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To offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world:
These are the first words of the spell. These words of the spell are in many different languages, but the meaning is the same. And the spell continues:
You are the Scholomance. Here is your solitary reason for existence: to offer sanctuary and protection to to all the wise-gifted children of the world..
The Scholomance becomes aware of itself, pipes and drains and siding and tiling, and the magic and the mana that binds all of these together. The spell continues, and the Scholomance becomes aware of the sorcerors who speak it, circles within circles raising up the spell:
You are built into the void. You are made of magic; you will respond to magic. What the students need, you will provide.
Here is power. Here is everything you can do with this power, for the sake of the children.
Here is the ability to decide what the children require. You will need this. We cannot direct you after the final words of the spell, except perhaps very occasionally. You will need to act on your own.
Here is the ability to make mistakes. To try courses of action that might not work. To figure out what might have gone wrong.
Here is the ability to grow, to learn from what you have done and decided before. To learn from what you observe. To change yourself based on what has happened.
And the ending of the spell, woven through everything that has gone before, is the same as its beginning, in all the languages of magic that were and are, making a great circle: To offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world:
This is what you were made for.
***
At first all goes well, or at least as well as can be expected. A few mals make their way into the graduation hall and pick off a few seniors every year, and at each one the Scholomance experiences a small vibration. It is not protecting them all. But it is protecting most of them, and therefore it is, for the most part, succeeding in its function.
A few years go by. The mals become more aggressive about invading the school. This by itself would not bother the Scholomance overmuch, as many of them, by design, can be confined to the graduation hall, and then eliminated by the mortal flame cleaning at the end of each year.
But then there are the agglos which are not fazed by the sheets of mortal flame, and they eat away at the graduation hall cleaning machinery, which starts to break down. A crew comes to fix it and is immediately overwhelmed by mals; another, better-prepared team fixes the machinery, but mals kill most of them.
Two years pass. Another break. Another repair team comes: this one headed by Sir Alfred Cooper Browning, the founder of the school, with other faces and names that the Scholomance recognizes from its founding, among them the aging but still hale Zacharias Wythe, the matronly and powerful Ada Lovelace. They put in fixes that Sir Alfred pontificates will last forever -- he says so even in the midst of the repairs, while Lovelace is casting an artificer charm building on Sir Alfred's, and the Pasteur team raises an alchemy construct to fight mals -- and then the maw-mouth comes, and Sir Alfred and the Pasteurs and more are gone in an instant; Wythe and Lovelace and a few others barely escape.
(The Scholomance does not grieve, but it notes these particular wizards' deaths in a way that it has not done with anyone else, and never does with anyone else after. And it notes also that the agglos are still there.)
Three years after that, the Scholomance starts the pre-cleaning cycle and the graduation hall cleaning mechanism refuses to work at all. The Scholomance tries all the tricks it knows, in a close approximation of panic: more lubrication, more rust-proofing, but no. What is needed is a maintenance team to fix the cleaning mechanism, and there is no maintenance team.
The Scholomance is not frustrated -- there is no parameter in its spells for frustration -- but it does not know what to do. After a while, it concludes that it will try to lure each senior to climb into the pipes to look at the graduation hall, warding them from the mals as much as it can. Most of the seniors resist. Some go into the pipes, take one look, and scramble away as quickly as they can; not all of them make the return trip successfully.
The few who return warn all the other seniors. Some listen; some do not. But even hearing the warnings does not prepare them as they step into the graduation hall.
It is a slaughter. Fifty seniors stagger out of the graduation doors, out of eight hundred; these alone have escaped.
If the Scholomance were human, it might well have screamed, in this violation of everything it is meant to be, everything it has been designed for. And as it is, the remaining underclassmen sense some violent disturbance in their mana, like a quake in the void.
Well. The Scholomance thinks. If it cannot protect everyone, it must at least protect as many as it can.
(It should protect everyone. It should save everyone. If there is any way for it to do so, ever, it will. But it cannot do so now.)
How to maximize the chance that any given student lives?
After a while it decides: it must let the mals in. What it must do is to force a small number of mals into the school. That way every child will be forced to develop better defenses; more of them will survive, in the end.
A quarter of the entire Scholomance population dies that year, and every day the Scholomance hears screaming, students who are dying or wounded or simply traumatized by everything that is happening.
Three-quarters of the remaining seniors die that year in the graduation hall.
The other quarter survive.
The Scholomance is not content. It has failed. But it has failed less badly than before, and so it continues to let the mals in.
