Bierhorst's translation names Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of lakes, rivers and standing water, as ruler of the Fourth Sun, called 4-Water, the age that follows Tlaloc's fiery Third Sun in the Legend of the Suns. Chalchiuhtlicue is described elsewhere in Aztec religious tradition as Tlaloc's wife or, in some sources, his sister, giving the sequence of the Third and Fourth Suns a thematic continuity of water and rain deities even as the specific ruling god changes between them.
Her age ended in a flood so total that it covered the earth for years rather than days, drowning the world's people, whom the Legend of the Suns says were transformed into fish as the waters rose, the last of the animal transformations recorded across the first four suns before the very different ending, and beginning, given to the Fifth. Chalchiuhtlicue takes her name from chalchihuitl, the Nahuatl word for jade or a comparable green stone prized above almost any other material in Aztec culture for its association with water, fertility and preciousness, and she is conventionally shown in surviving codices wearing a jade colored skirt and headdress, an iconography consistent with her rule over lakes, rivers and the standing fresh water that, in the Fourth Sun, rises to overwhelm the world she otherwise nourishes.