Regalitos: A New Work at the Intersection of the Aztecverse
By Cesar Torres
There are moments in an artist's work when everything converges into a single point, or a single image.
Regalitos: Xipe Totec is one of those moments.
My new composition — photo art combined with original poetry — arrived through a vision of one of the four major symbols and Aztec deities in my works. In this case, the god was Xipe Totec. Our Lord the Flayed One. The Red Tezcatlipoca. The brother who has been waiting in the margins of this universe since the first pages of 13 Secret Cities, accumulating power, accumulating resentment, waiting for the moment when he would unleash chaos across time and space, through every portal and dimension.
What You Are Looking At
The image is me, drenched in blood. In my hand I am holding a costume you may recognize.
Roland's costume.
Yes, Roland, the main character from my book series from How to Kill a Superhero. I am not going to tell you yet what happened to Roland after the finale of the book series. That revelation belongs to Hall of Mirrors.
The poem enbedded the image is titled Regalitos (little gifts).
I encourage you to spend time with the image, with the text, with the poem, and with the feelings this story invokes for you. It's a type of looking glass, if you care to peer inside it.
Where This Lives in the Aztecverse
Regalitos is not a work about any single book I have written. It is a work about the architecture of the entire Aztecvserse — and specifically about the cosmic war that has been building since volume one of The Coil. In other words, Regalitos is a type of portal. It cuts across every novel in my book catalog, and it cuts through all the major eras of my photographic works. It gives a traveler access to one of the 13 secret cities in the cosmos.
For readers who have followed my Coil series from 13 Secret Cities through 9 Lords of Night, you already know that Xipe Totec is the force behind the Rift — the cosmic rupture that is tearing time and space and driving the violence that Clara, Jose María, and the ensemble of characters in this universe cannot fully explain or contain. He is the neglected brother. The resentful one. The one doing the work of destruction that makes renewal possible, while the Black Tezcatlipoca watches through his obsidian mirror and Xochipilli tends to the bloom.
Regalitos is the first image in which I have placed myself fully inside that mythology rather than alongside it.
The costume I am holding connects this work to the How to Kill a Superhero universe — specifically to Stefan Pendley, known in World Without Daylight as the Skin Collector, whose hundreds of costumes and cosplays are themselves a manifestation of Xipe Totec's logic in the Aztecverse. The wearing and shedding of skins — spandex, leather, rubber, human — is not metaphor in this universe. It is ritual. It is theology.
But the image also connects to the serial killer the Night Drinker, who we encounter int he pages of 9 Lords of Night in darkened movie theaters and shadows of the night.
This image also connects to my upcoming novel Our Lord of the Flowers, which will drop on October 6.
And it is also, in the most immediate and personal sense, what I do with my own body in this work. It is an image about personal transformation, non-binary identity, gender and much, much more.
The Nagual Is Also Present
Those of you who have been following the emergence of El Nagual — the masked luchador rudo persona rooted in Aztec mythology and queer identity — will recognize this image as belonging to that world as well.
The nagual, in pre-Columbian tradition, is a shapeshifter. A being who moves between human and animal form, between the visible world and the spirit world. Tezcatlipoca himself is a nagual. Xipe Totec, who sheds one skin to reveal another, is a nagual. The act of covering the face with a mask, of wearing the body as costume, of presenting the self as both revealed and concealed — these are all nagual acts.
I am the Nagual.
What Comes Next
Hall of Mirrors — the third volume of the Coil series — is coming in summer 2026. Pre-orders will open soon. The Roland reveal, the full weight of the Rift, the descent into Mictlan that this series has been building toward since 2013 — it is all coming.
Our Lord of the Flowers — the standalone literary novel — arrives October 6, 2026. Xochipilli enters the domestic space. The bloom comes after the flay.
And the Aztecverse continues to grow in the only direction it has ever known: deeper.
Explore Xipe Totec in the Aztecverse Pantheon →
Learn about Xochipilli, the Prince of Flowers →