(• • • • • Life, • • • • • Spirit, • • • • • • Prime)                                                Dead Magic 74

The Aztecs considered themselves the chosen people of Huitzilopochtli, and to him and their other hungry gods they sacrificed a regular train of human hearts.  The Aztec creation myths even state that the monster from which the world was formed demanded human hearts in exchange for the growth of crops.

A hideous and terrible rite, this power requires the mage to cut open the chest of a victim and tear out his heart.  The blood of the victim is drained into a fire, spattered across the altar or sometimes even swallowed by the demented magician.  As the mage pulls the heart from the struggling, screaming victim, he tears out the subject's life force and devours it for magical power.  Aztec magicians probably offered up that power to their gods, but greedy and psychotic mages of the modern era might well try to capture such power for themselves.

System:  The mage must literally kill her victim and tear out his heart.  Nothing less suffices for this rite.  The subject must die, typically on the wrong end of a ceremonial knife.  Once the subject expires, the Effect captures the victim's life essence and spirit, then shatters them into power for the mage.  the mage starts casing this Effect as she plunges the knife into the victim's flesh and finishes it as she tears out the heart; each success scored on the Effect channels three points  of Quintessence directly into the mage or into any entity or receptacle prepared and waiting (the Quintessence can be split up, if desired).  If the Effect generates five or more successes, the victim's very Avatar is sundered -- Gilgul -- in the process.  Quintessence generated by this Effect typically has the Entropic Resonance of Death, though in some very special cases of sacrifices to fertility or agricultural gods it might have the Entropic Resonance of Renewal.

Everytime a mage uses this Effect, he gains a point of Entropic Resonance.  Aztec priests were terrifying figures with distorted, sunken coutnenances and a maniacal obsession with gathering victims for their gods.  Any mage who delves into this rite risks following their path.  Furthermore, using magic of this son is certain to bring down the ire of any other mage who discovers it:  The Aztec empire had many enemies among its neighbors, because the constant demand for bodies sent the Aztecs to war with many surrounding cultures.

A botch on this rite is hideous indeed:  Some ancient power decides that the mage's sacrifice is insufficient or incorrectly performed.  the exact effect is, as always, left up to the Storyteller, but a horrendous and lingering death is not a bad start.