Resolved in The Last Graduate
El will be her class's valedictorian
- She regularly gets assigned advanced projects when she isn't making up her own, she can learn esoteric spells in hours when it would take others days, her dependence on lateral problem solving makes her more flexible than her affinity would suggest, and she is hinted to be unnusually powerful for her age.
- Jossed, although she does get a special award that puts her name at the top of the list, stealing some of the actual valedictorian's thunder.
Resolved in The Golden Enclaves
The trap in the maintenance passage was reacting to Orion's presence, not El's
- He was the one directly before her in the shaft, and seemed pretty eager not to dawdle on the maintenance passages. He can also pull mana directly from mals. Since mals are basically made of pure malia, that can't be a good sign.
- Not definitively confirmed, but Orion is eventually revealed to be a human/mal hybrid created to be a Living Weapon.
One of El's first actions in the next book will be to seek out and take emergency birth control
- While it's easy to imagine history repeating itself with El becoming pregnant the same way her mother did - even with the added detail of the baby's father sacrificing himself to let her get away - El is not Gwen. She makes a point throughout The Last Graduate that her mother is permanently scarred by her father's actions to the point that she made some questionable choices in raising her daughter, that she believes her parents' actions to have upset the balance of the universe so badly that they created a monster, and that she's a great believer in science when it comes to birth control. Gwen was well along in her pregnancy when she graduated; El had sex only a day before her own graduation and is still well within the window to take emergency birth control and have it be effective.
- Not mentioned; either she took emergency birth control offscreen or she just didn't happen to get pregnant.
Orion is a mal, at least sort of.
- He can drain power from mals, and actively wants to fight them.
- El was warned to stay away from him.
- Confirmed. His mother turned him into a mawmouth/human hybrid as a way to solve the world's ever worsening malia problem.
After the graduation evacuation, someone from El’s paternal family will reconcile with her whether she manages to succeed in her efforts at achieving a Prophecy Twist or not.
- Basically confirmed. El's grandmother and Gwen had been keeping in touch in secret the entire time and are eager to get to know each other better in person once things are out in the open.
El will draw on malia in order to save Orion.
- After the devastating end of the second book, she is drained of power. Regardless, she doesn't have enough mana to reach Orion in the school. What if the only way for her to save him is to give in and use malia? Even if that means draining the life of a large area/forest. It would be a good reason for her mother to want her to stay away from Orion.
The whole "Prophecied To Smash The Enclaves" thing will come to pass, Metaphorically
- El's Dark Powers and associated vibes causes everyone concerned to put the most destructive possible spin on the matter, but if the Enclave-based caste system is disrupted in a manner that also gets rid of the rampaging mals that eat the kids outside of them....
- El has the spellbook of a famous enclave builder. She is going to build enclaves for every wizard who needs one. As a result, non-enclave students won't be sucking up to the enclave kids anymore. The survivability rate of the Scholomance will bump up to forty or sixty percent—for everyone. A wonderful boon to the non-enclave kids, a death sentence for a lot of the rest.
- As of The Last Graduate, she's reached this conclusion herself.
- And in The Golden Enclaves it's revealed that both interpretations are kind of true. El is going to be making a living as a wandering mawmouth slayer/enclave builder, but each mawmouth she kills will also destroy the foundation stone of a modern enclave unless said enclave agrees to her terms to replace their foundation stones.
The whole "Prophecied To Smash The Enclaves" thing is a Self-Defeating Prophecy
- If El had grown up in something that looked as much like an organized group as her father's family, then the enclaves who think that group might be on the other side in the next wizard war would have attacked her preemptively. They would have failed to kill El, but killed someone she loved instead, triggering a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. And the only way to prevent it would be for her to have no connection to her father's family—if there'd been a less dramatic warning, her father's family wouldn't have listened quite well enough.
- Per A Deadly Education, the prophecy about El was spoken by her great-grandmother. Per The Last Graduate, the best (or at least best-known) prophet in the Sharma family is her great-great-great-grandmother. Either El's misremembering relatives (she was five at the time, after all)...or Deepthi avoided meeting El so that her someone else would speak a sufficiently convincing prophecy, and is keeping quiet about the self-defeating aspects so that they indeed self-defeat.
Alternately, El will go Full Maleficer at the end
- The numerous victims of Patience and Fortitude not only yet live and remain conscious, but they are a source of Malia the normal run of Evil Sorcerer would not dare risk tapping even if they were certain they would not burn themselves out gorging on that many lives at once. For the power to destroy the Scholomance and save all who would come after her?