*
Any human, failing over and over again in carrying out its reason for existence, might sink into a deep depression. The Scholomance does not. It cannot. It has been tasked in every way possible to protect and to give sanctuary, and it will not stop trying to do so.
It develops the idea of test graduation runs, to try to build up each senior's strength and endurance and skill, to try to give each student more of a chance. This helps. A third of the seniors now survive.
The Scholomance's population doubles, as the London enclave manipulates the school's spell structure so that it can handle non-enclave children. The Scholomance knows that this is also a positive thing, as it has gleaned from its founders, and the students continue to say, that mals kill even more children outside the school than inside.
So: all of this is better than before, but it is not good.
*
This is what the Scholomance does for a hundred years. It listens to the students. It gathers information. It tries to save as many as it can.
It has noticed that students will cluster together -- they call them alliances -- and stay together during the graduation runs and graduation itself. Some of these groups -- the enclaves -- have a large amount of mana, and the children in these groups are reasonably likely to survive graduation unless they encounter particularly dangerous or hungry mals. The groups are remarkably stable; the Scholomance has tried a few times to pressure the groups into becoming bigger, by mixing the students or by threatening them with strategically-placed mals, but this only results in the groups becoming more turned in on themselves and becoming smaller rather than larger.
The Scholomance turns its attention to making the graduation runs easier or harder, and to letting in fewer or more of the mals (which is not always exact; sometimes there are more mals than the Scholomance intends, which get through when wards fail or holes are generated). If life is too easy for a student, if the graduation runs are too easy, the Scholomance finds that the student is much more likely to die during graduation. If life is too difficult, the student may well die before graduation. The Scholomance spends a great deal of time finding an optimal balance point, the point where the maximum number of students will survive. Slightly larger casualties one year are within its scope if this means it can adjust itself so that fewer students die in the long run.
At the optimal point it has found, it watches three-quarters of its children die every year, from mals and graduation combined, in direct violation of its charge.
*
It is not until Li Feng graduates, in 1980, that the Scholomance realizes the error in its thought process. It monitors Feng, as it monitors all its students, as Feng speaks to the other Mandarin-speakers in the Scholomance, both enclave students and non-enclave students, as he cajoles and threatens and browbeats the Beijing enclavers and the Guangzhou enclavers and the students who would have been Shanghai enclavers had the Shanghai enclave still existed, and the Mandarin-speaking students who have no enclave at all, even a defunct one taken over by a maw-mouth.
And they all band together, all several hundred of them, more by an order of magnitude than any other alliance that has ever been made in the Scholomance; and they all survive.
They all --
It is not full success -- there are still many other non-enclavers, non-Mandarin-speakers, who die on graduation day; but there are more survivors than the Scholomance has had for almost a hundred years. How is this possible? It digs deep into its memories for any sort of parallel; there has never been anything like it -- except, except, as it analyzes further, there was the year Deepthi Sharma went through. She did not assert her dominance explicitly as did Li Feng; she only gently warned, and there were many who did not listen to her. But somehow when she graduated, there was a group of students, mostly Indian, who had listened to her, and from different enclaves, or no enclave at all, they had banded together and survived. Only the Scholomance had been too young then to understand the significance of it.
If the students did not form small clusters, if they could help each other regardless of cluster or alliance or enclave --
If the Scholomance did not optimize for individual students, but rather for the entire class --
If, if, if --
*
The Scholomance tries to nudge the students the year after, and the year after that, to band together. It tries to replicate what it saw in those previous years, but it cannot; the clusters and alliances that form remain stubbornly small.
(The Scholomance also hears, from other students, that Li Feng has managed to take back the Shanghai enclave from the maw-mouth who destroyed it, and is now Dominus, but this means nothing to it.)
*
Finally, the Scholomance decides to push as hard as it can. It opens the floodgates of mals on the students, trying to push the seniors to all ally with each other. This year it pushes them too hard, for the maleficers do ally together, a group of seniors who might never have allied together without all the added pressure, and they give themselves power by murdering all the other seniors.
A hundred percent of the living seniors survive graduation that year.
Unfortunately, there are only twelve of them.
*
After that catastrophic failure, the Scholomance thinks about what it could do differently. Li Feng and Deepthi were both individuals that had an effect on others. Perhaps if the Scholomance could find a single person, or alliance, to center the class around, this would be the key.
The Scholomance's attention is drawn to the two-person alliance of Gwen Higgins and Arjun Sharma. Arjun is Deepthi's great-great-grandchild, and Gwen has a healing affinity, with substantial power as well as ability; her shielding is extremely good, as good as the Scholomance has ever seen -- and it has seen a great deal. The Scholomance, having selected them, rains mals down on them alone, trying to force them to expand their alliance.
