From Ash-Graven Drinking Horn, it seems like Tenoch was once part of the People of the Springs tribe but left after losing a fight with Tupac. Tenoch apparently caused so much trouble around Natlan that all the tribes chased him away, and the chief of the mines (mentioned in Talking Stick) wanted the Pyro Archon to expel him.

As Obsidian Codex and Talking Stick tell us, Tenoch united all of the tribes together against the Abyss as an “unprophesied hero” wearing a “crown of golden flowers.” He’s likened to the sun a few times, and it also mentions that “the sacred ones of the night realm” offered him the crown. I have no idea what that means or what happened after that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this “crown” was an ancient name.

The timeline of these things don’t really match up — I was under the assumption that the Obsidian Codex lore was earlier in history than the Archon War, which means there wouldn’t have been a Pyro Archon to expel Tenoch from Natlan. If that’s not true, and the Obsidian Codex story happens after the Archon War, then I find it kind of odd that Tenoch even had to step in to unite the tribes in the first place — why would we crown a new king as the savior of two worlds if we already have a Pyro Archon?

Given all that, there’s a part of me that thinks maybe Obsidian Codex and Talking Stick are not about the exact same moment in history. Maybe the former is about an ancestor of Tenoch’s who passed the weapon down to him, and he’s meant to fulfill a similar duty hundreds of years later.

Jillian

Obviously those last two paragraphs are wrong. Obsidian Codex and Talking Stick are both about the cataclysm 500 years ago, and the reason the Pyro Archon wasn’t there is because Mavuika was sleeping.