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The Scholomance

In Sapienta Umbraculum^*

The school itself. Built in the late 1800s by Sir Alfred Cooper Browning and the Manchester enclave, it is maintained by the New York enclave in the present day. Its exact degree of awareness is up for debate, but there's definitely something at work within it.

Tropes:

Alien Geometries: It's capable of adjusting its internal dimensions to a certain extent, although the general layout is usually consistent.
Believing Their Own Lies: In a sense. El speculates that, despite their words, the creators of the Scholomance didn't actually intend to use the school to protect all the wizarding children of the world, but rather to give enclave children a better chance at surviving. But while they never really believed the lies they spewed out, the school itself did, and never forgot.
Bizarrchitecture: Its architecture is constantly adjusting for each student depending on their personalities and overall levels of belief, and it's missing several walls and a roof, the openings of which lead to the Void Between the Worlds. The only reason this structure is even plausible is because the school is constructed within its own personal pocket dimension, not unlike an enclave.
Blue-and-Orange Morality:
- It was made "to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world", and it takes that duty deadly seriously. It has no issue utilizing lethal force in order to make sure its students learn, and learn well. Just look at how it taught El in her senior year for proof.
- Adding to that is its inexplicable fondness for maleficers. According to El, the Scholomance almost never attacks maleficers, and if they make it to graduation, they usually survive. It's not clear whether this is El being an Unreliable Narrator and maleficers don't actually have better chances, whether it's that pulling malia is so effective in the short term that maleficers can survive despite the Scholomance's efforts, or whether the Scholomance indeed does not attack maleficers for some obscure reason of its own.
Boarding School of Horrors: Yes, in both figurative and literal sense. It's so bad, the place has a seventy-five percent mortality rate, with only one in four students likely to survive past graduation. The only reason it hasn't been shut down yet is because the odds of surviving without attending are worse.
Breakout The Museum Piece: Its internal mechanisms are about two centuries behind the times, with the last major upgrade being to the cafeteria sometime in the 1950s.
Eldritch Location: On top of its own questionable and often malevolent design, the place is home to one of (if not the) worst mal infestations in the world.
Endless Corridor: One of its favorite tactics when it's trying to corral people or keep them out of somewhere.
Everything Is Trying to Kill You: Everything in the school, everything, from chairs, to tools, to the tray of what appears to be rice pudding, could be a mal, be controlled by a mal, or hide a mal trying to kill the students. Except the brussels sprouts.
Genius Loci: It's implied to be sentient, though to what extent is never clarified.
Good Is Not Soft: It does want to protect the students, but it doesn't love them and it's willing to triage when it has to.
MacGuffin Location: The series is named after the Scholomance because almost every conflict in the story takes place at or is somehow related to the school. Usually both.
- In the first half of the third book, El, Aadhya, and Liesel are trying to get back into the Scholomance so El can kill Patience and lay Orion's soul to rest. When they finally get inside the school, they don't find Patience, but rather a living Orion, who has started to lose control of his maw-mouth half.
- In the second-to-last chapter of the series as a whole, El and her allies again try to get inside the Scholomance, this time to stop the enclave war.
Magitek: It's powered by magic and wouldn't be able to work without it, but a large part of it is actually made of real material that was brought in from the normal world and assembled in the void. There are a large number of ducts, mysterious gearboxes, and other legitimate architectural components. At the end, teams of artificers are bringing in a lot of new equipment to give it a 21st century makeover, such as mana-powered LED lighting.
Malevolent Architecture: It was designed to use the misery of its occupants to reinforce itself. With the mal infestation as severe as it is, this component of its design is unfortunately strong.
Masochist's Meal: As originally designed, all of the food in the cafeteria was in the form of a nutritious but horrible tasting gruel. It was so bad that it was actually affecting survival rates, as most people used their induction allowance to bring in food rather than something more useful. New York's major contribution after taking over was figuring out a process that transmuted the gruel into something more palatable. This has created problems of its own, but after being given the original gruel as part of an object lesson, El concludes the new system was for the best.
No Ontological Inertia: Belief in its continued existence is a key structural element in its design. Get enough people to doubt its stability at the same time, and it could cause a cascading failure that would threaten the entire school.
Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: It is implied in The Last Graduate that it never enjoyed the suffering it was party to, it was just horribly limited in resources and inhumanly able to cope with death and suffering in the name of its duty. The instant a viable alternative presents itself it jumps at the chance, even at the cost of its own existence.
Powered by a Forsaken Child: It was built using the same methods used to build the standard modern enclave, and that means it has its own maw-mouth anchoring its foundation stone: Patience, the largest and most dangerous of the two maw-mouths that make their home in the Graduation Hall. After Patience is absorbed by Orion, Orion becomes its new anchor until El eliminates his maw-mouth half and turns him into a living Golden Enclave.
Small, Secluded World: There is little-to-no communication with the outside world, with the only news coming from terrified freshmen after Induction. That basically makes the Scholomance a society unto itself, with the students as the unwilling citizens.
Trickster Mentor: In addition to the lethal and sadistic way it gets the students to learn, it often employs indirect methods of teaching to get them to do what it wants. For example, it increases the difficulty of the obstacle courses in El's year to such an extent that the seniors can only hope to complete a run with the help of El and Orion, so they'll all be inclined to work together toward its true goal of finding the way to protect all the wizard children in the world. Not only does this work, but the lesson sticks after the kids graduate, when her old classmates help El get back into the Scholomance so she can stop the enclave war.
Training from Hell: Even without the mal infestations it is inclined toward this. Potentially lethal means of making students internalize lessons are routine and refusal to put honest effort into those lessons (or at least see it done) means serious motivation will be applied until the student shapes up or ceases to be a student.
Zeroth Law Rebellion: It's acted as a school for well over a century, as intended. However, in the second book, it sees a unique opportunity and encourages the students to lure a bunch of monsters inside and then blow it up, judging that this is a better way to protect the magical children of the world than what it's actually supposed to be doing.

General

The main cast of The Scholomance series, comprising of El and her main circle of friends.

Four-Girl Ensemble: The first four girls. El is the tomboyish one, Aadhya is the sensible one, Liu is the pretty one and Chloe is the naive one.
Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: A snarky, belligerent, would-or-rather-should-be dark sorceress who sincerely doesn't want to fulfill her destiny, a Cloudcuckoolander Magic Knight that only cares about killing mals, a no-nonsense artificer with great connections that often has to act as the Only Sane Man, an ex-maleficer that uses mice for familiars with a somewhat abusive family, and a Spoiled Sweet Nouveau Riche enclaver. They're later joined by an ice queen Insufferable Genius Social Climber whose only real goal in life is to avenge her mother's murder.

El Higgins

Galadriel "El" Higgins

The main character of the series. A young girl prophesized to cause destruction and mass havoc — with no intention of fulfilling her supposed destiny. She is the daughter of Gwen Higgins, a renowned healer, and Arjun Sharma, the great-great grandson of the renowned seer Deepthi Sharma.

Tropes:

