Ends and means

The Scholomance, magic systems, and plot

Hi all! I’m going to spend the bulk of this newsletter talking about the trilogy I just finished reading, Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series. I loved this series and tore through it fairly quickly, and it’s got me thinking lots of thinky thoughts, specifically about world building and how if you do it right, it helps you plot. Novik has built a magic system that perfectly informs both worldview and behavior in a way that doesn’t completely unspool itself until late in the series (with several deeply satisfying reveals.) I want to talk about this in some detail, because I feel like there are some plot points that illustrate this very well, so my apologies if this starts to feel like a wikipedia summary.

I’ll flag when the spoilers start, but be aware that there will be spoilers in this newsletter, so if you want to read the series without any idea at all of what happens, skip to housekeeping! If you want a general background, read on, and I’ll give you a heads up when the real spoilers start. Also, this is gonna be a long one— apologies.

So, what is the Scholomance? It’s Hogwarts, but it’s trying to kill you every day, all the time, from the minute you are whooshed into your dorm room via magic. The main character, Galadriel, is a friendless outcast in the school, which was built a hundred years before by wizards who were desperate to protect their children from maleficaria. (Those are basically evil creatures that try to eat you for your mana—something children are particularly rich in.) Life in the Scholomance is nasty, brutish, and short—historically, only a quarter of the senior class graduates. Graduation involves a cannonball run through the graduation hall, where a million maleficaria (called mals for short) are trying to eat you as you frantically scramble to get out.

Survival to graduation isn’t a guarantee, either. To make it to graduation, a student has to follow a lesson plan by themselves—there are no teachers in the Scholomance—and somehow get enough mana to power the spells they learn. And you don’t get dropped off at the Scholomance by doting parents who have taken you to Target to get new bedsheets beforehand and buy you and your new roommate dinner; you get sucked in via an induction spell, from wherever you are in the world, with whatever you have on your person. The economy of the Scholomance is that of barter and obligation. Almost anything can be had, but there is always a price to pay.

It’s this system of bartering, trade, checks and balances that was most compelling to me about this world. El is a friendless outcast for a variety of reasons. For one, she’s a deeply unpleasant person, with chips on both shoulders and a deeply cynical view of the world. She doesn’t suffer fools, she won’t kiss ass, and she especially doesn’t try and endear herself to the people who could help her most: the students from the Enclaves, which are communities in the real world that protect wizards from maleficaria. Enclave students come in with power sharers so that they can draw on mana from their group; they come in with special tools and spells that they can trade for other spells and tools. Most importantly, they come in with built-in alliances in the form of their classmates. And to make up their numbers, the enclaves have something to offer to others: help us, and you might get a place in New York or Dubai or Beijing. You could get a place in Toronto, and keep your whole family with you, if you make it out of the Scholomance alive.

El isn’t from an enclave. She’s not even from an independent wizard community. Her mother, Gwen, is a strict-mana wizard living in a yurt in rural Wales, giving out healing spells and aura work to whoever asks for it without asking for anything in return. El’s father is dead—in fact, he died on graduation day, when her mother was three months pregnant with El. She doesn’t have connections, she doesn’t have money, she doesn’t have anything that anyone can use.

What El does have is power. When her mother brought El to meet her father’s family in Mumbai, her great-grandmother predicted that El would bring death and destruction to the enclaves. Since then, her mother has raised El to be strict mana, because it’s clear that El is a destined to be a deeply powerful evil wizard. If she asks for a spell to help clean the goo of a dead mal off her dorm room floor, the school gives her a spell that will release a cleansing tidal wave of flame that can raze an entire forest to the ground. El can’t do anything by halves; it’s wholesale destruction or nothing, and she can’t draw on that power or else she’ll tip into dark queen territory. She has to fight every day to build mana in order to keep from giving into her destiny.

Now, back to mana. There are two forms of magical power in this world: mana, which is earned by effort you expend yourself, and malia, which you can take from any living being. Strict-mana means you don’t use malia at all. You don’t take shortcuts, you don’t sacrifice a mice or a cockroach or a person to get your power. Every time El wants to generate more mana, she has to do a punishing exercise routine or crochet, an activity she hates. Unlike the enclave kids, she can’t access a stored power bank of mana to power her spells. If she cheats—if she uses malia or one of the destructive spells she has for its intended purpose—she will become a maleficer, a dark wizard.

