Blood, as Reagent

You've opened the book, and now it's too late. Yes, yes, horror of horrors, all of your fears have become real! You thought you'd found something really good this time, didn't you? You saw the fine, well-aged spine of an old tome and thought you'd found an artifact of a lost library or one of those displaced compendiums of secret knowledge. But, no, you found this instead, and as soon as you read the first word the curse took hold. Yes, it's true. You're dying. Right now, you're already dying. Isn't that terrible? But isn't it also a little bit funny? Yes, it is, I promise. It's funny! You picked up a book and now you're dying! Have a laugh. You might as well, for you haven't long now.
There, wasn't that good? Do you feel better? Now, as long as you've already opened the book, you might as well keep reading. I do have recorded here some of the best, most terrible kinds of knowledge in the world. There are so many things inside this book worth dying for. Oh, but don't try to transcribe any of it, because that makes the curse worse, and it can be worse. It can be so much worse.
When you're done, please put the book back so that the next unluky soul can find it right where it's meant to be. Try not to die too close to the book, please. It might ruin the surprise for the next lucky truth-seeker.

-This article is excerpted from a transcription of a cursed tome, one of Sof Sator's Fabled Compendiums. It contains knowledge that is uncommon, forbidden, or perhaps even dangerous.-

They do not teach this in the Aethenium of Revan, though the place purports to compile all of Sof Sator's knowledge of magic are arcanism. Nor do they even teach it in the colleges and institutes of Arun, though those places boast of their fearless experimentation with every kind of horror that has ever been imagined in this world. It is below Arun, in a small, secret laboratory where comingle the priests of the Redfall Cult and ghost-bound professors whose bodies are so full of unwilling specters that their bones howl audibly to be freed from the cage of meat.
"Don't mind the screaming," said an anonymous professor as he shook my hand, his own wailing in my fingers. "Little things like gripping and writing -- careful motions, you know? -- put the ghosts through the worst of it, but what can we do? I can't just spend all day in bed. No, science as its demands." And magic, as well, as its demands. A demand for your blood. Everyone's blood, really. Everything's blood. All the blood of Sof Sator singing with magic, and echoing with that song even after it has been shed.
This is how it was explained to me:

Charging the Reagent

Magic is music, and living things sing however quietly at all times. That is, after all, what life is: a song. Be it of poetry and soliloquy shared in intimate moments, or of breath and gurgling belly while the singer sleeps, there is a tune to your ever living moment. This is true of person, plant, animal, and to some degree the very world itself (after all, the red trickling out of the Bloodletting Mountains does have a song all its own, carried from somewhere, somehow). This inherent song is different from magic conjured by sorcerers, soothsayers, arcanists, and monsters, that music written by sound on grudging air that waivers temporarily and then goes quiet. It is more like music pulled from an instrument. Like a bow pulled across a string, so your life is pulled across your... What do you think? Tendon? Bone? Brain? Clearly, it is the blood, perhaps because there is so much iron in blood.
Your voice and body sing against your blood, and it is your blood that reverberates with the music. It is not a quiet song, but it is sung so loudly and so lowly that in most cases it will never be heard unless sought by one who knows how to listen. The music remains in the blood, all the stronger depending on the life you have lived and how long you went on singing it. Whether your blood seeps into the ground, drains into a gutter, or drips carefully into an arcanist's phials to be stored on a shelf for later, there goes the song you've sung.

Use of the Reagent

Before the militaries of Revan and the Golden Reef hunted the osseans to extermination, the osseans imparted their alchemical knowledge to the arcanists of Revan. These were horrible secrets, which very much deserved to be lost to the world upon the extinction of their originators. Yet here the secrets remain, beneath Arun. The blood gives strength to many different concoctions here. Without it, you see, the ghost-addled professors of Arun would be torn apart by the specters inside of them, a secret they keep carefully, but not carefully enough that you didn't just find out. Furthermore, the wealth of Revan's elite fund experimentations with blood alchemy to create potions of longevity, which I can tell you have been at least marginally successful. For this reason, blood alchemy is the secret crux of Revan's wealth, and the key to its continued tolerance of Arun's heinous experimentation. Without these potions, Revan would not hold such constant primacy on the world stage, and certainly would not be gathering world powers under the umbrella of its Greater Sabine Trade Compacy.
This particular use requires the blood of anthrals, specifically, as those who partake are mostly anthrals, and any sanguinate can tell you that you become what you drink.
In fact, this is the most intuitive use of blood, which goes back to the beginning of the sanguinate curse and requires no great alchemical knowledge. The sanguinates, as anthrals who thirst for blood and must partake of it to survive, learned quickly that a living thing's nature is carried in its blood. They must feed on antrhals in order to remain anthrals. If they feed on something greater, they become more like that thing for a time, which has horrible results if done too often.

Source of the Reagent

The source is you, of course. You, and people like you. But to be more specific...

• Anthral blood: When used in potions taken by anthrals, it reinforces health and extends the consumer's lifespan. There are side-effects depending on the anthral's subgroup. A meat-eating carnivate anthral's blood will offer a potion that enhances strength and aggression. An omnivate's blood will yield a potion that also enhances the natural senses and increases focus.
• Tercaelo blood: A rare delicacy among any practicioner of blood elchamy, there are many places in Sof Sator that regard the tercaelo as a myth. If one were to summit the Rhyqirja Mountains and drain a tercaelo of its blood, one could create a potion that increases the intellect and helps in retention of memory. One professor claimed that it also makes fish taste better, but there was some debate in the laboratory as to the veracity of this claim.
• Angel blood: Once found only in the Golden Reef, the Angels of Sof Sator are long-extinct thanks to the appetites of the sanguinates that conquered the isle. Some of this blood still exists, preserved in the personal collection of the Prime Sanguinate. It carries an incredible magical potency and, it is said, bestows divine luminescence and flight. The members of the Redfall cult in the room spoke dreamily of being slain by a sanguinate using such magic, claiming that such a death would condense all the pain of hell into a single moment and leave the victim free to join the chorus of God. The professors insisted there was no scientific basis for this claim.
• Ossean blood: There is plenty of this in Arun, stored in phial-filled warehouses that have endured since before the extinction of the osseans. I was told it can be used as a less-potent substitute for the blood of anthrals. This is because it was the nature of osseans to capture and reside inside the still-living bodies of other beings, and the primary targets of this parasitic cohabitation were the anthrals of northwestern Sof Sator. As it was anthral marrow that produced ossean blood, it is near enough to anthral blood to be used in the same recipes. It lacks the positive side effects, however, and does not extend longevity. It also inflicts powerful waking nightmares of staring eyes in the shadows, opening out of nothing to bulge with rapt attention. The professors explained this was unsettling, but harmless, and said that they did not know why this particular vision would be inflicted. I, myself, am fully aware of the source of these nightmares, but I will not be telling you. That is a secret I'll keep to myself.

Common Material, Alchemic

Manufactured in

Universal

Component of

Experimental Alchemy
Medicines
Potions

Trade Status

GSTC: Legal
NSL: Banned
RVA: Banned
KGR: Regulated 

Exported by

GSTC

Imported by

GSTC
KGR