Literature / The Scholomance

"The greatest wizards alive can't kill maw-mouths, and they won't even try, because if you try and you don't kill it, it eats you and it keeps eating you forever. It's worse than being killed by a soul-eater and it's worse than being grabbed by a harpy and taken to her nest to be eaten alive by her chicks and it's worse than being torn apart by kvenliks, and no one in their right mind would ever try it, no one, unless the girl you'd started dating a few months ago was going to die, her and someone you didn't even know, not even a person but just a blob of cells that had barely started dividing yet, and you stupidly cared about that enough to trade a million years of agony for theirs."

— El Higgins

The Scholomance trilogy is a Dark Fantasy Black Comedy Coming of Age series by Naomi Novik.

The series consists of three books: A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves.

The series is set in a school based on the mythical Scholomance, a place for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) — until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets.

There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won't allow its students to leave until they graduate... or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don't walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere.

El is uniquely prepared for the school's dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.

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The Scholomance contains examples of the following tropes:

# to D

• 13 Is Unlucky: Inverted. As El puts it "13 is a number with distinction".
  • Angel Torres, who came in thirteenth in the class rankings, hasn't done well enough to make it into an enclave. However, his luck picks up when he gets a promised enclave spot in exchange for participating in the repair mission and then proceeds to survive that mission.
• Ability Depletion Penalty: El can usually transfer Mana to and from her storage crystals at will, but when they're completely drained, she needs to take time to re-enchant them or else they're permanently ruined. She also destroys several outright by draining them in a desperate fight.
• Absurdly Elderly Mother: Liu's grandmother had her uncle and father in her fifties and sixties, respectively, using magical means that left her frail in her old age. This is because China's one-child policy at the time meant she couldn't have another child until the current one she was raising started attending the Scholomance and effectively vanished from the face of the earth. Even then, her first four children ended up dying anyway and it wasn't until Liu's uncle that she finally got a child back from the school.
• Abusive Parents: Liesel's father, a council member of the Munich enclave, left her and her mother out to dry, with his only forms of child support being the occasional check of mundane money and a seat in the Scholomance for his bastard daughter. El notes that he could've easily brought them into the enclave without compromising his own status as an enclaver, but it would've cost him his seat on the enclave council, which he evidently valued more than their lives.
• Academic Alpha Bitch: Anyone aiming for Valedictorian tends to be decisive, ruthless, increasingly arrogant, and either possesses a genius-level intellect or is such a monsterously hard worker that the others can't keep up.
  • What made Clarita different from the usual stock is that she wasn't obvious about it, being careful to keep her head down all four years and even do a few maintenance shifts to make it seem as if she was on the maintenance track. However, after the rankings went up with her name at the top during her last semester, she was sure to post all her top marks outside her room, to make it clear to everyone that she deserved it.
  • The Valedictorian of El's year, Liesel, builds a careful facade of niceness that she drops completely the moment she gets the title. Afterwards, she becomes an Alpha Bitch, though one that El and her friends grudgingly have to admit is still a very useful person to know.
• Academy of Adventure: The Scholomance is an especially dark version. Not only is it ungoverned by adults and infested by deadly monsters, the school itself is an Eldritch Location that appears to have a will of its own and manipulates the students to feed on their misery.
  • It's possible that the rebuilt Scholomance where the series ends will play the trope more straight, since it's equipped with far better protections and guarded by Orion Lake.
• Accidental Suicide: Alchemy classes involve brewing antidotes to common poisons and toxins and testing them on yourself. If you don't get it right, you're liable to poison yourself instead (which, not-so-coincidentally, is great motivation to get it right). Ironically, the Scholomance being what it is, poisoning yourself in lab class is considered one of the more humane ways to die.
• The Ace: Orion is an almost-unstoppable monster-killing machine, in addition to being morally upstanding and an all-around Nice Guy. Deconstructed in that this results in absolutely everyone relying on him to the point where he has no friends and doesn't know how to be anything else. Deconstructed further in the second book, where he reveals that he's been a Blood Knight whose sole desire since childhood has been to kill mals, and even having opinions about how people feel about being saved came later. Deconstructed further in the third book, where we find out he's actually an Eldritch Abomination created by sacrificing an entire graduating class the year he was conceived.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Magic is powered by belief. Because mundanes don't believe in magic, mals aren't nearly as threatening around them. El was once attacked by a mal while attending a mundane school; her gym teacher killed it with a cricket bat. She remarks that she would never be able to do that.
• Affair? Blame the Bastard: Instead of getting rid of her "useless husband" (as El calls him), the wife of Liesel's father went after Liesel and her mother instead, injuring the latter so badly that she barely made it to her daughter's induction day before dying.
• After-School Cleaning Duty: Played With, since it's not imposed as a punishment (as there are no adults) but theoretically handed out to every student as part of the course load. As the place cares little who actually does that assignment either there's an unofficial "maintenance track" for students who pick up the scut-work for enclavers in exchange for alliances.
• Agonizing Stomach Wound: El gets one courtesy of Jack. Only the timely intervention of Orion and her mother's first aid healing charms keeps it from killing her outright. In true El fashion, she uses the aftermath to further her own interests. In this case, by subtly suggesting she and Orion just lost their virginity to each other.
• Alchemy Is Magic: Alchemy is one of the three main tracks at the Scholomance, with dedicated labs and supplies. While all students take an alchemy class every year, only those going for the alchemist-track take the more advanced classes and spend more than the required amount of time in the labs. As the labs, much like the workshops for Shop Class, are frequent hiding places for mals, there's no point in going for the alchemist-track unless you have an affinity for it.
• Allergic to Evil: Gwen Higgins is extremely sensitive to malia; one of the reasons why she refused to ever join an enclave is because she can sense the immense amount of malia that is used to build modern enclaves, something that physically sickens her. Her daughter El has a similar sensitivity, if to a lesser degrees thanks to the nature of her affinity.
• All of the Other Reindeer: El's powers give off some kind of aura that appears to make her feel wrong—mumdanes naturally dislike her without really knowing why, and wizards think it marks her as an incompetent maleficer. It would be Bullying a Dragon, but she takes pains not to use her Person of Mass Destruction powers and nobody knows about them.
• Alpha Bitch:
  • Chloe is briefly set up as one, but it soon turns out that she's a perfectly nice person who just never thought about the privilege she derives from being born into a powerful enclave.
  • Liesel is a closer example in the second book. While El quickly realizes her intentions are good and that she's highly intelligent and motivated, she's not nice or easy to get along with.
  • Myrthe Christopher from the Santa Barbara enclave wants to be one, but her one attempt to throw her weight around is quickly shut down.
• Ambiguous Ending:
  • At the end of the first book we are left uncertain if the plan to fix the scouring equipment worked, saving the graduating class, or if it failed and only succeeded in riling up the mals, dooming the graduating class and potentially endangering the entire school in the year to come. Not to mention El receives a letter from her mother warning her to keep away from Orion, without any further details. The second book reveals not only did it work, Patience and Fortitude ate everything that survived the mortal flame before trying to eat each other as well, making the Scholomance almost entirely mal-free except for the larval ones that were already in the school proper.
  • And then at the end of the second book Orion pushes El through the portal to save her, leaving him behind to face Uncertain Doom.
  • The third book resolves a lot more, but still leaves us in the dark about the future of both the enclave system and El and Orion's relationship. Though the latter is justified as they're both still 18.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's unclear when exactly Fortitude was absorbed by Patience. The only certain thing is that it and Patience turned on each other after the scouring machines at the end of the first book wiped out all the mals in the Graduation Hall, and that it was attacked at some point near the beginning of The Golden Enclaves, which is what weakened the wards of the London enclave enough to allow another maw-mouth slip in and attack the wizards who lived there. El initially suspects that Fortitude is still in the process of being eaten and absorbed by Patience at the beginning of the third book due to feeling two maw-mouths trying to absorb her when she was trying to rescue Orion. However, the later revelation that Orion is a maw-mouth suggests he was the second maw-mouth and that Fortitude was already absorbed by Patience, who subsequently took its place as one of the anchors for London. The resulting attacks on Patience are therefore what damaged London, not Fortitude. This is supported by the fact that El never actually sees Fortitude at any point during that confrontation; she just assumed it was there due to feeling a second maw-mouth, still unaware that Orion was one at the time.
• America Saves the Day: In a sense. After the London enclave fell into disarray during the aftermath of World War II, the New York enclave took over management of the school and is responsible for the overhaul of the cafeteria, allowing the students to eat actual food instead of the nutritious and watery slurp they ate before. It's no doubt part of the reason they're considered the most powerful enclave in the world in the present.
• And I Must Scream: When a maw-mouth consumes someone, their bodies are dissolved into its biomass, leaving only their eyes and mouth on its surface, and their minds last as long as the maw-mouth lives. Victims can be targeted with communications spells but can only send incoherent screams in reply.
• Anti-Climax: After nearly four years of training and preparing for graduation, the seniors of El's class discover that the graduation hall is completely empty, having been scoured clean after the climax of book 1. Subverted in that it doesn't remove the danger, but shifts the climax to a proactive mission rather than one of pure survival.
• Apocalypse Maiden:
  • El. If she were to ever lose control and go off her diet of strict mana, she'd do things too horrible to describe. She's a downplayed example, however; Deepthi reveals that only ever happened in the timelines where she was found by Ophelia.
  • Orion, who is the true Apocalypse Maiden that El is destined to stop. As a half-maw-mouth wizard, he is the most powerful mal in existence. Once he realizes his true nature, he starts losing control of his Horror Hunger, and it is outright stated that had he been allowed to continue as he was, he would've ended up destroying the entire magical world in the process of trying satiate his appetite.
• Artificial Outdoors Display: When the gym was first built by the Kyoto enclave over a hundred years ago, it was in the image of a peaceful cherry blossom garden that stunned all the visitors from the other participating enclaves who were surveying its construction right before the first official class was due to be inducted. The display fell into complete disrepair after maintenance was cut back and left to the students, with all the plants dead and the colors washed out, making the the entire area look decrepit. El restores it to its original appearance in the second book, traumatizing three-fourths of the school and making it the perfect hunting ground for mals to prey upon unsuspecting freshmen, the only students not experienced enough to realize that hanging out there is a terrible idea.
• Awesome, but Impractical: El's affinity is for death and destruction, which the school is more than happy to nurture and indulge. This does lead to certain drawbacks when she's trying to do more mundane things, such as find spells to clean her room or create water from thin air.
• Baby as Payment: A variation happens in the third book. It's revealed that El's mother and father tried to summon the Golden Stone sutras while they were students themselves. They were so desperate, however, that they left the payment for summoning them open... and as El herself muses, "[Gwen] didn't even know she had a daughter to pay with." While El lived, the horrible dark powers inflicted upon her are the "payment" enacted for summoning the sutras. Rather than being consumed, Gwen doomed her daughter to a life of destruction. However: it's later clarified that Gwen and Arjun didn't just want the sutras - they wanted a means to make the world better, and El is that means. Her father's death and her mother's grief were the payment that gifted El the power to help rebuild things better than before.
• Bad Bedroom, Bad Life: With no friends or connections in Magical Society and all her own limited resources dedicated to staying alive, El's dorm room has the bare minimum of furnishings, zero decorations, a recurring mal infestation, and an uncovered hole into the Void for one wall.
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: Downplayed. El is usually very rude to Orion, so when she finally acts nice for a change, he assumes she must be mad at him.
• Bad Powers, Good People: El, with the help of her mother, has gone to great lengths to avert the other trope, to the point where it practically defines her as a person, as much as it chafes sometimes.
• Balance Between Good and Evil:
  • According to the Principle of Balance, anything magical that upsets things too much will cause a countering effect. A coven of evil wizards kills a thousand of their classmates? The next year an evil wizard slaying hero is born. An unparalleled beacon of purity and goodness is selflessly helping all who come to her? Her daughter is prophesied to cause mass destruction and havoc. El notes in the second book that the fact her father heroically died to get her pregnant mother out probably didn't help matters either.
  • This trope is completely turned on its head when it's revealed El was born in response to Orion: specifically, Orion is a Living Weapon created by his mother using the sacrifice of hundreds of students from the Scholomance, and El is the wizard that the universe ensured was born to eventually stop him when he lost control. Despite her destructive affinity, it is only in the worst timelines that El actually turned evil and became the maleficer she always feared becoming; otherwise, she was always destined to be The Hero, not Orion.
• Balance of Power:
  • A fairly standard one. To wit:
    • Type A is represented by the New York enclave, which has been the dominant power in the magical world since roughly World War II after they took over the maintenance of the titular school from the London enclave.
    • Type B is represented by the Shanghai enclave, which has been gradually rising to prominence and power ever since it was restored forty years ago by Li Shanfeng.
    • Type C are the majority of the enclaves of the western world, who are primarily allies of the New York enclave, while Type D are the eastern enclaves, many of which were sponsored by the Shanghai enclave and are thus their allies.
    • Technically, there is no 'E', as there aren't enough independent enclaves to tip the balance towards either of the two, though that position can easily be fulfilled by a once-in-a-generation talent like Orion or El, who are both powerful enough to destroy enclaves entirely on their own given enough mana.
  • The balance of power between the New York enclave and the Shanghai enclave becomes a major plot point during the second book, as the latest allocation for seats at the Scholomance is coming up and everyone predicts a major power struggle between both enclaves over it. The downfall of the Bangkok enclave doesn't help, since an event like that usually precipitates an enclave war with people dying on both sides, though that is only if another enclave is responsible — and as Bangkok was an ally of Shanghai, if an enclave is responsible, they would've only done it with New York's tacit support. As a result, El finds herself targeted by the Shanghai enclavers for most of the book, who mistakenly believe she's been secretly tied up with New York for all her years in the Scholomance and that once she's gotten out, she'll join up with them and end up killing all of their families in the upcoming war.
• The Bard: Aadhya, who's building an elaborate magical instrument, and who acts as the face of the Trio when they need to make a deal.
• Barrier Warrior: Clarita has developed her own spell for shielding a group of people. Doubly impressive because it's a technical masterpiece and coming up with new spells at all is exceedingly rare.
  • Alfie in the second book also qualifies. His "spell of refusal," which he developed himself, is selectively permeable, to the point where it can keep out poison gas while still letting in oxygen.
• Battle Couple: Pretty much every couple that forms at the Scholomance, out of necessity. El and Orion especially.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Rather than start a fight with the horde of ravenous mals in the Graduation Hall, the students quietly walk in and start fixing the scouring engine. It buys them a fair bit of extra time before the mals overcome their confusion and attack.
• The Beautiful Elite: At least in the Scholomance, Enclavers are easy to distinguish on sight. They'll be the ones who are well fed, well rested, bathe consistently, and wear clothes that actually fit rather than making do with whatever they can scrounge. Usually seen surrounded by a crowd of hangers on/human shields.
• Because You Were Nice to Me:
  • Inverted. Orion starts hanging out with El because she's the only person who isn't nice to him. Given the intense pressure the guy constantly feels from all the fawning adulation of his peers, it's understandable.
  • Also, El with Aadhya and Liu, who also spent most of school wary of and avoidant of her, but who were also some of the very few people who weren't hostile and would trade favors fairly. When El's star begins rising she extends some largess to them as her closest-thing-to-allies, and they become friends.
• Beneath Notice: The best way to make it to Valedictorian is to make sure nobody knows you're going for Valedictorian, so that way you can work without fear of sabotage. Clarita manages this by acting as unassuming as possible, wearing shabby clothes, and taking the occasional maintenance shift to make it look like she's going for the maintenance track. Liesel similarly avoids sabotage by acting like a flirty bimbo and cozying up to enclave kids.
• Best Friends-in-Law: Chloe's father (an indie kid) and her maternal uncle (an enclaver) were allies when they attended the Scholomance together. Her uncle introduced her dad to his sister after they made it out alive, leading to their marriage.
• The B Grade: Inverted in the second book. El is furious when she gets an A+ in her independent study, because she perceives it as the school throwing in her face how much time she wasted focusing on her sutras rather than working on her other school work and her strategy for graduation like she was supposed to. When she later gets a prize for it at the end of the semester, it's practically rubbing salt into the wound.
• Big Applesauce: The city of New York gets a lot of focus in this series. Their enclave is the most powerful in the world, two of the main characters are from that enclave, and a third lives near it and has made it clear that is the enclave she would like to join the most.
• Big Man on Campus: Orion, at least as he's introduced. It soon becomes clear that despite everyone counting on him for protection, he has no real friends. This combination has turned him into a guilt-ridden child soldier with nascent PTSD.
• Bigotry Exception: After realizing she really does hate enclaves, El is almost consistently rude to most of the enclavers in the school except for Orion and later Chloe. She does loosen up later on in The Last Graduate after some Character Development, though she still keeps her low opinion of enclaves in general.
• Bizarrchitecture: The Scholomance's layout is only possible because it was constructed in a pocket dimension. Notable features include floors spaced a 15-minute walk apart, plumbing and air vents wildly miss-sized for their apparent needs, and walls and ceilings made of a featureless void that drives those who enter it mad.
• Black Comedy: The series wrings a lot of twisted, dry humor of having students die so horribly so often.
• Black Magic: While Mana is created through personal effort, malia is magic power drained from something else's life force. Wizards can get away with stealing a bit of energy from plants and insects, but the psychic taint from killing "anything complicated enough to have feelings about it" for a bigger boost causes maleficers to go Drunk on the Dark Side and eventually rots them alive.
• Blessed with Suck: Many of the stragglers at the Scholomance are actually perfectly competent wizards, but with strong affinities for things that won't help them and their allies survive the run through the Graduation Hall. El cites water weaving as an example—great for managing the sewage lines of an enclave, not-so-great for taking out a million different mals trying to bite off your head at the same time.
• Blob Monster: The maw-mouths are gigantic, amorphous masses of flesh, covered with the stolen eyes and mouths of their victims. They're by far the most feared type of mal because they're notoriously hard to ward against, just shy of impossible to harm, they can easily draw people in with their pseuodopods, and the people they absorb are trapped, alive, forever.
• Blood Knight: Ever since he was a kid all Orion has ever wanted to do is kill mals. He is perhaps the only non-maleficer to ever think being at the Scholomance was fun.
• Blood Magic: A common strategy for people who plan to go onto the maleficer tracker for the Scholomance instead of doing it ad hoc is to use their weight allowance to bring a bag of small animals like hamsters or mice and sacrifice them on a schedule to have a regular stream of malia while also minimizing the amount of psychic taint they might receive. This is Liu's original strategy at the start of the series, helped by the fact that she had an affinity for animals that allowed her to keep her sacrifices alive for constant malia use. After she goes clean, she stops using the mice for malia and instead makes them into familiars for herself and her friends.
• Boarding School of Horrors: The Scholomance manages it without having any teachers or bullies, trapping students in a years-long fight for their lives without any supervision or support beyond what they can get from each other. The kids hate the place so much that when they make up a plan to use it to get rid of the vast majority of the mals in the world and then it offers itself as extra material, they have absolutely no issue tearing it to pieces.
• Body Horror: Maw-mouths are bloblike masses of bloody, formless flesh covered in the eyes of all the wizards they've ever eaten. In The Golden Enclaves, the horror ramps up as El finds out how they're made: They're created by literally crushing a wizard into a bloody pulp while using enchantments to keep them alive, no matter what.
• Bookends: The series starts off with Orion saving El from a soul-eater, and them bickering over it. The last book ends with Orion saving El from a tiny digester, and once again, they playfully bicker over it.
• Book Smart: Every single student that is going for Valedictorian has to be academically competent to an extraordinary level. Whereas everyone else tries to go for easy classes whenever possible and focus on whatever strategy they have going for graduation, Valedictorian candidates are not only taking the hardest classes possible but also getting perfect marks in them, in addition to completing as much extra credit as they can to one-up their competition.
• Brick Joke: Early on, El complains about Orion saving her for the second time, but says it would be alright if he had done it "some really extraordinary number of times - about 13 or so". Guess how many he's up to by the end of the book?
• Cast from Hit Points: Some wizards will burn through their health to produce the needed mana in a crisis situation and the recovery for it is much like that of a long-term injury. Distinct from using other peoples' health to produce mana, which is malia.
• Cast from Lifespan: Using any significant amount of malia degrades the wizard's body, so most people who go full Evil Sorcerer don't live very long before they rot away from the inside.
• Cast from Stamina: Not mana itself but the ability to manipulate mana is tied to stamina which is somewhat linked to one's physical fitness but also native ability. Overdrawing at the bank can lead to heart attacks and permenant tremors.
• Central Theme:
  • People aren't good or evil, they're just people, and regardless of who they are or where they come from, they can make good choices and bad choices. El starts the series hating enclavers for being powerful, privileged, and ignorant of the plight of independent wizards, but she meets lots of enclavers and, talking to them, comes to realize that most of them aren't malicious and that they're fully capable of reaching out to, and even wanting to help, indie wizards. They also have their own lives, hopes, and dreams, and El realizes that, enclaver or not, every student of the Scholomance deserves a chance to lead the life they want. Throughout the series, she meets lots of people, immediately develops a preconceived notion of them as "good" or "bad," and ends up with her initial assessment dismantled in one way or another.
