He used it once. It was an accident. A boy from another clan was trying to kill him, on a raid, and Ma'ar killed him first, and then there was MAGIC - not like the scant flows of ambient energy sometimes near the watering-hole, this was a lot of magic - and he grabbed up some of it and then he got through the rest of the fight. He...doesn't feel evil? He remembers it feeling weird and disconcerting - at the time he likened it to how drinking someone's blood might feel, it's in some sense just another liquid like milk but the taste and smell would feel so wrong for drinking - and he remembers feeling odd afterward. And noting that this was maybe useful, but he's never actually used it since, not once on his long journey. It'd slow down running away, and usually he wasn't being attacked by enough people that the smartest idea wasn't just to run away. 

It's a little alarming, but mostly he's just confused. And kind of dubious, since the whole thing feels like a fake explanation. 

He raises his hand. "Could you - explain what sort of corrupted and evil, and how that works?" 

This gets him uneasy looks. 

"...Well, it's addictive," the teacher says after a bemused pause, clearly not having expected this question. "Mages will end up driven to use more and more - mad with power, I've heard. It damages them and damages the land and natural magic around them." 

"Why?" 

"...Because it's evil?" 

"I - don't get what that would mean. For a kind of energy to be evil. It's - not something that makes decisions?" He glances helplessly at Azabel; it doesn't feel like he knows any of the right words to voice the real question he has, here. 

"I've read all the Mindhealing books in the library," she says out loud, "and don't remember anything about somebody having a patient who got evil because of blood magic. Also evil isn't a diagnosis? 'Addicted' is kind of but most addictions don't make people evil, even if they sometimes help... Do you know more specifically what happens?"

The teacher seems to feel just as unprepared to deal with this question! "It's not like I have any friends who've done this, miss! Uh, so 'bloodpath' mages refers to mages - usually bandits and criminals - who use blood-magic as their main source of power, and they're nearly always - the sort of people who do a lot of evil things." 

Ma'ar raises his hand again. "I mean, killing people is bad?" he says, earnestly. "Because people dying is really really bad. And if a mage is using it for all their power, instead of nodes, they must be killing people a lot, even when they - wouldn't be otherwise..." 

"Oh, yes - there's accounts of bloodpath mages pillaging villages just to take hostages for blood-power -" 

"But you'd have to be..." Ma'ar kind of hates the word 'evil', he's decided, also it's been said enough times that it doesn't sound like a real word anymore, "- you have to be - the sort of person who doesn't care or think it's bad to hurt and kill people, already, to do that? So maybe it doesn't make them like that, they already were, and - uh, do you know what happens if someone only uses blood-magic when someone was dying anyway? Does it even have to be someone they killed, or could it be, I don't know, soldiers in a war are fighting and the mage with their unit gets blood-power whenever someone dies so they can fight better? Because I don't see how that could turn them into a different person who thought murdering people was fine, if they weren't already..." 

The teacher is speechless and looks so horrified and upset. 

Aaaaaaaaah what did he say wrong this time. 

:Azabel help???:

"Can I draw on the blackboard, ma'am?"

Blink blink. "- Er, yes, of course." 

The rest of the class is very quiet. 

Aza gets up and draws an oval and writes BEING EVIL in it and then an arrow from that to another oval reading KILLING PEOPLE and from there to one reading BLOOD MAGIC and then she draws a separate chain of ovals where it goes BLOOD MAGIC to BEING EVIL and then both of the chains lead to the same rectangle which says EVIL BLOOD MAGES. "You'd see the same thing whichever of these it was, right?" she says, tapping her rectangle and looking quizzically at the teacher. "And you're saying it's this one where it goes blood magic then being evil but it could be the other one and it would look the same?"

"....Uh, I - guess that's the case, it's - no one's...tried to order mages who aren't evil to use blood-magic to see what happens, because that would be an evil thing to do too..." 

"- Would it?" Ma'ar leans forward in his chair. "I mean, sometimes you have to do experiments, right, to know how things actually work - I read a book about how Healers do that, and they sometimes kill animals on purpose to understand how different injuries kill humans - they won't kill people who weren't going to die anyway but if someone's dying of a rare disease I bet they'd have students come watch for their lessons... And I read that Healers've watched executions before to understand how being hanged kills people, because it helps with saving people who're trying to kill themselves by hanging. Uh, you could do that to study blood-magic too?" 

"...Nnnno, that would be evil?" 

Ma'ar is so frustrated and wants to fling up his hands and yell something but he's learned enough, by now, to be aware that this wouldn't help with anything at all. Maybe Azabel will know what to say. 

"What are Healers doing specially to make it not evil?"

The teacher is also so frustrated. "Healing isn't evil! It's - well, distasteful and unpleasant, to study executions, but - Ma'ar does have a point, it helps them save more patients later. Blood-magic is completely different, it's never going to be about saving people, only about killing people, so I'm not sure what it would accomplish to run that test!"  

"I think it could be, though. Like if there were a war, or - what if the Guards were fighting bandits who were trying to kill students, and the bandits were mages and they killed one anyway, sometimes the Guards do kill bandits, then - what if getting blood-magic from that meant they could save the students when they couldn't otherwise because the mage was too tired?" 

The teacher's face is going red. She takes a deep breath. "I'm - not sure we should be discussing ways to - try to prove that it'd be okay if you wanted to use blood-magic." 

"I don't want to! Killing people is horrible!"

"Well, you sure aren't sounding like someone who thinks that!"