So my golden enclaves wouldn’t be as grand as a top modern-day enclave, but who cared? It would still keep the mals from getting to your kids, and if you had that, if you had safe, at least you’d have a choice. A choice that someone could make without being Mum. You wouldn’t have to suck up to enclave kids and bribe them. They’d still have advantages, they’d still have more hand-me-downs and more mana, some people would still court them, but it wouldn’t be everyone, desperate to survive. They wouldn’t get piles of free help just for dangling the slim hope of getting into their alliances and the even slimmer hope of getting into their enclaves.
I liked the idea; I loved the idea, actually. If this was how I’d bring destruction to the enclaves of the world, I was on board with my great-grandmother’s prophecy after all. I’d take Purochana’s spells and spread them all over the world, and I’d teach people how to cast them, and maybe they wouldn’t like me, but they’d listen to me anyway, for this. They’d let me stay in the enclaves I helped them build, and I’d make it part of the price that they had to help others build them, too. Either they’d donate resources, or they’d make copies of the spells, or train teachers—
While I was busy putting the world to rights in my spare time, what I wasn’t doing was any of my other schoolwork. I completely forgot the midterm assignment for my Proto-Indo-European seminar, and I would have been well on the way to outright failing if it hadn’t been for Ibrahim; when I remembered it on the Monday night before the due date, with less than one hour to curfew, he brokered me an emergency trade with an enclaver from Dubai that he’d got friendly with. He and I had sat near the Dubai kids in the library for one evening last term. They all still gave me dirty looks if we passed in the corridors, and he’d made one good friend and four nodding acquaintances. Story of my life. But now I got to benefit, because when I yawped in alarm, that night in Chloe’s room, Ibrahim said, “Hey, Jamaal’s probably got a paper for that.” It turned out that Jamaal was the youngest of five, and had inherited a priceless collection of hand-me-down papers and schoolwork for nearly every class he might possibly have taken, and more besides. I handed over a copy of the paper I’d written about the water-summoning spell and got back a nice, solid essay handed in for the PIE seminar of ten years ago.
I still had to rewrite the essay in my own handwriting, and while I was doing that, I got annoyed at some of the dumb things it said and ended up changing about half of it, staying up until all hours. I fell asleep on my desk and had to work on it the next day during my independent study. Afterwards I shuffled into the PIE seminar, full of unjustifiable resentment, and as I stuffed it into the submission slot still yawning, an eldritch vapor wisped out and went straight into my wide-open mouth.
Forget any preconceived notions you might have of gigantic Cthulhian monstrosities. Eldritch-category mals are actually relatively fragile. They hunt by driving people insane with enchanted gases that fill your senses with the impression of untold horrors, and while you thrash around screaming and begging everything to stop, the mal creeps out of its hiding place and tries to hook your brains out through your nose with its partially embodied limbs.
The problem with using this clever tactic on me was that there really isn’t an untold horror that the human brain is capable of experiencing that’s worse than being enveloped by a maw-mouth. So the vapor made me flash back to that particular experience, and I reacted just as I had at the time, which can be summed up as me yelling die immediately you horrible monstrosity with enormous and violent conviction. Only this wasn’t a maw-mouth, it was just a drippy ectoplasmic cloud, and I slammed it with the full force of a major arcana murder spell like someone trying to light a match with a flamethrower.
My handiest killing spell doesn’t kill things by destroying their bodies, it just goes straight to extinguishing life on a metaphysical level, so that’s what spilled over. More or less, I informed the eldritch horror it had no business existing with so much aggression that I shoved it entirely out of reality, and I then went on from there to try and insist that a whole lot of the stuff around it should also stop this absurd pretense of continuing to exist.
This was especially awkward because a lot of the Scholomance doesn’t exactly exist. It’s made of real material, but the laws of physics get quite flexible in the void, so most of that material has been stretched thinner than it should be, the engineering doesn’t meet the regs, and the number one thing keeping it up is that we’re all believing in it as hard as we can stare. And that’s what I took out: in one horrible moment, I made the four other kids in my seminar extremely aware that the only thing between them and howling nothingness was a tin can held together by happy thoughts and pixie dust. They all screamed and tried to get to safety, only they couldn’t, since they were carrying the lack of belief along with them, and the seminar room and then the entire corridor started to come apart around them.