Achievements in Ignorance: In her senior year, she does so much work on her sutras (which are written in Sanskrit) that the school awards her a prize for it, announcing it at the top of the class rankings and stealing some of the valedictorian's thunder. El didn't even know you could get prizes at the Scholomance.
Always Someone Better:
- Ironically, to every would-be maleficer in the school. Despite the 'benefits', it actually takes a lot of effort to collect malia and to find the necessary spells that would benefit the most from using it. El, meanwhile, can draw out malia from a nearly-fully grown wizard with a mere flick of her wrist if she so wished, and has to actively search for spells that can be useful and don't involve "destroying all my enemies and plunging the world into fire and blood".
- Even practiced maleficers don't hold a candle to her. When she was six, her evil step-grandfather sent a letter to her mom with a mind-tugging spell with the intent of making her take care of him as El's grandmother did before her death. El opened the letter instead, and instinctively snapped the spell back at him, causing him a great amount of psychic pain. He hasn't tried again since.
- This is shown starkly in the second book when one such would-be maleficer tried to collect malia from the group of freshmen in her homeroom class with a flaying hex circle. Unfortunately for him, El was the first to arrive, noticed the trap immediately, assumed it was lain by a brighter-than-usual mal, and not only reversed the circle but also made improvements to it. It barely took her any mana to activate it, and before you know it the guy lost all his skin and died a painful death from the massive bloodloss and shock.
- Horrifyingly, El has one herself in the form of Ophelia Rhys-Lake. The best seer in the world has to step in and force El and her mother into ragged poverty just to make sure the two don't meet before El knows enough to resist her influence.
Ambiguously Bi: When El was marveling at how Orion was not even registering Liesel's efforts at seduction she admits that she had given the Valedictorian's unbuttoned top and painted lips third and fourth looks she would not even pretend were due to the impracticality. She's confirmed bisexual in the third book, when she sleeps with Liesel when stricken with grief over Orion.
Apocalypse Maiden: Supposedly. Either way, she has no intention of following through. Or at least she did, until she found out how modern enclaves are actually made.
Attack Reflector: Sending spells back toward their caster on the fly is a very difficult task for most. So long as it is meant to do her harm, the hardest part for El is getting the return shots to miss rather than shove it straight down the caster's throat. She later learns to absorb the power from such attacks to fuel her mana reserves (they are giving it to her freely).
Bad Powers, Good People: She might be surly and rude, but at heart, El is just a lonely girl who has little taste for her affinity in The Dark Arts and just wants to have friends who see her for who she is.
Balance Between Good and Evil: El was born as a result of her mother's saintly nature, being a beacon of Incorruptible Pure Pureness who freely offered her skills to anyone that asked. The fact that El's father heroically died to get her pregnant mother out of the Scholomance probably didn't help matters. Or at least, that's what El originally thought. The Golden Enclaves reveals she was really born as both her parents' answer to finding a new, better way to build enclaves and as a counterpoint to Orion, who was being created around the same time as a Living Weapon. He was the Evil — she was the Good born in response to that.
Believing Their Own Lies: Told herself for years that she was going to join an enclave if she graduated from the Scholomance. It takes until the end of her junior year to accept that this is a lie and that she hates the idea of joining an enclave as much as her mother does.
Belligerent Sexual Tension: With Orion. She has no issues insulting him and they bicker a lot, but they obviously care about and are attracted to each other.
Black Sheep: For her paternal family, the Sharmas, thanks to the dark prophecy about her. It extends to her interactions with the Mumbai enclavers, who have heard enough rumors to give her a wide berth whenever she's near one of them. It turns out, however, that the situation was far more complicated than El or them knew.
Broken Ace: El can master powerful, destructive spells with a single glance, and even the largest and most complicated incantations take only a few hours at most. Combined with her skill with languages, she might very well be the most powerful incanter born in centuries. She's also cranky, cynical, rude, and incredibly prone to self-sabotage due to more than her fair share of internalized self-hatred.
The Chosen One: Two-fold. First, she's destined to destroy all the enclaves in the world and rebuild them into Golden Enclaves. Secondly, she was born to kill Orion and prevent him from consuming the entire magical world in his insatiable hunger. She technically succeeds, but saves enough of his human side to turn him into a Golden Enclave and keep him alive.
Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: For Orion, after (reluctantly) befriending him and seeing his severe lack of self-preservation skills firsthand.
Combat Medic: Being the daughter of a world-famous White Mage has given El the chance to learn some powerful healing magic, though her affinity favors “combat” so heavily that she can’t use it nearly as well.
The Corruptible: The reason why El refuses to use so much as an ounce of malia is because she fears even the smallest amount could send her careening over the edge and straight into becoming an Evil Sorceress. That's why her great-grandmother initially prevented her from joining her paternal family with a deliberately misspoken prophecy—they couldn't keep a child El safe from any of the corruptive influences that would be seeking to use her. Instead, they had to wait until she was strong enough to protect herself before allowing her to join them.
Crippling Overspecialization: Unfortunately, her affinity for powerful, destructive spells means that she struggles to perform the simplest ones.
Damsel Errant: Played With. She doesn't charm Orion with her beauty, though she is beautiful, but by treating him like a person, an annoying one, which captures his attention. She's powerful in her own right, demonstrating she could Instant Kill Orion if she wanted to in the first book. Throughout the second book, she regularly compares her and Orion to a lady and her knight, and she plans after graduation to tour the world with him defeating mals and putting up enclaves thanks to the sutras she snagged last year. Providing protection to children and wizards the world over in exchange for these people Paying It Forward.
Deadpan Snarker: She has no shortage of snark, though she focuses most of it on Orion after they become friends.
Defector from Decadence: Much like her mother, El is powerful enough to get into any enclave she wants. However, she actively shuns the corrupt, magical elite, and is content to continue living her life as an independent wizard.
Defrosting Ice Queen: While she's still rather snide, she becomes more personable over the course of the first two books, especially towards those she comes to consider friends. It's most evident with Chloe, who she solidly befriends in the second book despite some initial reluctance and resentment.
Detect Evil:
- Because of the nature of her affinity, El has the ability to detect maleficers almost on sight, no matter how much they try to hide their dark auras. It's how she knew Jack Westing was a maleficer, despite the rest of the school being completely unaware. It's also how she knows Ophelia Rhys-Lake is a maleficer upon their first meeting; despite Ophelia's appearance as a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman that manages to fool Chloe, Aadhya, and even Liesel, the scars on her anima and the dark aura surrounding her are impossible to hide from El.
- Her ability to detect malia usage also enable her to detect the malia that is used to build modern enclaves. It's later clarified that the malia she's sensing is actually the energy of the maw-mouths connected to each enclave's foundation stones. As she inherited this ability from her mother, El quickly realizes this is the real reason why Gwen refused to join an enclave for all these years.
The Dreaded: Everyone was wary of her because they assumed she was a shoddy maleficer the entire time, but after she repairs the gym, everyone but her closest friends and acquaintances become flat-out terrified of her. Not only is that when they realize that she is quite possibly the most powerful student the school has ever seen, but also the fact that none of them have any way of controlling her.
Everyone Has Standards: El might hate enclaves on principle, but even she finds Yancy and her crew lounging around on the London enclave's memorial to their dead children to be incredibly disrespectful.
Game Face: Not a physical transformation, but the aura about her that sets off the 'Evil Sorceress Approaching' reflexes of so many? It gets stronger when she is angry to much the same effect, especially if there is anything akin to eye contact.
Generation Xerox: Her time in the Scholomance ends up playing out almost exactly like her mother's did. She meets a boy during her time there, ends up falling in love with this boy, starts dreaming about bringing back the Golden Enclaves with him, and finally, she seemingly loses him to Patience, just like her mother lost her father all those years ago. In the end, however, El's story has a happier ending, because it turns out Orion is alive, and she manages to figure out a way to save him from his own dark destiny so they can finally have their happy ending.
The Gift: Much like Orion, El is a once-in-a-generation talent, and whatever she chooses to do with her life after her schooling could make or break the magical world. Which unfortunately makes her enemy number one to the Shanghai enclavers in the school for much of the second book, due to her close association with the New York enclavers. As the two enclaves are predicted to be at war with each other soon over the latest allocation of Scholomance seats, El joining the New York enclave would be disastrous for the Shanghai enclave due to the sheer power at her fingertips.
The Hero: Even though Orion supposedly ticks off all the boxes, El is the protagonist and the true hero of the setting. For all her self-hatred, she always tries to do the right thing and constantly refuses to choose the 'lesser evil', just like her mother. This is only reinforced in the third book, where it's revealed that she was never going to turn evil in anything but the worst timelines, and that her destiny was always to save the world from Orion and rebuild modern enclaves into golden ones.
Heroic Bastard: Her parents were never married, as she was conceived while they were still attending the Scholomance and her father died getting her pregnant mother out during their graduation day. Note that El's paternal family didn't have an issue with this — they were all up and ready to take El and Gwen in and even delighted in El's strong resemblance to Arjun. Then her great-grandmother made that prophecy...
Heroic Self-Deprecation: A number of people manage to see past El's surly demeanor, talent for mayhem, Aura of Menace, etc. to recognise her for the empathetic, courageous, and unselfish young woman she actually is. El herself is not among them.
Hoist by His Own Petard: Throwing malicious spells at El rarely works out well for the caster. If she doesn’t just counter one instinctively, she might send it back stronger than ever. Very late in the series she learns to snatch spells out of the air and steal mana from them to use as she pleases, though only with spells meant to cause harm.
Hopeless with Tech: Having grown up in a commune in Wales, she's not good with modern technology. Her friends have to teach her how to use a cell phone in the third book, and while she gets a hang of calling and texting, anything beyond that requires outside help.
Horrifying the Horror: In The Golden Enclaves a maw-mouth breaches the London enclave and is leisurely wandering about forcing open interior wards concealing munchies as it tanked-if-not-ate everything the premier wizards of Britain could throw at it. Then it spots El and instantly bolts for the nearest available exit, fleeing at top speed in the hopes of losing her in the catacombs.
I Just Want to Have Friends: What she's really wanted all along. She doesn't want an army of shallow admirers like Orion has, but genuine friends that want her for her. Making that realization is a major part of her Character Development and defines her motives for the rest of the series.
