The blood and bones of the titans are among the rarest and most valuable substances in Alaria. They are the only known materials capable of holding Deoric charge durably, the reality-warping power of the language of creation.
Origins
The titans were the first beings created by Azus, 23.5 million years ago. They were cosmic entities of pure structure and will, powered by Deoric itself rather than by soul and shadow. When the Ezz Rift flooded Alaria with Melera's music 12 million years ago, most titans experienced emotion for the first time, an agony they had no framework to process. Many killed themselves. Others fled to distant planar stacks across the cosmos.
The bodies that remain are the source of all titan blood and titan bone used today.
Physical properties
Titan blood
In its natural state, titan blood has long since dried into a dark red substance resembling dirt or powder. It can be found in deposits where titan bodies fell, sometimes layered into the earth, sometimes concentrated in caverns where the corpses came to rest.
When hydrated, titan blood reconstitutes into a shimmering crimson liquid that looks disturbingly like fresh blood. This reconstituted form is what gets used for handmagic tattooing and Deoric ink.
Titan bones
Unlike the blood, titan bones have not decayed at all. They remain exactly as they were when the titans died: enormous, pale structures of impossible hardness. Special tools are required to grind them down, since ordinary steel cannot scratch the surface.
Ground titan bone can be mixed into a paste that functions identically to titan blood for handmagic purposes.
Why titan materials work
Titans were cosmic beings whose very existence was bound to Aurus and Nydus. Their blood and bones still resonate with those frequencies. They vibrate in harmony with the sources of soul and shadow in ways no mortal substance can.
This resonance allows titan materials to act as a buffer for Deoric power. When Deoric runes are inscribed in titan blood, the blood holds the charge without disintegrating, creating stable anchor points that can channel reality-warping force through a mortal's threads without immediately tearing them apart.
For functional handmagic and charged ritual use, nothing else works: no mortal blood, no alchemical substitute, no synthetic compound can replicate this cosmic resonance. The titans themselves inscribed Deoric on stone and other materials, but those inscriptions bear the script without holding an active charge; they decay as the medium weathers, leaving the script as inert history rather than live working.
Uses
Handmagic is the most common application. Titan blood or bone paste is used to tattoo Deoric runes onto the back of the hands, and the runes are activated through specific hand articulations.
The same materials can be processed into ink for recording Deoric text. Writing Deoric is draining. Each rune or simple command takes about an hour to inscribe and costs the scribe 10 hitpoints, recovered at only 1 hitpoint per week. Once Deoric text is read by anyone other than the author, it disintegrates into ash. The titans also inscribed Deoric on stone and varied media across ancient Alaria, but most of those inscriptions have weathered to illegibility over millions of years, which leaves titan-bone records as the primary surviving source for scholars attempting to reconstruct the language.
Some Deoric rituals call for titan blood as a component, though the sacrifice of mortal life remains the primary power source.
The School of Summoning is one standing customer of this kind. Its summoners lay binding circles in titan-blood paste, inscribing command-structures that compel called creatures to service, and the practice spends paste at a steady rate. That demand draws on the same finite Deo Esari supply as every handmagic tattoo, so the School's purchasing agents feel each climbing price and each exhausted quarry as sharply as anyone in the trade.
Sources and scarcity
The vast majority of titan bones come from Deo Esari, a mountain kingdom built atop the ruins of ancient titan cities. The mountains there contain massive titan skeletons that have been harvested for centuries. Deo Esari supplies roughly 95% of the world's titan bone.
This monopoly is weakening because the supply is finite, not because of competition. Abandoned quarries dot the hills where veins have run dry. Prices climb year by year.
Not all of the closed ground was worked out. The harvest is held by the Titanic Priesthood, the order that governs Deo Esari, and much of the kingdom's southern country stands sealed behind warning markers, poisoned rather than exhausted, after a contamination two centuries ago whose cause the priesthood buried. That ground will never reopen, which tightens an already failing supply. The Southern Wasting carries the account.
The reserve of last resort
The blood gets spent; the bone does not. Titan blood is hydrated and worked into a tattoo, gone the instant it is used, while titan bone has neither decayed nor weathered across the millions of years since the titans fell. That imperishability is what made bone, and bone alone, the reserve of last resort, and the whole financial layer of the developed core is weighed against it.
It does not tarnish, and no house can mint more of it. A store of value that cannot be inflated and cannot be counterfeited is the only one that holds when every coin in the room is suspect, which is precisely the moment the largest debts come due. The great houses settle their largest balances against bone and back their heaviest loans against it too.
Adron's biggest paper rests on bone. The southern war-creditors of Azantir lend instead against ground their empire has not yet taken, so the continent's two great debts sit on opposite footings: a reserve that cannot be made, against a conquest that may never come. The reserves themselves are rarely seen and almost never moved. The great houses lodge their bone in the Bank of Infindior, where time does not pass, so a deposit neither ages nor can be reached by any hand but the depositor's.
The supply is fixed and held overwhelmingly by Deo Esari, nineteen parts in twenty, shrinking as the old veins run dry; how it is mined and hoarded belongs to the markets, but the floor under all credit gets a little smaller every year. That sets the money against the magic. Every ounce of bone sealed in a vault as reserve is an ounce that will never be ground to paste and worked into a hand. Handmagic and the banking houses draw on the same finite stock, and the houses win, because a great house can outbid a tattooist without feeling the price.
The black market
Desperation breeds grim commerce. Every handmagic tattoo contains titan blood or bone, which means every handmagic user carries valuable material in their skin.
Body harvesting exists. Practitioners are murdered and their tattooed skin flayed to reclaim the titan materials, which can then be processed and reused. This trade is illegal in most civilized nations, but where titan bone prices spike, the murders follow.
Dragon blood, a false substitute
Unscrupulous merchants sometimes sell "dragon blood" as a cheaper alternative to titan materials. This is snake oil.
Dragon blood does cause visible changes when tattooed: skin discoloration, heightened aggression, mild hallucinations, and other effects depending on the dragon's elemental nature. Buyers attribute these symptoms to "the magic working."
It is not working. Dragon blood cannot hold Deoric charge. It does not resonate with Aurus and Nydus. The runes inscribed in dragon blood are just ink. Any "handmagic" activated this way is placebo and poison, and the buyer walks away convinced they got a bargain while their threads remain exactly as weak as before.