Xquic, whose name means Blood Woman or Blood Moon, is the mother of the Hero Twins and a daughter of Cuchumaquic, the Blood Gatherer, one of the lords of Xibalba. Drawn to the calabash tree where the skull of One Hunahpu hangs, she stretches out her hand and the skull spits into her palm, declaring that in his saliva his descendants live on; thus she conceives Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Condemned to death by her father, she outwits the underworld by having the owl messengers carry back a false heart congealed from red croton sap in place of her own, and she escapes to the surface to seek out Xmukane. Sources differ on whether she should be understood chiefly as a lunar deity, but her escape and the cochineal-blood substitution mark her as a figure of cunning and regeneration.