Gods of Jade and Shadow

Casiopea and Hun-Kamé go to the ocean, where they stand in the water so Vucub-Kamé cannot overhear their conversation. Hun-Kamé has no plan beyond Vucub-Kamé’s two options, which dismays Casiopea. Hun-Kamé asks her to give him a name. He barely remembers his life as a god, and if she gave him a new name, he could be someone different. He kisses her, and she silently chooses the name “Francisco.”

Before she can say the name, she recalls an old conversation about what the world would look like under Vucub-Kamé’s rule—a wasteland strewn with corpses—and the idea of patan. She reminds Hun-Kamé of this, but he shrugs, saying, “[I]t doesn’t matter, if there’s you and me” (283). Casiopea wants so badly to name him and claim him as her own, but she can’t bring herself to do it. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the world, and she has to at least try to beat Vucub-Kamé. She will walk the Black Road. Before they go back to tell Vucub-Kamé, Hun-Kamé embraces her again, and holding her for the last time, looks at “the stars that he’d never bothered to survey before” (287).