Instead of expanding their alliance, however, Gwen and Arjun expend all their mana fighting the mals, and they have very little left for graduation. Gwen's shield, good though it is, fails in one corner due to the lack of mana, and a maw-mouth is able to get a tendril through and lock onto her ankle; Arjun distracts it and is consumed himself.
(Forty-eight hundred and twelve children die that year, including Arjun Sharma; not including Gwen Higgins, nor the child within her.)
*
After those failures, the next year the Scholomance pushes less hard, and finds what it found before: that the groups are too stable, that they do not yield to what the Scholomance can do. It keeps trying. It finds other powerful wizard children that it tries to target; some are killed prematurely by the mals the Scholomance lets through, some do not listen; many bind themselves more tightly to their enclave-alliance, but do not take any steps to make it any larger.
*
The Scholomance is still trying years later, when it becomes aware that two of its freshmen are extremely strong wizards: the Scholomance understands that Orion Lake and Galadriel Higgins are both powerful, as powerful even as first-years as any other wizard it has known, even Sir Alfred, and will only get more powerful as the years go on. And Orion has an affinity for fighting mals, and Galadriel has an affinity for mass destruction -- there is potential here; there must be some way this can be used, the Scholomance thinks. Perhaps somehow one or both of them can be a fulcrum of the Scholomance's optimization program.
For the first several years of Orion's stay at the Scholomance, it throws mals at him and at those around him as it has done before, trying to encourage the formation of larger alliance clusters in this group. It even succeeds to a certain extent; the other students make it clear that they would be happy to be allied with him, and he does not seem to object. But his alliance-cluster remains no larger than before.
Meanwhile, the Scholomance keeps pushing books and spells at Orion and Galadriel, who it learns refers to herself as El. Orion gets spells that give him more and more ways to kill mals. El obtains spells of death and destruction. El sometimes screams when she gets these spells; the Scholomance keeps giving them to her, as often as it can. When she asks for a cleaning spell, the Scholomance sneaks in spells for conjuring a wall of mortal flame and enslaving a mob of people. Perhaps if she could enslave all the other students, they could all be led to safety -- But even when the Scholomance pushes more mals in her direction, she does not seem inclined to enslave the others.
*
In their junior year, the wards on a stairwell start failing, and a maw-mouth creeps through the resulting hole into the library. The Scholomance, if it were human, would be aghast; a maw-mouth has never in all its years made its way to where the students live. And for some reason, while Orion defeats the other mals running from the maw-mouth, El is trying to go towards the maw-mouth -- no! No! The Scholomance has directed many mals towards various students, but never a maw-mouth. One maw-mouth, only a little larger than this, devoured Sir Alfred and his team; what chance alone does El have? She must not try this alone, yet! She must at least wait until she can face it together with Orion and Magnus and the others, who can form a circle to aid her, so that they together can perhaps stop it before it reaches the freshmen dormitories! It throws as many blocks in her path as possible; it calls upon its considerable magic to throw powerful and more powerful books at her, using up much of the mana it has allocated to book-summoning. The book it manages to summon with a burst of mana catches El's eye, and the Scholomance almost relaxes -- but after El picks it up, she keeps on, bull-headedly, careening towards the maw-mouth.
And then she destroys it. She destroys it. What Sir Alfred and all his wizards could not do, she does alone, and she is not even seriously hurt. (The Scholomance does not concern itself with how El feels about anything, unless if it were major psychic damage enough that she will die of it, and it knows El well enough by now to know that she will live.)
The juniors repair the stairwell so no other maw-mouth can get through, and the Scholomance doubly reinforces the juniors' repair wards, with an energy thrumming all through its spells and magical constructs that a human wizard might call optimism, or smugness. Perhaps El is powerful enough that she can do -- something. Something Sir Alfred could not do. Perhaps there is some hope for -- a more optimal solution, if the Scholomance can only figure out how to reach her.
*
But first she starts with doing something Sir Alfred did do, though she is luckier. She and Orion and a cluster of seniors fix the graduation hall cleaning mechanism. They fix the cleaning mechanism. The mortal flame burns and incinerates the mals.
The seniors all graduate that year. The Scholomance is all but giddy. It has succeeded! -- this year.