  • This is especially clear with Orion's mother, Ophelia, the founder of the modern Shanghai enclave, Li Shanfeng, and even El's great-great-grandmother Deepthi: Deepthi spoke the prophecy, running the risk that the family would kill the child, because it was the only action she could take that would keep El from falling into Ophelia's clutches and becoming truly evil. Li Shanfeng created lots of enclaves despite knowing the costs, but El realizes he decided that a handful of sacrifices to save the lives of many more people probably seemed like a good trade to him. Ophelia, meanwhile, is the closest thing the series has to an antagonist, an Abusive Parent who willingly turned her son into a Humanoid Abomination to exert power over the other enclaves... but who did so to encourage cooperation and prevent wars, which El admits is a goal fairly similar to her own. Orion even forgives his mother for what she did to him, and El has to accept that forcing him to hate his mother won't help anything. Best stated by El's mother, Gwen Higgins, who is fond of saying that there's no such thing as "good people" or "bad people": Calling people "bad people" makes it too easy to think of them as monsters instead of people, and calling people "good people" makes it too easy to excuse their actions when they do something wrong.
• Chekhov's Classroom: The entire point of the Scholomance. Not only does it teach young wizards the skills they need to deal with constant mal attacks, but it funnels the mals into a small enough space that the truly horrible ones can't get through.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • El mentions in passing that there were supposed to be scouring machines in the Graduation Hall, but they broke after about 5 minutes and were never repaired. Fixing them becomes the only hope for getting any seniors through graduation after Orion's heroism goes horribly right.
  • The honeypot spell in the second book. Chloe brings it up as a way to draw in mals that Orion can kill for mana near the beginning of the second book, but after numerous failures the group gives up and tries to find an alternative. It later provides the inspiration for Liu's plan to help the Scholomance "protect" the world's wizarding children: by drawing out mals through the induction portals used to send the students home after Graduation Day, trapping them within the school, and then destroying the school itself and sending it into the void.
  • El's spell to set off a supervolcano makes a few appearances in The Last Graduate as well. First to compel a cease fire between two groups of enclavers, and again at the end when its how they plan on destroying the school.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In the first book, El mentions that a band of indie punk wizards have been mooching off the London enclave by taking residence in the enclave's lining using some of its old lost entrances from World War II. The leader of these wizards, Yancy, shows up in the third book and helps El and Liesel escape London after some members of the enclave council try to put El under their thrall as part of their political games.
• Chekhov's Skill: El discovers an extremely rare spell to convert matter from one phase to another with minimal mana costs. This later becomes vital for fixing the broken staircase that's been letting in powerful mals.
• The Chessmaster: The Scholomance itself spends months if not years manipulating El into a position to save nearly the entire student body.
• Chest Monster: Ubiquitous, both the shapeshifting variety and the kind that like to hide in chests. Although most of the shapeshifting ones seem to prefer turning into chairs.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Orion suffers hard from this, recklessly throwing himself into danger to protect everyone around him regardless of long-term consequences to himself, his friends, and basically everyone else. In the second book El gets hit by it too, though she's much more sour about it.
• The Clan: Large, independent wizarding families unattached to an enclave. Sometimes this is because they intend to build their own enclaves, like Liu's family; other times it's because they don't like any of the potential offers and elect to keep their autonomy instead. El's paternal family, the Sharmas, are one such family; they were all invited to join the Mumbai enclave as a unit but refused because the enclave wasn't strict-mana like they were.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Magic requires a fairly strong expectation that it will work to be used reliably. As you might imagine, trying to use magic around mundanes is a losing prospect. The only bright side is that this also applies to the supernatural abilities of mals.
• Cliffhanger: The Last Graduate ends with Orion throwing El through the gates so he can face down Patience by himself.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder:
  • El's need to fill in for Orion's badly atrophied sense of self-preservation skirts this level, especially after the revelation that he has been aggravating the mal incursions.
  • It gets even more pronounced in the second book when he falls so far behind in his classes that even the school starts to get annoyed with how little effort he's putting into his assignments.
  • Liesel and Aadhya take over this role for El in the third book, when she's too preoccupied with various crises to figure out mundane things like air travel.
• Cold Equation: The Scholomance is essentially a massive triage operation that sacrifices approximately three-fourths of the student body to mals so enclave children and the best and brightest (and luckiest) independent wizard children can survive and live, the latter so they can be used for their services by the enclaves and provide their own children as fodder when it's the next generation's turn to attend. El outright says in the first chapter of the first book that they're not all meant to survive the school, and that Orion disrupting the status quo by saving so many people is going to eventually bite them in the ass. She's correct—Orion's Chronic Hero Syndrome starves the horde of mals down in the Graduation Hall so much that they're riled up enough to try and break down the wards that keeps them out of the rest of the school just for the sake of a meal.
• Commune: El and her mother Gwen live with mundanes in a rural New Age commune where Gwen can experience nature and offer free healing. The others aren't any paragons of moral purity, since they deliberately ignored a very young El when they heard her screaming in an emergency, but El generally thinks well enough of the place.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: This is how the series starts and is a recurring theme throughout. Oddly enough, it actually helped El's and Orion's friendship get started since it was clear from the start she wasn't interested in cozying up to him just for a bit of extra safety.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Students get so resigned to the Scholomance's inescapable dangers that it doesn't disrupt the lunch hour to have a mortally wounded senior bleed out at a cafeteria table. Most show no interest in the lives of people outside their own clique, but they'll quickly turn on anyone who actively preys on the others through malia or poaching. It's deconstructed in the second book, after El accidentally repairs the gym and turns it back into its original design of a peaceful Kyoto Cherry Blossom garden. Being in such a nice, normal place and knowing it's not real after being stuck in the Scholomance for years traumatizes everyone except the freshmen and Orion, causing them to either break down crying, flee the gym en masse, or both.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Justified in regards to El. Because she wants to limit collateral damage and her affinity makes it difficult for her to learn small- and medium-scale spells that use more reasonable amounts of mana, El has a harder time than most dealing with the small and (usually) singular threats that the average Scholomance student faces on a daily basis. It's easier for her to deal with larger and more widespread threats (such as armies) because there's more room for her to cut loose.
• Convicted by Public Opinion: Justified. Because There Are No Adults, there is no actual rule system in place beyond whatever traditions and conventions that have been developed and passed down to the students over the years. The only real way to sufficiently 'punish' someone for whatever 'crime' they committed is to convince almost all the students to side against the 'guilty' and mete out the appropriate penalty. Considering that most of the children are operating on a Darwinistic and survivalist mentality, the only times this happens is when the student(s) in question has done something that is, or proves them to be, a legitimate threat to everyone, not just a portion of the school.
• Cool House: Enclaves can take almost any form their inhabitants desire, without being limited by the constraints of mundane physics. It's then Subverted to a degree, as they're packed to the gills with wizards and they have to use all their physics defying tricks just to make it feel roomier than an over crowded college dorm.
• The Corruption: Malia can become this if not used sparingly. There's nothing wrong with cheating a little (such as taking malia from an anthill), and even dabbling maleficers like Liu can keep their wits and eventually go clean if they put in enough effort. For those who fully commit, however, the accumulated damage, physically, mentally, and magically, will become so great that's impossible to reverse and ultimately lead to them rotting alive.
• Crafted from Animals: Magical artificing sometimes uses mal remains, some of which need to be harvested with special spells. It's mentioned that sirenspider parts make good musical instruments, but it's unclear to what extent they're specifically useful and to what extent it's the students needing to scavenge whatever supplies they can get. The second book mentions that the ability to use mal remains as crucial components is rare.
• Cram School:
  • The Scholomance, as you'd expect. Subverted in that the school doesn't care whether you cheat, as long as the work gets done.
  • The school is an interesting take on this trope in that while it doesn't care who does the work and that it's not important to get particularly high grades unless you're going for valedictorian, it still expects you to pass your classes. If you don't, your work attacks you (either killing you or giving you a major injury) and you're stuck doing remedial work to make up for it. And woe to those who fail their assignments in their senior year, as it's practically a death sentence.
• Crapsack World: A huge percentage of students who go to the Scholomance never come back out. Yet wizards regularly send their children in there anyway, because all the alternatives are worse. Interestingly, it's only crapsack for the wizards—mundanes are more or less unaffected by the slavering hordes of monsters, since they don't believe in them.
  • There are strong shades of it being A World Half Full or even brighter in the second book especially, as El's Character Development forces her to care more about people and as the students, given more breathing room in a relatively non-awful year and therefore the chance to look beyond their own survival, become much readier to look out for each other, even if that is ultimately still serving their own self interest.
• Crazy Enough to Work: Everyone agrees that Liu's idea of using a honeypot to draw in all the mals in the world to the school, and then destroying the school right after, is completely insane. "Insane", however, doesn't mean it won't work, which is why nobody immediately crosses it off the list when it's proposed. Ultimately, when nobody can think of an alternative, her plan is the one they go with, and sure enough, it works.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • Any strong affinity has the potential to become this, but Galadriel's takes the cake. Hers is so geared toward dark magic that she can't take the normal shortcuts everyone else has access to without risking killing everyone around her. She's also geared towards spells meant to destroy armies; while she can cast such spells far more efficiently than most people, they're still so expensive that she usually can't use them at all against the smaller-scale dangers she actually finds herself in.
  • Liu theorizes in the second book that this gift results in El not just having a hard time getting small spells from the Scholomance; she actually has trouble getting them to work at all. It explains why, for example, El takes longer than the others to bond with her mouse familiar.
  • In the first book, a senior from China, Wu Wen, is in the top twenty students of his class despite flunking practically every class he had that wasn't shop or maths. This is because his artifice projects are so spectacular that they manage to pull up his grades high enough to cover the deficit.
• Crippling the Competition: The competition for Valedictorian is so fierce that back in the old days, candidates were willing to resort to murder to take out their rivals. The school remedied this by having the rankings only posted at the end of the first semester of a class's senior year so that way none of those in the running would know who was at the front of the pack until it was too late to matter. However, while that stopped most of the killing, it didn't prevent candidates from regularly sabotaging each others' work.
• The Dark Arts: Pulling malia, aka mana contained in living things. The more complex and self-aware the organism, the greater the potential source of power, the harder it is to drain, and the greater the risk of rotting from the inside out and dying horribly. Almost everyone "cheats" a bit—patches of grass, anthills, even objects made from wood can give a jolt of power. El's affinity for destructive magic is so strong that she can siphon another wizard her age dry and start in on anyone linked via mana sharing with the same effort and preparation most would need to clear out an anthill. In addition, pulling malia, even tiny amounts, aside from damaging oneself, also will inevitably create mals if it's done enough. As the human (and thus wizard) population increases, so too does the amount of this mild cheating, and the number of mals born.
• The Dark Side: Anyone who 'cheats' and uses malia risks falling into further and further depravity, until they're completely warped in wickedness and begin shriveling up. This is the reason why El can't use so much as a whiff of malia, as her affinity for The Dark Arts is so strong that even the smallest taste has the potential to send her over the deep end.
• Deadly Bath: Defied by the students, who only use the showers when they have backup standing guard against mals. El would rather stink for a week than risk her life showering alone.
• Death Course: The graduation ceremony from the Scholomance involves running through a long hall filled with monsters. Normally, only half of those who make it through all four years to that point survive (or rather ~80+% of the Enclaver kids survive, and rather fewer of everyone else).
• Defusing the Tyke-Bomb: Gwen has spent most of her daughter's life teaching her how to be a moral person and not abuse her natural affinity for dark magic. So far it seems to be working.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Maw-mouths do have Too Many Mouths, but the redundant name likely has more to do with the fact that every wizard is rightly terrified by the thought of them.
• Destructive Savior: Orion has the bad habit of acting before considering the consequences of his actions, especially how inconvenient the aftermath will be. Given that swift action is usually justified to save lives, no one is too upset about the clean up... except when he does it in the lunch line. However, he's also indirectly responsible for the climactic conflict of the first book. Turns out he's been so effective in his time at the Scholomance that the school population is getting above capacity and kids are starting to go hungry. To make things even worse, this also applies to the mals. Without a steady trickle of mana to sate them between graduations, the larger mals are starting to come up themselves and wreak havoc.
• Detect Evil:
  • All wizards have Supernatural Sensitivity that allows them to detect the auras of other wizards, with maleficers having particularly dark, ominous auras. Most maleficers can usually hide their auras from other wizards (unless they're neck-deep in malia and already rotting) and go about their lives with people none-the-wiser to what they are. However, someone with a strong affinity for dark magic, such as El, can bypass that and sense them. That's how El is able to identify Jack Westing and Liu as maleficers, which caused her to avoid the former as much as she could without tipping him off to the fact that she knew what he was. Ironically, this also works against El; because her affinity gives her such a strong, ominous aura, most of the school was under an assumption she was an incompetent maleficer that was unable to hide what she actually was.
  • El's mother Gwen also has the ability to detect malia usage, and it's implied that El's strong Supernatural Sensitivity is in part inherited from her. In the third book, El realizes this is part of why Gwen never joined an enclave — she could sense the immense amount of malia that is used to build modern enclaves every time she enters one, which is physically sickening to her. El herself has a similar reaction to such large amounts of malia, if not quite to the same extent.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Maw-mouths are one of the scariest mals of all. A group of ten adult wizards with months of preparation would be lucky to kill one after days of constant effort, and would almost certainly lose people. Prior to the beginning of the series, only one wizard is documented to have ever killed one, and it's later revealed that this is a lie and he never actually managed to kill it. Meanwhile, El takes one out by herself on the fly in under an hour, and that's just the start of her maw-mouth-killing career.
• Didn't Think This Through: The Hands of Death (or whatever they called themselves) from the year before Gwen Higgins' slaughtered their entire class on Graduation Day for a massive dose of power, which (obviously) allowed them to survive the run through the Graduation Hall. As lampshaded by El, it was "stupidly obvious" what they'd done, because they didn't even spare the enclave kids. Once the families of the other students figured out what happened, all twelve would-be maleficers were hunted down before Gwen could even graduate herself. Or at least, that's the official story...
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The enclave system is a clear analogy for economic and social inequality; as the books take place primarily in Scholomance, it's focused on how those inequities manifest in real-world education. Yes, everybody is going to the same school, but some are given benefits others are not. The enclavers are vastly better prepared due to generational wealth and training. This gives them a disproportionately high survival rate, to the point where some, like Chloe, think of mal attacks as something that mostly happens in the brochures.
  • A (perhaps) slightly more subtle analogy is the similarities between the enclave system and malia, and the exploitation of less powerful countries and peoples necessary for the luxuries of the developed world. No, enclavers don't directly use malia (i.e. exploit others for their life force); but they do ultimately exploit others, down to using lives of others' children as shields for their own to survive Scholomance. They're just able to do it at a remove that allows them to think they're doing nothing wrong—and indeed there's no necessary malice on their part; it is often simply a system most had no hand in building working as intended. This is why Gwen Higgins decided to be shot of the whole thing. El reflects in The Last Graduate how it's similar to why a bangle bought at a ridiculous markup made from metal mined by an indentured worker in a colonized country will never bring you inner peace.
    • The third book makes this more overt. The enclave system directly runs on malia, and while most enclavers don't know or didn't have a hand in it and are just trying to get by, allowing them to wash their hands of it...the ones at the top always know. They know, and often participate in it directly. The system itself depends on them doing it, magically compels the keeping of the worst secrets, and they are too bought into it to do otherwise, regardless of where they came from. This calls to mind people of different oppressed groups who manage to get rich often choosing to defend their own wealth and security, or even the system that oppressed them, rather than work to help others from their group in any way that would cost them their newfound privileges. El's work with the Golden Enclaves being slow going is also reminiscent of efforts to stall or fight climate change; mathematically the resources are there for everyone to have enough without putting out so much carbon, but those who use an outsized portion are resistant to the idea of it.
• Don't Ask, Just Run: In a variant, the instant Orion's attention moves over her shoulder during a conversation El casts the strongest defensive spell she has because something sneaking up behind you in the Scholomance is never good and normally fatal.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: If a student is not going for Valedictorian, then their main concern when it comes to their grades is doing well enough in their classes to pass so the school won't attack them and slam them with remedial work, but not so well that it eats into the time they're using to prepare their strategy for graduation. This is shown starkly with El, who is actually fairly intelligent and could get higher grades in her classes if she put in the effort, but has no reason to because she's not going for Valedictorian and because she's powerful enough on her own to get any allies she wants without having to use her grades as a point of reference. Instead, she focuses her attention on the classes where she's more likely to get spells for her affinity and does the bare minimum for the rest.
• Double Meaning: In the first book, El states that the school feeds on the students to keep itself running. She is speaking metaphorically—the school keeps itself running by using all the mana the students produce for it using their work to maintain its protections, along with helping maintain the Food Chain of Evil within its halls by having the mals snack on them from time-to-time. Unbeknownst to her, she is also speaking literally, as the Scholomance was created using the same methods to create a modern enclave, and its associated maw-mouth anchor, Patience, has been residing in the school and gnawing on its inhabitants since the start.
• The Dreaded:
  • While Orion isn't feared by his peers, he is feared by most mals to the point that they actively avoid him whenever they can. It's later revealed that this is because he's a maw-mouth, putting him at the top of the Food Chain of Evil.
  • While most people who spend enough time with El are unsettled by her, the India enclavers (particularly those from Mumbai) tend to avoid her as much as possible. While El is uncertain whether or not they know about the prophecy her great-great grandmother made about her, they know her family well enough to know that if the Sharmas weren't willing to take her in, it had to be for a very good reason. She doesn't become feared by the rest of the school until her senior year after she repairs the gym, which is when everyone finally learns how powerful she actually is.
  • Ophelia Rhys-Lake, Orion's mother, who is a maleficer so powerful, so ruthless, and so manipulative she terrifies El, at this point the World's Strongest Man. She's so terrifying that Deepthi Sharma deliberately misspoke her prophecy about El to her entire family just to ensure that Gwen and El were put on the path that would protect them from Ophelia, and even after she's out of Scholomance and traveling the world saving it from maw-mouths with minimal effort, Deepthi advises her to never go to New York or confront Ophelia directly for fear of being talked around to her side.
  • Li Shanfeng, the Dominus of the Shanghai enclave. He is the only person Ophelia fears, as much as she can fear anything. As the most powerful and talented artificer in the world and the leader of the only enclave on the same standing as New York, Shanfeng is the only person who can create a weapon to counter Orion. That's why Ophelia makes him her primary target during the enclave war; with him gone, she is convinced she can carry on her plan to subjugate the world's enclaves unopposed.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • It's implied that some Scholomance students who aren't able to handle long-term residence in the school go over the Despair Event Horizon and commit suicide. That's why events such as Induction Day are so important; it's a reminder that there is someone waiting for them outside, so that's why they have to keep going.
  • Aadhya suspects her paternal grandfather committed suicide after his Safety Worst idea of protecting his family led to her older sister (who was only eight at the time) getting killed by a mal after she got sick of the restrictions and snuck out of the house to play.
  • Deepthi reveals to El that if her grandfather had gotten his hands on her, as his family had wanted when they heard the prophecy, he would've carried El up to a tall mountain peak and thrown them both off it, no doubt so he wouldn't have to live with the guilt and grief of having to kill his only living grandchild, no matter why he had to do it. Understandably, when he finds out the "dark" prophecy surrounding his granddaughter was actually worded as it was to ensure El's safety and that he would've killed her for nothing, he nearly disowns Deepthi in a rage and tries to leave the family. It's only El finally reconciling with him that stops him, but he doesn't forgive Deepthi, at least not for some time.
  • This is what would've been Arjun's fate, had Deepthi given him a warning that allowed him to evade his death. Because no matter what path he chose, he would've always fallen in love with Gwen, and his survival would only ever come at the cost of Gwen and El's lives. He would've never stood for that, and would've eventually gone back to the Scholomance to get eaten by Patience anyway so he could be Together in Death with them. This is why Deepthi ultimately gave him no warning and allowed him to go to his death: so that way his lover and child would be able to live in his stead.

E to I

• Earn Your Happy Ending: El's paternal family ends up being Good All Along, and the prophecy that she would destroy all the enclaves had the hidden twist that she would then build them back better than before. She becomes the first slayer of maw-mouths, and with the help of her great-grandmother, she can use this and the Golden Stone sutras to help slowly fix the world's enclaves. The Scholomance is brought back from the void with its own Golden Stone foundation, becoming a true shelter for wizard children. El and all her allies use the sutras to Spirit Bomb away Orion's maw-mouth half, saving his life and helping him become the Scholomance's new protector. And, of course, it's heavily implied that El and Orion will live the rest of their lives happily together.
• Easily Forgiven: Liesel answers El's insult with a potentially deadly Booby Trap, but changes her mind at the last moment and pulls El to safety. El lets it slide, musing that being angry enough to kill but held back by conscience is very relatable.
  • In The Golden Enclaves Orion is very quick to forgive his mother for the whole "turning him into a human/mal-hybrid Human Weapon" thing. El is considerably more angry about it than he is and has to be repeatedly talked down from confronting her on his behalf, both to respect his autonomy and for her own safety.
• Eating Lunch Alone: In a school where cafeteria seating arrangements are literally a matter of life and death, nobody is allowed to do this unless they've committed a truly heinous crime.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Liu's minor use of malia is implied to have had this effect. When she's healed of its influence, characters notice that highlights appear in her black hair and her complexion gets more tan (and less undead). And then that long, lovely hair starts tangling, three years of bad hair days all at once.
• Eldritch Abomination: An actual category of mal. Thankfully, they're mostly mental effects and don't have much in the way of a physical presence to back up the incomprehensible horror they generate.
• Embarrassing First Name: El is short for Galadriel. As someone who grew up in a British hippy commune, she's heard all the jokes.
  Just think about the 'love me and despair' version.
• Empire with a Dark Secret: The foundation stones of every modern enclave are anchored to their own personal maw-mouths. And every time someone wants to create or expand an enclave, such as adding a new entrance, they need to create a new maw-mouth, which involves taking a strict-mana wizard and essentially crushing them into one. In addition, even if that maw-mouth can be destroyed—which almost no wizard can do anyway—whatever it's anchoring goes with it.
• Energy Donation: Wizards can transfer their mana to each other voluntarily; enclavers use "power sharers" to pool and distribute their spare mana. When Orion thinks El is having a Heroic RRoD, he gives her a solid year's worth without warning, forcing her to burn off the excess with some quick magic.
• Entertainingly Wrong: People thought for years that El was an incompetent loser maleficer. In reality, she's strict-mana, the daughter of renowned healer Gwen Higgins, and quite possibly the most powerful student the school has ever seen and the most powerful wizard in history.
• Equivalent Exchange: The basic rule of magic in the setting. No spell can be cast without something being spent in return, and any attempt to get around this, even after the fact, can cause the spell to come undone.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • The first time we meet El, she's trying to find a simple spell to clean her floor, instead receiving hundreds of spells for laying waste to her enemies.
  • Another one some time later, in-universe for both El and Orion: Even when dealing with an Agonizing Stomach Wound and facing down a maleficer egging her on, Galadriel Higgins will not use malia to save her own skin.
• Everyone Can See It: In the second book, almost all of El's friends are aware that Orion and her aren't actually dating. However, just because they aren't dating doesn't mean they don't want to, which Aadhya and Liu frequently point out to El whenever they feel like teasing her.
• Everything Is Trying to Kill You: Between the horde of mals and the school's seemingly deliberate efforts to prey on the unwary, it's no wonder three quarters of those who enter die. And it's still better than being a child wizard outside of Scholomance, where your survival rate is perhaps five percent.
• Evil Is Easy:
  • Mana requires personal effort; malia only requires something else's Life Energy. Most wizards "cheat" at least a little bit, draining the occasional shrub or anthill for a quick boost; on the other end of the scale, a a dedicated maleficer can work unmatched horrors with mass Human Sacrifice.
  • Building a Golden Stone enclave requires a lot of mana for not very much space, the casters can't utilize any malia at all and there are only a handful of people that can even do the ritual in the first place. On the other hand, efficient modern enclave construction spells are available at very reasonable prices and just require you to sign a magical NDA so you can't reveal that the final step requires a human sacrifice and generates a ravening undead horror.
• Evil Power Vacuum: As revealed in the second book, Patience and Fortitude stationing themselves at the doors of the Graduation Hall has one big benefit—they eat any new maw-mouths entering the school before they can get upstairs to attack the students. Therefore, when the two go missing after the scouring machines are repaired at the end of the first book, Alfie states it's only a matter of time before a new maw-mouth arrives, sets up shop in the Graduation Hall, and continues where they left off. A prediction that proves to be accurate to the letter when a small one shows up in the final chapter and nearly eats one of the seniors before El kills it.
• Evil Sorcerer: Anyone who specializes in pulling malia will inevitably end up as one. Not only is a maleficer's minds corrupted by the act of drawing malia, but making themselves the enemy of all other wizards tends to push them to ever darker acts in the pursuit of power. In the second book, El reveals that this doesn't stop people from going down this route anyway. The freshman handbook has warnings about it and even statistics^note about four to eight kids per class go down the maleficer track. However, few get very far as they usually don't plan and prepare for it like Liu and her family did for her; most usually do it out of desperation, like Prasong did after his enclave went down.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Aside from the extra mouths, maw-mouths are covered with the stolen eyes of the people they've absorbed.
• Familiar: Wizards bond animals as familiars by spending time with them and imbuing them with mana, after which they'll act independently on the wizard's behalf, and are apparently much clever and more insightful than normal animals. Liu does this with her mice when she swears off malia, and starts giving them to her friends. Gwen Higgins, meanwhile, is such a Friend to All Living Things that animals show up and volunteer as familiars now and then.
• Fan Disservice: An in-universe version; one student's mother told her to be wary of male students' "secret pet mal." To El's amusement (and mild exasperation) it seems to work; in fairness she wasn't terribly interested to begin with, but after hearing the phrase once, she can't even contemplate sex with another character who had indicated his attraction to her without having to fight down laughter, killing any chance her would-be suitor might have had. At least at the time. It comes back as a Brick Joke when El and Orion finally give in to the tension and start taking off each others' clothes; fortunately, he thinks she's laughing at how she can't get her belt undone.
• Fantastic Measurement System: Magical Society measures Mana in "lilim". Although any single wizard's mana generation and consumption are too unique to quantify, projects like the Scholomance demand enough mana from enough different sources that a unit of measurement can be averaged out, and thus relative contributions measured
• Fantasy Contraception: It's attempted but noted to be quite unreliable—because magic is so affected by belief, fearing that contraception won't work opens it up to not working.
• Fate Worse than Death: Getting eaten by a maw-mouth. No one's sure exactly what happens, but it's thought that the victims don't actually die, they just...give up after a while and stop screaming. "New" eyes blink and roll constantly; older ones stare blankly, glazed. New mouths, meanwhile, cry for help, while old ones mutter unintelligibly.
• First Day of School Episode: The end of the first book and the beginning of the second depicts "Induction", which is when the new freshmen are brought into the Scholomance via the induction spells and are welcomed by the older students.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • When the senior dorms are descending toward the Graduation Hall for El's graduation, something large obstructs the gears, causing a brief moment where the dorms stop moving while the gears work past it. Later in the chapter, the obstruction is revealed to be Patience, who had been hiding in the small opening between the dorms and the Graduation Hall to recuperate from the damage dealt to it by the scouring machines at last year's graduation.
  • During the rescue mission to save Liu, El and her friends encounter the Seventh Sage of Beijing, the founder of the Beijing enclave. He helps them by giving El a scroll that will take her to Liu, and the last thing he says before disappearing is: "I'm tired of demons in my house." Later, in that very same chapter, El learns that the creation of an enclave involves turning a strict-mana wizard into a maw-mouth.
• Food Chain of Evil: Mals don't have a problem eating each other and over time a fairly stable evil ecosystem has developed around the school. Normally, small mals that can get through holes in the school's wards will be responsible for most student deaths and act as the bottom layer of the food chain. Those mals then get eaten by larger ones, and so on and so on, until the mana eventually makes its way to the horde in the Graduation Hall. This slow but steady trickle of energy keeps the larger mals sated in between graduations when they can gorge themselves on the leaving students. This had been working... not well, but more or less stably for a few hundred years until Orion showed up and killed all the mals he could find. This eventually reaches its logical conclusion when a starved Patience eats the slightly smaller Fortitude, and again when Patience is revealed to have been eaten by Orion.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Despite the prime opportunity Orion's friendship offers her, El still can't find it in herself to be polite to the enclave kids and instead develops a reputation as an enclave-hater. Later on, this (along with a few other self-revelations) helps her realize that she actually doesn't want to join an enclave at all and that she legitimately hates them and everything they represent.
  • During the second book, Orion has a hard time finding any mals to hunt during the year, with all those who manage to get into the school from outside being quickly directed toward El by the Scholomance. This is the biggest sign that the mission to fix the scouring machinery at the end of the first book worked—the reason Orion can't find any mals to hunt is because there are barely any fully-grown ones left in the school, most of them having been killed by mortal flame produced by the newly-repaired machinery.
  • It's mentioned early on that many of the mals that exist today are the end-result of wizard experimentation, and that is why wizards now have a very dim view of breeding mals. As it turns out, maw-mouths are such a mal, being the direct byproduct of the spell that lays the foundation for modern enclaves.
  • The destruction of the Bangkok enclave happened a few weeks before the end of El's junior year. The first book, where El killed her first maw-mouth, takes place a few weeks before the end of her junior year. As confirmed in the third book, the two events are connected: the maw-mouth El killed was the one anchoring the sole foundation stone of the Bangkok enclave. When she killed it, she destroyed the foundation stone, and thus the enclave by accident.
  • In the first and second books, it's mentioned that the eastern enclaves are threatening to create their own Scholomance if they don't get a better allocation of seats during the next reallocation. During the climax of the third book, Shanfeng reveals that they've already collected the necessary mana needed to create it, and gifts it to El so she can use it to kill Orion's maw-mouth half and recreate him (and the Scholomance, which he was supporting after absorbing Patience) as a Golden Enclave.
  • Orion's status as a half-maw-mouth hybrid has been heavily foreshadowed since the beginning of the series
    • His ability to take the mana from the mals he slays and use it for himself is an affinity that no other wizard in the series has, both before and during their time in the Scholomance. Even El's affinity for mass destruction is something that's been seen before, if not quite to the same degree. That's because there's never been a maw-mouth/wizard hybrid like him before.
    • He is unable to control the amount of mana he can take from the New York mana pool, necessitating his fellow enclavers having to control the amount of access he has. This is because of his innate Horror Hunger nature. He cannot control the amount he can take because there is no amount that will ever be able to fully satisfy him.
    • His ability to distinguish ally from prey isn't completely reliable. Because they're all sources of mana for him in the end, so what they are to him doesn't really matter in the long run.
    • Up until he met El, he's only ever been concerned with hunting mals. While wizards are the preferred meal of choice, maw-mouths mostly snack on other mals both because they're plentiful and because they're far easier to get to than wizards.
    • He is never randomly attacked by any mal which isn't purely mindless. All intelligent mals avoid him unless they are starving, otherwise desperate, or trying to just get past him to softer targets. They all recognize his true nature as a maw-mouth and know they have no chance against him. Maw-mouths are at the very top of the Food Chain of Evil, and can only be really defeated/eaten by bigger, more powerful maw-mouths.
    • He never encounters another maw-mouth during the first two books. The moment he does at the end of the second book with Patience, he is immediately dumbstruck. Because he recognizes the same bone-deep hunger in Patience that he's felt all his life, and has finally realized what he truly is.
  • Early in the first book, El mentions that her paternal family, the Sharmas, came from an ancient Hindu enclave that had been destroyed during the Raj, and that they still keep many of the enclave's practices, such as being strict-mana. The third book reveals that their enclave was one of the original Golden Enclaves, and that it was her father's dream to rebuild the enclave for his family to live in that led to El's birth.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: Despite being in the same year at the Scholomance, El's parents Gwen and Arjun first met during their senior year. It only took them a few months into their relationship to decide that they were soulmates (Gwen falling pregnant with El may or may not have had something to do with this), and to emphasize how whirlwind the relationship was, they didn't even bother to exchange contact information before graduation, because "love would lead the way". Considering the nature of Gwen's magic, El is convinced love really would have led the way had they both made it out.
• Freshman Fears: Freshmen are the biggest casualties of any one year at the Scholomance (even shockingly easy years like in the second book). They're the weakest wizards in the school and the most numerous, making them the prime targets for mals; at the bottom of the social hierarchy, so most of the upperclassmen, even stragglers and losers, have no issues taking advantage of them; and aren't used to life at the Scholomance yet, so they don't have the in-built reflexes and survival skills that their older peers have already developed. Those who don't learn quick are gradually winnowed out until only those who have what it takes to at least make it to next year, if not all four years, are left.
• Friendless Background: El and Orion. It's just about the only thing they have in common, even if their reasons for it are very different.
• Friend to All Living Things:
  • El's mother, Gwen Higgins, is so kind to animals that she keeps picking up familiars by accident.
  • Liu managed to keep ten mice alive in the Scholomance for three years. El notes that Liu's animal affinity must have made it even more painful for her to pull malia from them, but when she goes clean, she starts to make them into Familiars.
• Game of Chicken: The eastern enclaves got the western enclaves who manage the Scholomance to add the Chinese-language track of general classes to the school and give them more Scholomance seats for their children to attend by threatening to create another Scholomance to compete with the current one. This is actually something that neither side wants, as there simply isn't enough indie wizard children to populate both schools and act as diversionary fodder without increasing the mortality rate of enclaver children. However, the threat had enough teeth that the Board of Governors relented and gave them what they wanted anyway.
• Gate Guardian: Patience and Fortitude flank the Scholomance's main gates and eat a large number of the mals that make it into the Graduation Hall each year. Without them to thin the horde, it's likely even more mals would get into the school than already do and even more students would die, both over the year and during graduation. Unfortunately, they're able to do this because they're two of the largest maw-mouths to ever exist and have no problem picking off any wizards who hove into their reach or try to come in to fix the school.
• Gayngst: Ibrahim and Yaakov. El realizes that the reason Ibrahim keeps sucking up to enclavers is because he and Yaakov both come from very conservative areas, neither of whom would accept their relationship. Enclaves tend to be more accepting of such relationships, so getting into one would mean they would be allowed to openly be a couple.
• Generation Xerox: Here's a story: a girl enters the Scholomance, and meets a boy that she shares an uncommon amount of similarities and interests with. She befriends him, and eventually ends up falling in love with him. Together, they begin dreaming of changing the magical world by resurrecting the Golden Enclaves. Then, on Graduation Day, just as they are about to start the rest of their lives together, the boy ends up sacrificing his life to save the girl from Patience. Now who does that remind you of — Gwen Higgins and Arjun Sharma, or their daughter El and Orion Lake?
• Genius Loci: While the exact degree of intelligence is up for debate, there is something in the school's design that lets it judge circumstances and change itself to suit the needs of the moment... however it might see them. As it turns out, however, it's not exactly as malevolent as it seems, as in the end it still seeks to fulfill the purpose it was originally built for: "to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world". And it's willing to do that, even if it means it'll be destroyed itself.
• The Ghost: All of the adult characters in the first two books are this. The reader learns about them from word-of-mouth and other sources, with the exception of El's mother Gwen, who gets more characterization thanks to El's memories of her. It isn't until the third book, when the main cast is finally out of the Scholomance and back in the wider world, that the adults play a larger role in the story.
• The Gift:
  • As explained in The Last Graduate, as insanely talented as both El and Orion are, they aren't actually all that special in terms of being gifted. People with gifts like theirs tend to appear once in a generation, as a counterbalance to whatever major event that happened the generation before. The only thing noticeable about them is how extreme their gifts are, and how they appeared in the same year as each other. There's even an official term for them, as revealed by Liesel in the third book: 'tertiary-order entities'.
  • The only other once-in-a-generation talent mentioned thus far is Li Shanfeng, the current Dominus of the Shanghai enclave. He's a powerful artificer with an affinity for large-scale construction, who got offers from every major enclave in the world before deciding to reject them all in favor of restoring his family's ancestral enclave. He's also the only known wizard to have killed a maw-mouth until El did it her junior year, and again her senior year. That later turns out to not be the complete truth: while he did do a significant amount of damage to the maw-mouth, he still wasn't strong enough, or perhaps willing enough, to kill it. In the end, he ended up using it to bring back the Shanghai enclave by replacing the core of "longing" that made up the maw-mouth with his family's own "longing", making it anchor Shanghai's new foundation stone. This is the only known instance of a modern-style enclave not needing a new maw-mouth to be created for it to have a foundation stone...but also meant the destruction of the San Diego enclave, whose foundation stone the maw-mouth had been originally anchoring.
  • The original creator of the Golden Stone sutras, Purochana, is speculated by El to be another tertiary-order entity like her. This is because the sutras can only be performed by a single wizard (not a group), who has an immense amount of power comparable to El's while still being strict-mana. That's basically why the sutras fell out of disuse and the modern enclave spells were created in their place; someone like El is born only once every several generations, if that.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • Orion's one-man quest to kill every mal he possibly can has two unintended consequences. First, the Scholomance operates with the expectancy of a sizeable student mortality rate and doesn't have the mana to provide adequate food for all the students with him saving so many, meaning some are starting to go hungry. Similarly, the mals aren't used to getting so few meals between graduations—either of students or of mals that are themselves better-fed on students—and are growing increasingly desperate to get into the school by whatever means necessary.
  • In a more light hearted example, there's El's attempts at social engineering. Early in the first book she comes up with the idea of parlaying Orion's apparent infatuation with her into an advantageous graduation alliance. In the end nothing really comes of it since she makes an alliance with her pre-existing acquaintances, and about all she manages to accomplish is to convince the student body that the two of them are screwing like rabbits convinced they're about to die and have to repopulate the Earth.
  • El's parents wanted the Golden Stone sutras for enclave-building badly enough to attempt summoning them without naming a price. El's father got eaten by a maw-mouth, El herself suffered a miserable childhood and survived a maw-mouth attack, and, after everything, El shows up at her mother's house with the Sutras, and Gwen takes it hard indeed.
  • The Scholomance was created with the intention of decreasing the mortality rate of child wizards. It did exactly that, causing a population boom that led to an increase in the rate of enclaves being built, and by extension, an increase in the political tensions between the eastern and western enclaves as they squabbled over the allocation of Scholomance seats. And that's not even getting into how the increase in enclaves led to an increase in the number of maw-mouths, which both sides have been lobbing at each other for the last several decades.