The El of the first book, A Deadly Education, is a hedgehog wrapped around a grenade. She expects nothing from anyone, and has vague dreams of joining an enclave, of belonging to a place where she will be safe and useful. So she doesn’t understand why Orion Lake, the school hero, insists on saving the lives of their class without asking for anything in return. When he saves her life (very much unasked, thank you very much) she’s even more suspicious.

Orion is everything El hates: not only is he an enclaver, but his mother is high up on the council of the New York enclave and on track to be its next leader. And worse, he doesn’t seem to be aware of or care about the elaborate system of alliances and barter that keep others in the Scholomance alive. Why would he need it? He’s got an almost preternatural ability to find mals and kill them. You learn in Book 1 that he gets mana from the mals he kills, and later on that he’s so powerful that his power sharer goes one way—from Orion to the enclave, and not in reverse. Orion is consistently heroic and selfless and oblivious to reality, and it drives El absolutely crazy. She can’t understand why he would stick his neck out for people who don’t care about him—he doesn’t need their help, and they take it for granted that Orion Lake will save the day.

Okay—plot spoilers start here!

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The problem with Orion’s three-year campaign of heroism is that it’s been a little too successful. He’s killed so many maleficaria that the remaining mals have grown desperate, hungry for mana. The graduating class are increasingly worried that they’re not going to make it—the mals will be so hungry that no one will make it across the hall to the gates—and they hatch a plan to damage the school’s defenses, so that the mals will flood the school and feast on the underclassmen.

Over the course of book 1 El has come to the conclusion that her dream of safety in an enclave is a fool’s dream. If she joins an enclave, they’ll have her use her massive power for destruction in the enclave’s service, but she’s learned the price of her magic, and she’s not willing to pay it so that the powerful can keep their kids safe at someone else’s expense. So she’s surprised when Orion begins to befriend her (also against her will.) And where Orion goes, others follow; falsely at first, but then real friendships start to form. El even forms a little alliance of her own: Aadhya, a wizard from big New Jersey wizard family, and Liu, whose family in Xi’an is near to the level that they can build an enclave of her own. So when El and the others figure out what the seniors plan to do, they vow to put a stop to it, and they hatch a plan to fix the cleansing mechanism that would scour the hall before the graduates go through.

The plan is successful; the seniors graduate without having to sacrifice the younger classes, and then, in book 2, El and her friends are seniors. Of course, that means they’re presented with different problems: first, El is given a punishingly difficult courseload. Second, the Scholomance seems extra-determined to kill her in particular, which is a problem because she’s been put into a homeroom class full of freshmen, who are understandably alarmed when creatures pop out of the vents to try and kill them during class. And third, El realizes that even if she makes it through graduation, the underclassmen are still vulnerable; worse, they’ll be killed in even higher numbers, because neither she nor Orion will be there to protect them.

El realizes that the school has actually been leading her somewhere the entire time: the Scholomance was built to house, educate, and keep safe the wizard children of the world, and until El and Orion showed up, the current system was the best way it could. But El went from loner, to ally, to friend, to caring about the others in her school, and the school is telling her that it has to end—that she has to end the slaughter. So El and her friends concoct a plan of their own: on graduation day, everyone graduates. Every student leaves, all at once. The seniors protect the younger students and one another, and they get across the hall as a group, and once they’re through they push the entire school out of reality and into the void. School will be out, forever. (Oh, that’s right—the Scholomance doesn’t exist in our reality. It’s tethered to our reality by thin connection points but otherwise exists in the void. All of this has a point, I promise.)

What does El want to do when she graduates? In book 1 the school gives her a gift: an incredibly rare book, the Golden Sutras, detailing how the very first enclaves in the world were created. It’s so rare that it disappeared about a hundred years after it was written; it’s so rare that the original methods for creating an enclave are lost, and the enclaves created today are made with malia. El decides that after she graduates she’s going to travel the world, creating enclaves for people who don’t have enough power to join one of the big ones.

But it takes a lot for people to sign on to her plan. It’s not until the obstacle courses that the seniors run in their last term start to grow so dangerous that only El’s alliance and Orion make it out unscathed that people begin to sign on to their plan. And as the clock ticks closer to graduation day, more problems emerge: it turns out that with so many surviving students, the school doesn’t have enough mana to keep them all fed. The Scholomance depends on most of them dying so that it can keep the surviving students alive.