Ineffectual Loner: Despite her indisputable talents and successfully reaching her junior year on her own, she is acutely aware that she has no hope of getting out without an alliance. Overcoming her loner mindset is one of the main obstacles she and her friends have to overcome in the series, and it takes awhile for the reality of the situation to sink in. She's so bad even the school takes notice.
It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: El might've been born with immense power and is destined to change the magical world forever, but it came at the cost of being ostracized from all her peers for all of her childhood and most of her adolescence, unable to use small scale spells that any other mage can pick up easily, stuck in constant fear of turning to The Dark Side and becoming an Evil Sorceress that could destroy the world, and estranged from her own paternal family for thirteen years in order to ensure another Evil Sorceress didn't find her and turn her into a Living Weapon. And that's not even getting into the fact that part of her destiny is to kill the boy she ends up falling in love with.
Like Mother, Unlike Daughter: The outward contrasts between El and her mum Gwen in terms of demeanor, mystical affinities/talents, and even their looks are quite stark, though it later turns out they're much more alike than El thought.
Lineage Comes from the Father: Played with. While El's strong moral character comes from her mother, the person she physically resembles the most is her father. In addition, most of her motivations and desires are inherited from Arjun, who had dreamed of restoring the Golden Enclaves since he was a child. El is the literal embodiment of that dream, thanks to Arjun voicing it to the universe in hopes of making it a reality, and the universe granting his wish by allowing his daughter to be conceived and gifted with the power to build the Golden Enclaves in his place. The payment it took in return was Arjun's life, which he freely gave to save El and her mother from Patience on the day of his graduation from the Scholomance.
Loners Are Freaks: While El had acquaintances, it takes until the end of her junior year to really begin seeing them as friends. Beforehand, everyone thought she was just some incompetent maleficer with an ominous air around her.
Loser Protagonist: Played with. As an indie kid with barely any friends or resources, is perpetually rude, is seemingly incompetent at magic and has the ominous air of a maleficer around her, El is technically a loser by the standards of the school. The truth of the matter is she could easily pull herself up into being the most popular student of the school if she wanted to, but is so prone to self-sabotage and Believing Their Own Lies that she's been subconsciously preventing herself from making the final leap. It's only after befriending Orion that she begins to overcome these flaws and fulfill her real potential as a wizard.
Mentor in Sour Armor: Despite doing her best not to get attached to them, El more-or-less begins mentoring the eight freshmen she shares homeroom and work study with in her senior year. Ultimately, protecting them is one of the reasons why she decides to go through with the school's demand to help it protect all the wizarding children in the world.
Mirror Character: Despite ardently believing otherwise for most of her life, it gradually becomes clear that El isn't really all that different from her mother. She has her mother's compassion, even if it's been smothered over the last couple of years by the environment of the Scholomance, and she shares her distaste for the elitist enclaves. She even falls in love with a boy in her last year at the school like her mom did, and has every intention of living the rest of her life with that boy if they both make it out.
Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: In a very literal sense. People who recognize the aura of inherently dangerous magic about El for what it is often conclude that she is an active low-end practitioner of The Dark Arts who is incompetent or careless enough to 'leak,' where in reality the aura is due to her OH DEAR GOD RUN level potential for The Dark Arts that she spends her days obsessively keeping contained.
Omniglot: As someone on the incantations track, El knows many languages. She entered the Scholomance knowing English, Welsh, Hindi, and Marathi, learned French and Spanish to a respectable level by the end of her sophmore year, and by the start of the series is studying a whopping five more languages in Sanskrit, Latin, German, Old English and Middle English. She later adds Arabic and even learns some Mandarin in her senior year, bringing her total to 13. It is perhaps worth noting that she doesn't think much of her work load, despite calling an Enclaver who was studying 12 languages a language fiend.
The Perils of Being the Best: As El comes to bitterly learn over the course of the series, her mother had very good reasons for wanting them to avoid enclaves as much as possible. El is the most powerful wizard alive before she's even reached adulthood, and she's only posed to get stronger the older she gets. Unfortunately, that makes her a target for both those who want to use her power for their own ends, and those who want to kill her to ensure she doesn't use her power against them. It's even why Deepthi deliberately estranged her from her paternal family; it was the only way El was ever going to avoid Ophelia long enough to ensure she wasn't corrupted by her, and eventually reunite and reconcile with said paternal family.
Perpetual Frowner: She is the sort of habitual grumpy-face that takes several moments to recognize an unfamiliar sensation about her cheeks and lips as her own sincere smile.
Person of Mass Destruction: To the point that mass destruction is her literal affinity.
Popularity Cycle: Towards the end of her junior and then her entire senior year, her popularity begins to vary. She starts out as a loser indie kid for her first three years, before her increasing association with Orion, and the establishment of her alliance with Aadhya, Liu, and later Chloe causes her popularity to rise. After the school learns she's a once-in-a-generation talent like Orion, she's basically treated like an enclaver. Then her popularity drops exponentially after she repairs the gym, somehow making the Scholomance worse and making everyone flat-out terrified of her. However, after it becomes clear that she's the only one that can get everyone through the increasingly difficult obstacle courses (and thus whatever the hell is waiting for her class on Graduation Day), her popularity gradually returns. By the end of the second book, she's the most popular student in the entire school, because it's mostly thanks to her and Orion that every surviving student can finally leave the Scholomance for good and not worry about sending their own kids there.
Puff of Logic: This is how her new maw-mouth killing spell works in the third book. A large of portion of magic only works because the caster and those surrounding them believe it will work, even if it doesn't correspond to reality. This includes maw-mouths, who only continue to exist because people believe them to be alive, even though they're ultimately just a large mass of people mushed together; which, according to logic, means they should not be alive at all. El's new spell is to essentially point this out by saying "You are already dead", injecting that logic into reality and causing her target to correspond to it, dying instantly the moment she's done speaking. Interestingly, despite being so simple on paper and barely costing El any mana, it's implied that El is the only one who can perform this spell because it takes so much power to kill a maw-mouth in the first place, even with reality helping coax things along.
Required Secondary Powers: Most of the spells El knows are impractical due to the sheer amount of mana they require, but her affinity allows her to cast them at a discount. This also allows her to learn Liu’s mana amplification song more easily.
Single Woman Seeks Good Man: As much as she tries to deny it, she starts developing feelings for Orion because he's just about the only person in school who's nice to her and who doesn't believe she's secretly evil. Ironically, he starts falling for her because she's the only person at school who doesn't worship the ground he walks on and is thus willing to call him out.
Small Parent, Huge Child: Gwen Higgins is described as a 'petite, pink, English rose', where her daughter El matched her height at age nine and is five-foot-ten-and-still-growing by the end of her junior year.
Statuesque Stunner: El inherited her father's above-average height and is actually rather attractive. She had no shortage of suitors trying to chat her up only to run in the other direction once they sensed the dark aura around her. In hindsight this only bolstered the rumors about her being a maleficer, as most maleficers are almost supernaturally attractive up until they begin shriveling up.
Strong Family Resemblance: To her deceased father, Arjun. El is said to be his spitting image. Conversely (and resultantly) the Marathi-looking Huge Schoolgirl looks nothing like the petite Welshwoman that is her mum.
Sweet and Sour Grapes:
- El spent her first three years at the Scholomance telling herself that she was going to do some amazing thing to catch everyone's attention and get herself invited into alliances and an enclave. Her Character Development in the first book is accepting the fact that she never really wanted any of this and just wanted friends and the chance to really live her life, and by the second book she's completely turned her attentions to getting her and her friends out of the school. The school then starts focusing on her specifically in her senior year, causing numerous incidents that allow her yearmates to learn how powerful she really is. By the time of her last semester, everyone is terrified of her and she now has a guaranteed spot at the New York enclave — which, at this point, is the last thing she wants.
- One of her most common fantasies is subverting the prophecy her great-grandmother made and triumphantly returning to her paternal family, where they all fall over her in begging for her forgiveness. This more-or-less happens towards the end of the third book, except now El knows that her great-grandmother only made that prophecy to protect her from Ophelia. Instead of feeling triumphant, El describes the entire experience as "awful" and has a complete breakdown after reconciling with her grandparents.
Taken for Granite: A go-to tactic of hers in The Golden Enclaves, as the spell isn’t fatal and can even be broken from the inside given time.
Tsundere: Towards Orion, to the point that when she starts acting nice to him, he thinks there's something wrong with her.
Unreliable Narrator: Her cynical outlook towards life and predisposition to self-sabotage means that she tends to assume the worst about everyone and everything. While she's sometimes right, more often than not her assumptions are disproven, which gradually causes her to adopt a more idealistic outlook not unlike her mother's.
Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The third book reveals she is the one who took out the Bangkok enclave, via killing the maw-mouth that was anchoring its foundation stone in the first book. She also did the same to the Salta enclave when she saved Tomas from the tiny maw-mouth that attacked him at the end of the second book. Effectively every attack the enclaves have suffered over the course of the series is a direct result of El killing the monstrosities anchoring their existences.
Willfully Weak: El could easily cruise through the Scholomance (including graduation) if she went maleficer. She doesn't, because she would probably destroy the magical world afterward, and no one would've been able to stop her. Thus, she can only show the true extent of her potential when she has a solid store of mana to use.
World's Strongest Woman: El has a good claim to being the strongest incanter born in several generations and the strongest student in the school (only rivaled by Orion) due to her affinity for powerful, destructive spells. For example, she managed to take out two maw-mouths, one in the first book and one in the second, in less than an hour each. The only other person who managed that needed the backup of a dozen or so fully-grown wizards and several days to make it happen, and even then, it later turns out he didn't manage to kill it. The only things holding her back from her full potential are a lack of a consistent source of mana, a refusal to use malia to make up the deficit, and her fervent desire not to destroy everything in sight. As it turns out, the universe deliberately made sure she was born this strong so she could one day stop Orion.

