Feathers fall softly all over the hall like rain. The walls are lined with representations of deities you can tell with varying levels of confidence aren't Tezcatlipoca.
Obsidian Cross says: You can know a person through the people they interact with, but that only tells you so much. And you won't be any scholar of someone if you only see them through their relationship to someone else.
Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca's status as the most aggressively misrepresented Aztec deities in popular culture extends to their relationship. They are not a god of good and peace vs god of evil and violence duo, why are you trying to reinvent Zoroastrianism with an Aztec coat of paint?
The conflict between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca marks the end and beginning of eras, but it's a conflict between two nuanced deities, not abstract concepts like order and chaos. Despite what many repeat, Quetzalcoatl is in fact credited in some sources with inventing human sacrifice, the idea he isn't comes from a blatantly post conquest piece of mythohistory.
Even calling them enemies is an oversimplification of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca's dynamic. They joined forces to create the current world and to bring music to humanity. Their domains sometimes overlap, Tezcatlipoca is linked to wind and Quetzalcoatl to sorcery.
Of Tezcatlipoca's four wives, Xochiquetzal is the one with the most complicated relationship to him. Some myths place her as the wife of Tlaloc who Tezcatlipoca abducted, and in some cases returned while in others Tlaloc responded by destroying the world. But we only know of festivals and the like placing Xochiquetzal as Tezcatlipoca's wife, not Tlaloc's. The episode of abducting Xochiquetzal was also invoked with love spells. Tezcatlipoca's seduction of Xochiquetzal is at times linked to the expulsion of the gods from the paradise of Tamoanchan.
Another myth features Yaotl, a name that sometimes refers to Tezcatlipoca, and Xochiquetzal. A man named Yappan is doing penance foreseeing great upheaval in the world. Two goddesses, Citlalcueye and Chalchicueye, sent their sister Xochiquetzal to keep him from becoming a scorpion who will kill all that he stings. Xochiquetzal tempts Yappan out of his fast and Yaotl decapitates Yappan (and his wife) for that, turning them into scorpions whose stings can be survived. Yaotl is then turned into a grasshopper. Be sure to say thank you to Yaotl and Xochiquetzal when you survive a scorpion sting.
