of brilliant crimson grew legs and a head and became a fiery dragon. It spread leather wings, which flapped like thunder. The creation of the world took place at its feet. Each of the scales of the breath was a day and underneath each nestled against its sinuous meat was a night. 
      On its tongue was the egg of a sparrow.  The egg was simply called the egg .It would never hatch. Gim wouldn’t allow it.  The three practiced the onion until they reached perfection. Tribal elders who saw these unfolding figures from afar saw whatever they needed to see and ordered the artists in their group to carve them out of wood. At the top they carved the sparrow as eagles and hawks, which gave them hope. Gim withheld the secret of the egg because it would give freedom to Why and Ah. Ah spoke about it endlessly but Why never spoke again. The hands of Ah were firmly attached inside his throat, Ah’s bleeding roses left a trail of drops wherever he went and his hatred of Gim grew. 

      They happened on the method of Gim’s destruction by accident. Though by that time neither believed in such things as accidents. 

      In the body of the egg they could see all things. All things that Gim being the most powerful would allow them to see, that is. He showed them the decent of consciousness from far beyond even Gim’s all-seeing eye to the minutest single-celled creature. Each he showed, revealing their strengths and innate needs. As they entered the worlds of each of these beings, they carried away some of its essence. Over time they managed to obscure this. It was a game they played not unlike hide and seek. They would bring images to the fore and keep others dim and opaque. Knowing from experience what Gim loved and what he rejected, they only let him see what they wanted him to see. They were always afraid that he would catch them. He had the ability to disperse parts of them to all corners of the earth. They would never find themselves again. 

     This is what they hid from Gim:

     This was Why speaking.  When they practiced the onion, his voice was pure and didn’t depend on vocal chords that were tied in knots around his brother’s fingers. “I have seen it. I have seen the way. These hunters in all shapes have the essence of terror. They peel back flesh amid the screams of the fallen and feel nothing.    A combined and compressed drop of this would overwhelm even him.
      And we would be rid of him.”
     This was Ah. “How would we obtain this drop?”
     Why: “He has trained them to bring him food, to build. We will do the same, and when they kill they will place that moment in hiding for us. We will save and save until we have one drop and when the dragon opens his mouth…”

     This they did. For a hundred years they saved nectar as the wolf tore the breast of a dove. As the snake struck and sank its fangs, as the venom flowed, Ah and Why captured those moments, millions of such kills and rapes. They trapped the wails and cries of small animals and beasts with large eyes, panicked and terrorized at the moment of bloodletting. One by one they carefully held them back under the light filled images and passages of time, buried them deep beneath the light of the world. Why who never said a word and Ah who could not grasp so much as a twig went through the daily rituals of learning the ways of Gim the most powerful. He held the brothers in his stone grip. 
     He showed them his plan.
     The three watched Gim’s display.  They watched the beginning, the planets, the life emerging from nothing, the separation of plants and animals. They saw in the shadows of time the birth of men and the struggle for existence. Then to their horror they saw that Gim intended to turn the world away from nature. The stone as it melted and transformed into monsters, the ever-changing shapes and images as they hardened stretched for hundreds of miles. The mountains of madness were a model for what would become real. Man and beast would fall under his obscene spells. They were completely helpless against his will. He called his plan Machu Pichu. 
      Gim would cause the merger of man and animal. In this way the will of humans and the innocence of the lower creatures would become obscured. The ancient ways were to be usurped and replaced by the insane desire of this upstart. He would change the very patterns of the future itself. It was a world full of horrible mutations, because Gim was mutating into something that was beyond evil. 

     All along the dark ridge the stone roiled and flowed. Gim ranted and spewed incantations. His mouth stretched and expanded and his eyes changed color rapidly. 
     “Where are my brothers,” he screamed. 
     “We are here brother,” Ah whispered. He was sure it was time. 
     “You stay away too long,” Gim shouted. “You’re plotting against me, I can feel it.”
     “Given the balance of things, day and night, sky and earth, we feel uneasy with the vision you have shown us. We agreed long ago that we would not alter…them.” Ah pointed in the general direction of an encampment two hundred miles away. 
     “They will benefit,” Gim said.
     “How brother, when they have no choice? What you propose is torture to them.”
     “I will remove that in them which will feel remorse.  They will have none of this thing, the weeping, the laughing, the—the happy…ness. None of that thing.”
     “But that is what makes them delightful to the eye. That they can dream, as we can. It is what unites us,” Ah said and Why nodded, gurgling his agreement.
     “ Do you dare—“
     “No!”
     “No?”
     “Men are nothing to us. Only you have been blood to us, only you have been life. You have taught us to change the metals of the earth and blend the elements. We see the future and sail the waters of the past like the hoof print of a faun filled with rain. My brother and I will help you and men be damned.”
“Will you prove your allegiance,” Gim said with bowed head. Pink blood flowed through his brain like the tributaries of a jungle river. His eyes rotated upward in their sockets and he gazed at Ah and Why through the top of his scull.
     It was dusk. The sun dropped with great patience behind the mountains of madness and the canopy of sky was brushed with the swirling, writhing colors of this time before night.  The moon peeked over the hills and below the men cried out with joy. For a thousand years, the darkness of night had been filled with terrors. Creatures with night vision, vipers and insects that could kill with a bite ruled the time until the sun came up. Now there was a light in the sky. They wanted to thank a God. They wanted to give him one of their young. 
     And the God was hungry.