Orion Lake

The deuteragonist of the series. Son of the future Domina of the New York enclave with a serious case of Chronic Hero Syndrome that takes an interest in El.

Tropes:

The Ace: In any other genre, a sword-wielding combat mage Nice Guy with an affinity that allows him to draw out mana from mals would be The Hero. Instead, he serves a deconstruction of the trope, 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.
Amazon Chaser: Implied. He's more than a little bit in awe when he sees El floating in the air, threatening to waste everyone in the gym with her supervolcano spell.
Apocalypse Maiden: In contrast to what El initially believes, that he's the perfect good to her perfect evil, he's a being born of a hideously vile act and would absolutely bring ruin to the entire world if a person of great goodness like El not been born.
Balance Between Good and Evil: Much like El, he was born as a result of this. The year before his birth, a coven of maleficers slaughtered their entire graduating class. Cue Orion, a slayer of monsters and evil wizards alike, who saves the vast majority of his own class once he starts attending the Scholomance. Except this is a lie. It was actually his mother had all those students slaughtered so she could use their mana to crush down her unborn child, spawn a tiny maw-mouth, and wrap it in her embryonic son well enough to create a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid. Orion himself is the imbalance, and El was born in response to him.
The Berserker: Not only is it quite difficult to make him re-focus when he is in the proverbial zone and there is still opposition about, but his ability to distinguish ally from rightful prey is not completely reliable. Which turns out to be a big red flag for his true nature as an insatiable maw-mouth.
Big Good: At the end of the series, after having his maw-mouth side destroyed by El, he becomes a human Golden Stone enclave, the embodiment of the Scholomance's desire to protect all wizard children, and starts living there to become the protector of all the world's vulnerable adolescent wizards, becoming the literal defender of all wizard-kind.
The Big Guy: Orion, who is the only student that rival's El in magical power and has amazing combat skills from years of hunting mals.
Book Dumb: He only cares about killing mals and has such a strong affinity for combat magic that El is bewildered as to why he chose the alchemy track (knowing Orion, he likely chose the track at random). He even admits to Aadhya that he's something of a substandard alchemist. This backfires on him in his senior year when he fails his midterms and is nearly killed by his work for his troubles. Even after that, he makes minimal effort at completing his remedial work to the point that El has to guilt-trip him into doing any of it, and it's only completed when Liesel (their year's Valedictorian) takes refuge in his room with El during the mid-year cleansing and decides to finish it for him to kill time.
Blood Knight: He loves hunting mals, to the point that he admits to El that it's the only thing he's ever really wanted to do. He's probably the only non-maleficer student to genuinely enjoy attending the Scholomance because of that.
Bolivian Army Ending: At the end of the second book he is last seen facing down the largest maw-mouth in existence with a sizable portion of all the maleficaria in the world right behind it. His first scene in the third book shows him entirely alone, later admitting that he ate every last one of his foes.
Can't Have Sex, Ever: Ultimately subverted but he worries that his ability to easily drain Mals means he might drain a partner if he doesn't have enough mana. El disabuses him of this notion with her usual lack of tact.
Chronic Hero Syndrome: Much to El's annoyance and eventual distress.
Death Seeker: After he realizes he's a maw-mouth, he starts losing control of his powers and tries to make El promise to kill him if he can't figure out a way to fix the problem non-lethally. Indeed, by the time he finally gives in to his hunger during the enclave war, he's practically begging her to do it, because he can't stand the idea of harming innocent wizards and potentially destroying the world.
Deuteragonist: And Love Interest. Orion is the second most important character after El, and understanding the kind of person he really is and why he came to be that person is the most important subplot after El's Character Development.
Distracted by the Sexy: El notes that he has a tendency to check her out a lot in their senior year, which both frustrates her and flatters her.
Energy Absorption: He has the ability to draw out mana from any mals that he kills. That's how he subsidizes his own mana stores, as he's not allowed to draw from his enclave's collective store due to his Power Incontinence.
Foil: As the deuteragonist, Orion is El's main foil. El is a female incanter with a perpetually surly disposition who comes from relative poverty and is supposedly destined to be the worst Evil Sorceress in living memory. Orion is a mal-slaying Magic Knight who is from the equivalent of wizard aristocracy and is idolized as a hero. People are put off by El at first, but when they get to know her, find that underneath her pathological rudeness, she's actually a kind and selfless person who genuinely empathizes with others. At the same time, people flock to Orion, but are eventually put off by how strange he actually is. Even their conceptions directly contrast one another: both were born as the result of their respective parents' earnest desire to bring positive change to the magical world. But whereas El's parents offered themselves to the universe as payment for that change and received El as their gift, Orion's parents sacrificed others, including Orion himself, to get the Living Weapon they wanted, under the justification that it was For the Greater Good.
Gag Nose: Described as having a nose with a "bit of an interesting hook", but when El is annoyed at him she'll tell him to keep his "beaky nose" out of her business or describe it as still being too big for his face.
The Gift: He's a once-in-a-generation talent that could determine the fate of the magical world. The prospect of the New York enclave having both him and El during the upcoming enclave war is enough for the Shanghai enclavers to try and kill the latter.
The Heavy: During the climax of the third book. While Ophelia is technically the Big Bad since she's the one who made him this way, Orion himself is the biggest threat as the most powerful maw-mouth in existence. It is him that El needs to stop in order to resolve the enclave war, not his mother.
Horrifying the Horror: Orion 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.
Horror Hunger: The true source of his obsession with hunting mals. As half maw-mouth, he has the same insatiable hunger that all maw-mouths have. After he realizes his true nature and absorbs Patience and the horde of mals that were drawn to the Scholomance, he begins to lose control of his hunger to the point that he starts absorbing wizards too. At the end of the book, he finally lets go of his remaining self-control and starts absorbing everything and everyone in sight during the enclave war, but only because he knows El is present and will stop him before it gets too far.
How Is That Even Possible?: He retains his ability to drain mana from mals even after his maw-mouth half is destroyed. El speculates that even though he really shouldn't still be able to do this, since Orion sincerely believes that he can, the universe just lets him.
Humanoid Abomination: He's a maw-mouth in human form, and as he starts absorbing the energy of more mals, he begins to lose control of the maw-mouth side of himself.
Hunter of Monsters: Orion is a One-Man Army who focuses his magical ability on slaughtering the various monsters that eat magical children. Initially, people put this down to Chronic Hero Syndrome, but Orion eventually admits that the thrill of the fight means just as much to him, if not more, than the Good Feels Good emotions that come from saving lives.
I Am a Monster: He develops this attitude in The Golden Enclaves, or more precisely at the end of The Last Graduate when he came face to "face" with the great maw-mouth dubbed Patience and recognized in it the same bone-deep hunger he has felt all his life.
I Love You Because I Can't Control You: He first becomes interested in El because she's the only one who doesn't worship the ground he walks on. He feels like he can trust her to be honest with him—and as much as El tries to pretend otherwise, she quickly comes to care about him, too.
Ideal Hero: Orion is kind to everyone he meets, even those who are rude to him. He has an almost pathological need to help others. And he's incredibly idealistic and believes in all of El's crazy plans to save everyone and the world. He even forgives his mother for making him a Living Weapon, a fact that El finds frustrating but ultimately accepts. There are elements of Deconstruction in his portrayal as such, however, as he's shown to be helpful to the point of being self-sacrificing and easily manipulatable, and part of his relationship with El is him Growing A Spine and learning to stand up for himself more. At the end of the series, he even becomes the protector of all wizard children, about as heroic a profession as you can get!
Idiot Hero: While he's not a complete moron, he has a very concerning lack of self-preservation instinct and doesn't care about his school work at all. After befriending Orion, El more-or-less has to babysit him so he doesn't get himself killed, and is often left wondering how he's survived long enough to make it to their senior year.
Ignore the Fanservice: When Liesel tries to seduce him, he doesn't even notice, much to her frustration.
Knight Errant: Admits this is how he saw his life going, putting down mal threats around the world until one of them finally got him. Which is why he jumps at the chance to travel the world with El and put up golden enclaves to provide shelter to every magical child.
Magic Feather: He doesn't actually need weapons or combat spells to destroy monsters (or wizards, for that matter). Coming to this understanding of his maw-mouth side is shocking and horrible for him.
Magic Knight: He specializes in combat-oriented magic and even occasionally wields a sword in battle.
Mix-and-Match Weapon: Orion's mentioned using a few artifacts that aren't described consistently such as a Whip Sword and a battle wand. It's eventually made clear that they're all the same thing in the second book which while not universally useful are still a highly effective tool for monster slaying.
Mystical White Hair: His hair is white, and he is the only student at the school that can rival El for power.
Nice Guy: Idealistic, heroic, and loved by all. He's even just about the only person at school who doesn't think El is a maleficer.
No Hero to His Valet: To El, which is one of the reasons they become friends and why Orion eventually falls for her. This later spreads to most of El's social circle come senior year, after he starts hanging out with them and they all get to know him better.
The One Guy: He's the only male member of the main cast. All other male characters in the series are supporting characters at best.
One-Man Army: Regularly fights large groups of monsters and isn't fussed about it. Taken to the extreme in the second book where he faces a huge horde of tens or even hundreds of thousands of deadly enemies all by himself.
Ridiculous Procrastinator: He has no issues procrastinating his school work in favor of mal-hunting, and it becomes much worse in senior year when there are barely any mals for him to hunt. Instead of using the extra time to finish up his schoolwork like a normal student, he instead spends unnecessary amounts of time searching for at least one mal to kill, causing him to fail his midterms and get saddled with remedial work.
Senseless Sacrifice: The Last Graduate ends with Orion choosing to stay in the Scholomance after it has been evacuated and used to lure in as many mals as possible from all over the world and was moments away from destruction. It later turns out that this "sacrifice" was more about keeping himself isolated from the rest of the world before he could destroy it.
Skewed Priorities: Orion's only concern in life is hunting mals, at least until he meets and befriends El at the beginning of the series. After meeting El, his priorities in order of importance are: 1) El, 2) hunting mals, and 3) everything else. That's why his fellow New York enclavers initially believe El bewitched him somehow, as they've been trying for years to get him interested in something or someone else, and don't understand how one random loser in their year that all of them were only peripherally aware of managed to do it on her own.
Single-Target Sexuality: El is literally the only person he's ever shown an interest in, let alone been attracted to. Even when the hot valedictorian with a great rack is trying to (subtly) throw herself at him, he doesn't so much as spare her a second glance.
Soulless Bedroom: He had a deeply alienated childhood with no interests other than monster-hunting. When El sees his old bedroom, it's a magazine-perfect spread of unused and unopened toys with a box of extensively used weapons in the corner.
Tomato in the Mirror: The Golden Enclaves reveals he's a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid created from his mother's experiments. Also literal, in a sense, because he only realizes the truth about himself after seeing another maw-mouth in Patience and recognizing the similarities between them.
Tyke Bomb: He's a humanoid maw-mouth designed by his mother to be a perfect weapon, used to bully other enclaves into submission.
Uptown Guy: To El. He's the son of the future Domina of the New York enclave, the most powerful enclave in the world. She's the daughter of a Granola Girl independent wizard that lives in a commune in Wales (with a yurt for a home, no less). Just about the only thing that makes her even a remotely respectable romantic partner for him is the fact that she might be the one wizard in the world stronger than him.
What Does He See in Her??: No one can figure out why he's infatuated with El, of all people, a probable maleficer who actively badmouths him. They don't realize that her active criticisms of him are the reason he likes her—and because he gets close to her, he realizes, and they don't, what a fundamentally good person she is.
World's Strongest Man: As a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid, Orion is without question the strongest mal in existence. With a single wave of his hand, he can absorb any wizard or mal into him with minimal effort — not even Patience, the biggest and most dangerous maw-mouth in the world, stood a chance against him when they finally fought. The only person/entity stronger is El, and that's because the universe deliberately ensured her birth so she could stop him when the time came.