It’s a fucked up trade. They’re all fucked-up trades, and the most fucked-up of all is that their plan works: El and her alliance (including Chloe, a New York enclaver who helps El out with mana senior year) create a plan to lure in mals from the outside, deeper into the empty school, while the seniors protect the younger students on their way out. But just as the last students have gotten through the gates of the graduation hall, as El and Orion are staring down the biggest mal left in the school, the enormous maw-mouth nicknamed Patience, Orion pushes El through the gates, sacrificing himself to the maw-mouth so that she can live.

Here’s another piece of world building: a maw-mouth is an enormous mal that eats wizards for their mana. It is a creature of unending, unsatisfied hunger, a rolling mass of tentacles with the eyes and mouths of its victims still visible on its surface. In book 1, El kills a small maw-mouth that has come up through the grates into the hallway. To kill it, she has to be eaten by it and fire off spell after spell once inside, trapped among the ceaseless screams of the victims the maw-mouth has been devouring since it was created. It’s a horrific, awful way to not-die; when you’re inside a maw-mouth, you’re screaming forever. There are two huge famous ones in the Scholomance, Patience and Fortitude. Patience killed El’s father, and at the beginning of book three (The Golden Enclaves) she is devastated that she left Orion behind for Patience to kill him, too.

(From here on out, major spoilers for book 3 and the world of the Scholomance at large.)

The transition from the closed, claustrophobic world of the Scholomance to the wider wizard world is not an easy one for El (or the reader, but more on that in the non-spoiler general thoughts section.) El has spent four years being brutalized by the Scholomance, and doesn’t even have the comfort of a graduation ceremony and a tearful goodbye with her friends. Instead, the Scholomance spits her back out into rural Wales, into the arms of her tearful mother. El quickly learns that things on the outside of the Scholomance aren’t doing great either; she’d already learned (in book 2) of the destruction of the Bangkok enclave, and in book 3 she learns that London was similarly attacked. In the course of helping London by killing the maw-mouth at their gates, she learns that parts of the London enclave are still tethered to the real world—so there might be a chance to help Orion.

El knows that there isn’t any helping Orion. What she wants is to end his suffering; she’s been inside a maw-mouth, three times now, and the horror of the experience is such that she can’t bring herself to describe it to anyone. The idea of leaving him inside Patience, inside the void, screaming for eternity is too much to bear. She goes to New York and asks the New York enclave for help—for mana, and for a map to the physical gates to the Scholomance. Specifically she asks Orion’s parents. And that’s when she learns that Ophelia Lake, Orion’s mother and the future Dominus of New York, is a maleficer.

This is where my pulse started to quicken. Her entire life, El’s mother kept her away from malia; if there was ever an easy way to do something El’s mother Gwen took the hard way and had El do the same. But something about Ophelia is sinister and puts El on edge immediately; she immediately suspects Ophelia is the maleficer who has been attacking enclaves. According to Ophelia, though, she gets her malia from volunteers; she’s not sucking people dry against their will. And also according to Ophelia, her goal and El’s are the same: make the enclaves share their power, so that independent wizards and smaller enclaves don’t get crushed.

They get into the school but miraculously, Orion has survived. Orion, however, is not Orion; when they break into the empty, broken Scholomance, there are no mals anywhere. Orion has eaten them all and absorbed their power, and El can’t bring herself to get close to him. They get him out, and return to the real world and more bad news: the enclave in Beijing is dissolving, the magic that keeps them safe failing. And El’s friend Liu is in trouble. When they get to Beijing, that’s when the real horror is revealed: to create an enclave, to power an enclave, the enclave creates a maw-mouth. They sacrifice a strict-mana wizard by crushing them with stones steeped in the mana of enclave members, and once the maw-mouth is formed, they feed it with more wizards. Liu is the sacrifice. And the enclave gets its power as the maw-mouth roams the world, eating wizards—the children in the Scholomance, wizard children all over.

It’s a monstrous trade. The spells for the creation of an enclave include the word deathless— deathless safety, endless comfort. But that safety and comfort is bought at the price of an unending life of agony: inside every maw-mouth she’s killed, El has seen a huddled up figure at its very core, still alive and screaming.

Remember when I mentioned that El killed a small maw-mouth in book one? and another, in London in book 3? El learns that the maw-mouths she’s been killing are the ones that form the basis of the enclave’s power—they aren’t just random mals running around the world eating children, they’re the mal-mouth created by the birth of the Bangkok and London enclaves. Every time she defeats one of them, an enclave is threatened.

