"Mmm, that makes sense. I guess set-commands are just really good for that since - there's not risk you'll hurt them badly by accident just defending yourself, you can put it right after..." 

"Yeah. Well, it takes a long time, I guess in a very emergent emergency I might have trouble with that."

Nod. "I guess if you...thought it was likely you'd ever end up in an emergency that bad, like if there was a war, you'd want to - get good at doing them really exact? So it'd stop people from hurting anyone but not from, I don't know, eating or going to the bathroom, and then it'd - be kind of bad but not a disaster if you couldn't fix it until later." 

"I guess that would be a good idea except I can't practice things like that, really - there's no targets, just people."

"How do you normally practice Mindhealing things - before you're good enough to definitely do it right, with patients, there must be some way..." 

"I watch Lionwind do stuff, and I reason it out before I touch anything, and I can do stuff to myself if I'm sure of it, and sometimes he has me practice on him, but he'd be a particularly bad person to practice set-commands on!"

"That does sound like a bad idea!" 

(Ma'ar is noticing that he is a person she could practice on safely and plausibly this is very very important but also, aaaaaaaaah. Well, it probably isn't urgent, there isn't a war right now and he has the sense that Urtho's Tower is the sort of place where a thirteen-year-old girl would absolutely not be dragged into a war even if there was one, and the Tower...does seem, if not entirely safe, at least not the kind of dangerous where Azabel might not have time to fix a set-command right away.) 

"Anyway I'm going to go rest. See you in class tomorrow?"

"See you!"

Classes continue. The Adept who tests people is very busy, so their exam is tentatively scheduled for two weeks from now, but the teaching assistant lets them mostly practice blasting the target, and when they also have to practice shielding he lets them stand still against the walls for it, why not, it's not like the thing they were doing before was particularly effective training for a real fight anyway. 

A few sessions later, in their classroom theory section, the teacher brings up the topic of blood magic. The explanation of it isn't very detailed - you can kill people and get magic from it, SOMEHOW, also it corrupts people and makes them evil - and the teacher explains with an expression of deep distaste. The students make various horrified sounds and gasps. 

Ma'ar thinks about raising his hand, and then thinks better of it and doesn't. :Azabel?: he sends. :Does that - also not make sense to you?:

:What, it corrupting people and making them evil? I mean, there's mind problems that soooort of do that - some people don't have the thing where they care if other people are okay and that looks kind of like them being evil - I don't know exactly how getting energy from a dead person would make that happen but I don't know for sure that it can't? I've never heard of anybody having a patient with that problem from blood magic instead of being born that way though... and I've read all the Mindhealing books in the library:

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?"