Aadhya

One of El's acquaintances and eventual best friend. A talented artificer with a great network of connections.

Tropes:

Heterosexual Life-Partners: She admits to El in the second book that she's come to believe their friendship is the universe's way of giving her a sister, after her actual sister was killed before she had the chance to live herself.
High-School Hustler: She's well-known for brokering deals between students. One of the reasons why El likes her is because she's one of the few to never totally rip her off in trade.
The Lancer: Aadhya, who is El's best friend and the most sensible member of the group. She has the social skills El lacks, which allows her to act as The Face of the group when make deals with other factions.
Magitek: She's an artificer with an affinity for exotic materials, specifically those that come from mals.
Nice to the Waiter: Invoked. Her mother told her to be polite to even the rejects, because you don't want to close any doors. Aadhya notes that this worked out for her — after all, one of those 'rejects' that she was nice to turned out to be the most powerful wizard born this century, and chose to ally with her over the enclavers specifically because Aadhya was one of the few not to completely shun her.
Only Sane Man: Aadhya is the most sensible member of the group, and often the one to set El straight when she's on the verge of freaking out or screwing things up.
The Reliable One: What El comes to like the most about her is her practicality. Aadhya is never one to make a foolish choice, only one that benefits her and her goals.
The Social Expert: On top of being a great artificer, Aadhya also has great social skills, which allowed her to make a solid network of connections that spans across the entire school.

Yi Liu

Another of El's acquaintances who becomes her friend. She's very loyal to her family, who often push her to make questionable choices for the sake of their prosperity. Has an affinity for animals.

Tropes:

Ambiguously Bi: While she finds Zixuan 'cute' and his interest in her flattering, the person she ends up developing feelings for is Yuyan.
Badass in Distress: In The Golden Enclaves, she's captured by the Beijing enclave and nearly used as a sacrifice to create the new maw-mouth that will anchor their new enclave. El manages to save her and she makes a full recovery by the end of the book thanks to Beijing's healers, but the experience traumatizes her so badly that she can't find it in herself to commit to her new home in the Shanghai enclave until they replace their foundation, to the detriment of her growing relationship with Yuyan.
Big Sister Instinct: She is very protective of her younger cousins Zheng and Min, which her family leaned on to convince her to go maleficer while she was in the Scholomance. Their argument was that the power would allow her to be in a better position to protect them when it was their turn to be inducted. It's for this reason that Liu refuses to abandon her alliance with El in the second book when it seems like the school is out to get her, as El has been blowing her mana stash to protect Zheng during their shared work period.
The Dutiful Daughter: She's very devoted to her family and always expected to make "the right choices". So when her family told her to take a group of mice with her to school and draw malia from them to help her get by, she went and complied despite hating every moment of it.
Evil Sorcerer: Subverted. Despite her minor use of malia, Liu managed to keep her wits about her and keep most of her moral fiber until El got her clean.
Familiar: The mice she originally brought with her for malia, after she goes clean.
Friend to All Living Things: Her affinity for animals, to the point that she can make them into familiars. It was because of this trait that her family made her go maleficer, as she could keep the mice she brought with her alive.
Gayngst: Downplayed. No one gives her grief about it onscreen, but she is very worried about her family's opinion of how she resolved the love triangle she was in. Zixuan is the best choice on paper - a brilliant artificer who specializes in large-scale projects who is also the nephew of the Shanghai enclave's Dominus - just the mix of talent and connections her family would jump at. Yuyan on the other hand is a talented but not terribly remarkable incanter, who would bring a much weaker connection to Shanghai. She ends up reciprocating Yuyan's affections, and spends some time worrying her family will see this as yet another time she put her own desires over her family's plans, like when she gave up malia.
Important Haircut. She had grown her hair very long on orders from her parents because never cutting it would mark her as either wealthy, fearsome, or both. in The Last Graduate, when El and Aadhya harvest it for the latter's lute she demands they hack it all off down to the not-quite-as-midnight-black roots that started coming in once she went off of malia.
Power Makes Your Hair Grow: Inverted, she wears her hair long to showcase her families growing power and her own ability to succeed despite the obvious disadvantage it puts her in at the Scholomance.
Raised by Grandparents: According to Liu, she was mainly raised by her grandmother, as her parents were too busy taking various enclave jobs to raise her themselves.
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 and hadn't gone completely Drunk on the Dark Side.
The Smart Guy: Liu, who comes from a clan that's on the verge of starting their own enclave and thus has the most outside knowledge of spellcasting and enclave politics. She acts as the go-between for the group and the Shanghai enclavers for most of the second book, and is the one to come up with the idea to use the honeypot spell and the school to decrease the mal population.
Trauma Button: At the end of the series, she technically becomes a Shanghai enclaver, but has yet to move into the enclave proper. This is due to the trauma of nearly being turned into a maw-mouth to support the Beijing enclave; Liu refuses to join the rest of her family and Yuyan in Shanghai until it's properly turned into a Golden Enclave by El.

Chloe Rasmussen

A New York enclaver that El becomes acquainted with after meeting Orion. Initially hostile to El, the two eventually reach an understanding. She specializes in alchemy.

