#6. Queen Nai

Lore

The Jaguar Queen

"So it is written that the warrior queen shall walk abroad and vex the Stranger Gods in their own house. She will defeat them in tests of their own devising and wrest the laurels from their crowns. And in the final battle she will call out, and our Old Gods will answer in fury, destroying all so the cycle may begin anew."

– The Prophecy of the Jaguar Queen


"Our beliefs aren't so different. For example, your notion of 'Ragnarok' is roughly correct, you just lack the bigger picture."

– Nai to a confused Bödvar

As the story goes...

Hundreds of years of war and plague had reduced the once mighty Empire of the Jaguar Kingdom to a shadow of its former glory. Neither the brilliant battlefield victories nor the cunning sorcery of the great Queen Nai could stem the tide of decline of her people or of her gods - a once great pantheon now faded to near extinction.

Seeing that her civilization's doom was sealed, Nai made a plan. She cast a spell, drawing into herself the essence of the eleven surviving gods of the Jaguar Kingdom. And when, during the Battle of Ixanocala, a Valkyrie offered Nai a place in Valhalla, she accepted, carrying Xanlecutli the Coatl, Eba the Snake, and nine other ailing gods with her to the great hall.

In Valhalla, Nai is a consummate warrior and has grown to love the place. Yet she never loses sight of her purpose - her victories nourish the gods of her people, and little by little they recover. Nai believes tales of Ragnarok represent Asgardians' dim understanding that creation is cyclical and that Asgard must be destroyed for the world to be renewed and for her gods to rule again.

Connections

• Nix's "quetzalcoatl quarry"; Nix took on the task of collecting Nai's pantheon, but "disaster struck" and eleven of the targets went missing, so Nix's thousand-year hunt led her to Valhalla
• One of few legends deemed worthy of direct address with Lord Vraxx

Context

Queen Nai is modeled after the Aztec style and archetype. This could be generalized to "Mesoamerican," were it not for the fact that Nix's lore calls Nai her "quetzalcoatl quarry." Quetzalcoatl is the name of the Aztec feathered serpent god of wind, air, and learning. The word "Aztec" comes from the language of Nahuatl, which used Aztecah to describe "people from Aztlan" (the arguably mythical ancestral home of the Aztec peoples).

The Aztecs (who flourished in 1300-1521 A.D.) had dozens of gods in their pantheon, including Quetzalcoatl. The two gods mentioned in Nai's lore, however (Xanlecutli the Coatl, Eba the Snake) cannot be found in any research of the true Aztec pantheon. It is interesting to note, too, that the word "coatl"  is translated as either "serpent" or "twin." So, calling one god "the coatl" and the other "the snake" could be either strangely redundant or could hint at a relationship between the two deities.

Jaguars did indeed feature prominently in Aztec culture and mythology. Their elite warriors were even called "jaguar warriors," although there seems to be no known historical reference to the Aztec empire being referred to as "the Jaguar Kingdom." Queen Nai's ritual that drew in the essence of the surviving gods seems to hearken to a practice in Aztec religion in which priests would dress themselves to impersonate the gods and be considered the physical embodiment of that god during rituals and ceremonies.

The calendar system of the Aztecs was cyclical, always starting at the very beginning once the cycle ended. It seems this concept of cycles is prominent in Queen Nai's beliefs and convictions.

Spears were one of the common weapons used by warriors of the Aztec empire. As for katars, the name and the weapon seems to have Indian origins (east Indian). However, Nai's katars have the appearance of sacrificial daggers, which were mostly used by priests. It could make sense for Queen Nai, a sorceress, to fight with her daggers, especially if she used those daggers as part of the spell that drew the eleven gods' essences to her.