A Mile in My Blood
The Council of the Four Suns: Book One
In 1511, the Taíno of Borikén rose against their Spanish colonizers. They drowned a conquistador to prove they were mortal. The body stayed dead. They learned the gods could rot. The rebellion failed. But the intelligence survived. What the Spanish bring is not just steel. It is systematic enslavement and an invisible plague that kills faster than any blade. From the burning Caribbean to the stone cities of the Maya, from the blood altars of Tenochtitlan to the mountain roads of the Inca, the question is not whether conquest is coming. It is whether the information arrives first.
The Cast
Survival in the sixteenth century is not won with speeches. It is won with blood, sabotage, and the cold logic of stone meeting iron.
Mateo de Alvear
Infantry Scout, Colony of San Juan. A minor hidalgo from Seville, three years in the island colony. Too tired to believe in much and too pragmatic to pretend otherwise.
Agüeybaná II
Cacique of the Taíno, Borikén. His people are being worked to death in the mines. He led eleven thousand warriors into the valley. What came after is where the story begins.
Ixchel
Maya scribe of Chactemal. She measures language, weapons, and patterns of death. The evidence is never enough. She builds from it anyway.
Chicahua
Tequihua, Mexica (Aztec) warrior. A professional warrior with a weapon older than he is. Twenty years of discipline that makes a man efficient.
Beatriz de Silva
Crown Auditor, Casa de Contratación. Sent by King Ferdinand to audit the colony’s books. She maintains a ledger. Everyone in it is either an asset or a liability.
The Civilizations
Four civilizations stand in the path of conquest. None of them trust each other. All of them face extinction.
Spain
The Crown. They read a legal document aloud on the beach, in Spanish, to people who do not speak Spanish. It claims the land, the labor, and the souls of everyone listening. Then they begin. The document has never been refused.
Taíno (Borikén)
The Front Line. The Spanish arrived on their shores first. Took their gold, their labor, their land. The Taíno drowned one in a river to see if he would stay dead. He did. What the Spanish left behind did not. What came after him was harder to kill.
Maya (Chactemal)
The Watchers. The Maya built calendars that predict eclipses. They engineered cities from the jungle floor. When foreign wreckage begins washing ashore, they do what they have always done — measure it, record it, and calculate what comes next.
Mexica (Tenochtitlan)
The Might. The Mexica have never lost. Their warriors train for decades, their armies have conquered every nation within marching distance, and their capital is an engineered island that no force on the continent can reach. Then the reports start arriving from the coast.
Inca (Tawantinsuyu)
The Logic. The Inca built roads across the Andes, fed a million people through vertical farming, and governed eighty provinces without a written language. They used knotted strings instead. Every knot is a number. Every number is a decision.
Publication Updates
Status: Currently seeking literary representation.
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About the Author
Eric Morales was born in Puerto Rico to Puerto Rican parents and raised by a loving single mother and supportive older brother. He carries Taíno, African, and Spanish blood. The name Agüeybaná — known to every Puerto Rican — has stayed with him since childhood, a story he always knew he would one day tell.
He is married to a Peruvian woman, and their two children carry the legacy of both the Taíno and Inca worlds. Through his family he deepened his understanding of Inca history and Túpac Amaru’s rebellion, which deepened the question he had carried since childhood: what if these nations had united before the conquistadors reached the mainland?
A Mile in My Blood is his first novel and the opening book of The Council of the Four Suns series.