IMPOSSIBLE FABLES
1515 · THE GULF COAST OF MEXICO
Obsidian and steel
No storm in our history ever carried a fleet whole across the Pacific. This is the fable where one did: two thousand soldiers of Japan’s civil wars set down on the Aztec gulf coast in 1515, four years ahead of Cortés.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
1515, THE GULF COAST
Japan bled through the Onin War's long aftermath. Provincial lords fielded ashigaru with pike, bow, and the new Tanegashima matchlock. Across the ocean, Tenochtitlan stood at its height under Moctezuma II, a city of a quarter-million on a lake. Cortes would not sail from Cuba until 1519.
No bridge of causes leads to the timeline recorded here. The atlas files it among the fables, where the question is not how but what then. In the timeline recorded here, one typhoon lifts a whole fleet clean across the Pacific. Two thousand soldiers of Japan's wars wade ashore near the Aztec gulf in 1515, four years before any Spaniard. A lord raises a lacquered war-fan against a sky he does not know.
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