• Good All Along: In The Last Graduate, El spends half the series thinking that the Scholomance is out to either kill her or drive her into embracing The Dark Side (which means she ends up killing a lot of people), only to realize that it's trying to force her to save everyone in the only way it can.
• Good Is Not Nice: El is incredibly cranky and cynical, and so prone to self-sabotage she can't even pretend to be polite to enclave kids—but she also actively chooses, over and over, to be pure mana instead of using malia to make her life much easier. In book 2, she goes from caring only about herself to refusing to let any of her friends die, and then from there to refusing to let anyone in her year die. She eventually comes around to trying to fixing the Scholomance so kids don't die, period. In book 3, she goes out and tries to save the world—not from some evil external threat, but from itself, and the pettiness, shortsightedness, and greed of modern wizards.
• Grade Skipper:
  • Defied. While it's possible to graduate early, simply by being in the senior dorms when graduation starts, no one dares as senior year is when your powers really begin to bloom and you get your best classes, along with time to practice with the school's obstacle courses to help you survive your run through the Graduation Hall on Graduation Day. Not to mention, being fully-trained is also important to survive life outside the school, which is why kids are sent to the Scholomance in the first place. Even El realizes she's outclassed if not exactly outgunned when a couple of seniors confront he in the first book.
  • Played straight in The Last Graduate. As the plan to decrease the mal population in order to protect the world's wizarding children involves the school's destruction, that means everyone, not just the seniors, is required to graduate that year. The younger students are even allowed to go first, because in case things go wrong, they're the least likely to survive the incoming incursion of mals.
• Granola Girl: El's mother, Gwen Higgins, is a magical version of this - an all-loving pacifist with incredibly powerful healing magic and crystals that can store mana incredibly efficiently. She could easily get a seat in one of the powerful covens that rule the world, but doing so would be wrong, you see? Instead she lives in a commune with muggles and freely gives her healing to anyone who visits.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The creator of the modern enclave spells. Essentially all the conflict in the series can be traced back to their decision to create those spells (and by extension, maw-mouths), and selling them to the highest bidder with an in-built compulsion spell to make sure the masses never found out the secret.
• Growing Up Sucks: In addition to the normal unpleasantness of adolescence, sorcerer children have to contend with monsters that think they would make a delightful snack. This trope gets exploited by the Scholomance as a way of generating power.
• Gunboat Diplomacy: The enclave war in the third book is actually a trap engineered by Ophelia for all of the most powerful enclaves in the world, in both the east and the west. She intends to bring Orion into the war so he can slaughter the eastern enclaves in front of everyone, ally and enemy alike, and use the display to cow them all into doing what she wants.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Orion and El. He gleefully charges in close to rend mals apart at melee range and drain their energy to fuel his might. She is at least as powerful and far more versatile, but goes for ranged and area-effect horrifying slaughter when given the choice, and doesn't have his knack for draining mana from slain mals.
• Gym Class Hell: The gym only sees regular use in the second semester of every year, when half of it is transformed into a Death Course for the seniors to practice graduation runs with. Even though it's horrible, they endure it because it's the best way to synergize and solidify strategies for their alliances. Those students who manage to survive the actual run are often in the best shape of their lives when they make it out, simply because of how much they practice using the course.
• Had to Be Sharp:
  • Anyone who survives the Scholomance will be an industrious hard worker with a multitude of practical skills, and able to cope with general privation included but not limited to sleep deprivation, lack of food, and poor hygiene. And, not least, be a fully-trained wizard. As El notes, the reason the mals come after wizard children is that for the most part, a grown wizard is the apex predator of the magical world.
  • Most indie kids from the east tend to be the best and brightest wizards in their respective cities and countries. This is because the number of spare Scholomance seats for eastern enclaves is extremely limited due to an inequitable allocation favoring the western enclaves, so the indie kids have to compete with each other through rigorous exams in order to get into the school as a student.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Played for Drama. After Purochana, the creator of the Golden Stone sutras, died, there was no one with the power to cast the final spell that tied them all together to create the enclaves people desperately needed to survive the world's ever increasing mal problem. Once developing new versions of the spells that multiple people could cast turned out to be a dead end, people hit upon another solution: creating their own once-a-generation-talent by turning a Human Sacrifice into an undying abomination that was strong enough to channel the requisite power, creating the maw-mouths.
• Held Back in School: Also defied. It's impossible to be held back in the Scholomance, due to the allocation of the school dorms. Once you're assigned a room at the school, it remains your room for the next four years. However, after your class is dumped into the graduation hall, your room is no long your room and is instead allocated back to freshman residence hall for the incoming freshmen. So even if you weren't in the senior residence hall for graduation, you no longer have an officially assigned room and can no longer be assigned classes because you've technically already graduated. Instead, you're stuck staying in the school trying to survive until either the next graduation day or until one of the mals get you — if the school doesn't actively try to get rid of you instead, since you don't belong in its halls anymore.
• Heroes' Frontier Step: When someone tries to murder El, she refuses to use malia even though it's the only way she could save her own life. Not only does this win Orion's trust on the spot, it leads her to realize she's a better person than she credited herself for and inspires her to greater actions later.
• Heroic BSoD: El completely breaks down sobbing from delayed stress and fear after killing a maw-mouth. It takes quite a while before she can even manage to speak, and for days after, thinking of the experience is enough to make her Stress Vomit; the trauma even lingers into the next year. It's strongly implied that she would have been near-catatonic from the experience had she not accidentally been forced to spirit-cleanse herself, stabilizing her traumatized emotional state.
• Heroic RRoD: After it's revealed that he's inadvertently been riling up the graduation horde, Orion is so wracked with guilt that he starts patrolling all night without sleep. It nearly gets him killed before El slaps him out of it.
• Hero Killer: Maw-mouths. Even with the smallest ones, the best advice for dealing with them is "be somewhere else," followed not particularly closely by "die before it gets you." There is one good option, "be a tertiary-order entity with more power than almost any other wizard who ever lived", but it isn't available to most people.
• Hero of Another Story: Plenty of students at the Boarding School of Horrors who barely interact with El have interesting backstories and struggles. Notable examples are Luisa being stuck there without preparation due to being a Mage Born of Muggles, Clarita using a Beneath Notice strategy while working to become valedictorian, and Maya Wulandiri putting all of her efforts into trying to gain admission of herself and her family to the Toronto enclave.
• Hero-Worshipper: Most of the students are in awe of Orion due to his Chronic Hero Syndrome, especially Ibrahim, who pesters El for details about Orion's heroics and is stunned to hear Orion admit any weakness or failure.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Due to her childhood and Evil Sorceress magical tendencies, El has more than a few insecurities and self worth issues. It basically takes Aadhya spelling out their True Companion status for her to accept that she actually has friends who will look out for her without expecting something in return.
• High-School Hustler: Every student at the Scholomance will keep an eye out for a good deal, but Aadhya excels at it. She often brokers deals between others, and is the one El calls upon to arrange an auction for the MacGuffin she's just acquired.
• Hippie Name: Galadriel "El" Higgins was named by her mother, a White Mage Granola Girl who lives in a rural Welsh Commune. El wryly observes that her own affinity for destructive magic makes the "love me and despair" connotations more apropos.
• History Repeats: A few months before El was born, her father gave his life to save her pregnant mother from a maw-mouth and get her out of the Scholomance. In The Last Graduate, Orion, the boy El loves, does the same thing with her; pushing her out the gates of the Scholomance so he can face down Patience by himself.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Prasong, after the flaying hex circle he was going to use on Sudarat and her freshman classmates in the library seminar is turned against him by El. He promptly loses all his skin, and dies in agony from the massive blood loss and shock.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen:
  • When the Scholomance was first created, the Manchester enclave was the main driver behind the project, and the school's founding is what established them as the most powerful enclave in the world. The main architect, Sir Alfred Cooper-Browning, earned the position of Manchester's Dominus on the strength of that project alone, and he was widely regarded as the strongest wizard in the world at the time. When he died a decade later along with several of his fellow council members and Manchester's best and brightest while trying to repair the school's scouring machines in the Graduation Hall, the power and influence of the enclave diminished immediately. Management of the school was handed over to the London enclave, and Cooper-Browning's own descendants left Manchester for London and never looked back. Since then, Manchester has completely fallen into obscurity.
  • Downplayed with the London enclave. At one point they were considered the most powerful enclave in the world, but fell deeply into debt thanks to borrowing loads and loads of mana from other enclaves to build the extra entrances they needed survive the Blitz. When World War II ended, they no longer had the resources necessary to maintain the Scholomance and handed management over to New York. By the time of the present storyline, they're still a very powerful enclave and New York's most powerful ally, but no longer quite the powerhouse they used to be.
• Hufflepuff House:
  • The kids who are sophomores in the first book and juniors in the second book get the least amount of appearances and plot relevance. Only one or two are even named.
  • There are dozens of enclaves of magic users with representatives in the Scholomance, but only the New York enclave (where Orion and Chloe come from) gets much description or prominence.
    • The London enclave (the one closest to El's home) is frequently mentioned, and some of its members have names and dialogue. It's later revealed that El owes her attendance at the Scholomance to them, due to an extra seat they decided to offer to her thanks to her mom's own ties to them. They also took over maintenance of the Scholomance after the Manchester enclave's fall from grace, but had to give it up to the New York enclave after World War II. This is later downplayed if not averted entirely in the third book, which starts off with El saving the enclave from an attacking maw-mouth.
    • El helps the Dubai enclave kids fix a broken chair in one scene. She later saves the Dubai enclave proper in the third book by replacing their foundation stone.
    • The Toronto enclave lets new recruits bring their entire families, but has ridiculously high standards.
    • The Shanghai enclave is talking about making their own Scholomance, and El reads a historical account of their fight with a maw-mouth. They get even more prominence in the second book when the outside power struggle between them and the New York enclave spills into the school's dynamics, and introduce two major supporting characters who each end up as potential love interests for Liu. Later on, the third book reveals that the truth behind Shanghai's revival is actually an integral part of the true source of all the conflict within the last two books.
    • The Manchester enclave built the Scholomance, but fell into obscurity after losing their best and brightest people while futilely trying to keep it safe.
    • Some seniors from the Seattle enclave get into a fight with the main characters.
    • The Berlin enclave kids promise guaranteed admission to anyone who helps out with the climax and persuade the other enclaves to agree.
    • The Bangkok enclave is given prominence in the second book, but only after it's been mysteriously destroyed, much to the shock of everyone, and making current students within the school from that enclave some of its only survivors. Now that it's gone, the enclavers are now like the rest of the 'loser' kids and are bargaining everything they have left for alliances with the other enclavers to get out. The implications of its destruction also drive most of the plot, as it increases the ongoing tension between the New York and Shanghai enclaves.
    • The Zanzibar and Johannesburg enclave kids get along with El's friend Nkoyo.
    • The Salta enclave hires Clarita's mother to do maintenance work. The Salta students impress El by not protesting their unfavorable placement during the school wide evacuation in The Last Graduate, and she saves one of them from being eaten by a maw-mouth during the climax.
    • Santa Barbara and the other California enclaves are a bit resentful toward New York, and one of their seniors has a short-lived Commander Contrarian moment in book two.
    • Aadhya's aunt married a Kolkata enclaver, giving her some minor family ties to them.
    • Mumbai once offered El's paternal family admission to their enclave but they refused because Mumbai isn't strict-mana. In The Last Graduate, El mentions that she does her best to avoid being noticed by the Mumbai enclavers because they know something is dangerous about her if the pacifistic Sharmas wouldn't take her in.
    • The Jaipur enclave is allies with Shanghai and were the ones to give the enclave-building spells to a circle of wizards who lived in Pune in exchange for a book of powerful spells the circle had co-authored together. When the circle fell to in-fighting, killing most of them off and ending the enclave before it could even be built, they took on a few of the survivors.
    • The Kyoto enclave was strong when the Scholomance was built and has gotten stronger since then, but was relegated to building the gymnasium by the Manchester enclave. They made the gym into an indoor garden, but it has since fallen into disrepair.
    • The bigger Japanese enclaves have each of their children create their own alliances with one or two potential enclave recruits from the Japanese indie kids, the rest being foreign indie students who they'll aggressively sponsor into foreign enclaves, with hopes of creating connections throughout the world. That makes Japanese enclavers highly sought out allies, since it's a great way for an indie kid to get a spot at an enclave of their choice.
    • The Munich enclave is said to be the most powerful of the German enclaves, and is integral to the backstory of Liesel. Her father is a council member of Munich, and his wife is the daughter of their current Domina. He could've easily brought Liesel and her mother into the enclave but it would've meant losing his council seat, so he essentially abandoned them, only bothering to give his daughter a Scholomance seat to keep their mouths shut. His wife found out anyway and murdered Liesel's mother, leaving a bitter Liesel to swear vengeance against both of them.
    • The Beijing enclave appears in the third book and their history is touched on briefly. Before they began expanding using the modern enclave-building spells, they used to be one of the few naturally-existing enclaves in the world, and their founder, the Seventh Sage of Beijing, makes an appearance to help El and her friends. Their enclave council also serves as secondary antagonists, having decided to use Liu as their sacrifice and try to make her into a maw-mouth in order to build their new enclave after El accidentally takes out their foundation stone by killing its associated maw-mouth to save the London enclave.
    • Everyone else is lucky to warrant a single passing mention that reveals what city they're in but gives no other details.
• Hunter of Monsters: Orion's affinity and temperament make him ideally suited as one. He is even able to pull mana from his recent kills.
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: El's attempt to use Orion's apparent infatuation with her involves the line, "He can't really like me, though".
  • A completely serious (albeit nonromantic) example: graduation alliances. El spends a lot of time scheming to make herself look good to Aadhya, and spends several pages explaining to the audience why Aadhya is a much better potential graduation ally than she herself is, and that she's going to have to work really hard to get Aadhya to take her—at the end of which Aadhya asks El to form an alliance.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Gwen Higgins, El's mother, is famous for her healing and protective spells, her generosity, and her near total refusal to commodify her talents and abilities. She doesn't even think less of the wizard who comes by once a year and makes a profit distributing the spells she's come up with since the last time he visited.
  The one thing [my mother] will never go for is the lesser evil.
• If I Wanted You Dead...:
  • After El, well, makes it clear to him she could drain him of his magic and life like a proverbial juice box at will, Orion freaks out. El then notes that they had gone to a store-room alone together less than an hour ago, and had she been a secret maleficer, she could have killed him there and passed it off as a mal attack. This has the opposite effect of her intent of convincing him that she isn't a secret maleficer.
  • She pulls the tactic again in the second book to convince the Shanghai enclavers she's not out to kill any of them, by building up the power for her supervolcano spell. This time, the message sticks and the Shanghai enclavers stop antagonizing her.
• Ineffectual Loner: Some few students might be able to tough out their tenure at the Scholomance on their own but trying to go it alone in the graduation hall is a death sentence, no matter how powerful they might be, and everyone is painfully aware of the fact.
• Insubstantial Ingredients: Potion ingredients don't have to make sense, best seen with the London indy wizards in The Golden Enclaves.
• Internal Retcon: The year before Gwen and Arjun's, where no student made it out of the Scholomance, is attributed to the actions of a coven of maleficers slaughtering every other student in the Graduation Hall for power, and who were eventually hunted down in retaliation. In the third book, it's revealed that the students were actually slaughtered by the New York enclave so Ophelia could have the necessary malia needed to turn Orion into her wizard/maw-mouth hybrid Living Weapon. As New York is in charge of maintaining the Scholomance, it was an easy matter of rewriting the story for the handbooks so their actions were blamed on this (likely) imaginary group of maleficers, though it's also possible the story was mostly true and the maleficers not named Ophelia were used as patsies and then betrayed once they had Outlived Their Usefulness. The only people who would suspect anything was up were the various enclave councils, and the only one who had the resources to figure out what really happened was Shanghai.
• Internal Reveal: Played for Laughs near the end of A Deadly Education when an incoming freshman announces he has a message from Gwen Higgins, setting off surprise and muttered speculation on if it is that Gwen Higgins and why the child of the famed healer had not made themselves known. Then the lad expanded "For her daughter Galadriel?", setting off double-takes and a few instances of people looking for someone else with the same name (to say nothing of how the members of El's Alliance react).
  Orion: Busted.
• Intoxicated Superpower Snag: Magic runs on Clap Your Hands If You Believe, so in The Golden Enclaves, a group of wizards get high on Fantastic Drugs to broaden their suspension of disbelief enough to walk through an Extradimensional Shortcut that no longer exists.
• Intra-Scholastic Rivalry: There's a rough division between the English-speaking and Chinese-speaking students, due to it being possible to take all your classes in just one of those two languages. This is a byproduct of the growing rivalry between the western and eastern enclaves, and the only thing preventing the Scholomance from becoming an Absurdly Divided School is that there are multiple students who are fluent in both languages so they can use one as their language requirement and have more flexibility in their classes. This bites El in the ass her senior year, as she's one of those students who isn't fluent in both English and Chinese, and therefore has had practically no interaction with the Chinese-speaking crowd. Because of that, the Chinese enclavers don't know her at all and make wildly off-base assumptions about her according to what little they do know, eventually coming to the conclusion she's some evil maleficer allied with New York who is trying to take over the student body. This causes them to make multiple attempts to kill her throughout the second book.
• Inverse Law of Utility and Lethality:
  • Poor El got bitten by this trope hard. She's excellent at casting massive devastating spells; having a huge, and unwanted, repertoire of them that she has to consciously ignore or miscast them to not kill anyone. Her only venture into spell creation gave her the world-wrecking supervolcano spell instead of the cleaning spell she was actually going for.
  • Spelled out plainly in the second book where Zixuan intuits the issue and confirms it via Liu. This gets El and her allies to review her school struggles in an entirely new light.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: Attempted on a strategic level early in The Last Graduate, when El concluded it was vanishingly unlikely she could recharge her Power Crystal stash^note (were she willing to let a bunch of freshmen get slaughtered in her presence she would not have that problem, but she ain't so she does) to the point of pulling her weight when she and her allies Aadhya and Yi Liu made their desperate dash for the exit at the end of the term, she confesses the situation to them and tried to talk them into 'ditching' her in time to throw in their lot with groups likely to survive Graduation Day.
  (Aadhya had) already taken half a dozen chances on me that anyone else would have called a bad bet. I did't want her to drop me, but — I couldn't be the reason she didn't make it out.

