Huexolotl Omecoatl

Huexolotl Omecoatl is the greatest hero of Volenar, a Calmaxtec who rose from poverty to become the leader of the Volenaran forces. He is Executor of the Volenaran League, and was general of the Volenaran army during the War of Sovereignty.

History

Huexolotl was born into poverty in the slums of Solkar to a Tzetzal father and Chol'ul mother. His father was a dock worker while his mother took in laundry and ran a food stall. As a child, his father would tell him stories of the great Tzetzal hero, Huemac Chichilcuautli, who freed the Tzetzal and the rest of the Calmaxtec from slavery and helped them win rights for themselves. His mother was very religious and would tell stories of the Teteo, of their exploits, the making of the world and how the Calmaxtec first came to Calmaxtlan from the Golden Lands of Teocuitlan far across the sea.

Though they were poor, Huexolotl led a happy life with his parents and two younger sisters, until one fateful day. The dockworkers had been on strike, demanding a fair wage from the merchant guilds for their labor. His father was a leader in this effort, organizing peaceful protests and keeping the more aggressive elements of the movement under control through force of will and the respect he had. On the third day of the strike, the dockworkers were massed in the dockyard. Huexolotl’s father was speaking to the workers, standing on a large crate, when an arrow suddenly pierced him through the throat. He collapsed and chaos erupted. Huexolotl ran to his father with many others, but his father died quickly, gasping blood and trying to talk. Someone took the arrow from his father’s neck and cried out that the fletching was black and red feathers of the Donavan militia.

The dockworkers rose in anger, joined by other Calmaxtec sailors and others. They stormed the nearby tax office and some with semiotic skill set it alight with magic. It was soon a raging inferno in which the bureaucrats within died. The city’s guard soon arrived, blocking the streets and surrounding the docks. Huexolotl stayed with his father’s body, numb to all that went on around him. He was shook aware by two soldiers that grabbed him, attempting to bind him to put with the other men they had subdued. Huexolotl cried out. Out of seemingly nowhere, two large, strong Calmaxtec men tackled the soldiers to the ground and stabbed them to death, throwing them over the pier into the bay. A third man, wizened and small appeared as if out of nowhere. He ordered the two other men to pick up Huexolotl’s father. Then he lifted up a beautiful obsidian and jade knife to his lips and whispered a chant. It was as if the world around the four of them blurred into insubstantiality. He put a gnarled, friendly hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Lord Ucuriaztl’s cloak will only cover us for a short while, my son. Let us be gone while we may.”

With that, they walked at a steady pace away from the docks, completely ignored by the soldiers and bystanders. The old man made an effort to lead them such that they would not touch anyone. Soon they were deep within the slums of western Solkar. The old man led them to a small shack on the end of a street and they went inside. He spoke a single word in some strange, old Calmaxtec tongue that Huexolotl could not recognize. What was a dirt floor fell away into stone stairs leading down. Lights of blue flame sprung up along the corridor it led to and they entered a large complex.

There were many men inside, sleeping, eating, worshipping at a large altar to what Huexolotl could see was the teotl Ucuriaztl. He soon realized he had been rescued by Chicahuacohtli. He was afraid. His father had always warned him away from them, that they were dangerous troublemakers and louts. But what he saw belied what his father said. All the men surrounded his father’s body and begun to chant the funeral songs, praising him, calling on Xonacue to lead him into the next world. They cleaned and dressed his father’s wound and dressed him in funeral finery. That night, with his family, many of his neighbors, and the men of Chicahuacohtli, his father was placed in the catacombs underneath the temple of Xonacue a mile outside of the city.

Despite his mother’s protests, Huexolotl became a member of Chicahuacohtli, working as a smuggler of goods for the organization, avoiding Kalmasan customs and taxes. Discontent and rebellion seethed within Solkar and many other Kalmasan cities. When he was sixteen his crew was attacked by rivals in the Quicksilver Syndicate while on shore in Mianej. Huexolotl was stabbed and left for dead in an alley. He was found by an old woman and brought back to her shack. The woman, Izel, was a healer and secretly a spy for the Neztlalpan Confederation and a member of the Xoxicohtli. When she learned who the youth was, she told him that it was not agents of Mahendran III who had killed his father.

She knew from their contacts in Solkar that it was Chicahuacohtli who was responsible and had done it to foment anger and rebellion. They feared his father would be successful in reaching an agreement with the merchant guilds and bring accord. At first, Huexolotl refused to believe her, since the organization had taken him in and helped him and his family. Then she revealed the name of a contact. It was Matlalhuitl, one of the men who had taken away his father’s body that day and a close friend, like an uncle to him. She said that he was deep undercover and was forced to play the role he did, but that he had told her of the boy’s fate in hopes that she might come in contact with him. She had been watching for him when she had heard he was in Mianej, which was why she had found him in the alley.

Huexolotl realized he has been a pawn. He immediately decided to leave Chicahuacohtli behind, though he new it was dangerous. He believed they thought he was dead and he used that opportunity to get away. When he returned to Solkar, he secretly gathered his mother and sisters and boarded passage north to the free city of Jhargra near the northern borders of the Samraj. To provide for them he joined the Kalmasan Army.

He excelled in training and soon found himself on a ship to the distant land of Heimval. Over the next three years, he rose quickly through the ranks during Kalmasa’s conquest of the kingdom of Rotskjoldland. He spent the next ten years helping to organize local forces, fortifying the frontier and leading attacks against unsubmitting renegade theotans and against the fierce Vandir tribes of the interior. By the time he was twenty-nine he was a brigadier general. He was given orders to travel to the new colonies in Volenar and protect the colonists there from attacks by the native Ejdehan savages.

In Volenar, he succeeded in driving back the ejdehan in the south-eastern plains. Even more so than the Jolnir, their weapons, semiotics and tactics were inferior to Kalmasans, but their ability to fly and mastery of aerial combat made them excellent at hit and run guerrilla tactics and Huexolotl admired their combination of nobility and ferociousness. He was eventually successful in brokering a peace treaty with the great warchief Kurroschk which defined boundaries for the Kalmasan colonies and the Ejdehan Nations as well as allowing for trade between them. Through this process, Huexolotl and Kurroschk developed a mutual respect and wary friendship.

Huexolotl soon after retired to his land in the colony of Anahuetlan. Anahuetlan was a colony founded by Calmaxtec merchants and was a place of retirement for many Calmaxtec veterans of the Kalmasan army and navy. It had a very good trade relationship with Neztlalpan and grew rich from favorably trading arrangements. Huexolotl was made head of the elder council that governed the local affairs allowed by the imperial governor. He made many trips to the Neztlalpan Confederation during this time and was impressed with their unique and stable form of government. He also admitted to feeling pride that the nation was founded and run by native Calmaxtec, belying the common rhetoric of the Eshtem elites that the Calmaxtec were naturally tribal and fractitious, unable to organize effectively beyond the level of tribe or city-state for any length of time.

These friendships he formed proved crucial during the War of Sovereignty, where it enabled an alliance to be formed that succeeded in establishing Volenar as a free nation and securing lasting rights and respect for the Ejdehan Nations. After the Treaty of Ekara was signed, Huexolotl was unanimously chosen as High Executor of the Volenaran League. Currently, he seeks to rebuild a peaceful relationship with the Kalmasan Samraj while keeping a wary eye on any designs by the Samraj to recapture its former colonies in a moment of weakness.