“Hey, so… you know that trouble I was having with that rabbit warren? Well, it turns out they’ve developed into a bronze age society, and I just don’t have what it takes to remove them now.”

(CW: animal death and injury)

It wasn’t the end of the world. Maybe if this place was my livelihood I’d start panicking or packing up, but it’s not. I’m a vet, I own my own home, and I’m not hurting if my vegetables get looted. The garden’s a hobby at best, and yeah, maybe it was Grandma’s pride and joy, but I warned her I killed my mom’s geraniums when she told me she was leaving me the house, so it’s not like she has room for disappointment.

If anything, the rabbits are lucky they picked my land to figure out civilization on, because I’m pretty sure my neighbor Carl would be dropping dynamite down the burrows in my shoes.

I won’t lie, I came close. Monster Truck got out while I wasn’t looking, and when he came hobbling home with a goddamn spearhead embedded in his leg, I was about ready to rain my own personal Iliad down on the little bastards. Lucky for them, treating arrow wounds on my cat gave me enough time to calm down and think. I figure it was self defense. I don’t like letting my cats outside off-harness anyway, and I would’ve been plenty upset if he’d come home with a dead bunny in his mouth.

Just because one of your chicken eggs hatched a fire breathing dragon people think you’re evil. But you’re still just a regular farmer trying to make a living while dealing with an overprotective dragon, heroes that want to kill you and fanatics who want to worship you as the new Demon Lord.

The thing you need to know about all of this, the thing that got me into all this trouble in the first place, is that chickens will sit on anything when they get broody enough. Anything. Duck eggs, goose eggs, turkey eggs, lizard eggs, egg shaped rocks, anything. Chickens aren’t smart. If it looks vaguely like an egg, they’ll plant their feathery arses on it and wait.

I noticed that there was a bigger egg under one of the broody chickens, when I checked. Of course I noticed, it was twice the size of the others. But I have geese. I figured it was a goose egg she’d found and stolen. It was about the right size, and I didn’t take it out to check the colour because that particular chicken gets very protective of her eggs. I’ve already got a scar on one hand from trying to get eggs away from her. I didn’t want a matched set.

That was a decision I regretted the moment I went out to feed the chickens and found a little blue-and-silver dragonet’s head poking out from under a very confused-looking chicken. The poor thing kept shifting around and looking under herself in a bewildered way, like she didn’t know what to do next. This particular chicken is a good mother, and she’s raised clutches of ducks and geese without any trouble – she’s even resigned to some of her children swimming – but this was too much. She didn’t object when I carefully reached in and fished out the little dragon.

It was so tiny, then. It fitted in my hand, with its little head peeking out one side and its tail looping around my wrist. Cute, too, with its big eyes and little snout turned up towards me.

That was when I made my second mistake. I decided to feed it before releasing it. Dragons are innately wild creatures, everyone knows that. They can’t be tamed. People have tried. The eggs are abandoned as soon as they are laid, and the dragonets hatch able to hunt, so they don’t even bond with their mothers. So just feeding it a little shouldn’t have been a big deal. It should have gobbled the meat and fled as soon as I loosened my grip on it and it saw the open sky.

It didn’t. As soon as I’d fed it, it fluttered up to a sunny window ledge and went to sleep. I went about my work, figuring that it’d leave in its own time.

By noon, it was sitting on my boot, squeaking pathetically. I wondered if maybe it was confused by the farmyard – they usually hatch in mountains, if the stories are right – so I took it back to the farmhouse with me and fed it again when I ate, then took some time away from the fences I should have been mending to walk it up to the hills. I found it some nice rocks, with plenty of lizards and beetles and suitable prey for something that size. It pounced on a beetle almost as soon as I put it down, and when I left it was crunching happily.

I hadn’t walked a quarter of the way back before something hit the back of my boot. The little dragon was holding on with all four claws, and when I looked down it squeaked pathetically. If possible, its eyes got even rounder.

Listen, you don’t make it as a farmer if you just let orphaned baby animals die. We hand-raise calves and lambs and ponies, set chickens to sit on abandoned eggs, or put them under the kitchen stove or by a fireplace. You don’t make a success of farming if you don’t value every animal. A good shepherd will spend all night looking for one lost sheep. So despite what was said later, it wasn’t just sentiment that made me sigh and pick up the little thing and carry it back to the farm.  I am a good farmer. I don’t let orphaned babies die just because they’re a little work.

