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That sounds like I’m some mad linguistics fiend, but there’re only three academic tracks here: incantations, alchemy, or artifice.
The better the enclave you get into, the more power you have to draw on.
The school will give you spells only in languages you at least theoretically know, but as previously demonstrated, it’s not particularly invested in meeting your needs.
The big ones are Mandarin and English: you’ve got to have one of those two to come at all, since the common lessons are taught in only those two. If you’re lucky enough to have both, you can probably use at least half of the spells in wide circulation at the school, and you can schedule all your required lessons to suit.
We get building materials down in the workshop and alchemy supplies in the labs, but for everything less exotic, like pencils and notebooks, you have to forage in the big stockroom at the far end of the language hall.
There aren’t any teachers at the Scholomance. The place is filled to capacity with kids; there are two applicants for every spot as it is, and our dorm rooms are less than seven feet across. Anyone who gets in doesn’t need external motivation.
I didn’t know much about her, except that she’d been one of the deeply unlucky few who don’t have wizard parents. The ability to hold mana does pop up in mundanes every so often, but usually they don’t get in here, they just get eaten.
Most people get alchemy assignments to produce antidotes and preventive elixirs, or the good old standby of producing gold out of cheaper elements.
I’m confident I can single-handedly blaze a path for me and my allies straight to the gates and out, no more clever strategy required. It’s one of the few situations in which a wall of mortal flame might actually be called for: in fact that’s how the school cleans out the cafeteria and does the twice-yearly scouring of the halls.
well damn
“You know, it’s almost impressive,” he said after a moment, sounding less wobbly. “You’re nearly
dead and you’re still the rudest person I’ve ever met. You’re welcome again, by the way.”
If you don’t complete a shop assignment on time, your unfinished work will animate on the due date and come after you with whatever power you’ve put into it. And if you try and get around that by not putting anything into it, or doing it wrong, the raw materials you should have used
will all animate separately and come at you.
We get a new assignment every...
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Or if you’re me, you can suck the life force out of a dozen kids and then incinerate half the school with you inside it. So helpful!
My anger’s a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning and stays a long time.
Forcing an incantation into a physical material—which then preserves the incantation’s magic and makes it ongoing instead of something ephemeral—is the hard part of making artifice for most people, because the physical reality of the stuff resists you trying to muck with it, and you have to put a lot of power behind it.
I didn’t want Orion’s help and I didn’t want him to sit with me and I didn’t want any fair-weather tagalongs sitting with me, I didn’t, but—I didn’t want to die, either. I didn’t want a clinger to jump me and I didn’t want anoxienta spores to erupt out of the floor beneath me and I didn’t want some slithering mess to drop on my head from the ceiling tiles, and that’s what happens to people who sit alone. For the last three years, I’ve had to think and plan and strategize how I’m going to survive every single meal in here, and I’m so tired of it, and I’m tired of all of them, hating me for no
...more
an enclave girl but someone who could sit down at a good table and do a decent perimeter and people would join me instead of going out of their way in the opposite direction.
aww el :(
no one wants to be in honors classes unless they’re going for valedictorian; the school puts you in them against your will—and
Unless you’ve got project work you have to do—and several friends watching your back—the library is always where you want to be: it’s the safest place in the whole school.
based
“Rank and power hath their privileges. I’m shocked.
“You think the maleficaria can tell?” he said. “You think they care?” “I think they go for the lowest-hanging fruit on the vine, and it’s never one of you.
really liking the parallels and commentary on privilege and access re: education
Enclavers generally club together in groups of ten and trade all their maintenance shifts to one kid in exchange for the promise that the kid gets to join one of their alliances at graduation time. We call that maintenance track, even though it’s strictly unofficial, and it’s one of the most reliable ways to get into an enclave after graduation.
If you don’t adequately complete your maintenance shift within the week it’s due, you aren’t allowed into the cafeteria again until it’s done. And if you don’t do someone else’s maintenance shift that you’ve promised to do, they don’t get to go into the cafeteria, so enclavers keep a sharp eye on their little helpers.