     Why in his bitterness, thought: 
     I have swallowed my brother’s hands and his touch is bloody and red. His pain haunts me and I cannot eat, cannot drink. This is your time, oh great Gim. Your fall will be celebrated by two. Men will never know how their torment was averted. They will sing the name of Gim and think him their savior.

    They gathered  in the shadow their deities. Only the bravest warriors would venture near the changing mountains and many did not return.  Melting stone and earth in upheaval trapped men, left them half imbedded in rock, still alive. Some lasted for days before the rock buried them completely. 
They wanted to repay the God Gim. Hunters had heard his name in their dreams and they had seen three lights beyond the changing hills. A young girl was selected for her beauty and her virginity. She would please Gim. She would appease his appetite for hunters and he would see that they were grateful for the ball in the night sky. It had started as a tiny speck of light and had grown and grown until it was a great white eye gazing down at them. The animals that ate their children and rushed their campfires were terrified of the eye. 
     Dressed in the ceremonial skins and wearing the antlers of a stag the leader Tage directed the others as they tied the child’s hands. Her feet were bound and wrapped with the skin of a snake. She was naked and her belly was full. She was bleeding, ready to bear children. No man had been with her and she was a pure gift to Gim.  They lifted her on the pole. It was a carved log. At the bottom was the shell of man topped by the multi-colored serpent and on up to the hawk, a symbol of their journey beyond death. 
The child was weeping silently. If she screamed, she knew, it would shame her family, and so, she bore the fear quietly. She hung on the pole watching her tribe look upon her with lust. They wanted to kill her. 
     Tage the leader approcached her with a stone knife, long and slender. The cruel edge was serreated . She closed her eyes. The leader stepped up on a stump and raised the knife. He pushed the point deep into her stomach but didn’t pierce it. She winced but didn’t make a sound. Then he opened her belly, spilling her entrails.

     They fell on their faces and howled their pleasure. The sight of the open child was both erotic and religious. It filled them with power. The God would accept the gift and shower them with nuts and fruit. The animals would come within easy reach and the hunters would travel less. They began to rise, the effect of the dying child beginning to wear off and saw a dim light approaching from the mountains. A thin cry came from the virgin as the life ebbed from her. Another light was coming from the opposite direction. Now the lights were getting brighter. They were men. They were floating in the sky like the moon. A light as bright as the sun shown down from them, shown through them, clear as a stream.  The clear men hovered around the girl. From the ground, the tribe whimpered as one.
     These clear men shown their lights on the girl. By now her thin scream had reached its peak. She was dying. Gradually, she became transparent and inside her chest a red glow pulsated. A glowing tube slipped from one of the men and entered her heart, and the red light was sucked out of her. She was dead.
     “Now,” Why roared, “Now I am full!”
     Ah hissed and began to spin. Sparks flew white like snowballs all over the tribe. They shivered as the clear men withdrew. They’re lights dimmed and they were gone. The child on the pole was a dried husk, turned to ash.

     Ah and Why drifted close to the light of Gim. 
     “Where have you been brothers,” Gim shouted. He knew, but asked to receive an answer.
     “The men below have slit the belly of a child for you,” Why said in a trumpeting voice.
     “And they did this for what?”
     “To honor you,” Why said.
     “I am honored,” said Gim. “I’m pleased that they know my power and would deny the child its life for my pleasure. Soon they will give them all to all to me.”
     “Let us onion together and begin the process,” Why said, kneeling in mid air. 
     Ah bubbled his approval.

