Nine Times Nine Drops of Dragon’s Blood

The blood of dragons is a potent thing indeed. Some (usually those far from the reach of the Palace Sublime) say that the blood of Dragons is the only thing strong enough to bear the power of Exaltation, when the blood of Mortals cannot, and it is from this the Dragonblooded receive their name. Some know that the eyes and hearts of Dragon Spirits are rich reservoirs of essence, able to fuel artifice and reinvigorate a depleted Exalt should they rip them free and gorge upon them. And some know how the mystical properties of their blood can be extracted and employed as an Exotic Component in Artifact Creation.

To form this Component, an artificer must gather nine times nine drops of blood from dragon spirits, each drop from a different dragon. Whether these be Lesser Elemental Dragons, Greater Elemental Dragons, or the Five Elemental Dragons themselves. The more potent the dragon, the more potential power might be supplied to the work, while the natures and elements of the dragons will depend on the nature of the artifact to be crafted.

Artificers of the First Age found that artifacts crafted with Dragon’s Blood seemed to attune particularly well to the Essence of the Dragonblooded. During the Golden Age, further experimentation discovered that substituting a single one of the drops of Dragon blood with a drop of blood from a Terrestrial Exalt of high Essence served to adapt the final artifact intimately to the Dragonblooded donor and their immediate descendants. Some mused at the possibilities offered by using the blood of other great draconic spirits, at the power that could be achieved with a drop of the Ebon Dragon’s blood worked into an artifact, but the Sidereal Exalted were unaware of any examples where this had been carried out before the Usurpation allowed suppression of the theory.