Quetzalpetlatl

A priestess of Quetzalcoatl, who was sometimes believed to be his older sister. Petlatl knew nothing beyond the remote temple in which she had always lived, safe in the company of the women who served alongside her. Their days were filled with learning the complexities of the ritual calendar, sacred songs, and spinning pleasing textiles for the gods. Outside of that work her hands often spoke a language of their own, occasionally going so far as to create the impression of prophecies which sent ice up her spine when she looked too closely. But the women consoled her fears and urged trust in the distant Quetzacoatl whom they all served. He already knew, they said. This need not be shared. They believed in his divine protection, and so did she.

Possessed of a disposition strangely unbothered by oddity, Petlatl never questioned why she could remember nothing of her childhood. Not a memory, not a face, not even the scrap of a name. She was entirely unaware of dreaming, just as she remained unaware of who and what she really was. In the World of Dreams she was little more than a benign wanderer, cut adrift from all those who had once shaped the woman she’d become, and unanchored even from herself. If she was watched, she never showed any signs of noticing it. Rather she spent her time drifting, looking for something she could no longer remember even having lost.

Years passed before Petlatl ever met Quetzacoatl in person. By then news of the mighty Greeks having all but fallen had finally reached even their remote temple. Distant news, from a distant land. It meant time was trickling on to its inevitable conclusion, for which Petlatl was surprisingly pragmatic, but something in the news touched her more deeply than she could understand, and she’d sought the unusual affliction of solitude to contemplate it.

Quetzacoatl found her in the floating garden, standing barefoot at the edge of the canal. She was seldom without attendants, and there were no men permitted inside the temple grounds, but she only blinked at the intrusion. Though he seemed kind and spoke with the sort of deep, steady voice which promised well placed trust, he was not at all what she expected. Mostly because he seemed both dishevelled and intoxicated. 

Petlatl had too much curiosity for fear, despite an apparent legacy of powerlessness and seclusion to her own sex. It was perhaps one of many things that didn’t quite add up about her, but she had never cared to note the tally. Though she was listening to what he said, what she perceived was a man weighted down by heavy burdens. The other priestesses had always assured her that this was the man who would protect their people from the future. She wondered instead if it had slowly broken him to carry it alone. Because that was what he looked to her, then: alone.

It was her who reached out to touch his hand. Not a gesture condoned by her training, nor one she knew he should accept. Yet it was offered in the moment of his stupefied weakness, and perhaps that was why the unasked for kindness unraveled something in him. For before their encounter had ended, they both did something neither should have.

She was still sleeping when Quetzacoatl roused enough to understand his grievous mistake, and so stepped into the Dream in the flesh to rectify it by placing Petlatl’s dreaming self beyond Tezcatlipoca’s reach. When she woke she was simply alone, a plucked reed in her hand, and already indistinct drawings blurring to nothing on the muddy bank. There were tears cold on her cheeks, an echo of feeling in her chest.

That was how the other priestesses found her.

If there were answers to be found in what she had drawn, they were already lost.

Quetzacoatl was both mourned and vilified, depending on who was asked. Gossip said he had broken his own vows of celibacy and defiled one of his own, then immolated himself for his great shame. The priests and priestesses of his many temples fled from a scourge led by Tezcatlipoca, who visited countless atrocities upon them in his search for one woman. Petlatl herself never spoke about what had happened, or why. Her survival depended on the discretion of silence, even when what was spoken was untrue. She spent the rest of her life running and seeking answers. In the growing chaos, the Aztec people finally began to turn on the gods they had worshipped. Petlatl died, never having found what she was looking for.

Other Lives

1st Age: Thalia Milton

2nd Age: Alethea Sayre

3rd Age: Miraseia Breakwater

5th Age: Sothis

6th Age: Lethe