The glyph on the right probably reads OCH-ja, ochaj, "entered". This would seem to be a cryptic death expression, lacking as it does any indication of the thing entered, be it "water" or "road". We have seen how Pakal's sarcophagus states that Aj Ne' Yohl Mat "entered the road", meaning he died. On Tikal Stela 31 occurs the famous passage where Jaguar Paw of Tikal is said to have "entered the water" on the very day of the arrival of the "strangers" from Teotihuacan. But there is nothing sinister going on in the present instance, as the subject of this apparent death verb here is Aj Sik'ab', the ti' sakhuun depicted on the monument.

That leaves us to puzzle over the glyph on the left, which describes what happens to the lord of Santa Elena just three days after Aj Sul is sworn into the office of yajaw k'ak'. The collocation on top can be said to have either the diagnostic curve of the mu in the center photograph or the curve of the "partitive marker" on the "fist" sign for OCH that we see in the photograph on the right. (When Maya glyphs show a body part, they always indicate where it was severed from the body. The dot in the middle of the curve may be the bone, seen in cross section.)

Continuing our examination of the mystery glyph on the left, we might ask if the center collocation is ka, as in the photograph in the middle. And is the sign below it ja, again as in the middle photograph? This is by no means obvious. And if the sign on top is OCH rather than mu, then -ka-ja would make no sense. Marc Zender (personal communication 2003) suggests that the signs have at least the general shape of OCH-U-CH'EN, a war expression meaning that Aj Sul (and the others who acceded into the office of yajaw k'ak' with him) attacked the center of the kingdom of the Santa Elena lord.

(It is worth nothing that one of the other Palenque monuments that names Aj Sul — a block that was reused in the masonry of one of the North Group temples — shows him in a military context. Another indication that the office of yajaw k'ak' has strong associations with warfare comes from the Tablet of the Slaves, which records an impressive string of military triumphs achieved by the yajaw k'ak' Chak Sutz'.)

Whatever the fate of the Santa Elena lord, it came only months before the Kan attack on Palenque. On the available evidence, it is impossible to say whether Kan had wrested Santa Elena from Palenque control and Aj Sul scored a victory in trying to gain it back (but provoked the Kan attack on Palenque in the process), or whether the stone incensario records the death of a Santa Elena lord loyal to Palenque (who might conceivably have been killed by Kan). Since we don't know the date of the accession on Santa Elena Monument 1, it is even conceivable that this assertion of Palenque overlordship in Tabasco followed the Kan attack.