Quetzalcoatl

Physical Description: Quetzalcoatl (Q) has two primary forms - dragon and human. His dragon form is a long, sinuous serpent with multi-colored (primarily green) feathered wings; I’m imagining him to be somewhat similar to Oriental dragons in this sense. In this form he is actually not terribly fearsome, due to his normally docile nature.

Q’s human form would be of a handsome man in his prime, with blond hair and a beard (some legends I’ve read were quite specific on those points). In fact, I’m imagining that he could pass for European with relative ease. This form will also have some constants in its apparel: Q seems to really like the color green, for he wears feathers (especially green ones) or emeralds on his person.

Personality: A gentle, cultured, and well-educated person with the best qualities of what humans would consider ‘nobility’, Q is nevertheless in a state of apathy. He doesn’t feel like he’s terribly relevant in the modern age, and even if he was he’s kind of gotten burned out with humanity in general. He’d like to believe in the best in humanity, but he’s seen too many things to be that naïve anymore; one has to prove oneself to him now. Other than that, he’s a perfectly likeable individual, with something of a wild and flamboyant streak that appears now and again. (I’ve found reference to him being friends with a coyote spirit named Xolotl, whom in the TGS universe I take to be the Coyote we all know and love.)

Quetzalcoatl does have a dark side, though. For one thing, he is most certainly the type of person who can do the ‘break a few eggs to make an omelet’ routine; he can be very cold and merciless if pushed (though generally, you really have to get on his bad side to see this part of him). He doesn’t really feel much remorse about the European invasion of the New World that he helped with, though he does understand the magnitude of what he did and has decided not to attempt such a thing again.

Powers: To begin with, Q is a master shapeshifter, able to assume a multitude of guises (including a star) though he prefers either dragon or human forms. He has very strong recuperative and regenerative powers; from some of the legends, even cremation (non-magical) isn’t enough to take him down. He has powerful magics, related to giving life (such as healing, agricultural plenty, and fertility) and he tends to use them for peaceful purposes (as Ce Acatl, though, he can be the proverbial ‘holy terror’), and he also has a fair amount of power over wind (through a magical conch shell). In addition to all this, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of various civilized arts (metalworking, arts, language, agriculture, etc.) and is a fair warrior (though he relies a bit more on magic and allies than on his own physical prowess).

(Note: the fertility part does have an analog in the legends about dragons in the Orient; which might lend credence to the idea that TGS Quetzalcoatl was a dragon himself.)

History: Quetzalcoatl started out life as the third of four ‘divine’ brothers (they were from oldest to youngest: Xipe Totec, the god of agriculture; Tezcatlipoca (T), a warrior and oracular deity who was the most powerful of the four; Quetzalcoatl; and Huitzilipoctli, a war god and the weakest of the four). In particular, Quetzalcoatl had a bitter rivalry with Tezcatlipoca, and the two waged war with each other back and forth, each one having their days of glory (considering that they were almost diametrically opposed in terms of nature and personal ethics, this isn’t surprising; Tezcatlipoca was supposed to be a god of strife and suffering that would have made TGS Loki look like a model citizen), and each generally trying to make the other’s life miserable.

It started with Tezcatlipoca and his kingdom of barbarian giants; Quetzalcoatl came in and destroyed it, and created his own kingdom under the guise of Ehecatl, the god of wind. This culture (which was only slightly more civilized) in turn was destroyed by Tezcatlipoca with a major hurricane that blew Q and his people into the forest; supposedly the monkeys of the forests are the descendants of those people. After that they went after each other from time to time on a less grandiose scale.

The last major recorded act in this drama was when Quetzalcoatl took human form in the late 9th Century AD and became ruler of the city of Tula, capital of the Toltecs. Using the name Topiltzin, he began building a glorious civilization, which apparently became the mother culture for several other cultures in the Valley of Mexico (including the Aztecs). He abolished human sacrifice (which seemed to have a very long history in the region), instead giving offerings of things like flowers and butterflies; he also taught the people many of the arts of civilization. According to the legends, the land grew bountiful beyond measure and the people rich and prosperous (with Q himself having several palaces, including one made of feathers).

Of course, Tezcatlipoca couldn’t stand this, so he got together with some Toltec dissidents and plotted to drive his brother away. The legends differ on how exactly he did this, but apparently Tezcatlipoca used magic and trickery to embarrass Quetzalcoatl and increase dissent among his people (among those this was getting Q drunk and tricking him into seducing their own sister). Eventually, Q was thrown out of the city, with the final blow coming from a barbarian invasion from the north (which destroyed the Toltecs). T didn’t stop there, visiting more than a few indignities and basically heckling Q as he made his way to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. By the time Q reached the Gulf, he was in pretty bad shape, broken and stripped of much of his dignity.