“You know that feeling when you’re a mile away from anywhere, and you didn’t take your umbrella because it was sunny when you left, and you’re in your good suede boots, and suddenly it gets dark and you can tell it’s about to start pouring buckets, and you’re like Oh great.” She nodded to herself, satisfied with her brilliant analogy. “That’s what it feels like, whenever you show up.”
unintentional burn lmao
For further reading, see the seminal literature by Abernathy, Kordin, and Li in the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, who discovered that it was possible to direct a communications spell to even a long-digested maw-mouth victim and receive back a response, albeit nothing but incoherent screaming.
jesus christ
I could see the ring of tiny pockmarked scars around her ankle, the familiar ring. I’d liked it before; it fascinated me. I’d always try to touch it when I saw it when I was little, and I’d asked Mum about it a lot more often than I asked her about what happened to Dad. She’d always pushed off that question, too, but I hadn’t realized it was the same question.
ah so that's how her dad died
That’s all Dad did. He grabbed the tentacle and pulled it away from Mum, back into the mass of the maw-mouth. He had time to turn around and tell her he loved her and loved me, the baby they’d only just realized was on the way, and then the maw-mouth got through his shield and swallowed him up.
damn
She says it’s too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it’s okay because they’re still good people overall, inside their own heads.
“Oh, she looks so much like Arjun.”
Yes, now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet.
Before them, the only way that enclaves happened was by accident. If a community of wizards live and work together in the same place for long enough, about ten generations or so, the place starts to slip away from the world and expand in odd ways.
Our rooms are handed out on the day we get dropped into them, and you don’t get to change, even if someone dies. The empty rooms do get cleared out at the end of the year when the res halls rotate down, but the Scholomance decides how to reshuffle the walls to hand out the extra space. The only way you can deliberately change to another room is if you take it, and not by killing someone. You have to go into their room and push them into the void.
And if you do that, if you go into someone’s room after curfew and you push them all the way into the
dark like a spellbook you don’t want anymore, even while they’re screaming and begging and trying to get back out, then after they’re gone, you can spend the night in their room, and you won’t get swarmed, because there’s only one person in the room, and it’s your room after that.
“Can anyone spare anything?” I put one of my own rolls in front of him, and then one after another every single one of the kids at the table started passing something down, even if it was just half a mini muffin or a section of orange, and a kid at the table behind us reached out and tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a carton of milk for him.
aww they're all so sweet!
welsh word for cuddle or hug
The rotten thing about having Mum as a mum is, I know how to stop being angry. I’ve been taught any number of ways to manage anger, and they really work. What she’s never been able to teach me is how to want to manage it. So I go on seething and raging and knowing the whole time that it’s my own fault, because I do know how to stop.
And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.
And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.
if you aren’t in an enclave, the sensible choice is sending your kid to the largest mundane school you can find, because maleficaria avoid mundanes.
Doing magic in front of someone who doesn’t believe in it is loads harder. Worse, if their disbelief trumps either your certainty or your mana, and the spell doesn’t come off, you’ll probably have trouble the next time you try and cast it, whether the unbeliever’s still there or not. Do that a few more times and you’ll stop being able to do magic at all.
Which didn’t make her a great choice for me to ally with, but I didn’t actually care. I wanted her, I wanted Aadhya, and not just because I didn’t have another option. I wanted this thing here between us, walking to lunch together after a morning working hard side by side, a small warm feeling that we were on the same team. I didn’t just want them to help me live. I wanted for them to live.
at the moment, there was a graduation mal on the other side, which meant that somehow there was a path for mals to make it up here from the hall, despite all the wards and barriers along the way, and the staircase was our last line of
defense. If this one made it through, all its friends would follow. It would effectively start graduation early. Except, since the senior hall hadn’t been separated from the rest of the school yet, the waiting mals would instantly come pouring up for all of us.
“ ‘All shall love me and despair,’ ” I said. She was eyeing me very dubiously. “Galadriel? In Lord of the Rings?” “Is that the movie with the hobbits? I’ve never seen that. Is that where your name is from?”
how it feels talking to Gen Z lmao
“Liu put a shield up, and Aadhya and I got the wall fixed in time,” I said, and didn’t tell Chloe it was okay, which I’m sure she wanted me to. I’d been right about her not wanting the deal. She’d run away exactly the way that every enclave kid ran away when bad things showed up, letting their entourages take the hit. That was why they had the entourages, and the kids in those entourages were doing it because they were desperate for a way out at graduation,
and they had nothing else to offer that would get an enclaver to recruit them. So they made shields out of their bodies, and if they lasted all the way to graduation, at least the most dedicated of them would be offered filler spots in enclave kids’ alliances. And that wasn’t okay, and she could work out for herself it wasn’t okay.
However many literature classes might try to sell you on Lord of the Flies, that story is about as realistic as the source of my name. Kids don’t go feral en masse in here.