     The process began slowly with a great exhale of breath. It roiled, golden and bursting with bolts of energy. It joined between them and tied it self into seven knots. They paired their physical forms which were clear and viscous, falling like dripping drapery. Up rose three forms filled with dreams and flickering images. Up came the gorgeous winged women dancing an obscene hula, opening their beckoning mouths. The snails unraveled and intertwined with the seven breath-knots and the dragons appeared, blowing fire.

     There were three.
     Three eggs, tiny speckled sparrow eggs came forward on the dragon tongues. What would become great souls lay coiled inside the fragile shells coiled, seeing in all directions, piercing all veils. The egg of Gim swelled and nearly burst, the razor beak of his soul nearly cracking the shell. But he held it back not yet ready. This tiny winged being was the essence of all life trapped in the most delicate prison.
     “Show us,” whispered Why.
     “Reveal yourself master,” Ah thought with great sincerity.
     Why glanced below at his bleeding hands and hid his rage. 
     “I will,” breathed Gim, “I will.”
     The dragon’s tongue fluttered and flamed. Mouth after mouth opened revealing more and more crimson slashes and more teeth like pearls. The egg swelled and burst. A minute crack appeared and the most brilliant light, a light like a million suns shot free, like a ray of insanity. Gim groaned for a thousand years, for a split second as his self was revealed. In that moment he was blind. He could see neither light nor darkness. His eyes were sealed and his life in all its power was contained in nothingness. 
     The two brothers called their ugly memories and bore them to the surface. The hide flickered with images of murder. Flesh exploded in a sea of blood. Claws flashed and the eyes of prey begged for release. The screams of a thousand broken creatures floated and spewed upward. The wings of the woman were batwings lined with spines dripping venom. This cacophony was condensed and distilled until between the two magicians hung a single drop, a spearhead of all terror.
     As the tiny sphere of winged light rested on Gim’s tongue, his eyes began to open. He was changed. The evil Gim had seen in that endless moment his error. Men and his egg were one. They were creatures of light like himself, not lowly simians of which he had been sure. Though he was all seeing, he had not seen. Though he had thought himself a God, he was still a man. Thought he looked to the future with optimism, he was about to die. 
     Why summoned the killers. In that moment when they strike, when needle talons rip to the lower levels of skin, when the blood sprays, Why focused like a diamond.  A power of muscle and bone, of horses legs and bear haunches, of shark jaws and coiled intent he flew forward. Ah the silent one rushed to the cracked shell and together they poured the poison of all worlds into the heart of Gim’s egg.

     He collapsed. The creatures of his onion fell and toppled into each other. They mixed and formed new beings never seen before. Even the monsters of stone that surrounded the three were weak compared to the things that spun and bounced in the air. Then they vanished. Only a small frail figure stood with his feet on the ground. This was Gim. This was the man he would have become. He stood bewildered and gasping in the morning light. 

     Ah and Why laughed. They circled the crumpled man and taunted him with sharp horns and spikes. They trampled him under cloven hooves. He was as broken and bleeding as any of the monsters he had created, as any that he had dreamed. His egg was smashed and could never be repaired. He was no longer transparent and the clear, potent magic he had possessed had given way to a new power. Gim had swallowed the poison that had smashed his precious sparrow. Raising his hand, he showed his palm to Ah and Why. They didn’t understand. They had defeated they’re enemy. This creature that they had long hated was reduced to mere flesh. He could do no harm. 
      But as they watched, a cloud began to form in the air above the little man. It was independent of the magicians, with a will and purpose of its own. All the evil power and terrible moments that Ah and Why stored for a hundred years was staring back at them with malevolent eyes. Thousands of blinking red-rimmed eyes filled with cold hostility, the moments of innumerable immeasurable kills, the compressed desire of all predators lashed out at Ah and Why. A clotted sea of sharp talons and ragged teeth fell on the two conspirators tearing them to pieces. Each time they would try to re-form and piece themselves together, gather organs and the floating net of veins and arteries, snatch the pumping transparent heart, the hideous thing would fall again in wave after wave. This continued for days. Finally, Gim hovered over the head and torso of his former student. 
     “Ironic,” he said to the crushed thing at his feet. 
     “How brother?” Why said, coughing, spitting pink foam. 
     “I had changed my mind,” Gim answered solemnly. “I had in the moment of my awakening a revelation and an awakening of –“
     “Compassion?”
     “Compassion, yes.”
     Ah lay a short distance away. He was holding his head in his hands, which were near the rest of him. Gim hummed a tune. It was a sweet clear melody and the head made a croaking sound, opened its mouth wide and the hand of Why crawled free. It labored like a wounded crab to Why’s body and gently reattached itself to his wrist. The other hand, which was deeper in Ah’s throat, did the same. 
     “I have caused so much pain,” Gim said and began to weep. 
     Why and Ah were dead. 