J to N

• Jerkass Realization: Chloe's last scene in the first book has her apologizing to El for treating her so coldly earlier on and for taking the protection of her enclave for granted.
  Chloe: That day Orion introduced us, I acted like all I needed to have you be my friend was let you know that I was willing to let you talk to me. Like I'm so special. But I'm not. I'm just lucky.
• Karma Houdini: Even after everyone knows what Ophelia did, she suffers exactly zero consequences and even gets promoted to Domina of New York. El still resents the hell out of this, but grudgingly agrees it would probably be a bad idea to actually go try to fight it out.
• Kick the Dog: In addition to trying to turn Liu into their new maw-mouth anchor, the Beijing enclave council ties up her parents, aunt and uncle and sets them right outside the altar to be her first meal when the ritual is done, just because they protested using Liu for it. While the former can be justified under The Needs of the Many, there is no reason for the latter other than abject cruelty.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • The Scholomance handles its recurring mal infestation with a biannual scouring of "mortal flame", a Magic Fire that consumes anything containing mana, whether it's human or mal. The scouring is automated, so any student not in their dorm room when it begins is out of luck.
  • Strangely enough, Incarnate Flames are killed by overloading them with more fire, not by extinguishing them.
• King in the Mountain: The Seventh Sage of Beijing, the original founder of the Beijing enclave. Apparently, he never died but rather just disappeared, occasionally reappearing throughout the ages whenever his home was in a serious crisis. By the time El and the others meet him, nobody has seen him in hundreds of years.
• The Lancer: Orion is El's, although the students would probably say it's the other way around.
• Language Barrier:
  • As all the classes in the Scholomance are taught in English or Chinese (the latter a recent development), there is no point in sending a student there if they're not fluent in either or aren't good enough in languages to learn one of them early enough for it to matter. According to El, that doesn't stop a lot of desperate families from sending their kids anyway.
  • Wu Wen, the head artificer for the repair mission in the first book, is the only member of the team not to know a lick of English, requiring one of the others to translate. Apparently when he started out as a student at the school, he copped out by claiming Mandarin was his native language, so he could use Shanghainese, his actual native language, for his language requirement.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • In the second book, Prasong, a Bangkok enclaver who found himself shit out of luck when his enclave was destroyed, decides to go maleficer to keep his current lifestyle and tries using an incompetently-made flaying hex circle to drain malia from a group of unsuspecting freshman kids (including one of his fellow former Bangkok enclavers) whose homeroom is in an isolated corner of the library. Unfortunately for him, also on that weird library homeroom is El, who has a far stronger affinity for The Dark Arts, assumes it was so incompetently done it must have been a particularly stupid mal, and takes the opportunity to show the little freshers how to not only do it better but instantly turn it around on the being that cast it in the first place. Needless to say, it does not end well for Prasong.
  • The Beijing enclave council try to turn Liu into their new maw-mouth anchor, and were going to have her eat her parents, aunt, and uncle as her first meal when the ritual was done. Then, when El manages to find a different way to save the enclave without "killing" Liu and her family, they try to kill her because they view her as a threat. They're stopped before they can succeed and eaten by the half-maw-mouth Orion, forcing them to live through the same torment they were going to make Liu and her family endure for several days until El kills Orion's maw-mouth-half.
• Last-Name Basis: common, though not universal, at the Scholomance. El mentions thinking it odd that Alfie insists on being called by his first name like a primary school kid, when normally an upper-class British boy his age would go by his last name even with his friends, like in a posh mundane boarding school. It turns out that he's not just an enclaver, but a descendant of one of the builders of the Scholomance, and he doesn't want to only be known as that guy's great-great-grandson.
• Lensman Arms Race: The true driving force behind most of the conflict in the series. When the Scholomance was founded and started welcoming independent students, the number of wizards surviving to adulthood increased drastically. This mostly benefited the west, which the school primarily catered to at first, and an increase of adult wizards meant an increase of enclaves being built, which meant an increase in the number of existing maw-mouths. Obviously, enclaves don't want maw-mouths sticking around, so they translocated them to other, mostly eastern, countries where there were little to no other powerful enclaves to protest — which eventually led to the destruction of the original Shanghai enclave. After Shanghai was revived and figured out what was going on, they tried to negotiate compromises to slow down the rate of new enclaves, but the west refused to budge on their expansion. So Shanghai retaliated by sponsoring their own enclaves, and having those enclaves chuck their maw-mouths to the west. By the time of the series, the number of maw-mouths have become so great that there aren't enough mals being spawned fast enough to feed them, which is only accelerated when El's class takes out half the mal population in the world at the end of the second book. Now the maw-mouths are so desperate to feed that they're actively attacking enclaves and clan compounds in hopes of getting a decent meal; were it not for the existence of El, the one wizard capable of killing maw-mouths, it's likely they would've eventually devoured the entire wizarding population to satiate their hunger. It turns out that rather than her affinity being for great and horrible destruction, she was gifted the sort of extreme firepower needed to unmake maw-mouths, free the souls trapped within, and give wizardkind an alternative to making modern enclaves and the maw-mouths that go with them.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste:
  • In a conversation with Yancy, Liesel reveals she plans to take advantage of the recent losses from the maw-mouth attack on London to boost her career and get a position in her new enclave five years ahead of schedule.
  • While Liu's family are genuinely horrified by the modern-enclave building spells and outraged that Liu was nearly sacrificed to make Beijing's new enclave to the point that they worked with El to stop the ritual, it doesn't stop them from leveraging the incident to get spots in the much more powerful Shanghai enclave at the end of the third book. Liu herself doesn't hold it against them and even has her own spot in the enclave, but refuses to move into Shanghai proper until it's rebuilt into a Golden Enclave by El.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: In a considerably less sadistic example, a wizard can extend their lifespan by sacrificing a part of their body, such as an eye or a limb. The catch is that you need loads of mana in order for the procedure to work, so only enclavers can really do it.
• Living Battery: Orion can pull mana out of the mals he kills. Most of it goes into the reserve for the New York enclave, which everybody else is happy to draw from.
• Living Is More than Surviving:
  • A consistent theme across the series. Everyone in the school is doing all they can to survive, but the biggest struggle is learning how to do that while still staying true to themselves and keeping what morals they have. This is most evident with El; she wants to survive (hence her initial interest in joining an enclave), but at the same time doesn't really understand what she wants. Discovering that is an important part of her Character Development in the first two books.
  • A poignant part of Aadhya's backstory. One of her grandparents practically locked up their entire family inside their home and refused to let anyone go outside so that way none of the mals could get them (or more specifically, their children). Aadhya's older sister (who was eight at the time), didn't understand this and grew frustrated with all the restrictions, which led to her escaping home to finally see the outside world. By the time any of the adults found out, it was already too late and a mal had already gotten to her. The entire experience forced Aadhya's parents to accept that keeping their children locked up away from the world to protect them wasn't something they could do forever and wouldn't be doing the kids any favors when they were gone, so they completely inverted their strategy. They made sure they had as mundane a house and knew as many mundane kids as possible, with only tiny locked-away rooms for training in magic, and tried to give her as much of a good life as they could before she had to attend the Scholomance.
• Living with the Villain: The Last Graduate reveals that two mals have been living in Chloe's room for years, disguised as cushions. They've spent that time eating anyone else who's ever been alone in the room, while leaving the owner alive to avoid suspicion and draw in more victims (students coming early for study group sessions, etc.)
• Load-Bearing Boss: Enclaves are built on a foundation in the void with an act of sacrifice which creates a maw-mouth. Should that maw-mouth later be destroyed, the foundation stone breaks, which will severely damage the enclave (if it has more than one foundation, as the larger ones do) or cause it to fall out of reality entirely (if it’s got only one). This isn’t generally known even among those who know the closely-guarded secrets of enclave creation because no one had ever actually managed to kill a maw-mouth before El—apparently a smaller one being absorbed by a larger one doesn't do anything than just make the larger one the new anchor for whatever the smaller one had been anchoring—and El is somewhat horrified to realize that the mysterious destruction of enclaves was not due to the first shots in an enclave war but because of her killing them. Worse, it doesn’t seem like the relationship works the other way: they can’t eliminate maw-mouths by evacuating existing enclaves and destroying the foundation stones.
• Locked Out of the Loop: As there are no holidays at the Scholomance, the only news of the outside world any of the kids get are from the freshmen that come in at Induction every year. That usually isn't an issue unless there's an especially big piece of news, like the downfall of a major enclave. As that's usually a prelude to an enclave war, many of the students' parents could be at war with each other right at this very moment and they wouldn't even know it, which is not conductive to the already fragile school solidarity.
• Loophole Abuse: Students regularly work around the rather loose rules of the Scholomance to improve their chances of survival. The most obvious example is homework—the school doesn't care about who does the work, as long as it gets done. Students regularly do each other's homework and sit for each other's exams for trade or to win brownie points, and the Scholomance won't give a damn. As to why, the less time a student needs to spend on homework, the more time they have to work on their strategy for graduation, whether that's building mana, practicing spells, brewing potions, or building a powerful piece of artifice. For example, if your ally needs time to build you a weapon but has to take a language exam, you can have someone take it for them so they can focus on the weapon.
• Lottery of Doom: Zigzagged. In the third book, the Beijing enclave holds a "lottery" to determine who will be the Human Sacrifice they will use to create their new enclave. In reality, the lottery is a publicity stunt used to make it seem like the whole situation has some pretense of fairness — they were always going to use Liu, because the ritual requires a strict-mana wizard and she was the only one they had on hand.
• Lovecraft Lite: Sure there are hoards of monsters roaming the halls, and even more on the outside picking off lone wizards an the occasional magical city-state, but if you keep your wits about you there's a decent chance you can find friends and lead a pretty good life. Assuming you survive childhood, anyway.
• Love Triangle: Liu finds herself with two suitors during The Last Graduate.
• MacGuffin Location: The Scholomance, in both the traditional sense and in a literal sense. Every single conflict in the series takes place at the school or is somehow related to it—even in the third book, after the main characters have graduated, they still find themselves trying to get back inside the Scholomance for various different reasons. In addition, control over the school has been a major sticking point in the wider geopolitics of magical society ever since it was first founded, since whoever controlled it more-or-less decided how many children of every country could attend and therefore had a chance to survive. Therefore, the enclave in charge of its management is usually regarded as the most powerful enclave in the world.
• Made of Magic: "Mals" are the diverse supernatural monsters that form out of magic and feed on wizards' mana (and on wizards themselves). They range from tiny but lethal pests to titanic Blob Monsters and are varied enough that wizards only bother to name a few of the common varieties. Though some reproduce through pseudo-natural means like laying eggs, others appear to manifest spontaneously. It turns out that all maleficaria are ultimately a natural reaction to wizards using malia, even the most innocuous of 'cheating' by taking the lives of plants or insects or already-dead wood. This is in fact a well-known phenomenon, but its long-term effects are little considered by wizard society—the cost (dead children) is terrible, but too divorced from the initial cause (all those little bits of cheating). Everyone knows everyone cheats a little, so what's the harm? But add that up to millions of wizards across the world, every single day, and it's no surprise that mals are growing more and more common. This foreshadows the reveal of the awful truth: that maw-mouths are the result of a particular ritual that produces the foundation in the Void a large enclave can be built on. Killing maw-mouths destroys the foundations they support, and thus the bastions of luxury and safety built atop them. The only way to stop maleficaria from growing to a dangerous level is for every wizard to refuse even the littlest bit of malia—unlikely, in other words.
• Mage Born of Muggles: Wizard children can be born to mundanes but rarely survive to adulthood because Magic Is a Monster Magnet and elitist Magical Society is generally disinclined to help them. Even if they're completely surrounded by mundanes who make the magic threats hunting them entirely vulnerable and killable, most don't survive to adulthood—the one named example of the trope in the series is a Posthumous Character because she even didn't know about magic, or the Scholomance, or its life-threatening dangers until the moment of her Induction.
• Mage-Hunting Monster: Mals are monsters Made of Magic, ranging from tiny parasites to titanic Blob Monsters that feed on wizards for their Mana (and/or flesh, and/or souls). Most are no match for an adult wizard, but they're so pervasive that Magical Society is built around minimizing the child mortality rate.
• Magical Counterfeiting: It's easy for almost any decent wizard to create, say, a fifty-dollar bill or simply coax an electronic transaction into going through, hence why Magical Society prefers to trade in magical resources. It also adds insult to injury when enclavers pay outsiders in mundane money.
• Magical Gesture: Gestures aren't shown to be a common element of spells, but one of the nastiest spells in El's arsenal requires a fiddly hand gesture and kills the user if it's performed incorrectly. French spells are implied to have a lot of little bits of flair like this.
• Magical Incantation: Each spell has a spoken incantation, which can range from three words to an ongoing semi-improvisational group dialogue. There's no Language of Magic, so spells can be cast in any language, with some preference for dead ones.
• Magical Library: The Scholomance's library is even more of an Eldritch Location than the rest of the place, rearranging itself according to dream logic and its own desires for what the students will find within. Then there are the shelves upon shelves of Spell Books, each of which has its own power and autonomy.
• Magical Sensory Effect: Some people manifest little effects when they cast spells. El's tend to cause light to shine through her skin and levitate her off the ground if she's given enough mana. This is frequently far more menacing than she prefers.
  • There's also talk about how Mana feels and tastes depending on its source.
• Magical Society: The upper crust of wizards are "enclavers", who have the resources to create a private Pocket Dimension for their community and are by far the best-connected and best-equipped. There's also some coordination and communication across enclaves and with non-enclavers, but for the most part, communities appear to look out for themselves almost exclusively.
• Magic Eater: Mals form out of magic and are drawn to wizards to feed on their mana. Specifically, they're formed whenever wizards as a whole use enough malia, and due to magic's need for balance seek out the mana that should have been used in place of the malia that created them. Unfortunately for the wizards, this generally means feeding on their flesh too. And that's one of the better options.
• Magic Fire: "Mortal flame" is a blue-hot fire that burns through matter and magic alike, making it especially deadly to mals and wizards. It can consume any protective spell except a firebreak of more mortal flame.
• Magic Is a Monster Magnet: The entire reason why the Scholomance exists is to give its students a fighting chance of seeing adulthood without getting eaten by a passing mal. The survival rate for students without an enclave might only be around 1 in 4, but that beats the 1 in 20 odds of anyone not lucky enough to get in—and once you get out, you're all but unkillable by anyone who's not a wizard stronger than you.
• Magic Knight: Orion Lake fights with a magic sword and other accessories, a suite of efficient offensive spells, the power to tear mals apart with his bare hands, and a unique affinity that generates mana from his kills.
• Magic Mirror: El has to make a magic mirror from scratch for an artificing assignment. It's tricky work, requiring help from two friends, and they're all quite annoyed when it comes out cursed to dispense prophecies of doom instead of helpful advice.
• Maker of Monsters: It's noted that many of the mals that prey upon wizards today were bred by their ancestors for various purposes (e.g. Cheyenas, Quattrias, etc.). That's why most modern-day wizards take a dim view on breeding mals, because that rarely ever ends well. Also, wizards in general, whenever they use malia in enough quantities to do anything.
• Malevolent Architecture: Downplayed - most of the time it's more like Obnoxiously Inconvenient Architecture. Being built in a pocket dimension makes the school's layout somewhat suggestible, and one of the easiest ways for the structure to reinforce itself is to make sure the students focus on how miserable it is to get from place to place.
• Mana: One of two forms of magical energy that can be used to cast spells, mana is generated through personal effort. This is a subjective measure—El suffered diminishing returns building mana with push-ups as she became fitter, but can make a fair amount by crocheting because regardless of how much she does the work she finds it difficult and unpleasant. Wizards have a limited personal capacity for mana and can store extra in "sinks" like Power Crystals. Or they can use malia instead...
• Mana Drain: The main trick of maleficers is to take mana against their victim's will. Methods vary based on the maleficer's talents, but the go to options are either tricking someone into voluntarily sharing mana and draining it all, or gruesome rituals with lots of pain and screaming. This is generally a losing proposition, because creating malia damages a wizard's anima, the part of them that lets them build and hold Mana. Once you go maleficer hard enough, there's no going back, and eventually the psychic pollution in the malia will destroy the maleficer, rotting them from the inside out unless they have superhuman discipline in its use. Part of what makes El so dangerous is that she doesn't need to go to such lengths and can just yank the power out directly, using about the same amount of effort as an average wizard would need to drain an ant colony.
• Masquerade Enforcer: Everyone who is taught the details of the enclave building spells by buying them from people who already know them—specifically the part about needing to create a maw-mouth during the final step of the process to anchor the foundation stone—are magically compelled to keep it secret and suppress the information (if someone figures it out on their own, they aren't bound by the same magic).
• Meaningful Name:
  • Like her namesake from Tolkien's Legendarium, Galadriel has tremendous personal power and is challenged to avoid the lure of easy Black Magic that would corrupt and destroy her.
  • Gwen's name means "White" or "Holy", and she's a White Mage and probably the most morally pure character in the series.
  • Orion in Greek mythology was the world's greatest hunter. Orion Lake is a supernaturally skilled hunter of mals. And considering that he's a Living Weapon, his mother probably named him very deliberately.
• Men of Sherwood: Minor characters from the larger student body are willing and able to help with the plans to keep mals from killing graduating seniors in the climaxes of the first and second books, doing a lot of work the heroes couldn't do alone and suffering few casualties in the first book and none in the second.
• Mercy Kill: Given the standard maw-mouth foul-mockery-of-life-cycle and the fate of everything it eats, killing (save through absorbtion by other maw-mouths) or even measurably damaging them boils down to doing a great deal of this. Even moreso as maw-mouths are at their core Targeted Human Sacrifices tortured and purreed into Loss of Identity and unending Horror Hunger.
• Meta Power: A wizard's "affinity" might let them use certain magic more easily and efficiently or even change how magic works for them. Orion's unique affinity lets him create mana by killing mals; El's affinity for dark magic gives her a massive power boost to destructive spells, a Supernatural Sensitivity for malia and maleficers, and other dubious perks.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Played with, but ultimately subverted. There are over a thousand kids that are inducted into the Scholomance each year, and by their senior year that crowd is usually winnowed down to a little bit over half the class surviving. Of those survivors, only half usually make it through Graduation Day, meaning only a fourth of the class survive overall. It's horrible, and everyone acknowledges it as horrible, but since they can't think up of a better alternative, they're forced to accept it as a fact of life. Everyone except the school, which has never forgotten its original stated purpose of protecting all wizarding children. To the point that when it sees El's potential, it deliberately focuses on her and encourages her Character Development so she'll accept the same and try to save everyone as well.
• Miracle Food: Possible, but with some caveats. It's easy enough to make something taste good, but making it nutritious is prohibitively mana intensive, even for enclavers. The school gets around this by starting with a healthy but unappetizing gruel and transforming it into things people actually want to eat just before being served. By the time the sensory illusions end, it's past the point it matters.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: "Cheyenas" are cheetah-hyena hybrids with a dash of water buffalo and rhino mixed in, first engineered to be trophy animals for Great White Hunters in colonial Kenya. The local alchemist took offense and added a paralytic bite, which eliminated the hunters fairly quickly. Despite this, they're Non Malicious Monsters if raised properly and have some popularity as guard animals.
• Moment Killer: A Running Gag in The Last Graduate is El's new mouse familiar Precious doing her best to cock-block Orion and prevent El and him from having a moment together.
• Muggles Do It Better: Zigzagged; scientific understanding protects them from mals and as just one example modern medical technology provides much better birth-control options. But wizards, assuming they survive puberty, still have magic powers, can make functionally infinite money, and an extended lifespan so they have their own benefits.
• Mundane Luxury:
  • As the Scholomance is a Small, Secluded World and the students can only bring so many supplies without exceeding the weight allowance, basic necessities for everyday life such as clean clothes can be considered incredible luxuries by the school's low standards.
  • For enclaves, it's space. In order to form an enclave, the residents have to borrow space from the real world and pull it into the Void. That's likely the main reason why enclaves are so exclusive; even if they wanted to bring all the wizards they could into their home, there's only so much space to go around. Tellingly, the room of Orion's family in New York, which is the size of a large apartment, is considered extravagant by enclave standards.
• Mundane Solution: The major problem with the Golden Stone sutras is that the final spell requires a tremendous amount of power and can only be channeled by a strict mana wizard, and after Purochana's death no one was able to handle the necessary power. Once the the modern enclave builders figured out the strict mana part was entirely necessary, they resorted to creating a maw-mouth out of an undying strict-mana Human Sacrifice just to work around the limitation. The solution El and her allies think of? Have multiple strict-mana wizards cast the final spell as a circle working. They even have a handy supply of strict mana enclave builders ready to go from her family in Mumbai.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Being stuck in a Death Trap of a school, constantly attacked by nightmarish monsters and trained to take advantage of everything and everyone around for your survival is not very conductive to the students' sense of morality. A surprising number of students, not just maleficers, are willing to jump to murder to solve their problems. Rarely does it ever occur to the students to find another solution, such as just talking to each other.
• My Greatest Failure: Luisa's death serves as one for Orion.
• Mysterious Parent: Invoked. El is very set on keeping her relationship to her mother a secret from her classmates.
  Orion: Gwen Higgins is your mother?
  El: Yes, and I don't mind the massive incredulity at all, really, it's why I make a point of telling everyone.
• Mystical Pregnancy: El's conception and birth is revealed to be this. When her parents attempted to summon the Golden Stone sutras in hopes of bringing back the Golden Enclaves and left the payment open, the universe didn't give them want they wanted immediately, knowing neither of them had the necessary power to use the sutras themselves. Instead, what the universe did was allow them to conceive a child, El, that would be able to use the sutras in their stead and bring about the change they wanted. And part of that is because around the same time, Ophelia was using untold amounts of malia in order to conceive Orion and turn him into her half-maw-mouth Living Weapon. The universe needed El as a counterpoint to Orion, to stop him when the time came.
• Mystical White Hair: Orion Lake, Kid Hero of the Scholomance, has unique silver-white hair and a special magical affinity that makes him a hugely effective mal-slayer.
• Nepotism: There are two ways you can get onto the council of an enclave. You can either commit a dramatic display of magic and earn yourself a seat—or you can cleverly arrange to be descended from a founding member and inherit your seat. There's also the option of marrying a wizard from a high-ranking family, like, say the daughter of the enclave's current Domina.
• Never Heard That One Before: Inverted when Galadriel quotes her namesake's "love me and despair" line from The Lord of the Rings herself and is thrilled that Liu doesn't get the reference.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Orion's one-man quest to kill every mal in sight has been so successful that the mals in the Graduation Hall are starting to starve and have decided to try their luck at breaking into the school.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: A fairly transparent attempt to get Orion out of the way of the senior class's plans quickly transforms into a feasible plan to fix the mal scouring equipment in the Graduation Hall, potentially saving everyone for years to come.
• No Adequate Punishment: "Poaching" is when one student irretrievably shoves another into the Void — an unimaginable fate, given that short-term exposure causes lifelong insanity. Other students merely shun a poacher until they either graduate alone or get killed, because really, there's nothing else to be done.
• No Hero to His Valet: At the start of the series, El is just about the only person not impressed by Orion's heroics. While she does come to care for him as a friend and then more, she still remains unimpressed, and often gets exasperated by his Idiot Hero antics. The rest of El's friends and acquaintances similarly begin to gradually lose their reverence for him as they get to know him better.
• No Periods, Period: Justified - there is an easy to brew potion to stop one as soon as it starts. It's perhaps one of the only forms of misery the Scholomance doesn't utilize for its own ends.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Maleficaria are terrifying killers of wizards, focusing primarily on children and teenagers. However, this is for the same reason that real-life predators focus on young, sick, or injured prey - they're easier targets than adult wizards, and even the mals that are smart enough to set ambushes and lay traps don't seem to have any agenda beyond feeding.
• No One Gets Left Behind: In the second book, everyone in El's alliance makes up multiple reasons to justify allowing Jowani (who has yet to secure an alliance of his own) join their alliance. What they don't say out loud is the real reason why they're letting him join them—he's their friend, and they don't want to leave him behind.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Agglor grubs are one of the most benign mals in the Scholomance. They ignore or will even retreat from the students, preferring to nibble on bits of enchanted metal and scavenging cast off debris to decorate their shells. El even says they can be useful at times thanks to this trait. They're also what's been breaking the scouring equipment in the Graduation Hall. The best efforts of thousands of wizards across two hundred years have been unable to solve the problem, with armor only lasting a few unpredictable years before being eaten through, exposing all the vital artifice. Trying to breed a mal that would only go after the grubs isn't even tried, as those schemes have a distressing tendency to produce really nasty mals.
• Not the Intended Use: Given the nature of the spells the Scholomance throws at her to learn, El is obliged to do this a great deal. Need a high-pressure environment to properly craft a perfectly-smooth mirror that can be enchanted into a magic mirror for a project? Some Roman composed a way to efficiently crush a pit full of sacrificial victims to paste and it works like a champ if your Latin's good.
• Nothing Is Scarier: At the beginning of the second book, it's revealed that the Bangkok enclave has been destroyed. This in itself would be bad enough, but what makes it worse is that no one knows what did it. Sudarat, one of the freshmen that El befriends, was the only survivor of her age group and she did so by complete happenstance, having been outside to walk her grandmother's dog when it happened. When she came back to return to the enclave, it was already gone, indicated by how she was unable to open any of the entrances. During Graduation Day that year, a massive naga hauls itself into the school from one of the Bangkok induction portals, and El suggests that it might be the one responsible, but obviously she can't confirm it either way. It later turns out that El was the one who took out Bangkok, because the maw-mouth she took out in the first book happened to be the one that was anchoring the foundations of the enclave.
• Now or Never Kiss: Orion responds to an onrushing wall of Mortal Flame his powers are useless against by kissing El, who interrupts him with a knee and casts a firebreak.

