“How would the world be different?” “It would run with the blood of sacrifices and the adulation of mortals. The cenotes would be piled with gold and corpses. Men would be painted blue and their bodies riddled with arrows, although, certainly, the supreme offering is the severing of the head.” She had seen this imagery in books, had read about the wooden rods displaying hundreds of human skulls at the entrance of the temples, the bloodletting rituals involving shells and obsidian blades, but these were practices long forgotten.
