Havenstone:
As that small cadre of early alchemists discovered when they began successfully probing the reasons Theurgy worked, human blood has a relatively low aether concentration, which it loses easily by sublimation once the blood leaves the body. A living person using their own living blood makes fairly effective use of its teleomorphic potential. Early alchemists tried and failed to preserve that potency through preventing sublimation. None were able to come up with anything that fixed a meaningful volume of aether, not enough for more than a party-trick level of Theurgy–nothing that could really compete with a dedicated Theurge using their own blood.
Thaumatarch Hera was thought to have been the one who finally cracked that problem, through a carefully guarded refinement process. In fact, while she did discover a new alchemical pathway for reducing sublimation, her truly crucial insights were (1) that other human bodily tissues have a much higher aether concentration than blood (If you go kamikaze and pull down a mountain in Game 1, you’re basically drawing on a whole bunch of that aether, not just the stuff in your bloodstream) and that (2) it would be possible to mask a fairly large-scale process of harvesting those tissues thanks to the Krypteia traditions of helot-hunting in certain city-states.
Thus began the conquest, and the Thaumatarchy.
Those aether-dense tissues (brain, mostly, but the eyes also have enough to be worth harvesting) lose less to sublimation before the aether can be “fixed” through the alchemical process that begins in the Harrower (yielding an inert precursor that can later be refined into usable form). Blood remains a useful natural solvent, contributing a bit to the solution’s potency… and “blood” makes an even more useful, politically tolerable label for the final product.
And yes, the aether concentration in humans does drop off significantly from infancy through puberty before stabilizing in adulthood. The Karagond Theurges pride themselves on their refusal (by and large) to make use of that fact; you’ve got to have something to point to that makes you feel less of a monster at the end of the day. Of course, they can’t overtly explain to the laity just why they’re so proud of eschewing child-murder, but they spare no opportunity to blast the Halassurqs for it. When you meet Erjan in Game 2 Ch 1, you can hear how Halassur justifies the opposite choice, while abhorring the nightmare slave system of the Thaumatarchy.
What does it mean that human beings are the only known sublunary source of the element that makes telos malleable (by analogy to the way the element fire makes many lesser substances malleable)? Well, some–notably Abhuman philosophers and seers, and some long-extinguished Karagond heretics–would suggest that this is strong evidence that humans were wrought by Theoi or Angels with a particular overarching end in mind, as a couple of folks surmised over on the old WiP thread. This is of course rankest heresy , unwhisperable among Karagond Theurges.
@Havenstone Just out of curiosity, what about harrowing Plektoi or Abhumans ? Sublimation is going from solid to gas so it does not seem applicable to blood
Also on a different note, how did you manage to quote from a locked thread? Can it be done just by typing in the right html?
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