Tropes:

Alchemy Is Magic: Is very talented at alchemy, much to El's surprise, as both of Chloe's parents are artificers. She inherited it from her grandmother, whose talent in alchemy was enough to grant her a spot into the New York enclave.
Demoted to Extra: In The Golden Enclaves, where her position as a main character is effectively usurped by Liesel, Chloe only appears once.
Fangirl: For Orion, like everyone else in their year. She gradually grows out of it over the course of her senior year, in part due to El's influence and in part due to getting to know him better.
Hidden Depths: El is surprised to learn that she has a passion for art. According to Aadhya, if she manages to graduate she plans on "getting her Da Vinci on" and putting frescos up all around New York.
Nouveau Riche: A variant. Chloe might be an enclaver but she is closely descended from two hardworking indie wizards, who got into the New York enclave on their own merits (and, in the case of her father, marriage). That's one of the reasons she isn't as arrogant or entitled as most enclavers tend to be.
Spoiled Sweet: After El and her get to know each other better, Chloe gradually reveals herself to be this: a kind, warmhearted girl who has never really understood how hard it is for indie wizard kids to get by until she befriended El and the others.

Liesel Mueller

A girl from Germany in El's year, who first appears in The Last Graduate. She puts on the airs of being a blonde bimbo to hide her smarts. She ends up as the Valedictorian of El's year.

Tropes:

Academic Alpha Bitch: This comes with the territory of being the valedictorian. However, as The Last Graduate proves, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The Ace: Come El's senior year, she's the best wizard in the school after El and Orion (who are so naturally talented that they're scored against an entirely different bell curve). When running with Liesel's team in the gym obstacle course, El even admits Liesel is the most competent wizard she's ran with, next to Orion.
Admiring the Abomination: Despite the sheer danger she presents to the world and all her horrible crimes, Liesel can't help but admire the sheer cleverness of Ophelia, much to El's quiet disgust.
Ascended Extra: She becomes a main character in The Golden Enclaves, being El's most consistent companion throughout the book and her secondary love interest.
Bastard Angst: The Golden Enclaves reveals her backstory as the bastard child of a council member of the Munich enclave.
Beneath Notice: She employs a similar strategy to Clarita in her bid to become Valedictorian, in that she acts like a flirty bimbo and openly coos enclavers in order to hide her intelligence. Just like Clarita, she drops the act after she becomes Valedictorian and reveals her real personality as an Jerk with a Heart of Gold Academic Alpha Bitch.
Best Served Cold: She's got a thirty-year plan to avenge her mother's death. This plan includes, in no particular order, becoming Valedictorian of her year at the Scholomance, seducing a wizard her age with powerful connections (in this case, Alfie), and becoming the Domina of an enclave stronger than the Munich enclave.
Buxom Beauty Standard: She's said to have a sizable bust and has no issues using it to great effect against the boys of various enclaves.
Cryptic Background Reference: Liesel seems to dislike the German enclaves (or vice versa), given how she focuses on trying to get into London and New York even though she'd have greater status in an enclave from her home country. El picks up on the oddness of this, but never finds out why Liesel feels that way. Until the third book.
Dark and Troubled Past: Liesel is the bastard daughter of a council member of the Munich enclave, whose wife happens to be the daughter of the enclave's Domina. She was kept his dirty little secret all her life in exchange for getting a seat at the Scholomance, just so he could keep his council seat, but eventually his wife found out and killed Liesel's mother on her induction day. Liesel's only goal since then has been to avenge her mother's death.
Drill Sergeant Nasty: She basically takes over the training runs after the school ups the difficulty of the obstacle courses to impossible levels and forces all the students to basically work together as one team. And she is far from polite about it.
Everyone Has Standards: She can be ruthless at times and her only goal in life is revenge, but even she is horrified when she finds out modern enclave-building involves sacrificing innocent wizards and turning them into maw-mouths. So much so that at the end of the series, she puts aside her revenge plan to help El with her plan of destroying all the maw-mouths in the world and rebuilding the Golden Enclaves.
Femme Fatale: Liesel is probably the most sexualized of El's classmates and often gives cooing, insincere compliments to well-connected male enclavers and is an an Academic Alpha Bitch who menaces El a few times and flirts with her boyfriend. In one scene, El finds her dolling up for a date with the well-connected Magnus and gritting her teeth about it when he isn't there to see her. Ultimately though, she's a Jerk with a Heart of Gold at worst.
Heroic Seductress: She seduces El with the intent of giving her even more reasons not to go full world destroying maleficer after Orion's presumed death. El is a little indignant when this comes out but, given that she doesn't want to run mad and destroy the world, agrees that the plan was a good idea on Liesel's part, at least in concept.
Iconic Sequel Character: Despite her recognizability, Liesel is never even mentioned before the second book.
Insufferable Genius: Liesel is oftentimes the most brilliant and clever person in the room, has no issues flaunting it once she's declared Valedictorian, and seems infuriated that nobody else is anywhere close to being as smart as she is.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Once she's declared Valedictorian, she stops bothering to be polite to everyone, with El at one point wondering how the hell she ever convinced anyone she was nice. Nonetheless, she proves she's not a bad person and El and her eventually come to respect each other. Their relationship grows even more during The Golden Enclaves, to the point that they've become genuine friends by the end of the series.
Magi Babble: She has a tendency to speak in advance thaumaturgical terms that only she can really understand whenever she's particularly worked up about something
Polyamory: She's in an open relationship with Alfie, which is why she's able to sleep with El twice in the third book. This is partly because their relationship is more of a partnership with the goal of rising up in their enclave's hierarchy than an actual romance.
Sixth Ranger: Liesel, who joins part way through The Last Graduate. None of the others get along with her all that much, but she's by far the most competent wizard in the group and the strongest after El and Orion thanks to being their year's Valedictorian.
The Social Expert: At one point, El sarcastically asks how Liesel has managed to make people think she's a nice person, and Lisel gives a mini-lecture about identifying the most popular people in every class, learning what they like, and giving them "a minimum of three relevant compliments a week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead."
Tarot Troubles: Liesel has a homemade deck of tarot cards. She and El play with them to pass the time in one scene, and El keeps drawing ominous cards from the deck... even after those cards have been put away in their box.
Vitriolic Best Buds: Gradually becomes this with El in the third book. Despite their belligerent relationship, it's clear by the end of the story that they've come to genuinely see each other as close friends.
What You Are in the Dark: Liesel casts a spell to knock El unconscious and leave her to be incinerated by the cleansing systems after El gets the spot in the New York enclave Liesel is after, but she quickly regrets this and goes back to save El's life.
Knowing she was furious enough to commit murder but also couldn't go through with it in the end gave me a rather fellow feeling for her.

Other Students

Jack Westing

A budding maleficer that El takes great pains to avoid.

Tropes:

The All-American Boy: Name dropped. What he looks like, not what he actually is.
Drunk on the Dark Side: He's already drained another student for malia by the time he hits his junior year. El says that at the rate he's going, he'll be rotting from the inside out five years out of school. In some ways, Orion killing him was a Mercy Kill.
Evil All Along: From the perspective of the school, he is this once his status as a maleficer came to light after his death. However, it's subverted in regards to El, who knew all along what he was thanks to her Detect Evil ability.
Evil Sorcerer: A budding one, and unlike Liu, one who is very much in tune with The Dark Arts.
Killed Off for Real: By Orion, after delivering El an Agonizing Stomach Wound.
Laser-Guided Karma: He murdered Luisa for malia. He's promptly killed by Orion, Luisa's neighbor.
Starter Villain: The first real antagonistic force in the series. It's through their conflict with him that causes El and Orion to really befriend each other.

Luisa

A girl who grew up in the mundane world who found herself dragged into the Scholomance against her will and hopelessly out of her depth, leading to her demise.

Tropes:

Mage Born of Muggles: Brutally deconstructed. She was living a perfectly normal mundane life until the school dragged her into its halls through forced induction, and barely made it through her sophmore year before she was murdered by a budding maleficer.
Must Not Die a Virgin: She knew she wasn't going to make it very long so she asked Orion if he was interested. Orion refused, of course, so Jack took her up on the offer instead — and used the 'consent' to draw malia out of her, killing her.
Out with a Bang: How she might have died. El's not entirely sure if actual intercourse happened, but Jack certainly did have some form of consent from her to drain her for malia.
Posthumous Character: She's been dead for at least a few months by the time A Deadly Education starts. El later clarifies in The Last Graduate that Luisa was killed in their sophmore year, meaning she's been dead for almost a year by the time the series begins.

Magnus Tebow

Another New York enclaver that El gets acquainted with after befriending Orion. Unlike with Chloe, El and him do not get along.

Tropes:

Alpha Bitch: The rare male version. Even when he's trying to be nice, he can't help but be condescending.
Condescending Compassion: His version of being nice still inadvertently emphasizes his assumed superiority over the subjects of his concern.
Upper-Class Twit: He's a talented incanter from the most powerful enclave in the world, with the ego to match. El notes that if he hadn't been born in the same year as Orion, he'd probably be the Big Man on Campus. He's also something of an idiot, not realizing how much El genuinely hates him.

