Blood Magic
Blood magic makes the Body itself an interface for power. It is direct, brutally efficient and easy to understand: someone bleeds, someone gains force, and the price is paid in life, mutation and the growing conviction that another body is only unused fuel.
The Body Pays First
Blood magic belongs to Body, the physical carrier through which Time normally passes. Its active source is the blood of living beings - human or monstrous - and its defining advantage is immediacy. Blood can supply force without asking the caster to draw the same amount from a personal reserve. In the source, this makes sacrifice a universal interface: even an average practitioner can force difficult workings through if enough living material is available.
The classic operations reveal the school's logic. Blood oaths bind a promise to bodily consequence; violation can manifest as a kind of necrosis of fate. Battle sacrifice turns the fallen into payment for the surviving attacker - "the fallen pays, the living strikes." Groups performing a rite together can produce a short violent surge far above an isolated caster. For armies, execution grounds and crisis rituals, this makes Blood one of the most practical schools in Aurelion. In peaceful life it becomes far less useful because its efficient fuel is precisely what ordinary society cannot spend without becoming monstrous.
Its price is therefore not hidden behind metaphysics. Life is consumed. Bodies deform. The caster learns that every shortage can be solved by finding another victim. The source explicitly describes long-term practitioners as becoming slaves to the need for sacrifice, their identity dissolving behind the requirement to feed the next working. Blood can soften recoil because the payment is externalized into flesh, but this does not make it cheap. It makes the accounting morally and physically obvious.
Blood magic also presses on the larger balance of the world. Mass sacrifice is associated with violations of the Law of Balance and with strengthening the Dark Lord through accumulated violence and disruption. This is why the school sits uneasily beside Golden Blood. Both can involve blood, but they are not the same operation: Blood magic spends living substance directly through Body, while Golden Blood is a separate synthesis in which gold, Body and Will struggle over who controls the result.
