Bierhorst's translation names Tlaloc, the rain and storm god, as ruler of the Third Sun, called 4-Rain, the age that follows Quetzalcoatl's brief Second Sun in the Legend of the Suns. Tlaloc's rule ended, according to the text, in a rain of fire falling from the heavens, a destruction that consumed the world's people even as it fell from a sky more commonly associated, under Tlaloc's ordinary rule, with life giving rain rather than flame.
Some of the age's people are described as transformed into birds in the destruction, escaping the fire by taking to the air, a detail Leon-Portilla reads alongside the transformations recorded for the Second and Fourth Suns as part of a consistent narrative device across the Five Suns cycle, in which survival from a world-ending catastrophe comes only through a change of form rather than through any of the surviving humans remaining as they had been. Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas, a separate colonial compilation of Nahua cosmological material, assigns a different sequence of ruling gods and disasters to the ages altogether, and Miguel Leon-Portilla treats the mismatch between it and the Codex Chimalpopoca as evidence of genuine regional or lineage-based variation in how the Five Suns were told across different Nahua communities before the Spanish conquest, rather than a single fixed and universally agreed myth that colonial scribes simply transcribed.