Alexis and the Fifth Sun
Alexis Moreau is thirty-two years old, a modest Parisian historian who dies on a Tuesday morning beneath a subway train.
He wakes up inside the body of Itzli-Quauhtli, a seven-year-old boy, son of a minor noble of the Ancient Aztec Empire.
It is all there, the smell of copal, the heat of Lake Texcoco, the drums of the Templo Mayor beating at dawn, and yet Alexis feels as though he is dreaming. And yet this is 1504. The Aztec Empire, its Triple Alliance, its thirty-eight provinces, its twenty million inhabitants, its island city surpassing in greatness anything Europe has ever known, stands at its absolute peak.
And inside Alexis Moreau's mind, there are fifteen years of history he has spent his entire adult life studying.
He knows that Hernán Cortés will land in 1519. He knows that the Tlaxcaltecs, sworn enemies of the Aztecs, will provide Cortés with an army of eighty thousand warriors. He knows that Tenochtitlan that fabulous island of blood and gold, that marketplace where sixty thousand people trade every single day will be razed to the ground by Spanish greed.
To help him accomplish his mission, Tezcatlipoca, an Aztec god, granted him a gift at the moment of his reincarnation: a small disc of polished obsidian that allows him to see fragments of the future.
And so Itzli, the historian turned warrior, sets himself an impossible plan: climb the military ranks, earn the trust of Moctezuma II, forge secret alliances with tributary peoples before Cortés turns them against the empire and above all, uncover the secrets of Aztec magic.
He has fifteen years. Not one day more. Fifteen years of maneuvers. Fifteen years of battles, sacrifices, black magic, and court politics.
Welcome to the Fifth Sun.
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