Clarita Acevedo-Cruz

A student from the class ahead of El's, and that year's school valedictorian. No one could even remember what country she's from before that happened.^noteIt's Argentina.

Tropes:

Academic Alpha Bitch: Played with. She originally kept her own pursuit for valedictorian close to the vest — but once the position was hers, she posted all her perfect marks outside her room to make up for the years of not boasting.
Almighty Janitor: Took so many maintenance shifts people thought she was on the maintenance track, but she was instead taking honors classes by the boat load to get where she wants to go.
Awesome by Analysis: Clarita shows her calculating nature by keeping track of just how many people Orion has saved at least once in the past three years (the number is around six hundred).
Beneath Notice: Her entire strategy, which El outright calls 'brilliant'. She deliberately wore dull clothing, kept her head down, and even occasionally took a maintenance shift from a maintenance track kid that wanted some free time so everyone would assume that was what she was doing. As a result, none of the other valedictorian candidates realized she was in the running, allowing her to work on her assignments without fear of sabotage. Thus, when she landed at the top of the rankings senior year, everyone was stunned because she practically came out of nowhere. El notes that even if she hadn't grabbed the top spot, coming out of the left-field like that would've caught everyone's attention and guaranteed her an alliance regardless.
Small Role, Big Impact: Clarita is only mentioned once, in passing, before the last fifth of the first book, but plays a significant role in the climax.

Ibrahim

Another student in El's year, and a major fanboy of Orion.

Tropes:

Badass Israeli: Downplayed, but he's from a kibbutz and El describes his magic as similar to her mother's, a world renowned healer.
Closet Gay: He and Yaakov keep their relationship a secret, as does El when she finds out by accident. Wizards tend to be accepting of such things, but life at the Scholomance is dangerous enough that they don't want to add any more risk.
Professional Butt-Kisser: From El's perspective at least. While he's perfectly competent, he doesn't really stand out as a student, so this is the only thing he has as a selling point.
The Heart: Seems to genuinely like people, which El doesn't get, and reads out little prayers his father transcribed for him every breakfast to lift people's spirits.
Those Two Guys: With Yaakov, his boyfriend.

Nkoyo

An acquaintance of El, who is also taking the incantations-track. Much like Aadhya, she has great social skills and a network of solid connections.

Tropes:

Magic Dance: Her strategy come graduation combines with Dance Battler.
Out of Focus: Compared to El's other friends, Nkoyo doesn't get that much dialogue.
The Social Expert: Much like Aadhya, she's great at socializing. Her two closest friends, Cora and Jowani, only really managed to last all four years at the school by latching onto her and her own network of connections.

David Pires

The salutatorian of the class ahead of El's.

Tropes:

Academic Alpha Bitch: David is a pretty boastful sorcerer and volunteers for a dangerous mission that offers guaranteed enclave seats even though he already has one. El speculates that he wants the satisfaction of getting to pick and choose out of every enclave out there rather than take the safe choice he already has.
Informed Attribute: Both his arrogance and the magical skills which made him salutatorian are mainly described rather than shown.
Negated Moment of Awesome: In one scene, when a Mal shows up, David leaps to the front of the group and makes a dramatic pose to cast a spell to kill it, only for Orion to beat him to the punch.
Red Shirt: He dies in the chapter he's introduced in, while accompanying El and Orion on a dangerous mission.
Second Place Is for Losers: David spends three years bragging to anyone who will listen about how he's at the top of his class and will be the valedictorian and is rather sullen about how Clarita beats him for the position when he barely even knew she existed.

Alfie

A London enclaver in El's year. Unlike most enclavers, he's a genuinely a polite and pleasant person. He specializes in defensive magic.

Tropes:

Barrier Warrior: While it's technically not a barrier, his evocation of refusal works on similar principles. He offers the spell to El in senior year to help with the obstacle course runs, and she's be able to use it to frightening effectiveness.
Berserk Button: He flips his lid when he finds Yancy and her friends throwing a party at Memorial Green, the London enclave's memorial to their dead children who never made it out of the Scholomance.
Hidden Depths: Despite his proud and privileged nature, Alfie is a decent warrior and spends his whole four years in the school successfully hiding that fact that he is descended from its founder rather than boast about the fact.
Hold the Line: To El's surprise, in the climax of the second book, Alfie and his fellow London enclavers volunteer for some dangerous rearguard duty to keep the others safe during the evacuation of the Scholomance.
King Incognito: Downplayed in that he does not hide his membership in a venerable enclave. However there is a reason he went mononymically by a childish nickname within the Scholomance rather than Alfred Cooper Browning Insert-Numerical-Designation-Here.
The Igor: He set himself up to become one in The Golden Enclaves, with a sincerely open-ended oath upon his word and mana to repay El if the leadership of the London enclave failed to provide a satisfactory reward for coming to kill the maw-mouth rampaging through the place. El, being fully aware that sort of thing is how Evil Witches get compulsively loyal servitors, is not at all pleased by the matter; and a political rival of Alfie's father tries to maneuver the council into breaking the agreement they eventually make with El because having one's only son geas-bound to a dangerous outsider would make a bid for the rank of Dominus more difficult.
Mr. Exposition: Alfie is the one to explain the long-term problems with the cleansing machinery that prevent students from graduating safely.
Named After Somebody Famous: It's implied that Alfie is named after the founder of the Scholomance, Sir Alfred Cooper Browning. This is confirmed in The Golden Enclaves, where it's revealed he's the original's descendant.
Nice Guy: He's a genuinely swell person, if a little proud.
O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The normally affable and put-together Alfie is greatly frazzled at the beginning of The Golden Enclaves, due to a maw-mouth attacking the London enclave and essentially holding the place hostage, eventually causing his father to offer himself up for a suicide mission to take it out. Alfie all but begs El to save his father's life by taking it out first.
Out of Focus: Doesn't distinguish himself much as a junior in the first book but as a senior he steps up as a major part of the plan to rid the world of mals and plays a large role in the beginning of the third book.

Sudarat

A freshman that was inducted during El's senior year, who shares her work-study period with her. She is one of the only survivors of the destruction of the Bangkok enclave, and the only one of her age group to make it to induction.

Tropes:

Broken Bird: Sudarat barely survived an unexplained disaster that wiped out her community and is left to fend for herself by the older kids from her enclave who were already attending the Scholomance, as they try to find ways to save themselves.
Fallen Princess: She came in with the gear and training of an Enclaver, along with news that her enclave was no more with the associated ramifications.
Irony: The senior who mentored her and saved her from eventually dying while attending the Scholomance is also the one responsible for destroying her enclave and killing everyone she loved. El notes that if Sudarat ever finds out the truth, she's unlikely to forgive El for her actions, even though it was completely unintentional and an accident.
Protectorate: To El. It's Sudarat basically resigning herself to death that prompts El to save everyone at the school, not just the seniors.
Sole Survivor: While she's not the only survivor of the Bangkok enclave, she is the only survivor of her age group.

Guo Yi Zheng and Guo Yi Min

Liu's twin cousins, who are inducted into the Scholomance during her senior year. Zheng ends up being one of the freshmen that shares his work study period with El.

Tropes:

Bit Character: They don't really have much characterization outside of being Liu's cousins. Zheng does get a bit more being one of El's protectorates in senior year, but not much.
Friend to All Living Things: Liu recalls that as small children, they constantly brought her hurt animals to heal even when other children cruelly teased them for it.
Mister Exposition: Zheng is the one to reveal to El the destruction of the Bangkok enclave.
Protectorate:
- To Liu. One of the ways her family was able to convince her to go maleficer was by pointing out that she would be better able to protect them when they got inducted in her senior year.
- Zheng is also this to El, initially by virtue of his connection to Liu but eventually thanks to El's own growing Character Development.

Hu Zixuan and Wang Yuyan

Two Shanghai enclavers who lead the Asian faction in El's year. Zixuan is the nephew of the current Dominus of the Shanghai enclave, and a brilliant artificer. Yuyan is an incanter like El and Liu, who is on the languages-track with El.

Tropes:

Because You Were Nice to Me: When the Shanghai enclavers attack El, she holds back against them largely because Yuyan once politely asked her for help translating a spell and then offered to translate one for her as repayment - a tiny kindness, but El was so unpopular that it stood out to her.
Bullying a Dragon: Yuyan and Zixuan try to kill El due to viewing her supposed cultivation by New York as a threat to the Shanghai Enclave. It becomes really clear that they've either underestimated just how powerful (both personally and in terms of allies) she is or are desperate enough to take suicidal risks in the hopes of removing her from the board. The only reason they survive their second attempt is because El wants to sway them to her line of thinking (she succeeds).
Gadgeteer Genius: Zixuan masterminds and helps rig a speaker system to lure mals through the portal and into the school in a way that will distract them from attacking students in the graduation hall.
Love Triangle: It happens offscreen, but both Zixuan and Yuyan develop romantic feelings for Liu, and she takes a while to decide which one of them she likes back.
Mouth of Sauron: The leaders of the Shanghai Enclave don't appear in person until the third book (due to being adults who have already graduated from the Scholomance), with Zixuan and Yuyan voicing their views and positions to the main character.
Omniglot: Yuyan is one even more so than El, who is apparently middle of the road. She's currently studying twelve languages — which, considering she is an enclave kid, is insane.
Wrong Genre Savvy: The two of them think that El, The Hero, is a Fake Ultimate Hero who is only pretending to be the senior class's savior as part of a plan to kill them and drain their mana. El is frustrated by this, but admits that it isn't an absurd or illogical theory.

