Character bio: Ichtaca

Ichtaca, the Flayed One they call her and Keeper of Secrets, bringing fear, death and blood in her quest for vengeance against her own people. Chicomecoatl is the goddess of maize of nourishment and every September a young virgin is skinned alive and the priest dances in her flesh. Ichtaca was one of these virgins, a beauty at the age of 14 and the daughter of a local noble. Every boy in the tribe wanted to marry her and claim her for their own. She was smart, well educated and fiercely independent, much to her fathers dismay. That year the harvest was devastated and people began to starve, the old and the weak perished though this her people accepted as a part of life. Then the next year came and again the crops failed and this time the whole city starved and grown men and women began to wither away and die.

The city's people were in uproar and the high king had to fight in the streets of his own city, fight his own people to restore order. Eventually the people gathered before the great temple and the high king told them that every year they honoured Chicomecoatl with the skinning of a beautiful virgin but this was now not enough. The gods were displeased and punish them for their meager offerings. He ordered that in the coming year that instead of just one virgin, 20 would be flayed alive and the greatest celebration would take place to honour the great god of nourishment. Only then will the crops flourish.

They came without warning on the eve of her 16th birthday and took her before the priests. They had gathered to the city, one priest for every virgin and skinned each in turn with their obsidian blades. Lured by their screams and the stench of blood, Camazotz, the Bat god, the bat of death came to her in those last moments as the sun set remade her in his image and vampirsm in the America's was born in that moment. She lived each night ever since, empty and cold, filled with hatred and anger, craving her revenge and a never ending font of human blood.