There are SO MANY books on reserves and nodes and ley-lines; it's possible one of them has an annotation somewhere but if so it's not in the index or otherwise findable without skimming every page of every book. 

Ma'ar Mindspeaks her after about ten minutes, though. :I think I found something!:

She puts back the one she was index-checking and goes over to him. :What's it say?:

:Just let me find the right chapter, it's about all the different kinds of magic that're illegal in Tantara: He sits down against the bookshelf and flips through. :All right, here - we can both read it?: He holds it at a convenient angle for this. 

Blood-magic is understood to work by releasing all of a person's life-energies at once, via a violent death, in a format such that a mage - even a mage with very poorly trained or minimal mage-sight, and there are rumours this includes people without mage-gift at all - can wield them. Bloodpath mages commonly torture their victims first, on the grounds that this releases more energy; the book doesn't know if this claim is true, obviously no scholars have tested it. There are a couple of quotes from anonymous sources about the 'rush' and 'high' of wielding blood-power. There's also a mention that it makes some people very ill after using it; the example given is a farmboy with an untrained and unrecognized mage-gift semi-accidentally used it when under attack by nomadic horsepeople, bloodpath mages don't tend to collapse after fights, the theory is that they become inured to the horror of it and so don't get sickened afterward. 

:Are you done this page?: 

:Almost - yeah okay -: She's scribbling stuff down.

Blood-magic, in addition to its addictive high, is suspected to damage the minds of people who use it regularly; the main source for this claim given is that bloodpath mages generally have very sloppy control and, for example, almost none of them can Gate even though taking in blood-magic provides more than enough power.

Blood-magic use is also damaging to the land, in the short run; it behaves differently than the naturally released mage-energies that emanate from living things and eventually trickle into ley-lines and finally to nodes. It's 'stickier' and tends to block up these flows, causing particular problems with the weather and making people with certain Gifts or sensitivities sick. 

There are almost no official schools of magic that train it, for the obvious reason. There are the usual unskilled criminal groups, who are assumed to be self-taught or maybe apprenticed with more experienced bandits, and there are rumours of very secretive mage-cults that teach it in more elaborate ways, but of course nothing much is known about the specifics of this. 

Blood-magic is illegal in Tantara because it involves murder which is almost never justified, it's harmful to mages who use it and to the land, and because obviously letting people just do that is a terrible terrible idea. 

"I wonder why they can't Gate. Maybe it's too hard to learn if a normal school won't train you? I know Gates and stuff can mess with weather too, though, it doesn't explain enough about how this is different."

"I was thinking that. Gates are - I asked and they're not normally even covered until two years in, that's a lot of classes and tutoring they think you need first. Probably these mages out on their own don't even have books! And I thought that too, doesn't any really big use of magic mess with the weather? Even draining nodes for doing construction or something, if you do a lot of it fast in one day, it messes up the ley-line flows nearby, I read that somewhere." 

"Yeah. So it sounds like - there are a lot of problems that come with blood magic and you can mostly not have those problems if you don't have blood magic but it's a stretch to say that blood magic is in fact always bad, if you have a dying person on hand anyhow."

Nod. "I - think that's my impression too. It doesn't seem urgent to figure it out all the way, I guess, I - think it's right, for it to just be illegal here, and I'm not going to do it, so... I don't know, maybe when we're older we'll have a teacher who knows more and thinks it's okay to tell us." 

"Yeah. Lionwind's really good about it, he didn't go all stupid when I asked him at all."

"Wow! That's...so good, I didn't realize there were any grownups like that."

"I told him he should come to class and do a guest lecture since our regular teacher didn't know what she was talking about and he said not without permission so I have to ask her but he would do it if she invited him."

"That's a good idea! Then maybe the other students will believe less stupid things- Uh, if the teacher agrees, do you think she will?" 

"I don't know but I think I'll ask in front of everybody so they'll all know if she says no."

Nod. 

She checks the book to see what other kinds of magic are illegal.

Index

Ch 1: Summoning of Abyssal Demons

Ch 2: Deception with Illusions (Disguising Identity or Merchant Goods) 

Ch 3: Use of Blood Power

Ch 4: Cursed Artifacts 

Ch 5: Use of Compulsions

Ch 6: Involuntary Binding of Elemental Spirits 

What is a cursed artifact...?

The chapter explains that trap-spells - a variety of set-spell, which is a kind of spell that's laid permanently or semi-permanently on a physical focus - are an accepted use of magic in war or for border defence against hostile regions. A regular trap-spell is basically a detection ward plus a triggered spell that can set a fire, or paralyze a person nearby, et cetera. 

Cursed artifacts are items - they can be sold as magical artifacts for some other purpose, or just functional like a sword or decorative like a tapestry - which also secretly include some sort of trap-spell. Often they're made to purpose for assassinations. Sometimes they can be triggered by a mage from a distance, for example that lovely tapestry on the wall above the baron's mantlepiece could be triggered to explode violently when he's known to be sitting there having his evening nightcap. Or they can be triggered by a nearby action, like someone touching or picking them up. (Weapons triggered like this are legal in war, though there are strict rules about it; the illegal thing is specifically selling or installing such an artifact with deceptive intent, hiding its true nature.) 

"Okay, that makes sense but I kind of want to come back to this at some point to see if it has historical examples but not right now..." Note note. "Compulsions and demons and fraud and being mean to elementals is obvious."

"I read about demons in a different book about a war, they sound horrible, they just eat everything including all the magic and they're not smart enough to obey orders, even, just magic bindings." Shudder.

Ma'ar looks at the index again, flips through, stares into the distance. "...It's not illegal if you have to do Mindhealing set-commands, right?"

"No - though I guess that's probably just because we're too rare for there to be a lot of laws about us. Maybe it would be if there were lots. - also mages have more self-defense options than Mindhealers do that aren't that, if I'd already been a mage at the time I probably wouldn't have needed to that once."