It’s an absolutely genius piece of world building. And Novik takes it even further; remember when I mentioned that Orion’s mother is a maleficer? The year before El’s parents graduated, the entire class died—and Orion’s mother used that sacrifice to create a human maw-mouth: Orion. Orion gets power from killing mals because he effectively is one. He and El are perfect opposites.

In a final confrontation between enclaves, El is presented with something that will help her kill Orion; they think that’s the only way to stop Orion’s monstrous power and New York’s ambitions for domination. But El sees another option: there’s the hunger, and the person inside, the sacrifice. Orion himself—the Orion that sought out her friendship and her love, the Orion that helped the other kids, the Orion that pushed her through the gates rather than saving himself—that Orion isn’t his hunger, his endless desire for slaughter. In a beautiful mirror of the way a golden enclave is built, El is able to draw out the maw-mouth and leave the real Orion behind, with the help of her friends.

So, after nearly three thousand words of summary and exposition, what I’d like to point to is this: the world building sets up conditions for action, and automatic consequences for those actions. Every action has a reaction, and though the cycle starts out small, it builds and builds as El uncovers more of the realities of her world and drives towards the conclusion of the series. If there were an out for any of the characters—a shortcut, so that you could create an enclave without a sacrifice or the massive outlay of mana required by the Golden Sutra method—then the stakes wouldn’t be as high.

Additionally, the world building allow the tension to build by keeping the stakes low at first: this isn’t a trilogy where one knows in chapter one that the fate of the wizarding world is at stake. But Novik slowly opens the world and the stakes up as the series progresses; book one is solely concerned with the Scholomance and survival, so the relationships are smaller—El and Orion, El and Aadhya and Liu. In book two, not only do the alliances expand (El’s alliance adds Chloe, an enclaver from New York) but by the end the whole school has teamed up. In book two the outside world begins to creep in, too—Sudarat, one of the freshmen, is from the recently-destroyed Bangkok enclave, which is how El first learns about the unrest going on outside the school walls. And in book three, the world is much wider, as El and her friends go all over the world dealing with the enclaves that have been attacked.

The actions/consequence cycle in the Scholomance series is short, which means that the books set an absolutely brutal pace. This is both a bug and a feature; on the one hand, there is a lot of action that moves quickly and compellingly along a ramp of tension, but on the other hand, book three feels like a series of planes, trains, and automobiles at times. I wish book three had been longer, had more space to breathe—but then again, the consequences of letting the characters breathe would have been death and destruction in-world.

The Scholomance series certainly isn’t a perfect series of books, but I enjoyed them so much. The friendships feel real and important, and there’s a character that comes to prominence in book three that I would absolutely die for. There are moments of humor and deep emotion, and even though Orion can be a lump at times, by the end I was in love with him, too. If you’re looking for a fast-paced, action-packed read, the Scholomance is the way to go.

A Deadly Education
The Last Graduate
The Golden Enclaves

WHAT I’M READING

I was craving more Naomi Novik so I picked up Spinning Silver for a reread, and I’m about halfway through. Interestingly enough, Spinning Silver is also about exchange. Roughly inspired by Rumplestiltskin, one of the main POV characters is Miryem, a Jewish moneylender in a Eastern European-inspired country. She ends up inadvertently making a deal with a fae prince to turn silver into gold, with the unintended reward of marrying the guy when she succeeds. The book deals with the antisemitic hostility that Miryem encounters with her background and her job—it is absolutely infuriating to read, especially in the early chapters before her encounter with the fae lord, the way the villagers to whom her father has lent money disrespect her and her family and refuse to pay their debts. There aer other point of view characters, too, and the world feels rich and promising. I’m really enjoying it again—It’s just as good a read the second time as the first time around.

HOUSEKEEPING

Pals, I don’t know. It’s five pm and I’m tired, and tomorrow is my last shift at the coffee shop. I’m available on Reedsy still, and I’m just happy y’all have stuck around this long.

THIS WEEK IN HOCKEY

The Capitals beat the Penguins last night 3-2, and Sidney Crosby immediately had to go complain to the refs about it. This picture has huge “snitching to the substitute teacher” energy.

READING: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
WATCHING: 1899
LISTENING: Helena by My Chemical Romance

This has been A Faster No, a dispatch on publishing, writing, books, and beyond. Is there something you’d like me to talk about? Leave it in the comments or reply to the email! You can support the newsletter here. If you purchase a book from any of the links to Bookshop.org I get a small commission at no cost to you. I am available for developmental editing and editorial assessment services via Reedsy.