     Everywhere the earth was covered in tissue, pink as pearl and meat, blood the color of rubies. It sank into the ground and changed the earth forever. The momentum of Gim’s great plan for men and their world would not be denied. He began to gather stones. They rolled grudgingly from their hiding places and began to pile themselves into walls and partitions. The horrid sculptures of the brujo’s terrible fantasies began to crumble and re-shape into rough cubes. The city was built in an afternoon. The city was a burial place for the Ah who had spoken his first word in one hundred years. It was a sepulcher for Ah who had grasped the hand of his enemy for the first time. 
     It began to rain. 

     The torrent washed the city clean. Tissue and ruby blood were carried down the mountain forming streams, which passed the encampments of men. Gim’s dream he had named Machu Pichu, The Departure. Now Machu Pichu was buried under a walled city atop a lush green mountain. Gim threw a spell upon the molecules, the atoms, the living cells of the mountain commanding that it remain forever green. As one they responded they would obey, but the rest would begin to dream Gim’s dream.
     Gim closed his eyes and gazed into the spot between his eyes. There the deepest darkest hole that made no sound gazed back at him. It was a hole in the shape of a sparrow. 
     As weeks passed he began to hear sounds from the valley. It was the cry of lobeshomen. The moment of a thousand kills. Their wails and screams got louder as they came near. Huge lumbering beasts bristling with tusks, slithering and writhing made their way toward their master. Some bore resemblance to the men they had once been, some resembled nothing that had ever been intended. Long gleaming fur and gorgeous heads with huge eyes filled with malice, they hungered for rotten meat. Black tentacles rippling with spines, sinewy arms crowned with talons reached for Gim. They nipped and pinched and stretched the object of their affection. 
     Gim showed them what they wanted. He split his face and skull and revealed the gleaming onyx head within. As the onion grew from inside Gim’s wasted flesh, it sprouted black wings that would never fly, huge claws that gripped the earth, terraces and plateaus of muscular obscene limbs. Eyes wet and questioning roamed the expanding mountain that was Gim. 
     The lobeshomen roared.  They backed away and receded from the immense power of their lord Gim. He continued to rise, touching and poisoning the clouds. His wings were a canopy that covered the hills and valleys of Machu Pichu. Then the sun went out and there was only Gim. 
     Later when he was man again he began to walk, a slender tiny man with black hair and deep set slanted eyes. As he climbed down the hills and left the city of Ah and Why a parade of bouncing crawling monsters followed clamoring and gibbering their approval. They were great beasts with round hooves, they slithered snakelike along the ground, mouths full of irregular teeth and they walked upright the marriage of bears, cats and wolves. This parade followed in all its dark majesty. 
     When the journey was at an end and Gim performed the onion his blood flowed from a million cracks and cuts in his ebony skin. It soaked the land and the jungle and altered the creatures and plants. The trees and flowers began to attack anything that moved. Insects and animals grew in wild diversity spreading their plague with only a touch. The lobeshomen ruled the jungle for hundreds of miles and men stayed clear. The only natural enemy of Gim’s children were the trees. They were squat and pithy with a soft center. A tree could send a sharp pike with tremendous force impaling anything in its path. The trees were death to the lobeshomen. When they died, pierced by a great thorn, the blood erupted and covered the jungle. Then Gim in his great display would suck the husk back into himself and spit them back white and purified. He would sprout hooks and spikes to hold him to the ground. His body would ooze through the forest in and around the trees. They could do no harm to him and he did none to them. As the hooks grew old, he would shed them. The jungle was littered with the throw-off claws of its master. 
     Within the interior of Gim’s influence were the hanging bodies of humans. The lobeshomen needed the old meat. Only the strongest warrior could engage them and escape. The beasts were intelligent and cunning. Their only purpose was to feed and serve Gim.  Occasionally one longed for the human they had once been and would come too close to a deadly tree. 
     The jungle changed. It grew more and more into an ecology of malice. It devoured all that was natural and supplanted it with grotesque creations. It expanded its perimeter.     It devoured. 
     Legends and rumors spread throughout the Amazon. There was a place that men could not go. This place in the jungle became part of the storytellers’art. It wove itself into the dances and rituals of the tribes. 

     Ah who could not speak and Why who could not touch had not seen this future.  Thirty-six hundred years ago, they could not have known the sparrow as it would become. Now there was only Gim, and his dream within a dream.