O to S

• Obviously Evil: The more malia maleficers take and use the harder it is to conceal resultant tell tales, until everyone can sense it. That's why everyone thought El was a maleficer, because she was very attractive in spite of the low hygenic standards of the Scholomance, her strong affinity for The Dark Arts gave her the aura of one, and her lack of displayed power only meant that she was bad at it. What makes Ophelia Rhys-Lake so unsettling is how she's not this, looking like a perfectly ordinary woman who is neither supernaturally beautiful nor a decrepit hag. If it weren't for El's heightened Supernatural Sensitivity, neither she nor her friends would've realized she was a maleficer at all.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Many of the systems in the Scholomance are in place to prevent frowned-upon behaviors employed by the students who attended earlier in its existence. For example, a curfew was instituted to ensure students remained in their own rooms and didn't try to steal anyone else's; prior to that, seniors were throwing newly-inducted freshmen out of their rooms and delaying their graduation by one to two years once they realized there was a massive horde of mals down in the Graduation Hall^note The Senior Dorms are on the second most bottom floor of the school, and therefore the ones closest to the horde, which is in the hall on the bottom floor.
• Odd Couple: Galadriel and Orion. She's an independent loner who lives in a yurt in the middle of nowhere and whose magic is trying to make her the most terrifying dark wizard in living memory. He's an enclave kid whose mother is next in line to lead the most prestigious enclave in the world and whose magic makes him an ideal dark wizard/monster slaying hero. Just about the only thing they have in common is wishing people would judge them for themselves and not their preconceived notions of what they are.
• One True Love:
  • El and Orion. Orion shows absolutely no interest in anyone else in the series — and indeed, has never shown interest in anyone else in his life, according to Chloe. Meanwhile, El has shown attraction to others and even seeks solace in sex with Liesel in the third book, but comes to realize that the only person she wants to be in a serious relationship with is Orion, thanks to briefly believing Orion to be dead for a few weeks. To top it off, it's revealed that the universe deliberately engineered El's conception and birth in response to Orion, meaning she was literally made for him, even if it was just to stop him once he lost control of his powers.
  • El's parents, Gwen Higgins and Arjun Sharma, are this to the point that Arjun's great-grandmother, the most powerful seer in the world, outright confirms there is no timeline where they don't fall in love while attending the Scholomance. Unfortunately, they're also the Star-Crossed Lovers version of this trope, because there's also no timeline where they both survive attending the Scholomance. Every timeline Arjun did, he eventually ended up Driven to Suicide in grief. It's implied that were it not for El, Gwen likely would've done the same; subsequently, while El helped Gwen move on from Arjun's death, Gwen has shown no romantic interest in anyone else since.
• Only the Pure of Heart: The Golden Stone sutras create enclaves without the usual cost in malia, but can only be cast by wizards who are completely free of malia themselves — no cheating whatsoever, for their entire life. They unfortunately also have to be once-in-a-generation level powerful, which rendered the spells all but useless for thousands of years.
• Opportunistic Bastard: Every student who attends the Scholomance is expected to be opportunistic to an extreme degree. Enclavers are drilled in Scholomance strategy from a young age, from the best places to sit in a classroom to identifying the most capable indie kids to take advantage of. The smarter indie kids come up with long-term strategies to help them survive all four years and graduation, oftentimes blowing their weight allowance for specific supplies that will grant them a huge advantage inside. And above all else, everyone is expected to grasp at any windfall that comes their way the first chance they get, even if it's at the expense of someone else.
• Overpopulation Crisis: The establishment of the Scholomance (and its expansion to include independent wizard children) decreased the overall mortality rate of wizards, leading to an increase in the amount of malia being used and therefore an increase in the number of mals. It also led to an increase of enclaves being built, which led to an increase in the number of maw-mouths to gobble everyone and everything up. El notes that even without her bungling her way into the situation, the entire world was already in one big fat race to the bottom. All she did was speed it up.
• Out with a Bang: Sexual consent is one way to bypass a wizard's personal defenses and drain their life energy for Black Magic. El guesses that Jack killed Luisa this way, since he wasn't powerful enough to drain her by force. And given the way he tried to coerce El, what qualifies as "consent" isn't particularly strict.
• Parents as People:
  • Liu's family essentially guilt-tripped her into using malia in order to both further their status and help her and her cousins make it through the Scholomance. However, they are not willing to sacrifice her in order to make their new enclave, and later help El in saving her from being sacrificed to make Beijing's new enclave.
  • Deepthi Sharma, who clearly loves her family but, thanks to her gift of prophecy, is often forced to make hard choices that will cause them to hate her just for the sake of their own futures. This includes El, who she deliberately estranged from the family just to ensure she wouldn't fall into the hands of Ophelia Lake and turned into a monster.
  • El spends the first two books building up an increasingly unflattering picture of Orion's parents inside her head. When they finally meet in The Golden Enclaves his father turns out to be a more or less normal man who was a little out of his depth as a parent and is genuinely moved to know that his son had finally made a friend before he died. His mother on the other hand...
• Penny Among Diamonds: This is the fate of every single valedictorian, with a side of Riches to Rags. In the school, the top few students will be courted heavily and have their pick of graduation aliances. On the outside, however, there's not a lot distinguishing them from maintenance track kids - they're merely brighter than average teenagers with a few loose allies and no ties to the established factions in their new homes. They might have an enviable step up in the world compared to indy wizards, but they're on the lowest rung of the power ladder.
• Pent-Up Power Peril: Some people have a limit for how much mana they can hold at any one time and need to bleed it off otherwise they might pop. El doesn't have nearly the trouble that others have dealing with large amounts of mana, stating that her mana capacity is probably around "ten times the average", while Orion seems to outstrip her even in adolescence if his ability to hold the whole New York mana supply is accurate. The final book reveals that as a maw-mouth who is directly connected to the Void, he has no limit whatsoever.
• Perfectly Arranged Marriage: A variation with Liesel and Alfie—although no one is forcing them together, valedictorian Liesel fully admits she courted and recruited Alfie, the descendant of the Scholomance's founder purely for political reasons: he had power, and she wanted to become as powerful as possible. However, she says that, after setting up a purely power-motivated relationship with him, she realized that she admired the kind of person he was anyway and came to truly care about him. El thinks that, even though it's not her idea of an ideal relationship, it's clearly working for both of them. He's even open to her making it a semi-open relationship by adding other people to their circle by any means she can convince them, including sex.
• The Perils of Being the Best:
  • The more powerful you are a wizard, the more likely it is that you're going to be a target—whether that's so some enclave can get you under control and use you as a weapon against their enemies, or as someone to kill so you can't use your powers against them. What makes El empathize with Orion is realizing that he suffers from the exact same problem she does, only in the reverse: people only see his power, which is why they want to get close to him. Just like how people see (or sense) her power, and flee in the other direction.
  • Back in the old days, the school used to regularly post the student rankings for every class at the end of each semester. This ended when students going for Valedictorian started using the rankings to murder those ahead of them so they could be on top, so now they're only posted at the end of the first semester of the senior year of each class. While that mitigated the worst of it, Valedictorian candidates still regularly sabotage each other's work, which is why the best way to become Valedictorian is to use a Beneath Notice strategy.
• Person of Mass Destruction:
  • Galadriel "Spells that only affect one person at a time are a bit beneath me" Higgins.
  • This is implied to be yet another reason Gwen was resistant to joining an enclave. At best any enclave she joined would see El as a strategic weapon to discourage attacks from other enclaves. At worst they would give her all the malia she could stomach and point her at their enemies.
• Place of Power: Magic is much more effective and mana-efficient inside wizard enclaves. Because magic runs on the power of belief, it's a huge advantage to work in a place that's built from magic, exists mostly in an already-magical reality, and is reinforced by the perceptions of an all-magical population, compared to the mundane world. Conversely, however, it's only useful when dealing with other wizards; letting mundanes into an obviously magical space is a very bad idea.
• Please Get Off Me: Orion causes this situation in the first book coming to the rescue of Aadhya, El and Chloe only to crash into them instead. Is the recipient of this from Chloe in the second book when she flees a mimic mal that was hiding as one of her couch cushions.
• Pocket Dimension: With powerful magic, locations like the Scholomance are "coaxed loose from the world and into the void", where they can only be accessed through discreet gates and their local reality is a bit malleable. This lets the elite of Magical Society live in extradimensional "enclaves" which are both safer and more convenient than the mundane world.
• Poison and Cure Gambit: A subtle one is set up at the end of The Golden Enclaves. The Sharma Clan, who have worked out a labor-intensive means for ordinary wizards to create (admittedly small) Enclaves and even patch existing ones with the ancient Golden Stone Sutras, are not only fully aware of what is blowing the foundation stones that have been in use for centuries but quietly coordinating with the people responsible.
• Popularity Cycle: Usually with the exception of enclavers, everyone's popularity varies depending on how capable they prove themselves to be and what connections they have. Ironically, the biggest example of this involve the Bangkok enclavers in the second book, whose popularity dropped exponentially after the recently-arrived freshmen revealed that the Bangkok enclave had been destroyed, making them no longer enclavers.
• Popularity Food Chain: A very interesting case. Due to the nature of the Scholomance and the magical world in general, popularity is dependent on utility and merit first and foremost, before taking into account the usual factors. Usually, the biggest deciding factor is whether or not the person in question can get you through Graduation Day. In short, the chain goes like this:
  • Once-in-a-generation talents (e.g. Orion and El), with things like approachability and perceived willingness to help/harm other wizards making the difference between fawning adoration alloyed with efforts to curry favor and openly terrified deference punctuated with desperate assassination attempts. What makes El realize the fact that she doesn't actually want to join an enclave is that she could've shown off her power any time she wanted, with or without a mal present. Yet, despite telling herself for three years that she would do such a display, she never actually went through with it. Which is why it takes until her senior year, when the school is explicitly forcing her to show off how strong she is to everyone, for her to take her proper place at the top of the food chain.
  • Enclavers, aka students who are from an enclave. They're popular not just because of the advantages they have, but also because most of the students (should they survive) want to join an enclave after they finish their schooling, as that means their children will have those advantages too when they attend the Scholomance. How popular an enclaver is relative to other enclavers depends on how powerful the enclave they come from is. Among enclavers from the same enclave, it depends on their parents' power and their own skill and likability.
  • Indie kids, or 'loser' kids, aka kids from independent wizarding families that managed to luck into a seat at the school. They form their own sub-chain, and are cherrypicked by those higher up the chain to join alliances depending on their skill and likability.
    • Valedictorian stands at the top of this chain, because they've proven themselves to be the smartest, most skilled, and most ruthless student of their year. Becoming the valedictorian guarantees you a spot at whatever enclave of your choice.
    • Valedictorian candidates. The top ten or twenty students after the valedictorian. Might not get guaranteed spots at enclaves, but will still be heavily considered and courted by enclavers.
    • Kids from powerful independent families. They come from families within shouting distance of setting up enclaves themselves, and if they do not have the resource base/mana reserves of full-on Enclavers they have some level of connections by default. More to the point they are in positions where they need not latch onto the first Enclave willing to take them for the sake of long term survival.
    • Kids with great magical skills and social skills. They're both useful and likable and usually have a lot of connections, so if an enclaver can't get one of the valedictorian candidates, they go for these ones.
    • Kids with great magical skills or social skills. They're either useful or likable, so they can help you survive through their own skills or through their connections.
    • Maintenance track. They did all your maintenance shifts for all four years of your schooling, so you pay them back with a spot on your alliance.
    • Minion track. They lack the skillset for the Maintenance track so they make themselves useful to enclavers as gophers, servants, (in all honesty) human shields, and so forth in return for whatever consideration they have left.
    • Stragglers. Everyone else that doesn't fit into the above categories, who are usually left to sort themselves out once everyone else is locked down.
    • Maleficers. Usually avoided by everyone. While minor maleficers like Liu can usually bypass this and find a place higher up the chain, powerful maleficers like Jack are ostracized if not outright hunted down and killed should they be exposed, because they usually become a danger to everyone - at least one alliance of maleficers was (supposedly) able to take out the entire graduating class in the past. It's revealed in the second book that the majority of the school thought El was an incompetent maleficer due to the ominous air around her, until she started hanging around Orion, who would've never tolerated a maleficer's company.
• Power Crystal: When properly enchanted, small crystals are a highly efficient "power sink" for storing Mana for later use, optionally at a distance via Sympathetic Magic. They aren't the vast mana pool tapped into by power-sharers used by enclave kids, but they work well enough. El has a staggering fifty courtesy of her mother, who makes world-renowned mana crystals, but is stuck with the grueling task of filling them herself.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child:
  • The Scholomance is powered in part by the collective misery and gruesome deaths of its students.
  • It turns out the foundation stone of every modern enclave is powered by the creation of a maw-mouth, using a strict-mana wizard or witch as its "core". That maw-mouth essentially serves as the foundation's "anchor", and its destruction will cause the destruction of the foundation and thus the enclave. This includes the Scholomance, which was created the same way all modern enclaves are; Patience, the larger of its two signature maw-mouths, is actually the maw-mouth that was created when the Scholomance was first coaxed into existence.
  • Ophelia Rhys-Lake murdered an entire year of Scholomance students (at least a hundred, if not more, since they were all seniors) in order to turn her son into a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid. And part of the process was making said son the core, effectively murdering him in utero before bringing him back.
• Power Incontinence:
  • Orion is bad at keeping track of how much mana he's using. If left to his own devices, he'd draw down the reserve for the whole New York enclave, so he needs someone else's permission to activate his mana-sharing device. He's reluctant to admit this, with good reason, since it's basically the magical equivalent of wearing an adult diaper. It turns out that's because he's half-maw-mouth and thus is constantly hungry for mana.
  • El has her own problems in this area. She is so magically gifted with large-scale complicated spells it's hard for her to manage delicate small-scale effects. In addition her "knack" for draining malia is sufficiently over-clocked that if she ever cast anything she did not have enough readily accessible mana for she would automatically rip the lives out of everyone within a radius of several meters (or more if it were something major) to make up the difference. To say nothing of what would happen if she intentionally tried to "cheat" with low-end (bugs, etc.) malia draining.
• Powers That Be: The universe is implied to be sentient on some level. There isn't an explicitly defined divine power named, but there are still laws like the Principle of Balance that need to be obeyed, and some events throughout history are lined up in such a way to lead to a specific outcome that it suggests deliberate engineering from an outside force. This includes the birth of Li Shanfeng, whose revival of the Shanghai enclave was pivotal to shifting the Balance of Power between the east and the west to something more equitable, and El's own birth and destiny as the rebuilder of the Golden Enclaves.
• Pre-Climax Climax: El and Orion have their first time right before the climax of The Last Graduate.
• Prisoner's Dilemma: Wizarding society faces this issue with malia generally; using it makes life easier for the individual wizard, but generates maleficaria, which are a burden on all wizards. In an effort to escape the maleficaria, wizards seek to create enclaves, which are much safer for anyone associated with them - but this solution makes the maleficaria situation much worse.
• Professional Butt-Kisser:
  • Minion-track kids, who are non-enclaver students who aren't magically-talented enough make themselves useful allies for the Graduation Run (or do maintenance shifts) and don't have the social skills to make good connections with others. They instead resort to kissing up to enclavers and anyone else with enough talent and clout for whatever scraps they can get. Ibrahim is an example of a minion track kid, someone that El is surprised to realize actually does like people and isn't putting up an act.
  • The author of the copy of the Golden Stone sutras that El receives. Much of his commentary in the book is mainly geared toward sucking up to his sponsor, a Baghdad enclaver who helped him get into the enclave after his whole family was killed.
• Properly Paranoid: Every student is constantly on the lookout for mal attacks — from every room they enter, from the wardrobe, from their lunchtime pudding. Between mals, maleficers, and the school itself, paranoia is practically a requirement if you want to experience adulthood as a wizard. The only notable exception is Orion, and the only reason he can get away with it is because he's The Hero with an affinity geared toward mal slaying.
• The Prophecy: We don't get the specifics, but apparently there is one about El that is so terrifying it causes an entire family of Actual Pacifists to think killing a five year old is acceptable. Later information suggests that El is supposed to destroy all the enclaves in the world, though how she's supposed to do that is not clarified, and in a rare moment of optimism she daydreams that it means she'll destroy the enclave system by travelling the world and helping people build modest, safe enclaves, vastly reducing the power of the big ones. The truth is actually somewhere in-between: she's destined to destroy the maw-mouths anchoring modern-day enclaves, and then rebuild said enclaves using the Golden Stone sutras.
• Psychic Nose Bleed: The main downside of pulling malia (besides the inherent ethical and moral problems) is that most people don't like being murdered for their mana and try to resist the process. This taints whatever power the maleficer gets and damages them in a way that accumulates over time. A smart, careful maleficer can eke out a career of it, but anyone less restrained tends to rot from the inside out within a few years.
• Psychosomatic Superpower Outage: A hazard of attempting magic in front of Muggles, since magic runs on Clap Your Hands If You Believe and non-wizards quite firmly believe magic isn't real. Not only can their disbelief cause the spell to fail, the failure can start to erode the wizard's belief in their own powers.
• Realpolitik: Discussed.
  • This is the entire reason why the enclaves opened up the school to children of independent wizarding families in the first place. By doing so and giving these children a quality education, they increased the potential number of recruits to help enrich their enclaves — and more importantly, provided Cannon Fodder for the mals that reside at the school to chomp at while keeping their own children safe. When El realizes this for herself, it puts her off the idea of ever joining an enclave, just like her mom.
  • As the Scholomance was built by western enclaves and has only ever been maintained by them, a disproportionate amount of seats are allocated towards wizards in the western world, to the point the nearly every indie kid in the UK, including kids who don't even know they're magic, gets a seat at the school. El even admits that her own seat in the Scholomance—which the London enclave gave to her as a favor for her mother—is one she really shouldn't have. Compare that to the east, where the enclaves only have just enough to send their own children (and even that is a recent development) and a handful of seats for their own indie kids to compete viciously over. As there is a stark divide between the western and eastern wizards with minimal overlap, that means the eastern enclavers have less potential allies and recruits to choose from for graduation and thus lower survival rates than their western counterparts. This has become a major point of contention in the recent decades and drives much of the conflict of the second book.
  • This reaches its logical extreme in the third book, when it's revealed that the foundation stones of modern enclaves are created through a process that produces maw-mouths using strict-mana (and usually independent) wizards. Said maw-mouths act as anchors for the foundation stones, and are often chucked elsewhere (usually places that don't have any powerful enough enclaves to protest) to feed while the new enclaves go on with their lives. The tensions between the western and eastern enclaves is a byproduct of this process, thanks to the west constantly translocating their maw-mouths to the east, one of which eventually led to the destruction of the original Shanghai enclave. When Shanghai was revived, they eventually started retaliating by sponsoring new enclaves of their own and chucking those maw-mouths to the west, and the entire thing devolved into a fantastic Lensman Arms Race that likely would've filled the world with so many maw-mouths that it would've ended up killing the entire wizarding population.
• Reconstruction: Maleficaria are a reconstruction of the classic fantasy "monster" archetype, with nods to the way monsters are portrayed in video games and anime as well. They are magical creatures born of using malia—that is, stealing the life force of other living things, which typically kills those creatures—and thus their creation is shown to be inherently unethical. No matter what purpose they're made for, they always end up hungering for more malia to fuel themselves and becoming violent, needing to kill to survive. Unfortunately, the best sources of mana tend to be adolescent wizards (strong enough to be magic-rich, weak enough to be mostly incapable of defending themselves), so they end up so Harmful to Minors the Scholamance itself exists for the purpose of stopping them. In fact, around 75% of wizards die in adolescence because of mals. Thus, they're a type of monster that is dangerous, senseless, and vicious enough to show why they're so feared in the setting, and to justify the existence of monster hunters.
• Recruit the Muggles: While the students of the Scholomance are all magic users, most of them they tend to rely on Orion and El to save them from seriously dangerous monsters. In the final act of book 2, everyone in the school joins El and Orion in a brainstorming effort to get everyone out alive while not leaving them vulnerable to the mals In the outside world, and then they band together to implement that plan, at no small risk to themselves.
