A Prodigal Bastard

Volume 1 of The Escape from Mictlan Trilogy, A Prodigal Bastard - copiously illustrated with drawings by the Author, from his time exploring the peyote badlands of Northern Mexico.. It was a secret from his amnesic past that even his NY analyst couldn't decipher, which meant he had to go to Mexico in search of answers, specifically to a ghost town in the bandit-infested Sierra Madre, where his mother was waiting for him at the only hotel in town. Deep in the Sierra Madre, behind a tunnel carved through the top of a mountain, one of the five that encircled the place like the fingers of a hand, is the strangest ghost town in Mexico. There is a hotel, run by a serial killer, and just across the street, a cantina, run by a drug cartel banker. The town was founded in 1495, when a band of conquerors who, after the fall of Tenochtitlán, had been hunting the last Aztec eagle warriors in the mountains, found silver in the ashes of the previous night's fire. They were thirteen conquerors, whose descendants ruled the town for four hundred years, the richest in Mexico at the time, with a treasury, a mint, even an opera and of course a cathedral, until Pancho Villa and his North Division took the town in 1914 and shot the descendants of the conquerors, who took the location of the secret treasure to the grave. After the Revolution, bands of adventurers from the four corners, lured by the legend of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre (some said there were thirteen treasures), dynamited most of the buildings of the medieval town - but of the treasure, or treasures, nothing was ever known. The Nahuas of the remote mountains think that it will never be known, as it is the property of the Lord of Death, king of Mictlán, and whoever discovers its location will be taken to one of the nine levels of the vast kingdom, which lies under the buried silver mines. in the depths of the Sierras. This is the story of a search for answers, among which is what happened to a disgraced bishop, a damned enormously rich Kabbalist, who left for Mictlán with the secret of the treasures, where his prodigal bastard son has to go, if it is that he wants to decipher the enigmas of his past.