Cabrakan ("Stands So Far" Series)

Sources: wikipedia, https://www.worldhistory.org/article/415/the-mayan-pantheon-the-many-gods-of-the-maya/

Today, everyone stopped being able to understand each other abruptly. Luckily no one has taken this badly enough to get violent, but neither written communication nor sign language has worked. It will be fine for a bit, but we may experience supply difficulties if it takes too long. In the meantime, I’ll take what notes on the phenomenon that I can and hope they’re intelligible once this ends—because someone will figure out how to undo it.

Cabrakan is Zipacna’s twin brother, and as such is a giant humanoid caiman. Like his brother, he was also defeated by the Hero Twins and trapped within Xibalba. He is the deity of earthquakes and mountains, meaning that while his brother raises mountains up, he tears them down. It would be an incorrect assumption to position Cabrakan as the destructive twin and Zipacna as the creative twin—they are both equally responsible and capable of devastation, if in vastly different ways (consider a mountain spontaneously rising out of a highly populated city, for example!). If anything, Zipacna was his enabler, and the plotter of the two, knowing exactly what to say to goad his twin into whatever he wished.

The Hero Twins used trickery on Cabrakan to kill him, just as they had killed his brother, asking for his help destroying a mountain. They poisoned their kills with magic handfuls of earth and cooked them underground before presenting them to Cabrakan, insisting that he was the one who deserved to eat for the great deed he was going to do, leveling the mountain to aid passage of merchants through the region. Infused with the power of Earth, Cabrakan slowly weakened and was unable to call on an earthquake, collapsing in the attempt. The Hero Twins then dug a grave and buried him alive.

Cabrakan is strong and has some powers over Earth, although he is weaker and less cunning than his twin, and his powers are less useful when he, too, is trapped underground and therefore likely to hurt himself as well as his foes. It’s even possible that he has a fear of causing himself to be buried again—not that he would stay dead, in Xibalba, but it can’t be comfortable waiting for death in the manner you were first killed only to resurrect once again.