Younger Hero Twin; the strategist-and-rescuer to Hunahpu's direct-confrontation role. Where Hunahpu loses an arm to Vucub Caquix and his head to Camazotz, Xbalanque is the figure who reattaches the arm, recovers the head, devises the squash-substitute deception, and rallies the animals to the rescue. The narrative architecture treats them as a complementary pair: Hunahpu as the figure who endures and is restored, Xbalanque as the figure who restores. The K'iche' apotheosis pairing — Hunahpu as Sun, Xbalanque as Moon — is canonical in Tedlock's reading of the Popol Vuh ending; alternate readings (Coe 1989 proposing Venus; Milbrath 1999 proposing the jaguar-Sun-as-night-Sun, with both Twins as solar aspects) are scholarly options worth flagging. The Classic-period reflex Yax Bahlam ("First Jaguar") is iconographically distinct from Jun Ajaw (Hunahpu's reflex) by the jaguar-pelt patches at face, arm, and leg, and this distinction is consistent across the Codex-style polychrome corpus of the Late Classic Petén lowlands. The Twins' joint sacrifice-and-resurrection scheme — burning themselves voluntarily to be ground and resurrect, then luring the Xibalba lords to seek the same trick (without resurrection) — is the foundational K'iche' theological narrative of voluntary-death-as-cosmic-victory, the structural template Classic Maya royalty performed in their own death-and-apotheosis-as-Maize-God ideology.