Once each year, under the blood eclipse, the Yautja returned in fire and light.
Their mothership would hover silently over the great pyramids—temples they themselves had designed—and the Ritual of the Ascent would begin. From caverns below and vaults seeded across the jungle, thousands of xenomorphs—feral, primal, and seething with hive-rage—would be unleashed.
And then they would charge.
In waves. In screeches. In hunger.
Ten Yautja Elders, god-kings cloaked in energy and ritual armor, would stand at the apex of the pyramid. They did not flinch. They waited.
The people watched, trembling in awe.
There were no prayers to idols. No statues to spirits. The Aztecs did not worship ideas—they worshipped what they saw.
They saw ten beings stand against thousands, their blades igniting the night, their roars shaking the stone. And when it was over, the pyramid was painted in black xeno blood, the bodies of monsters lying in heaps. The gods did not fall. They never had.
They were Yautja, and to the Aztecs, they were gods incarnate.
When the rituals ended, the Yautja would ascend once more to their ship above—returning to Pech, their jungle-star world orbiting near the T’au frontier world of Pandora. There, they would meditate, forge, and prepare for the next hunt. A galactic migration that cycled with ritual precision, generation after generation.
The Aztecs recorded their returns with calendars of blood and stone, tracking the heavens to know when the gods would return—not in spirit, but in shiplight.