Keep reading

In retrospect, the scene of El going down the library stacks trying to get to Orion is so funny, because. She's doing such grim, survivalist, cold mental gymnastics to try and make sense of the school behavior. Over the course of it, El thinks the Scholomance is:

When in reality, what it was doing was:

It's. It's so funny. El is basically a cat trying to eat a piece of plastic, fighting against its helpless owner that just wants to help. She accused the school of trying to kill Orion whilst it was busy trying to save her fucking life. Herding teenagers: the world's most thankless job.

Another scholomance reread (I know, okay, I know) and it’s so cool to reread the first book with the perspective on the school’s intentions that comes from reading the second book. It’s a point early on that people who are alone are at the highest risk of dying, and the school goes out of its way to force the students to work together. El’s magic mirror can only be made by one student from each track, and that’s part of what brings her and Aadhya together. There’s a history paper that has to be about a civilization whose language you don’t speak, which drags Liu and El into translating each others’ primary sources. I’m keeping an eye out for other examples, but it’s such a simple thing that these aren’t necessarily making the students learn better, or learn more- it’s just forcing them to work together, because people who work together are more likely to survive, and everything else about the school scares them into isolating self defense.

What protects the wise, gifted children of the world? Group projects, apparently.

Edit: more examples! During the build up to graduation and the attempted repairs, El describes how others are able to do the school work of the students who are doing repairs- “The school will come after you if the work doesn’t get done, but it doesn’t care in the slightest if you cheat.” It’s something that makes no sense for a school where learning is the only way to survive, but apparently cooperation is more helpful to survival than actually knowing the answers to your exams.

Hmmmmm okay more scholomance posting!! Because I can’t stop!!

I just finished rereading the golden enclaves, and I really love how the other scholomance students are her strongest allies in this book. Maybe it’s just because they know her, but they’re the first ones to stick their necks out to speak for her. At first it’s in the “we desperately need help and El is maybe the only one who can save us” way, but even after that, when given the chance to side with enclaves (those things they’ve been fighting with their lives to be a part of for four! Years!) they keep choosing to side with her!

It doesn’t make sense from a selfish standpoint, particularly at the end with the enclave war. If they just kept their heads down and didn’t cross her, she wouldn’t have affected them. But the way that they all join her, even when it means turning their backs on their own enclaves, is so similar to everyone banding together in the Scholomance.

It feels like a big theme in these books that once these people- and the ones in Shanghai, and the ones in Dubai, and the ones in London in the end!- are shown there’s another option, one that may be uncomfortable but that WORKS without sacrificing people, they choose it! And continue to choose it! Orion chooses it too, once he knows the reality of what he is, even if choosing it means that he doesn’t survive.

It’s the most hopeful thing in the books to me, particularly when they end on Ophelia earning a position of power and El potentially being hunted down for her work in killing maw mouths. Once people know the cost of their ways, and know that there’s a better way, they keep choosing to be better!!

I just think that’s neat :))

It took me some good 5 chapters to understand why the you’re already dead spell worked without mana.

My first thought was that she was using the mana from the maw-mouth to kill it, because she can extract the mana so easily and all, and that’s why she ended with the same mana as before. But that sounded too much like I was just begging for El becoming a maleficer by accident to happen, so I discarded it.

And after 5 chapters I came to realize that it was because the maw-mouth was already dead. Magic is all about convincing reality to do something that it shouldn’t do, and El said it already, idk how I didn’t realized. The maw-mouth shouldn’t exist, and El is just reminding reality to do its work.

Been thinking a lot about El's "you're already dead" spell. The first time she used it, it felt a bit like a cop-out: so much power at the cost of no mana at all. It was so shocking - up to that point, everything cost mana. It was baked into the world from the very beginning. All the calculations. What you had to pay for everything that you received, both socially and in mana.

This came right after where her mother revealed the cost of the Golden Stone sutras.

So, to get so much power without a cost. . . surely there's a catch.

I think I understand now. "You're already dead" doesn't cost mana because it's already true. It's not like make-and-mend where you pay mana to change the shape of your doorknob or your shirt or what-have-you. It's more like how the Scholomance reshapes according to student beliefs.

I'm guessing that "you're already dead" is not an all-purpose killing spell: if El went and tried it to a squirrel, it probably wouldn't do anything. She'd just be saying something blatantly untrue and feeling a bit silly. It only works when she genuinely believes that the person or monster is already dead.

The Scholomance series is going to have just so many re-read bonuses. Isn't it.

There's some spell, I think in book two? Where the origin story can be summed up as "a bunch of deeply ethical wizards formed a promising community, saved up to buy the enclave-building spell, and promptly fell apart; some of the more notable survivors went off to become hermits and even swore off magic use for the remainder of their days" and. Yeah. Understandable.