Mawmouths spawn in enclaves
- El mentions that nobody knows how mawmouths spawn. She isn't going to build golden enclaves. She's going to get to the bit of Purochana's book where it mentions this bit of little toxic waste that has to be removed from an enclave every decade or so, recognize it as a mawmouth bud—she's one of the two world experts on mawmouths at this point, and the other one didn't actually build an enclave—and start showing up on enclave doorsteps, politely giving the residents enough warning to vacate the premises (thereby casting children from their homes), then once the evacuation is complete, going in and casting her destruction spell (leveling the sheltering walls). Wizards have spent the last five thousand years identifying "enclaves" with "safety" and "shelter", so the force of that belief means that destroying enclaves yields prophecies of destruction, even if she's saving lives by destroying the enclaves.
- This is actually known to quite a few people high in enclave leadership. Some of them are terrible people who aren't willing to disassemble the enclaves to stop mawmouths from spawning. A lot more of them are selfish people who are willing to see the enclaves disassembled to stop the mawmouths...as long as someone else goes first.
- Confirmed, in several respects. Creating a mawmouth from an undying human sacrifice is the only known way to channel the ludicrous amounts of mana needed to complete modern enclave spells. Destroying a mawmouth also destroys the foundation that mawmouth was used to create, so every time one is killed it also destroys (or at least, seriously imperils) that enclave. And the enclave leaders are all magically compelled to go out of their way to keep that information secret from the general population and sell the spells at a fair market price, even if they want nothing more than to shout it to the world and wipe the spells from existence.
Candidates for who will be smashing enclaves in the third book.
Given how most of the characters from the first two books were in school when Bangkok fell, it seems unlikely that any of them are personally responsible, but some of them could be part of a bigger scheme with their relatives.- The Mumbai enclave. Since they have some inkling of a prophecy about El, they could be hoping to make her a scapegoat.
- Liesel. The way she seems to avoid the enclaves in her home country while reaching out to powerful ones elsewhere could be some kind of strategy. Also, in the extremely unlikely event that someone inside the Scholomance was able to use magic to bring down Bangkok without leaving the facility, who is more likely to have that kind of skillset than a valedictorian?
- A California enclave out to undermine New York.
- One of the British enclaves like Manchester, trying to get back on top.
- Sudarat (possibly in a brainwashed state, as she seems genuinely innocent and confused), given her status as a survivor of the Bangkok enclave.
- New York. They could have taken out Bangkok to weaken the Asian enclaves, just like Shanghai fears.
- Shanghai or another Asian enclave, as a Pretext for War.
- One or more of Liu's relatives, trying to increase the power of their family.
- Some adult paranoid about the balance because of the lives Orion is saving.
- One of the maleficers from the year ahead of Gwen, having faked his or her death and spent the years since plotting revenge.
- A Sharma Black Sheep.
- No one. Bangkok was indeed destroyed by the massive naga that came into the school through one of the Bangkok portals. There's no villain killing off enclaves.
- Jossed - no one was destroying the enclaves directly, they were just destroyed as a side effect of killing a mawmouth.
Enclaves which may be destroyed or threatened in the third book or that may have been destroyed during the events of the second book.
- Zanzibar, Seattle, and Santa Barbara. All of them have briefly featured notable but at least slightly unpleasant characters (Khamis, Victoria, and Myrthe). Taking one of them out might be a way to show the stakes are high while avoiding a lot of angst.
- Sydney. They are the only mentioned enclave on their continent so far, and that isolation may work against them.
- Paris. It's in a very important city, but few if any students from Paris have been directly mentioned. Killing them could be a sign of seriousness while also avoiding any of the characters we know.
- New Orleans or Atlanta. In the first book, El says Aadhya might be going to one of those. If they are destroyed before she gets a chance, that could cause her to stick around El instead.
- New York, with or without most of its people, as a Sacrificial Lion entity.
- Chicago. Anyone who knows America will know there would be an enclave there. Possibly two, north side and south side.
Orion will have killed every last Mal in the Scholomance if/when El makes it back to rescue him, but will have lost a limb or two doing so.
Confirmed, but the damage is purely mental trauma.The prophecy about El destroying enclaves is a Motivational Lie that her great-grandmother made up to set the conditions for El to fulfill her real destiny.