• Red Herring: There are some fairly clear (at least in retrospect) clues as to who was destroying the enclaves. Bangkok was destroyed a few weeks before graduation El's junior year. El killed a maw-mouth a few weeks before graduation her junior year. Salta is only a few years old and was destroyed on graduation day. El killed a very young maw-mouth that came in through the Salta portal on graduation day. Beijing was attacked a week later, the day El killed a large and powerful maw-mouth in London. And then there's London. London was also attacked on graduation day, and El didn't kill two maw-mouths on graduation day. To figure out how London was attacked, you have to remember that in the process of trying to rescue Orion, she did cast La Main de la Mort at Fortitude, the maw-mouth that was helping anchor London^note either by whatever was left of Fortitude or through Patience, which had absorbed most, if not all of Fortitude at that point, and while that didn't let her accomplish her goal of rescuing Orion, it did apparently do enough damage to London for the maw-mouth to get in.
• Red Shirt: When El and Orion embark on a dangerous mission without most of the other named characters, and with a bunch of people we met in the same chapter, it's not hard to piece together that some of them aren't coming back.
• Reduced to Dust: In the stairwell fight, El hits a giant mal with a disintegration spell so efficiently that her friends miss it and even the mal doesn't immediately notice its own collapse. Only later does one of El's friends clue in on what that means about her destructive potential.
• Reflective Teleportation: One Summoning Ritual uses a reflective surface as a focus — optimally a large, ornate Magic Mirror, but in an emergency in The Golden Enclaves, El brute-forces it with a ton of mana and a puddle of water to breach the Scholomance's defenses and reach Orion Lake.
• Relationship Upgrade: El and Orion become a couple for real in book 2. And after all the trials they have to go through in book 3, the ending of series heavily implies that they're going to live Happily Ever After.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • When you re-read the series, it becomes a lot more obvious that the Scholomance is preparing El for her actual destiny as the destroyer of maw-mouths and the builder of Golden Stone enclaves, than preparing her to be an Evil Sorceress like she initially believed for most of the books. The reason she keeps getting all these dark, destructive spells to learn is because they're the only spells that match her affinity and will allow her to kill something as dangerous as a maw-mouth, and for her senior year, it even gave her an independent study explicitly focused on nothing else but translating the Golden Stone sutras.
  • When explaining the background of the Golden Stone sutras, it's stated that the original author, Purochana, was the one to erect all ten of the original Golden Enclaves. El dismisses this as false, because it makes no sense for him to bother building any more besides the one he was going to live in himself. Upon a re-read, the detail actually serves as a major hint as to why the sutras fell into disuse. Purochana did erect all of the original Golden Enclaves himself, and the reason why is because he was the only person alive at the time who could use the sutras, something El only realizes in the third book after using them herself.
  • It's offhandedly mentioned in the second book that the reason why there's no enclave in Pune is because the wizards who were going to build it immediately started infighting after receiving the enclave-building spells from the Jaipur enclave in trade. Most of them died, some joined Jaipur, and the rest renounced magic, purged their body of mana, and left to live ascetic lives in the woods. A seemingly innocuous fun fact and one of the initial hints about the dark nature of modern enclave-building; it's implied the reason they began infighting is because they fell into conflict over whether or not to use the spells, knowing they would be condemning an innocent life to becoming a maw-mouth in exchange for their new home. Hence why some of the survivors joined Jaipur while the rest swore off magic entirely.
  • Alfie's knowledge of the numerous attempts to fix the scouring machinery in the Graduation Hall and keep it working becomes a lot more noticeable once you know he's a descendant of the original creator of the Scholomance, Sir Alfred Cooper Browning, who he also happens to be named after.
• Rescue Romance:
  • Actively defied by El when it comes to Orion, literally since the very first sentence of the series. Not that the rest of the school will believe her.
    I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life.
  • Played straight by Orion at the end of the first book when El saves him from mortal flame. El is not amused.
• Restoration of Sanity: When El overclocks her mother's meditative exercise for "making the choice to put yourself right" with a huge amount of mana, it cures Liu of the physical and mental corruption from her malia use. Downplayed in that it only works because Liu was using the bare minimum^note (El compares the carefully rationed mouse sacrifices to sneaking a cigarette every couple of weeks, and theorizes that going cold turkey on magic outright for a few years would have repaired most of the damage on its own) and hadn't gone completely Drunk on the Dark Side.
• Riches to Rags: Valedictorians are in insanely high demand in the Scholomance, with the serious contenders courted heavily by enclavers looking for their best chance to survive the Graduation Hall. But if they're lucky enough to make it to their new homes, they'll be given a pat on the back and shown to the shabbiest rooms the enclave has to spare. They might have a few fond feelings from more senior enlcavers to help them along, but they'll largely have to prove themselves all over again from the ground up.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: El is completely correct that Orion was born in response to the year of the Scholomance where all the students were supposedly murdered by a band of maleficers. Because they were actually sacrificed to turn Orion into a wizard/maw-mouth Living Weapon. And there was no band of maleficers—or if there were, they were always intended to be, and were, disposed of by the mastermind: Ophelia, Orion's mother. Additionally, she is also completely correct that she was born in response to his birth. The universe outright engineered her birth and gave her extraordinary magical power so she would be in position to stop him from destroying the world when the time came.
• Rousseau Was Right: A major theme of the books. The characters are shown time and again to be people who will do good if given half a chance as long as their own survival isn't significantly imperilled. Even the most selfish enclavers are shown to step up, and most maleficers only went that route as a last resort to survive the Scholomance. Even the Enclave councils have a reasonable excuse, as they're being magically compelled to perpetuate the modern Enclave system and its attendant horrors.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Luisa is a Posthumous Character who, as a Mage Born of Muggles, didn't stand a chance in the Scholomance and eventually fell prey to a maleficer. Orion keenly feels what he considers his personal failure to protect her.
• Sadistic Choice: The Scholomance is fond of these. In the second book, El is assigned to a study period packed full of freshmen and all of the surviving mals get shunted into that room. El then has to choose between gathering power for herself and leaving the freshmen to fend for themselves, or protecting the freshmen with the mana she's generating during the class, all while being taunted with how defenseless they'd be to her if she so desired.
• Safety in Muggles: The best bet for anyone not lucky enough to get into the Scholomance is to find the largest concentration of muggles they can and stay there. The collective disbelief of normal humans might prevent magic from being used reliably, but it also negates the majority of a mal's powers. The gateway into the Scholomance is even hidden beneath a mundane tourist destination to weaken mals as they sneak in.
• Safety Worst: When Aadhya was a toddler, her paternal grandfather tried to keep his family safe from mals outside by essentially locking everyone up in the house and never allowing them to go outside. Eventually, Aadhya's older sister couldn't stand the restrictions any longer and snuck out, only for a mal to get her before the adults could find her and bring her back. Aadhya's family took her and left her grandfather's house after that for their own place, and while they never told her outright, it's heavily implied the guilt over the situation led to her grandfather committing suicide.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!:
  • The wife of Liesel's father, who is the daughter of the Domina of a major enclave, is able to get away with essentially murdering Liesel's mother, who isn't an enclaver. Therefore, the only hope Liesel has of revenge is to become the Domina of a more powerful enclave.
  • El openly acknowledges the only reason her end-of-series plan of destroying maw-mouths and rebuilding Golden Enclaves is only possible because the Dominuses of the two strongest enclaves in the world are completely on board with the idea.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Because seats for indie kids are more limited in the east, some families buy their children's way into the Scholomance rather than having them compete for a seat with the poorer families via the rigorous exams. Sometimes it works out, because their child is good at magic, has great social skills or both, and manages to accrue the necessary connections they need to survive the run. Sometimes it doesn't, and they end up a straggler with no real chance at all.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When El meets Ophelia Rhys-Lake for the first time and realizes she's a maleficer, one that makes Jack Westing look like a pathetic worm, her automatic reaction is to bail the immediate area and take her friends with her. Ophelia engages her long enough to give her a power-sharer to use, but after that El moves to leave New York as fast as her feet can take her with Aadhya and Liesel in tow, barely bothering with a goodbye to Chloe and Balthazar.
• Secret Test of Character:
  • This is one of the popular explanations for how homework is graded in a school that very explicitly doesn't have teachers to do the grading. Since the Scholomance sees everything that happens at all times, it's able to judge not only how much time and effort a student puts into their work, but can also tell how confident they are about it. The more work and the greater the confidence, the higher the grade. This system isn't as terrible as it might sound, because magic is largely fueled by belief and effort anyway.
  • As with all things in the Scholomance, this system subtly favors enclavers. Enclavers are told that they're better because they're from an enclave, so they genuinely expect to get better grades, so they do get slightly better grades on average despite being in line with indie kids in terms of magical ability and intelligence.
• Seers: El's paternal family, who specialize in divinatory magic and are famous worldwide for it. Unlike other practitioners of this branch of magic, they're able to predict things that will actually make people happy. The most famous of these is El's several-great-grandmother Deepthi, who Dominuses of struggling enclaves spend millions just to have a five minute chat with. She's also the one to give the dark prophecy about El that has haunted her all her life.
• Senior Year Struggles:
  • The school deliberately gives seniors the more unpleasant tasks, time slots, classes, etc. explicitly because they're the most powerful and experienced wizards in building. Anything that might gobble up freshmen by the dozen will die against a reasonably skilled senior. Hence why the senior residence hall is always on the bottom of the school, right above the Graduation Hall.
  • If you don't have strong magic skills and a solid group of friends by the end of senior year, you'll get torn apart by monsters on graduation day.
  • Oddly subverted during El's senior year... for everyone except El. The Scholomance seems to be out to get her directly and funnels all the mals towards her. Within the first two months or so there's only been twenty-three deaths, with one being someone El herself unknowingly killed by reversing his flaying hex circle and throwing the backlash back at him. El initially believes that it's either out to kill her so it can prey on the rest of the school unimpeded or trying to turn her maleficer. It's actually deliberately encouraging her Character Development so it can convince her to help it with its original purpose of protecting the world's wizarding children.
• Servile Snarker: El's mouse familiar Precious who, while loyal to El, has no issues biting her ear and protesting any actions her master commits or is about to commit that she doesn't agree with. Liu later notes that Precious developing an independent personality is another sign of El's incredible power.
• Sex for Solace: In The Golden Enclaves, El sleeps with Liesel twice. The first time is to help her grieve for the presumed-dead Orion, the second time so she can settle her mind properly and explain to Liesel the truth about Orion's conception.
• Shop Class: Every student is required to take shop every year. The assignments are for magical artificing (with those specifically going for the artifice-track taking the more advanced classes), and if you don't finish by the deadline, your work comes to life and tries to kill you. The workshops themselves are frequent hiding places for mals, so it's not worth going for the artificer-track unless you have an affinity for it.
• Shout-Out:
  • El's full name is Galadriel Higgins. Her friends later enforce the trope by naming her mouse familiar Precious, a name that unfortunately sticks.
  • Aadhya's mouse familiar is named Pinky.
  • In the third book, one of the mals El encounters is a grom.
  • El's spell for killing maw-mouths instantly is to tell them that "You are already dead."
  • In The Last Graduate, El uses a "palm light," whose spell is the single Latin word "lux."
• Single Girl Seeks Most Popular Guy: Inverted. El has no interest in dating Orion and assumes he feels the same way. It turns out he's been the one crushing on her, though the first book ends before El truly has her feelings sorted out.
• Sleeping Their Way to the Top:
  • Everyone believes El is sleeping with Orion in order to get a guaranteed spot with the New York enclave. While El does initially use her new connection with Orion to better position herself in the school's hierarchy, she grows to care for him as a person and eventually realizes that she doesn't actually want to join an enclave, subverting this trope. As for everyone else, the idea that she's sleeping with him for perks is dispelled in the second book after the school starts manipulating El into revealing how powerful she is, proving that she could've made it into New York with or without him.
  • Liesel specifically seeks out Alfie as a future spouse because of his high standing in the London enclave, planning to use him to springboard herself into being London's next Domina in about thirty years or so. Unlike most examples of this trope, Alfie is fully onboard with the idea because Liesel's plans include boosting his career as well. The two are also willing to make El a part of their relationship if she's up for it. While El does end up sleeping with Liesel for solace, she's not interested in becoming a triad with them, and ends the series in a fully committed relationship with Orion.
  • It's flat-out stated that Liesel's father got his enclave council seat by marrying the daughter of its current Domina. That's why he did his best keep Liesel a secret and didn't bring her and her mother into his enclave; shaming his wife by flaunting his bastard wouldn't have gotten him kicked out, but it definitely would've cost him his seat on the council.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Believe it or not, more towards the idealistic side. It's hard to notice amid the constant fatal attacks from nightmare beasts, but finding moments of true kindness and decency in the Scholomance isn't hard. Special mention goes to the final scene, where all the school's current students gather in the cafeteria to help the incoming freshmen adjust. And to the second book in its entirety.
• Small, Secluded World: The Scholomance is built in the Void Between the Worlds and completely isolated, except for freshmen being teleported in and seniors trying to survive Graduation Day. All other communications are blocked because they could let monsters in — not that it has any shortage of those.
• Sole Survivor: While Sudarat isn't the only survivor of the downfall of the Bangkok enclave, she's the only survivor of her age group.
• Solo Mission Becomes Group Mission:
  • In A Deadly Education, the climax of the book involves turning a desparate Suicide Mission to clear out the Graduation Hall that Orion Got Volunteered for into a school-wide effort to fix the hall's cleansing machinery.
  • Most of the plot of The Last Graduate revolves around the Scholomance gradually forcing the graduating class into working together rather than continuing the century old system of free for all alliances.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Gwen Higgins' lover Arjun Sharma saved her from a maw-mouth on their graduation day, going into its gullet in her stead as he told her he loved her. Galadriel was born six months later, and favors her Mumbai-born father greatly.
• Soul Eating: "Soul Eaters" are a breed of mal, though how their feeding differs from other mals' Magic Eating isn't explained apart from that it involves an impressive light show (from the soul eater) and a lot of screaming (from the wizard).
• Space Cold War: A magical example. The western and eastern enclaves have been in a cold war for the last forty years, ever since Li Shanfeng restored the Shanghai enclave and made it prosper into the second most powerful enclave in the world. Using that same prosperity, he sponsored several of the eastern enclaves that stand in the present day, who are all now beholden to him and Shanghai. What's driving the tension is the imbalanced allocation of Scholomance seats, which heavily favors western wizards over the east. However, while that is part of the problem, the actual reason is the west constantly chucking the maw-mouths produced by their enclaves towards the east prior to Shanghai's revival. Shanghai tried to resolve the conflict peacefully by slowing down the rate of enclaves going up, but when the west refused to budge, retaliated by having the maw-mouths of the eastern enclaves they were sponsoring chuck their maw-mouths to the west. This cold war is part of the secondary conflict in the second book, before taking center stage in the third book when it blows up into an actual war.
• Spell Book: Books with spells recorded in them are a bit at odds with reality and tend to vanish and reappear, unaged, in another Magical Library. El has a hard enough time coaxing useful spellbooks out of the Void that when she finds an ancient and extraordinarily valuable book, she uses all the tricks her mother does to entice it to say: lavishing it with flattery and special treatment and promises of even better once she's out of Scholomance. In this specific case, while kind of adorable, the treatment wasn't at all necessary; the Golden Stone sutras would have been useless in the hands of any other wizard of the era, so they wouldn't have left her care for anything other than active mistreatment or, presumably, her going maleficer.
• Spell Crafting:
  • A rare non-video game example. It's entirely possible to craft your own spells, and learning how to do so at the Scholomance is called the creative writing-track. Liu is on the creative-writing track, and one of her assignments includes translating a spell from Mandarin to English (essentially recreating the spell in another language), which would make it more accessible for trade. El tried that track early on in her education — and ended up creating her supervolcano spell. As once a spell is created it's out there for anyone to use (no matter how much you try to destroy any evidence of its existence), El understandably decided to switch permanently to the incantations-track, lest she fulfill her dark destiny by helping some other future dangerous maleficer with her own spells.
  • This later comes into play again in the climax of the third book, when El weaves together her spell to kill maw-mouths, the spell that was used to create the Scholomance, and the Golden Stone sutras in order to kill Orion's maw-mouth half and turn him into a Golden Stone Enclave, saving his life in the process.
• Spirit Bomb: In the climax of The Golden Enclaves, El is forced to kill Orion due to him being a human maw-mouth—but the tiny portion of him that's truly human remains. All of El's allies begin chanting the Golden Stone sutras at him, channeling their power into him and begging him to stay. All of their combined powers are enough to keep him from dying, and rebuilds him as, essentially, a human Golden Stone enclave.
• Spoiled Sweet: Many of the nicer enclavers can be generous once you get to know them and are seemingly ignorant of how lucky they actually are. Chloe Rasmussen says as much toward the end of A Deadly Education, and gradually proves to be this over the course of The Last Graduate. By the time the book ends, El and her end up reasonably good friends.
• Spiders Are Scary: Sirenspiders are an arachnid variety of mal that likes to strike from ambush and enthrall its victims for leisurely consumption.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Gwen Higgins and Arjun Sharma, El's parents. Arjun's great-grandmother Deepthi confirms that there is no future where they didn't fall in love, and no future where both of them survived. In fact, every future where Arjun survived instead of Gwen and El, he would eventually be Driven to Suicide because he couldn't handle his grief over their deaths.
• Starter Villain: Jack Westing, a student who turned maleficer and started taking human victims. He becomes a personal concern for both Orion and El, but Orion quickly puts him down when he makes a move against El.
• Start My Own:
  • Large, independent wizarding families who find it difficult to get into one of the preexisting enclaves may try to build their own enclave instead. It usually takes several generations of gathering up the requisite materials and mana needed to buy the enclave spells from an existing enclave, but if they can manage it, they'll have their own enclave with their family in charge, rather than just being new entries for one of the other enclaves, starting at the bottom of the pecking order. At the beginning of the series, this is what Liu's family intends to do. Their plans subsequently die after they learn the truth about the modern enclave-building spells, an attitude that is only reinforced when the Beijing enclave tries to sacrifice Liu for their new enclave. Ultimately, they end up just using their new leverage and connections to get spots in the Shanghai enclave instead.
  • As revealed in the third book, this was the dream of El's parents. However, instead of a modern enclave, what they wanted to build was a Golden Enclave, to the point that they tried to summon the Golden Stone sutras and left the payment open. What the universe gave them in turn was El, who is the one wizard capable of using the sutras to their full potential and is destined to fulfill their dream by destroying all the modern enclaves and rebuilding them into Golden Enclaves instead.
• Statuesque Stunner: El has inherited her late father's considerably above average height, and admits that she is growing to be quite beautiful "in a tall and alarming way." Even with her barely-adequate-even-for-there grooming standards a number of other students have tried to chat her up before a few moment's eye contact sets off a she's-gonna-eat-my-soul Gut Feeling and they bolt. Meanwhile Orion, who's not scared even of things he should be, certainly doesn't seem to mind Eating the Eye Candy.
• Stress Vomit:
  • For some time after, El throws up violently when reminded of her fight with the maw-mouth.
  • The "induction" for freshmen at the academy is so intense that it causes many of them to throw up.
• Stutter Stop: One of the stragglers in El's year, Hideo, is actually a rather talented incanter—who is unfortunately inflicted with a horrible case of shakes (likely the result of either a failed poisoning or trauma) that make him interrupt his own incantations. Luckily for him, El's mother has a potion to help settle someone's nerves, and with some experimentation, she and Chloe manage to brew up a batch for him.
• Summon Binding: In The Golden Enclaves, El tries to evacuate a friend from a dangerous Pocket Dimension with an obscure summoning spell. It has a built-in compulsion of obedience, but she figures she can deal with the mind control sometime the target isn't in mortal peril.
• Supernatural Sensitivity: Galadriel's affinity for malia and destructive magic also lets her sense when someone is a maleficer, even in the very early stages. It's implied she inherited the ability from her mother, who has a similar (if stronger) sensitivity.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Just because the students of the Scholomance are stuck in a Small, Secluded World does not mean the ongoing events of the outside world don't affect what happens inside the school, as seen in The Last Graduate, whose plot is partially driven by the ongoing tensions between the western and eastern enclaves.
  • While wizards are generally more 'enlightened' than mundanes, that doesn't mean classical forms of bigotry such as homophobia don't exist among them.
  • El has figured out a solution to the whole maw-mouth problem, among other things. But few enclaves are willing to take her up on it, because it involves sacrificing a lot of their power and prestige immediately in exchange for there being fewer deaths in the ephemeral future.
  • The reason why natural enclaves are so rare is because it requires a community of wizards to live and work together in the same place for at least ten generations. The issue with that is that it is exceedingly unlikely for any one place to have ten straight generations of historical stability; most of these communities are destroyed by things such as mundane wars before they can get that far.