The books must be peppered with things like that.

So i’m doing a re-read of the Golden Enclaves and got to the part where El leads Orion out of the Scholomance. And it has me GAGGED because

Is really giving

Sorry I'm going to ramble for a bit since the paragraph is conveniently here for me to reference-

This paragraph is obviously a reference to Orpheus and Eurydice, and I think it comes off as metaphorical- comparing Orion in this state to regular living people would be emotionally devastating to El. But also, I think it might be literal, whether she knows it consciously or not, and El could have accidentally killed him.

She's already created her maw mouth spell, you're already dead, at this point. The way that works is that she knows it's true- under all the hunger and immortality spells crushed into them, mawmouths are just corpses. The magic holding them together can't work against El's disbelief in it, so reality takes back over and pulls them apart.

If she looked at Orion, at this point, in the crowd of mundanes, it would be like when she first used the Golden Enclave spell. The old enclave still held together despite the broken foundation, because it still seemed solid and real. At least, it did until they started building the new foundation, and were able to compare it to how solid and real that was, which made everyone realize how fragile and barely-there the enclave was, so it started falling apart immediately.

If El had looked at Orion- if she had seen him among people who were overwhelming alive- he would have been dead in comparison.

A Deadly Education versus the golden enclaves

NAOMI NOVIK, THE WOMAN THAT YOU ARE

The Scholomance as a global tale

The thing I keep finding myself thinking about is how hard The Scholomance works to not be centred around the West or Europe. (Spoilers ahead.)

This is a book written by an American, published in an American market, and yeah we can point to Novik's other works and say, "well she wrote this Eastern European inspired stuff" but that's still a far cry from what she does in the Scholomance. She makes repeated, concerted efforts to remind us that magic is international. El is half-Indian and Novik explicitly points to the region of her origin. El speaks Marathi and Hindu and Sanskrit. Her Indian family are said to be one of the few natural enclaves. They all make a deliberate effort to be "strict mana", and even when we see them wrong El and try to kill her because they fear she will become a great dark sorceress, Novik avoids the "these communitarian foreigners are sheep who can't think for themselves".

Meanwhile El talks about how the school was started by Manchester and therefore greatly favours the Western hemisphere over the East, and how that has impacted and rightly upset the enclave in Shanghai and Hong Kong, among others. Novik talks about how they might want to start their own school, which would be a great strike against Manchester/London/New York.

Apart from what we know about India enclaves via El and China enclaves via Liu, we also see substantive characters from Arab countries (admittedly I can't remember if it was the UAE or Saudi Arabia) and West/South Africa.

It may seem like such a small thing, but the most successful "magical school" book in contemporary memory is Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling certainly made zero effort to consider the global south, nor even leave the door open on future world building in that vein. Meanwhile here's Naomi Novik, creating a work that makes significant effort to recognize that there's more to the world than London.

Just finished listening to the Scholomance series audiobooks yet again and I simply cannot express how fucking perfect these books are please read them they are criminally underrated!!!!

You get:

Plus the way the plot all comes together and the characters grow together is just so fucking chefs kiss like I NEED y'all to read this series I BEG

Thinking yet again about the casual cruelty El experiences at the hands of the people around her, even when she's a child. A literal nine-year-old wailing in terror, screaming for help, and none of the nearby adults bothered to come check on her.

Her fellow students who turn her away from safety and the support of the collective, just because they get the sense that she's different OR even if they don't think so, they're willing to fall in line with the majority.

Over and over again in her younger years El is forced to navigate unimaginable injustice and danger just because that's how circumstances are and nobody has ever been willing to step in.

And over and over again throughout the books we see El recognize injustice or potential danger aimed towards other people, yet she chooses to step in. She looks around and sees nobody else speaking up and she knows it'll be hard and it'll be scary, but she jumps in anyways. She chases the mawmouth and stops it before it heads for the freshman dorms. She sees the senior students ganging up on Orion and she throws her lot in with him. She recognizes the danger the younger students face and she forces the students to take action together. She even helps the Enclaves even though she doesn't have to, even though she doesn't want to. Enclaves are unimaginably rich and powerful in a way El can hardly fathom, but she drags herself, in the depth of her grief, to help London. And she negotiates a payment that will benefit people she doesn't even know.

El is so pragmatic and so short on hope but she still deliberately takes action over and over again when it would be so much easier to shrug and stroll away. She takes action even when she has no skin in the game.

I love her so damn much, she's my hero.

Mild spoiler for The Last Graduate ahead, but: