Piltzintecuhtli, whose name means young prince or noble child, is the third of the nine Lords of the Night and one of the pantheon's youthful solar figures, distinct from the elder fire god who opens the sequence and from the full strength of Tonatiuh at noon. The Anales de Cuauhtitlan and related colonial sources associate him with the rising sun in its first, most tender light, and pair him in myth with Xochiquetzal, the young goddess of flowers and love, as parents of Centeotl, the maize god who follows him as the fourth night lord, a genealogy that reads the newborn sun and the newborn ear of maize as siblings in one telling and as parent and child in another, since the sources do not agree and this is properly counted debated rather than settled.
Piltzintecuhtli also carries an association with healing and with physicians in some colonial accounts, the youthful vigour of dawn read as curative force, though this thread is thinner in the surviving record than his solar and genealogical roles. He belongs to a cluster of youthful, flower associated deities including Xochipilli, the flower prince, with whom he is sometimes conflated in modern popular writing though the primary sources keep them as distinct figures. As with several of the night lords, Piltzintecuhtli has no major surviving temple or festival cycle of his own; his presence in the record is almost entirely as a night lord and as a figure in the Centeotl parentage myth, a reminder that not every deity in the tonalpohualli's night count carried equal public weight in Mexica religious life.
Sources Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble with History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex ChimalpopocaJohn Bierhorst (trans.)