Your Avatar has been broken into pieces by some past-life trauma. As a result, the part within you is incomplete… but that situation can be rectified. If and when you locate the missing pieces of your Avatar, you could make that inner spirit stronger. In gamespeak, this Merit allows you to increase your Avatar Background after character creation – a thing that cannot, ordinarily, be done. (See Mage 20, p. 336.)

As with Twin Souls, above, this Merit provides plenty of dramatic story hooks. The missing pieces of your Avatar might be incarnated in other people; trapped in spiritual prisons

(Paradox Realms, demonic hells, soul-snares, enchanted gems, and so forth); embedded in a tree in a garden that’s warded by five dragons, and so on. The quest for your soul-fragments can be an epic part of your chron­ icle, with puzzles, twists, reversals, betrayals, and battles for which your soul is literally the prize. This sort of thing might be hard to reconcile with your beliefs if, for example, you happen to be a Technocrat. Still, until you unite the missing bits of your Avatar, there’ll be an essential part of you that feels incomplete.

The Storyteller should determine exactly what it was that shattered your Avatar, and what you need to do in order to reunite the various bits into one spirit again. Whether or not she shares that information with you is up to her – it might be something you’ll discover over the course of the game. With each piece restored, you add one dot to your Avatar Background rating, unless that Avatar was embodied in another mage; in that case, his Avatar rating gets added to your own if you manage to kill him… and if he kills you first, then your Avatar gets added to his own. (There can, apparently, be only one.)

No matter how many pieces are involved, however, the Avatar Background maxes out at 5 dots. Although this Merit allows you to raise your Trait’s rating, it does not allow you to raise it above that level.