More or less confirmed. The prophecy was real, just worded in a way that would lead to the least disastrous outcome for El and the world. Bangkok enclave gained sentience, the way the Scholomance did, and detached itself from reality.
- There could have been some outside threat trying to get in, and this way the only way the enclave could defend itself.
- There could have been some sort of threat inside the enclave which couldn't be allowed to get out - a giant mal like Patience or a maleficer attempting a coup.
Either way, it's possible Bangkok enclave will find a way to reattach itself to reality, likely far from its original site, but most or all of the inhabitants will have been driven mad by the experience.
- Perhaps Gwen will be asked to come join or leas an attempt to heal them, kicking off getting a distraught El back
- Jossed in The Golden Enclaves.
Since Orion pushed her through the gate, El will end up in New York instead of Wales.
New York Enclave is going to be pissed that the school was destroyed.
Running the Scholomance was a major source of power for New York. Fear of mals is much of what make people want to join an enclave, so vacuuming up 99% of them and sending them into the void means all the enclaves have lost a huge source of their power; but, people will do things for their kids' sake they would never do just for money or ambition, so getting an enclaver seat for their child(ren) was probably their single biggest carrot to dangle, and New York would be the biggest carrot. Plus, if the cleaning-the-world-of-mal routine is going to have to be repeated every few years or decades, you can bet the other enclaves will be only to happy to point out how determined New York was to be in charge of maintaining the school, and thus they should shoulder the responsibility and cost of building a new school-slash-mal trap.- Confirmed. The school might have been almost impractically resource intensive, but it was also the best bargaining chip in the wizardly world and the thing that made New York Enclave the indisputable king of the heap. Even if El hadn't reconnected it they would have tried to get it to a stable stand-by state for if they ever needed it again.
The leadership of the Enclaves, especially those of New York and Shanghai, are going to be far more concerned with Galadriel Higgins than one another once they put matters together
- First and foremost, she was the driving force behind blowing up the Scholomance. Maleficaria breed back and are created so getting rid of so many is a temporary fix and they have to replace the school before things get bad again.
- Of at least as great a concern long term, she has retrieved the Golden Sutras and can pass out how to throw up mana-cheap mini enclaves to all the independent wizards. This seriously cuts into their bargaining position insofar as getting expendable sorts to do the inescapable Dull-Dirty-&-Dangerous jobs about their luxurious Pocket Dimensions.
- For New York in particular, the next (or perhaps current) Domina has lost her son due to the Higgins girl's reckless scheming when it was all but certain he would make it out. Perhaps she does love him. Perhaps she sees him as valued tool. In either case, she will not take him being lost with the Scholomance lightly.
- If he gets out of the Void alive and sane he is more likely than not to go skipping off to some yurt the Welsh back-beyond with El. So even presuming Ophilia Rhys-Lake would be fine with such a thing personally she is more aware than any save her husband of how the kid going functionally rogue kicks over the strategic situation above and beyond his crush's existence.
- As for Shanghai? Their students started cooperating with El's mass evacuation scheme because they were obliged to conclude that the baroque plot to destroy their Enclave they ascribed to her was not something that anyone who could easily obliterate the Yangtze estuary herself would bother with. The adults now know that there is a stubbornly independent wizard who could easily obliterate the Yangtze estuary herself running loose who neither they nor their rivals have any control over whatsoever... who recalls the people who tried to back-shoot her.
- Dominus Li Shan Zheng of Shanghai in particular; being the only other wizard alive with a maw-mouth kill on his belt and having solid memories of what it took in terms of preparation, time, and backing; would feel particularly obliged to keep an eye on someone who was witnessed charging into one of those things and slagging it within a few minutes (esp. if it is worked out that she had done it before). He may respect and admire her, he may envy and fear her, but he will never ignore or underestimate her.
- One of the major points of contention between Shanghai and New York is how many Scholomance seats are given to Asian students as opposed to European/North American students. Now the answer in both cases is a flat zero, with nothing left to argue with each other over.
Lots of people get kicked out of enclaves
- 75% of non-enclave kids and 20% of enclave kids die in the Scholomance. Enclavers are a lot less likely to think, "I don't want to watch my kids die, I just won't have any." But somehow, after centuries, enclavers are still a minority of the wizards. note So either there's some major magic or social rules keeping the enclave birthrate down, or lots of people whose parents were born in enclaves aren't. The enclavers keep quiet about this to make their "guaranteed" enclave spots more valuable, and the ex-enclavers keep quiet because admitting to being an ex-enclaver makes it almost impossible to get back in.