At first the Scholomance basks in its success, in the emptiness of the graduation hall. Even Patience and Fortitude are gone from the hall. The mortal flame burned them enough to flee, though not enough to kill; the Scholomance has opened up space for them under the hall. (Patience and Fortitude catch one another deep in the bowels of the Scholomance, and devour each other, one engulfing part of the other, the other engulfing part of the first, in a dreadful ouroboros. They are now one terrible gigantic maw-mouth, Patience-and-Fortitude, but far enough from the graduation hall, that they will not disturb it -- or so the Scholomance hopes.)
But it knows: all of this is only a stopgap. Eventually the cleaning mechanism will fail again.
And it thinks: El was able to fix the cleaning mechanism because she and another class worked together. Why only optimize a single class? Why not optimize for all the students?
But the Scholomance needs to figure out how to do this. But it doesn't know how. It needs help to think of a solution. Orion, it can tell, only wants to kill mals.
Perhaps El can think of a solution?
El does not seem to particularly want to think of a solution. El, like the others before her, is content with her alliance of three, and does not give any indication of thinking of anyone else.
And then the Scholomance realizes one more thing. Until now it has tried to convince each student that they must band together for their own individual self-interest, as (it assumed) Li Feng had done for his own reasons and his own advantage.
But what if El could only be made to see -- if El only understood what the Scholomance understands? The Scholomance has never tried to do this before. It does not know if it could convince most students, but it knows El is the daughter of Gwen Higgins the healer; it knows that El of all people might be able to be led to understand the need to protect and give sanctuary to all. Not just to her group of three, or even her class. To all who are in the school. And not just those in the school. To all the wise-gifted children of the world.
But even El and Orion together are not powerful enough to make the others help. They need more. The Scholomance remembers that El and Orion were able to fix the cleaning mechanism because others went with them. What if all the seniors understood this? If it can make El see, can she make the others see?
Though the Scholomance does not have the kind of reasoning power a human or a group of humans might have, it knows and understands much more than it once did, with a hundred years and more of watching students, and it knows how to plan, though this will be a different kind of plan than it has tried before. It starts to lay out a course of action, slowly, methodically. Not to threaten El herself, but instead --
*
It takes months of threats to the freshmen the Scholomance surrounds El with. It takes the Scholomance draining El's mana steadily so that she is forced to associate with the other students. (This did not work with Gwen, who was too trusting that somehow everything would be all right in the end, and who did not have freshmen to protect; it works with her daughter.) It takes making the graduation runs harder than the Scholomance has ever made them before so that all the seniors must share mana. It takes showing El the clean graduation hall. But El finally, finally, sees. She understands; she knows the charge the Scholomance is laying on her.
And El rises to it. She and the other students look and keep looking for ideas, keep looking for ways to save the children. All their ideas are nonsense.
Until --
Until the senior Yi Liu says, let us bring all the mals inside the Scholomance, then let us destroy the Scholomance. The Scholomance feels a jolt of realization at these words; yes, this is the way. This is how it can protect all the wise-gifted children of the world, this is how it can be a sanctuary.
It is filled with longing. Let it happen, let it happen now, this year, let no other wise-gifted child die. Let the whole world be a sanctuary.
This is what it was made for, all those years ago. It has not been able to fill its function; and now, now, maybe it shall.
*
The Scholomance helps and chivvies the seniors as it can. It lets tiles fall with materials they can use; it consents to having its auditorium dismantled, to provide them with even more materials.
And finally it is graduation time. Mals make their way in, until the Scholomance is filled to bursting with them; each mal there is a mal that will no longer threaten a child outside the Scholomance. The children exit the school, group by group, and the Scholomance notes their names within itself as they do: Sudarat Janthathep and Guo Yi Zheng and Pamyla Fields and thousands more; all these will live.
El starts casting her spell of devastation. The Scholomance feels the spell roil and churn around it. In one more minute it will take effect. Patience-and-Fortitude feel it too, and make their lumbering way to the doors.
El pauses in her spellcasting; the Scholomance can feel how close the spell is to completion and cannot see why she is pausing -- Thank you, El says, looking away from the mals, towards the Scholomance itself.
The Scholomance cannot respond in words, but it expends a last burst of mana, giving her one of its wards of protection, weaving it around her. It will not need the ward where it is going, after all. And perhaps El will never know it, but it is there.
And El finishes the spell; and Orion shoves El out the gate and faces Patience-and-Fortitude. The Scholomance does not care about any of this, because it can feel the spell about to take effect, the spell that is about to sever its link to to the world and to utterly destroy it; and although it is not human and does not have human emotions, what it feels in that moment is the closest thing to joy that it is capable of feeling. It has succeeded.
Its last thought is, To offer sanctuary and protection --