At the coast, it is said that he threw himself into a pyre to rejuvenate himself, becoming what we know of as Venus as the Morning Star; in this form he was considered a terrible god of vengeance and destruction named Ce Acatl (he was particularly feared because he was seen as competing in an adversarial manner with the sun, the ultimate source of the universe’s existence). The other popular legend says that he magically created a ship out of snakes, which he then used to transport himself to the east; before he left, he said that he would return later.

(Note: interestingly, Xolotl was seen as Venus as the Evening Star, which might mean that in TGS, Coyote and Quetzalcoatl continued to stay friends even after Q became…vengeful in nature.)

In the TGS universe, some of each of these varying legends had truth, as Quetzalcoatl truly did sail east from Mesoamerica, but his motives weren’t very benign. Still burning with rage, humiliation, and hatred of both his brother and the people of the region (the latter for kicking him out), Q was determined to annihilate the kingdom he was sure T was building. But for that, Q would need the most savage barbarians he could find, warriors who would cut through anything T had ready.

He found what he was looking for when he arrived in Europe: here was a backward, unwashed mass of barbarians (at least from his viewpoint) who were plenty violent, warlike, and greedy for conquest (at the time I imagine he arrived, early in the first millennium AD, the Crusades were still going on, so he could have seen all these qualities first-hand). He waited, spending his time examining them and trying to figure out who would make the best tools in this endeavor of his. As a guise, he sometimes took the form of a monk or priest of the Christian Church (for the reasons that such a person could go a lot of places without drawing attention, and that he was himself an educated man like many of the monks of the time).

Europe advanced in technology and power until by the end of the 15th Century Chistopher Columbus had ‘discovered’ the ‘New World’. By now Q had set himself up in Spain, and he did what he could to help the Spaniards try to establish themselves in that region (he didn’t care much for the natives of the Caribbean). Slowly but surely, the conquistadors made their way further west until they heard about the might Aztec Empire and its treasures. Q took his chance when Cortez arrived in the New World, going along in the commander’s column, and eventually the man and the Spaniards achieved all that Q had wanted. They destroyed the Aztecs, abolished their practices of human sacrifice, and eventually eradicated the local cultures (and any power base that Tezcatlipoca might have had among them). Q’s victory was more or less total.

(Note: Q never directly or bluntly manipulated the discovery of the New World and what came after. He didn’t give Columbus a map showing the man where the New World was, never directed the Spanish monarchs’ views on Columbus’ expedition, nor persuaded Cortez that a career in the New World would be a good thing. Quetzalcoatl merely took advantage of trends and events that were happening in Europe; he was only providing enough of a nudge in a few areas to make people do what they would probably have done anyway.)

In the aftermath, however, Quetzalcoatl found that his revenge had also made him largely irrelevant: the people who used to worship him were gone or converted, and the Spaniards and Europeans had no need for a pagan dragon-god. He was also disturbed and revolted by the sheer level of destruction that his revenge had wrought, with the depredations of the Spaniards and the mass slaughter of Native Americans by smallpox; Q had realized that a great many people would lose their lives, but actually seeing it turned his stomach. He was disgusted with both humanity in general and, more specifically, himself and thought the best thing to do would be to simply take himself out of the world picture.

With that in mind, he took what share of the art treasures of Mesoamerica he could back to a cave in the Pyrenees and there he decided to sleep, only occasionally coming out to see how the world has changed, as well as do the odd bit of do-gooding. His very presence has caused the valley near the cave to become exceptionally fertile, and over the centuries humans have come and established a small community to take advantage of the bounty. As well, tales of a dragon’s cave and of treasure have circulated in the region, though no one seriously considers these tales to have any merit…

Goals: For right now, Quetzalcoatl is merely interested in sleeping in his cave high in the Pyrenees, guarding his treasures. Occasionally, he’ll go out in human form and look after the local community, but he’s more or less done with being a god-king. He’s also mentally buried the feud he had with his brother; after all that happened, he’d rather not worry about vengeance or fighting anymore. (If he has a ‘permanent’ human identity in the modern age, he would almost certainly have a massive butterfly and/or flower collection, as he preferred those things as offerings.)