T to Z

• Take a Third Option: For over a hundred years, every wizard on Earth has assumed that the options for their kids are the Scholomance (1 in 4 survival rate) or going it alone (1 in 20). El's class figures out a solution that, for the first time in a century, saved almost everyone—and then the year after that, they figured out a way to save literally the entire school.
• Targeted Human Sacrifice: In order to create the foundation stone for a modern enclave, a new maw-mouth needs to be created using a strict-mana wizard. According to El, there can't be so much as a hint of a cheat. That's why the Beijing enclave's council selected Liu to be the sacrifice for their new enclave in the third book under the guise of a random lottery — Liu's anima was completely cleansed by El during the first book, and she had remained strict-mana since then. El speculates that enclaves typically used random indie wizards from the minion track who had been lucky enough to get through the Scholomance without having to take the leap of using malia, instead of powerful strict-mana wizards like Liu, who are exceedingly rare.
• Tarot Troubles: One of the many frustrations caused by El's Black Magic affinity is that when she tries to play a friendly tarot card game, she keeps drawing the Tower and Death cards, even after Liesel takes them out of the deck.
• Teenage Wasteland: Averted. Despite being entirely made up of kids aged 14 - 18 with no adult supervision, things generally stay civil in the Scholomance. It helps that the school is dangerous enough on a normal day that no one is particularly eager to add fellow students to the list of things openly trying to kill them. There still might be students secretly trying to kill them, but that's more of an occupational hazard.
• Tell Me About My Father: Getting the answer to this marked the end of El's childhood for her, asking what had happened to her father and what the interesting scar on her mom’s ankle was. Little did she know that they're related, as Arjun sacrificed himself to get Gwen free from the maw-mouth that grabbed her leg.
• There Are No Adults: The Scholomance is built in the Void, powered by magic, and autonomous enough not to need adults on-site. Students are teleported in at the beginning of their freshman year and left to their own devices until graduation... hopefully to survive the monsters that stalk its halls. The original plans for it weren't quite as isolated, but wizard students are so attractive to mals that maw-mouths showed up (in reality they were there from the start because they had to be to build the Scholomance's foundation stones in the first place), and no adults dared take that risk to come in.
• There Are No Coincidences:
  • The last book reveals that El receiving the Golden Stone sutras was not by any sort of luck at all. They're the entire reason she was born. The ancient enclave her father's family used to live in was one of the Golden Enclaves, and her father's dream was to rebuild the enclave, one he shared with her mother. When they voiced their wish to the universe, it responded by giving them El, who would have the power to properly use the sutras and rebuild the Golden Enclaves for them.
  • In the first book, it's noted by El that once-in-a-generation talents such as Orion and herself aren't rare, but what's weird about their situation is how extreme their gifts are and how closely they were born together, being in the same year and all. She suspects that he, a mal-slaying hero, was born in response to a group of maleficers who sacrificed their entire graduating class, and that she, a prophesied mighty dark witch, was in turn born in response to him. The third book reveals this wasn't even that much of a coincidence: there was no cabal of maleficers, or if there were they were scapegoats. Orion was deliberately engineered by his mother Ophelia to be a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid she would use as a Living Weapon, who she was destined to eventually lose control of as he tried to consume the world in his insatiable hunger. The universe responded with El, who was essentially born with her immense destructive power so she could stop him when the time came. Everyone knows about the principle of balance in magic, and Ophelia, an uncommonly gifted wizard, even predicted that the universe would respond this way, and actively searched for El for years. Deepthi, El's own great-etc.-grandmother and a great seer, in turn saw that coming, and had to estrange El from her paternal family to ensure she would remain out of Ophelia's clutches until she was strong enough to defend herself—as much or more from Ophelia's manipulation as any direct attack.
  • It's only until Shanfeng points it out that El realizes how strange it is that the maw-mouth anchoring Beijing was found attacking London, and how that contrasts the original Shanghai enclave being taken out by the maw-mouth anchoring San Diego's enclave. Shanfeng confirms that this isn't a coincidence, and reveals that the western and eastern enclaves have been in a Lensman Arms Race of maw-mouths ever since Shanghai was revived.
• Those Two Guys: Ibrahim and Yaakov, who are nearly always seen together. Ibrahim is an inveterate suck-up to enclave kids while Yaakov is quiet and restrained. Unusually for this trope, it's romantic.
• Three Plus Two: El, Aadhya, and Liu form the main trio of indie kids, while Orion and Chloe are the outliers as New York enclavers. While Chloe later officially joins their alliance and essentially joins their friend group, Orion mainly sticks around because of El.
• Too Many Mouths: Maw-mouths are covered with the stolen mouths of everyone they've absorbed. When El fights one, she has the awful feeling that they're still trying to speak. In book three, this is confirmed when the mouths of the newest victims of the maw-mouth attacking the London enclave are still begging for rescue.
• Tsundere: El starts off the novel half-jokingly thinking of killing Orion and chews him out after he saves her by blowing up a monster all over her room, and only gets slightly softer on him from there. That ends up being the reason Orion becomes drawn to her because she's the first person he ever met that didn't worship and depend on him and treats him like a regular guy. When El finds this out, she keeps up the act of needling him, just to avoid him thinking she pities him, despite the fact that she actually cares for him and wants to help him move on from his life as the great hero to his enclave.
• Ultimate Final Exam: The only way to leave the Scholomance is to get past the legion of monsters that infest the Graduation Hall. Students work throughout their academic careers to develop the alliances and personal resources to survive the run, and a substantial fraction still die in the attempt.
• Ungrateful Bastard: No sooner does El save the Beijing enclave from destruction with the Golden Stone sutras than its elders try to kill her, immediately, as in the very next paragraph, as a potential threat. The murder attempt gets them a Fate Worse than Death from Orion.
• Unknown Rival: Clarita to every other student going for Valedictorian. While vying for the top spot at the Scholomance typically involves a lot of bluster and posturing, Clarita quietly outpaced all her rivals without drawing attention. After the class rankings are announced, she posts all her marks on the wall outside her room, daring anybody to suggest she doesn't deserve it.
• Unreliable Narrator: El routinely tells the audience things that she believes at the time, that then turn out to be false—it starts in Chapter 1 of the first book, when she's sure that Orion was the one to chase the soul-eater into her room. More significantly, by the end of the second book, it's clear that the Scholomance didn't want to make her go maleficer, and pretty clearly didn't want the maw-mouth to eat half the freshmen in the first book.
• Unusual Pop Culture Name: Protagonist Galadriel (named by Hippie Parents) goes by El, and she even wryly compares herself to her namesake.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • The original creator of the Golden Stone sutras, Purochana. Whoever they were, they clearly had good intentions by leaving behind their work so Golden Enclaves could be continued to be built for future generations of wizards. What they seemed to fail to realize is that their spells were only possible for them because they were a "tertiary-order entity", a generational talent, like El and Orion—literally no one else since was both strong enough and strict-mana in order to make them work. Wizards became so desperate to find a way to create enclaves of their own that eventually one of them figured out the maw-mouth-spawning modern enclave spells that are used in El's time, which eventually started the line of Disaster Dominoes that led to the events of the series.
  • Of all people, the mundane Chinese Government during the Cultural Revolution is retroactively revealed to be this. During the Cultural Revolution, they found several of the original Shanghai enclave's best wizards, found them "suspiciously rich", and sent them away, causing the wards of the enclave to go down and allowing it to be destroyed by an attacking maw-mouth. That started a line of Disaster Dominoes that could have led to the destruction of both the magical world and the mundane world.
  • Every time El kills a maw-mouth, she takes out a foundation stone for an enclave. For young enclaves like Bangkok and Salta, who only have one foundation stone, she took out the entire enclave. This also has the effect of igniting the long-anticipated enclave war between the western and eastern enclaves. While Li Shanfeng does his best to comfort El and tell her it wasn't her fault, but rather the enclaves' for producing so many maw-mouths in the first place, that does very little to assuage her guilt.
• Upsetting the Balance: This one of the basic laws of reality as far as the magical world goes, called the Principle of Balance. If anyone does something that tips the scales too much in one direction, then the universe will engineer some kind of event to tip it back so both sides are more equitable. El initially believes that this is why she was born with so much power and prophecy of doom relating to becoming an Evil Sorceress—both of her parents are paragons of goodness, her father having heroically died to save her mother (who had been pregnant with El at the time) from a maw-mouth during their graduation, and her mother being a Incorruptible Pure Pureness Granola Girl who heals other wizards for free. Therefore, their daughter being destined to be the worst evil wizard society has seen in centuries is par the course. Of course, her theory is later proven to be wrong. While El was indeed born to correct an imbalance, it wasn't one her parents caused.
  • Justified by the balance being the self-contained ecosystem of the Scholomance's Pocket Dimension. Orion has saved over 600 students' lives, meaning the Scholomance has to support more people with less mana, the mals' Food Chain of Evil is starving from the bottom up, and the most powerful mals are getting riled up.
  • As El explains, the Principle of Balance doesn't just account towards good and evil, but anything involving magic that requires a balance. For example, when influence over the magical world tipped too much towards the western enclaves, an extremely talented Chinese artificer was born. Despite being offered spots from all the major enclaves in the world, he instead restored the Shanghai enclave and was made its first Dominus. Forty years later, his enclave is one of the two most influential in the world, to the point that they've been splitting off into creating newer Asian enclaves they can influence to side with them as allies, and can even threaten to make a new school to rival the Scholomance if they don't get a better allocation of seats and classes that favor their children — which is why a Chinese-track had been added to the school in the eighties.
  • The Golden Enclaves reveals that El wasn't born because her parents put too much good in the world, but as a response to Ophelia's crimes against humanity. By slaughtering every student of one year in the Scholomance in order to create Orion, her wizard/maw-mouth hybrid Living Weapon, Ophelia created a terrible imbalance in the universe that needed to be corrected. The universe responded with El, the only wizard powerful enough to eventually stop him when he finally gave in to his hunger, and able to end the injustices that are the maw-mouths. El having the strength to not only kill maw-mouths but do it easily has a more gentle use too, even beyond ending the suffering of those a maw-mouth has devoured—it allows her to create Golden Stone foundations in place of the malia-anchored ones, making her the embodiment of the change in magical society her parents earnestly wished and suffered for.
• Uptown Guy: Just about any relationship between an enclaver and indie kid is going to be unequal, unless the indie kid is from a powerful independent family.
  • Orion and El's relationship plays with this trope. On the surface, Orion is vastly superior in station to El, being a once-in-a-generation talent whose mother is in line to become Domina of the most powerful enclave in the world. El, meanwhile, is an indie kid wizard from the middle of nowhere with barely anything to her name. However, El is actually of a much higher station than most people are aware of, being the daughter of a world-renowned healer and a descendant of the most powerful seer in the world, and a once-in-a-generation talent herself. The only reason she hasn't bothered to elevate her status to match Orion's is largely by choice.
  • Played straight with Alfie and Liesel. Alfie is a powerful London enclaver who is directly descended from the original founder of the Scholomance and whose father is in line to become the next Dominus of London. Liesel is the Heroic Bastard of a council member of the Munich enclave, who specifically sought him out as a future spouse to gain more power.
• Utility Magic: Any spell ever written by a wizard can manifest in a Magical Library, which is how El gets stuck memorizing ninety-nine Old English housecleaning charms for a reading assignment. Only the well-off in Magical Society can afford to burn Mana on work they could just as easily do by hand, but it's sometimes a matter of life and death, like when El has to repair a monster-repelling barrier. Sometimes played for Serious Business: people are willing to pay a mint to learn a low-energy spell to shift matter from one state to another.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Is it worth creating a safe place for magical children to grow up if you have to doom an innocent to an eternity of suffering and create a maw-mouth to do it?
• Villain Has a Point: Orion's mother isn't wrong about the world needing a better solution to the ever increasing mal problem. It's just a shame she decided to force her proposed solution onto an unborn child. And that the child was her own, whom she turned into a weapon to threaten other enclaves into compliance. And that she had to slaughter several dozen people to do it in the first place. And, of course, that that solution would have grown beyond her ability to control and consumed all wizard-kind, if not the world.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Orion and El settle into this dynamic fairly quickly. It gets to the point that Orion's first reaction to El being overtly nice to him is to ask if she's mad at him.
• Wham Line: The final line of the first book. What could possibly be so dangerous about Orion that Gwen Higgins thinks he poses a threat to El?
  My darling girl, I love you. Have courage. And stay far away from Orion Lake.
• What Does He See in Her?:
  • Orion and El provide an (initially) platonic version. The other students (especially the kids who grew up with Orion in New York) are stunned and baffled by how much time Orion starts spending around surly loner El, when he's spent his entire life ignoring everyone else except when acting on his Chronic Hero Syndrome. The real reason is that Orion finds all of the attention everyone else gives him unsettling and considers El's annoyance at his rescues as a sign that he can be more open with her, plus, he's a Blood Knight and until connecting with El literally the only thing he wanted to do is kill monsters. It takes a while for anyone else to figure this out.
  Chloe: I've known him since we were born, and the only reason he knows my name is that his mom drilled him with flash cards in the second grade ... We all knew he was special, we were all grateful. But it didn't register. He wasn't being a snob or anything, he's never mean or rude. I just —didn't matter to him. Nobody ever mattered to him before. Then he talks to you once, and all of a sudden he's making excuses for following you around ... We've only been arguing about whether or not you're a maleficer who's doing something to him.
  • Humorously, the dynamic is inverted within the circle that actually knows both of them fairly well, especially in the second book; El is the talented, beautiful, capable young sorcereress leading the charge to get them then later their entire class, and finally the entire school out of graduation safely, who's going to be their generation's dark horse star once her talents are found out, while Orion is—beyond his also-obvious talent as a mal-hunter—an antisocial weirdo with a shaky grasp of hygiene, academic rigour, and self care.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The magic mirror El makes disturbs her sleep for one night, then seems to disappear entirely. It does get another mention in the second book, so it's still there, but she definitely doesn't bring it with her during graduation.
• What You Are in the Dark: A consistent theme throughout the series that even the most seemingly selfish people aren't as terrible as they act deep down and are capable of acts of kindness.
  • Despite the fact that she is dying from the Agonizing Stomach Wound Jack has given her, El still can't bring herself to use malia to save herself.
  • El's decision to go after a maw-mouth on its way to the first year dorms, rather than show off to the enclave kids during a mass mal incursion firmly cements her status as Bad Powers, Good People.
• Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: Whenever someone does something that would be idiotic by Scholomance standards, El wonders who it is, and comes to the conclusion it is either a freshman (who haven't experienced enough time in the school to recognize when they're doing something stupid) or Orion (who is far from the typical Scholomance student). Hilariously, at one point she starts including herself, thanks to contracting Orion's Chronic Hero Syndrome.
• Wicked Stepfather: El's maternal step-grandfather, who is a practiced maleficer. El is fairly certain he murdered her actual maternal grandfather (the timing was too much of a coincidence) to prey upon her maternal grandmother, who was also a renowned healer like El's mother, to have her take care of him. He's still alive, and even tried to trap Gwen into doing the same for a while before El accidentally opened one of his letters and sent one of his mind-tugging spells back at him.
• Willfully Weak: El is a strict mana user, because if she ever risked tapping malia, even on the fry-insects-or-rot-out-wood levels only absolute saints think twice about, she likely wouldn't be able to stop herself from killing everyone around her.
• Will They or Won't They?: El and Orion. She hasn't decided what she wants by the end of Lesson One.
  • Complicating matters is the fact that all the students think they already have, and El's nature to be contrary to expectations makes her reflexively shoot the idea down whenever it's brought up.
• Wizard Duel: Only one in the first book, since the Scholomance kids spend most of their time fighting mals instead of each other. El and her friends go up against a group of seniors who are trying to thin out the graduation horde at everybody else's expense. Subverted in that the good guys win by finishing their repair job, not by deploying superior magic.
  • The Golden Enclaves has another interesting battle. Several groups of wizards are fighting, but they don't line up to blast fire at each other — instead, they hide in concealed locations from which they try to work spells, which usually consist of manipulating the environment to force opponents into disadvantageous positions.
• Wizarding School: The Scholomance is a much darker take on the trope than the average, but is in line (more or less) with the real life legends about the Scholomance. Given the in-universe timeline, the Scholomance the series is set in took its name from the legends, rather than being their originator.
• Wizards Live Longer: If Galadriel's offhanded comment is anything to go by, wizards can easily live to 150 if they don't fall to using Black Magic and rot from the inside out. They show no sign of being physically different from mundane humans, but can heal themselves with magic. Eventually, though, cancer or dementia get to be too much.
• Words Do Not Make The Magic: Averted; incantations don't need to be actually said if you have the intent and the power to make something happen. Spells can be recognized by their effects even if they aren't voiced, a spell can even work if you don't use the exact words despite if you have the power and intent already queued up. A lot of magic is belief and for most (but not all—see A la mort) spells, it's fine if you're close enough.
• Worldbuilding: A significant portion of the series is dedicated to fleshing out life in Magical Society. The first book centers on the average life a wizard, both independent and enclave, and explains why the Scholomance exists and why El is bothering to attend it. The second book dives into the political landscape of Magical Society and how those dynamics relate to the students of the school. The third is a more in-depth look not just at the enclaves but on the secrets behind them.
• Wrong Context Magic: There doesn't seem to be a "standard" magic user in this setting - there's an enormous variety of affinities, abilities, and power levels. However, El's ability to destroy maw-mouths has never been true of any other known wizard that ever lived, and Orion's abilities are, if not quite as impressive at first, even more aberrant than that.
• Xanatos Gambit: Clarita, the valedictorian, proposes that Orion save them from the insurmountable number of Mals who are amassing to overwhelm the next graduating class by fixing the scouring equipment. If he succeeds, great, if he fails, then he won't be around to stop the seniors from sacrificing some or all of the younger students to save themselves, and the bloody path he'll have carved through the mals down there in the attempt will significantly reduce their number. El quickly figures out what Clarita is doing, calls her out for it, and makes her come up with a different plan.
• You Are Already Dead: El develops a spell to kill maw-mouths at absurdly low mana cost by saying these exact words to them while believing it's true; they take a beat to process the information and then comply. Shanfeng later tells her this works because she's been inside one and knows that they are endlessly suffering murder victims at their core, but even though he's survived one as well, he still wouldn't be able to do it—possibly because he wasn't able to actually the kill the one he fought, possibly because even he's not as strong as her.

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