Esoteric Arcana In Axioms: Magical Transference Of Characteristics
Become who you were meant to be! Or be drained of what you are...
Axioms Of Dominion has a very unique form of magic, even for games outside of the strategy genre. This is slightly inspired by the infamous lates 90s fantasy story The Rune Lords. However there is more going on than in the system from that series.
In Axioms you can use magic to take both attributes and magical aptitudes from one source whether population, character, creature, or monster, and temporarily give that benefit to another entity. The time can be anywhere from a single months to centuries depending on various variables.
Beyond that you can also shift other aspects of one entity to another like giving draconic or demonic nature and physical appearance to another entity. This is the basic of my Secrets/Conspiracy example of a character of a tribal steppe society finding and chaining a sleeping dragon and then stealing aspects from it to pose as divinely blessed and unify and lead his people on a great campaign of conquest.
Economic Applications
One very diabolical thing that can be done is to take productive capacity in some area from a population of slaves and provide it to freeman or citizens or nobles or some higher class. While you pay the cost of the magical drain for the spell/ritual/enchantment you can essentially move capacity to loyal and productive populations from those with little motivation to benefit you. This makes revolts especially unlikely.
Military Applications
One method more similar to the inspiration is to drain non-military populations and empower army units. You could also drain a large population into a small population or into individual characters for extra impact. This allows the projection of power outward from safe sources. Additionally this provides some degree of logistical advantage compared to sending larger armies. In that way the magic functions as a magical logistics tool.
Diplomatic Applications
Altering the nature of a population or character allows for a variety of diplomatic applications as well. By transfering knowledge, like that of a language, from one character to another, likely more important character, you can present yourself in a better light to another character or society. Characters get a benefit in diplomatic and political actions from speaking a language or knowing the history and culture of the target.
Risk Mitigation
Whatever the sphere of application there is a strong benefit in projecting valuable skills or attributes onto expendable characters or populations. Projecting combat prowess onto skeletons or zombies or other expendable summonable units is one example. Providing various capabilities to spies or assassins is another. Similarly a common envoy imbued with diplomatic knowledge that dies to ambush or the whim of a foreign potentate is less of a loss than the character holding the actual talent.
Uncommon Applications
Those who are the target of bestowments are useful in other ways. In tournaments as competitors, as powerful individual supercombatants in military efforts, as extremely charismatic spies or diplomats and so forth. Bestowments of intelligence can create highly valuable researchers or mages who can cast otherwise unusuable rituals. There are a large variety of potential applications.
Alternatives
It is important to remember that not all potential magic is available in all worlds and different societies will also have a significant but not complete array of magical capabilities so that if the uses of some magics overlap they are not thus rendered useless.