- It's more complicated than that. Due to the Westermarck Effect, most enclavers don't marry people from their own enclave, and there aren't that many people joining enclaves. note So a lot of enclavers move from one enclave to another. Aadhya's cousin, who grew up in Kolkata enclave, was visiting Boston in The Golden Enclaves—he was essentially auditioning to get a slot to move in to Boston or another American enclave. The kids whose parents live in the powerful enclaves (New York, London, Shanghai, Jaipur, Munich, etc.), even if they don't inherit their parents' slot or get into another powerful enclave, nevertheless tend to get slots in midrange enclaves. The kids who grew up in the midrange enclaves tend to get slots in the smaller or weaker enclaves. It's the kids from the smallest, newest, or weakest enclaves that get kicked out permanently.
- And there is an effort on the part of enclaves to keep their birthrate down and the indie birthrate up. Everyone who can afford it, meaning every enclave in the world, puts a lot of R&D effort into life-extension magic. The enclavers then sell to the independents, at a very reasonable rate, every longevity spell or potion they find that increases fertility, messes with mundane contraception, or requires you to have had children to work properly. Liu's grandmother wasn't overly frail because she'd had children so late—she was overly frail because she'd only had six children, and so a significant fraction of the available long term life-extension magic wouldn't work for her.
- In The Last Graduate, New York has exactly one guaranteed enclave slot to give out—if El has it, Liesel doesn't. In A Deadly Education, every major enclave in the Scholomance puts up guaranteed enclave seats—a week before graduation, when surely they've been bargained away to get the very best independent students into alliances. That boy from Berlin was probably expecting to convince his enclave council that taking anyone who went on the mission was a good deal, but the only way he could be sure that a place in his enclave was available...was by being willing to give up his.
Students do the marking.
If your marks/grades are good enough, your maintenance shift is to do the marking for an appropriate class you've already taken. Nobody talks about this, because saying "I have a marking maintenance shift!" is tantamount to saying "I have a serious shot at valedictorian!" and if you get one all the valedictorian candidates think you're someone to sabotage, and also because saying "I have a maintenance shift that I can do in the library!" is a great way to make everyone else jealous of you.
The Golden Stone Foundation Spells are going to be subjected to all the R&D going forward now that the "Caster Level" problem is solved
Clan Sharma has negative motivation to keep these rituals secret; and as they are proof against whatevertheheck is blowing up the ones all the enclaves are using every enclave that can recruit or sprit-sandblast a strict mana chorus will be trying how to get more space out of them for the same if not any less 'riff-raff' moving in.- And yes, the ones who know how they have been making the Foundation Stones all this time will gleefully back this (especially if they work out what is blowing the old ones). Many would have enough of a conscience to favor an alternative that did not unleash maw-mouths upon the world, while those that do not are aware that the only alternative to phasing out the blood sacrifices that release a critical vulnerability into the wild would pose significant risks of getting something that kills maw-mouths handily to come after them directly.
There's a very strong Sunk Cost Fallacy spell built into the enclave spells.
El tells us about one group of wizards, the authors of The Fruitful Vine, who got the enclave-building spells and decided not to use them (for reasons that by the end of The Golden Enclaves are pretty clear). Notably, this group didn't have to trade years and years of mana and work for the spells; they traded one copy of a spell book that they'd already written, and so they hadn't actually sunk that much of their work into buying the enclave-building spells.
Liesel Mueller has not given up on becoming Domina of London
Yes, helping phase in Golden Stone-derived Foundation Stones and put a stop to building/expanding/maintaining Enclaves through horrendous blood sacrifices is important enough to set her timetable back a decade or so, but nothing about that plan actually contraindicates her original one and she has the lifespan to spare. There may be more of a need to purge what is left of the old guard when it comes down to it, and Galadriel would not lift a finger to help unless her opposition was as nasty as and more short-sighted than Ophelia Rhys-Lake, but it remains doable.- However, there is a real chance that overall Positive Friend Influence would have mellowed Liesel to the point that by the time she is in position to lower the boom on "Daddy Dearest" and his meal ticket over the fate of her mother she would be satisfied by making certain they are aware of how precarious their well being now is and letting them sweat.
