This my friends is Coyote.Lucas Hopkins was born in 1900 in Lawton, Oklahoma where the Comanche Nation is headquartered. His father was white and his mother was Comanche. His father ran off as soon as Annabelle told him she was pregnant so she raised her son on her own. As a decidedly white looking mixed race child, Lucas was often bullied and physically abused by his full blooded Comanche peers and left Oklahoma at the age of 17. He wandered for a time until he found employment as a police officer in El Paso, Texas and kept his Comanche half a secret.Due to his dedication, work ethic and his high profile arrests of many area bootleggers Lucas was quickly promoted to detective. His promotion angered many other detectives and officers as his actions had a serious impact on the flow of bribe money they'd been receiving. A group of detectives soon decided he needed to be dealt with.In the summer of 1930 Detective Hopkins lead a raid on the operation of a notorious female Comanchero bootlegger known as La Serpiente de Cascabel ("the Rattlesnake"). It was during this raid that his brother officers planned to do him in. Unfortunately, unknown to Hopkins and his team, the Rattlesnake was a powerful bruja (witch); a mistress of "desert magic." During the assault on the compound, bullets flew, mystical creatures burst from the ground and winds whipped a malevolent twister into life.As the situation deteriorated, Lucas' fellow detectives turned on him, calling him a "dirty half-breed rat" and shot him. Hopkins managed to killing one of the corrupt cops and threw himself into the bruja's storehouse, coming face to face with the witch herself…only to discover that she too and been betrayed by her own men and shot. The combined force of corrupt detectives and traitorous thugs then attempted to end both their problems by throwing dynamite into the storehouse.Hopkins and the witch barely escaped the explosion which collapsed the building around them and a blow to the head knocked the detective out. When he woke, the witch told him where they were. As they fell she had reflexively used her strongest magic to transport them away to the safest place she could think of, Cave of Darkest Sand; the refuge where for generations, members of the Rattlesnake's family went to learn their magical abilities; the truth about their innermost souls and to be chosen by an animal spirit. A place where time passed differently than it did in the rest of the world. A person who survived the Cave was never meant to enter again and she had done so; her death was certain. Lucas Hopkins on the other hand had a chance. He would need to undergo the test, as the Rattlesnake had done in her youth. He would need to learn the magic of the land, confront his truth and be chosen, in order to survive.The bruja began to teach him her ways and they discovered that he possessed a natural proficiency for magic. He experienced visions of the world outside the cave. He saw his mother travel to El Paso to claim a burnt body that was not his and witnessed as she was struck down by his former brothers in blue as she attempted to uncover more facts about his death. He watched as these former detectives grew fat and rich on the suffering of others as their criminal enterprise stretched all over Texas and Mexico. All this he witnessed as months turned into years and he equaled the bruja's abilities, but no animal spirit came to claim him.One night Hopkins finally confessed to the Rattlesnake that he'd gone through much of his life hating his Comanche half and upbringing. He told her how much he'd resented his mother for raising him among a people that shunned him and that he ran away from them and lied to the world about who he was; tricking them all. Later that night he dreamt of an epic battle between a coyote and a rattlesnake. He woke to find the witch had died while he slept and the words "coyote ... trickster" were scrawled in the sand near her body. Lucas Hopkins had
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