Bloodstone & the Doom of Tyria
Soooo, been a while since I’ve done a lore thing, and this time I’d like to take a look at bloodstone, since I’m getting deeply concerned about it’s uhhh…
Well, lets just say the seers may well have created something far more dangerous than they realized. But, to get there we need to first go through what the bloodstone actually is and how it was created.
The worryingly ubiquitous substance known as bloodstone was once an artefact, The Bloodstone. As you may know, it was created by the Seers at the tail end of the last dragonrise, in an effort to hide away what little of the world’s magic remained. As far as I can tell, it acts as both a sponge and prison for magic, capable of absorbing vast quantities of it and sealing it in a form undetectable to dragons. Notably, the dragons can still consume it, as evidenced by the death-branded shatterer event in Jahai bluffs using bloodstone as bait for the dragonspawn, but the stone seems effective in its goal of hiding from draconic attention.
The method the seers used to create the bloodstone is a little murky. We know it involved an artifact called the ‘shadowstone’, a lesser bloodstone used to amp up the seers’ magic for the real thing. Strangely, the forgotten seem to indicate that the bloodstone’s creation required divine resources
The time period when this tablet was written (which was when they were exalting the humans of Tarir), the gods were present on Tyria, however the first bloodstone was made WAY before they touched down. It might just be the remaining forgotten don’t have the magical juice to perform the ritual and would thus need help from the human gods, but who knows. It’s not like the Seers left a recipe book and Isgarren sure isn’t chatty about it.
Unfortunately, bloodstone doesn’t just entrap magic. If someone dies in the vicinity of sufficient quantities of bloodstone, their soul will be entrapped in the crimson crystal. My best guess is that souls are inherently magical, and so the magic absorbing bloodstone eats them too. Once entrapped its very, very, very difficult for a soul to get free & pass on to the afterlife. As shown in bloodstone fen, even detonating the bloodstone & absorbing its magic doesn’t work. The white mantle slain near the stone are still haunting the crater to this very day! I’d hesitate to say its straight up impossible to send them on to the afterlife, but given the number of spirits haunting any outcropping of the stuff, don’t get your hopes up.
For most of its history, the bloodstone performed its purpose, and that was that. Unfortunately, the Human Gods arrived and ruined things. They found the stone and performed a few… ‘alterations'. First, they tapped Zhaitan for power to boost the stone and then they split it into 5 pieces. Four representing their view of the schools of magic, and one to act as the keystone
This was (and I cannot stress this enough) a terrible mistake on their part. Firstly, splitting the bloodstone allowed the mursaat do use human sacrifice to stave of their destruction. As by stationing shards of the stone at the mist gates spread across Tyria, they could hold them closed using the entrapped souls. But more importantly, this first splitting of the bloodstone was an act that would be repeated again, and again, and again.
Bloodstone is everywhere these days. I mean the dust is so common we LITERALLY carry around little pets to dispose of it. But thanks to the white mantle’s (and probably the mursaat’s, lets be honest) mining operation, bloodstone shards are used as ammunition, in food, as bait. There’s so much around that you have to ask, where is it all coming from?
Here we get to the crux of my argument. I believe that bloodstone is growing. Look at the site of major bloodstone detonations, you’ll see the stuff everywhere, in ways that I believe cannot be explained by being simple debris. Janthir's crater seems to imply that its become infused into the local flora, giving a distinct crimson hue.
But if you’re not convinced by that, just take a look at those who overindulge in bloodstone. Crystal growths take over their body as they go berserk in their hunger for more. It happened to Mathias, it happened to Caudecus, and will keep happening as bloodstone spreads throughout Tyria. And, yeah, being almost pure concentrated magic, the stuff is highly addictive. Those unprepared quickly go into
a frenzied power high. Their bodies adapt to absorb magic and they become willing to kill to get their next fix.
Loose bloodstone also has a habit of creating ‘bloodstone elementals’, hostile creatures whose attacks quite literally spread bloodstone. My theory is that the original shell of the artefact (seen in bloodstone fen as these runic chunks of rock) acted as a ‘containment field’ for the stuff.
Now that it’s long since free of its original constraints, it can grow without limit. Worst case scenario, if nothing is done, bits of bloodstone will make their way through the entire ecosystem, and eventually grow to the point that passage into the afterlife will become impossible.
If I’m right however, this problem is a few centuries away from becoming a global crisis. Bloodstone can be neutralised, consumed, and destroyed. This is a solvable issue, and the earlier the people of Tyria recognise it, the more easy it will be to solve.
So be sure to write to the Tyrian alliance asking for the formation of a bloodstone EPA before we’re all tethered to Tyria forever in a hellish purgatory hunted by bloodstone-crazed maniacs.