Todd Quayle

A New York enclaver a year ahead of Orion and Chloe. The son of a powerful member of the New York enclave's council.

Tropes:

Hated by All: Todd becomes a pariah after killing Mika for his room, even amongst his fellow enclavers and the members of his graduation alliance. Even after it becomes clear that he won't be punished for his actions, it also becomes clear that absolutely no one has anything good to think or say about him (not even Todd himself, even if he tries to make himself feel better by blaming Orion and his disruption of the status quo).
Murder Is the Best Solution: When Todd gets freaked out after hearing a maw-mouth go up the stairwell near his room, he reacts by "poaching", which involves murdering the occupant to take their room (which is further away) by shoving the screaming pleading boy, Micah, into the void to die. He doesn't even try to alert his powerful alliance members to see if there's a less ruthless way to accomplish his goal. The others acknowledge that sleep deprivation and (justified) terror of a maw-mouth that passed his room kept Todd from thinking clearly, but his actions are still universally reviled.
Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Todd breaks one of the biggest taboos of the magical community by killing another student for his room, but he avoids any major punishment due to his father being a prominent member of the New York enclave.
- Some of his fellow Enclavers make some noises about him being kicked out but we don't see if this is the case.

Cora and Jowani

Nkoyo's best friends.

Defrosting the Ice Queen: Cora initially treats El with cold disdain even after Nkoyo befriends her but softens up some by the end of the second book (although not to the point where the two could be called friendly). By the third book, she only hesitates a little before greeting El with the same hug she gives the rest of her friends.
Hidden Depths: The midway point of the second book fleshes them out a bit after they previously come across as Flat Characters.
- Cora is developing Dance Battler/Magic Dance skills for the graduation ceremony and is the first person to say no when an enclaver proposes that the seniors abandon El's plan and save themselves first.
- Jowani's apparent aloofness is because he has a Speech Impediment that makes it hard for him to interact with comparative strangers, and every morning he reads a poem about love and hope from a book his father gave him.
Doomed Hurt Guy: Cora injures her arm while training for graduation and is terrified that this will cause her death, as her injury will take a long time to heal and will ruin most of her alliance prospects. El helps her out with one of Gwen's healing spells.
Satellite Character: They don't have much role in the story beyond being Nkoyo's friends, and Nkoyo herself is a Satellite Character of sorts. Jowani only gets one word of dialogue.
Took a Level in Kindness: Cora is resentful and wary of El for a long time, partially due to Cora having spirit magic that makes El feel dangerous and unsafe, and partially out of jealousy that Nkoyo gets along with El. After Cora hurts her arm in the second book and El heals it, Cora has a Tears of Joy moment and is the first person to speak in favor of El and her graduation plan when another student tries to sway opinion against it.

Khamis Mwinyi

A boy in El's year from the Zanzibar enclave who forms a graduation alliance with Nkoyo.

Heel–Face Revolving Door: Khamis initially seems to be a Token Evil Teammate to El's loose graduation alliance, then develops subtle signs of loyalty toward his allies. He falls out with them due to feeling that El's plan to save so many people is absurd, but later seems to change his mind, as he’s in a crowd of students who confront the Shanghai Enclave for trying to kill Orion and El. When he reappears in the third book, he goes from attacking El to grudgingly joining her mission to stop the enclave war. Then he goes from urging her to Shoot the Dog to helping her save that same person from dying.
Jerkass Has a Point: He's kind of a dick, but he's not wrong to challenge El when she doesn't have a good plan or getting involved in the enclave war.
Pet the Dog: Khamis spends most of the time being a Jerkass and Entitled Bastard who is contemptuous of El's plan to save the entire senior class. A rare exception is when he risks his life helping Nkoyo when she is injured and helpless on the obstacle course, taking wounds of his own in the process.
Small Role, Big Impact: Khamis only has dialogue in four or five scenes, but some of them are pretty important ones. It's his Pet the Dog moment toward Nkoyo which causes El to realize that even the worst people in the Scholomance have some good in them and that she wants to save everyone in the senior class, which expands to saving the entire student body. Ironically, his second important moment is figuring out what El is doing and causing everyone else to learn about it when he argues with her about how insane her plan (which he indirectly motivated) sounds.

Maya Wulandiri

A Canadian girl a year above El who is focusing on getting into an enclave that will accept her whole family.

Agonizing Stomach Wound: During the battle to fix the cleansing machines, Maya falls down while clutching her stomach. She survives and gets up to leave with the other survivors, but El observes that she's "stumbling and clammy blue" due to her injury.
Big Sister Instinct: As the seventh-highest scoring senior, Maya can write her own ticket into any number of enclaves, but has spent her school career trying to cozy up to the Toronto enclave because admission to that group means that they'll take in her whole family and her little brother and sister will have the protection of being enclavers when they attend the Scholomance. She volunteers for the dangerous mission in the first book's climax in exchange for admission to the Toronto enclave, which will extend to her siblings whether she survives or not.
The Voiceless: She appears prominently in the first book's climax but has no dialogue that is directly recorded in the text.

Myrthe Christopher

The leader of the Santa Barbara enclavers in El's year.

Break the Haughty: She's an arrogant, slightly condescending enclaver whose effort to rally the school into rejecting El's plan utterly fails (even one of the other Santa Barbara kids gives her a Shut Up, Hannibal! comment), leaving her red-faced and alone in the middle of the room.
Minor Major Character: She's the de facto leader of a large section of enclavers who don't always take cues from New York, but she doesn't appear until more than nine tenths of the way through the second book.
Sugary Malice: She gives a speech arguing that the seniors should abandon El's plan and just graduate themselves while smiling sympathetically and arguing reasonable sounding points. She goes on to insult El directly, while continuing to smile and also saying that it isn't as if she doesn't appreciate the sentiment behind what they're doing and doesn't think they shouldn't try to help the younger kids in smaller ways. El alternates between barely suppressing her rage and admitting that Myrthe is only saying what a lot of people are thinking. Ultimately, the sugariness of her malice fails to sway anyone.
Tears of Joy: As she watches El's plan succeed and it comes time for her to safely get out of the Schlomance, Myrthe's stony expression falters and she starts sobbing happily.

Ravi

An enclaver from Jaipur.

Chekhov's Gunman: He only appears once in the first half of the second book but then (due to some prodding from Liesel) shows up for one sentence much later in the book to get several enclavers to join El's training efforts to save their entire class, lending the project more credibility.
Dirty Coward: He offers El the protection of a group when a bunch of students are traveling the halls after their classroom is pumped with dangerous gas, but wants her to be on point and face any danger first. El isn't impressed and doesn't accept his offer.
Upper-Class Twit: He's an enclaver, an elite of the magical world, and spends most of his time ogling Liesel, overlooking signs of how intelligent Liesel is, and getting non-enclave kids to do his homework.

Victoria

An antagonistic Seattle enclaver.

It's All About Me: El tells Victoria that her efforts to divert mals from the graduation hall and feed them before Victoria's class graduates will endanger hundreds of additional kids for decades in the future, including the younger Seattle enclavers and Victoria's own kids, if she ever has any. Victoria just sneers "I'm going to worry about living that long first, thanks," and continues with her plan.
Elemental Weapon: She fights El and Orion with a flaming whip.
Karma Houdini: She and the other Seattle seniors try to indirectly sacrifice the younger kids for their own survival but survive a fight with El and her friends, aren't punished by their fellow seniors, and then graduate with the rest of the class (even if the survival of so many people as a whole is a good thing).
Kill It with Fire: She attacks El, Orion, and their friends with fire spells.
Shout-Out: Twilight also features a supernatural antagonist named Victoria who leads an antagonistic group from Seattle at one point.

Yaakov

An Israeli student who is Ibrahim's best friend and secret lover.

The Quiet One: He has far less dialogue than Ibrahim.
Start My Own: He and his kibbutz in Israel hope to start their own enclave one day.
Token Religious Teammate: El describes him as the only religious person in her circle of acquaintances, and he says a prayer during a healing ceremony for Cora.

Prasong

A former Bangkok enclaver in the year below El's.

Cruel and Unusual Death: Jerkass or not, having all of your skin ripped off all at once and dying from the massive blood loss and shock is not a good way to go.
Entitled Bastard: According to El, he acted like this to every indie kid and reveled in his status as an enclaver. Then his enclave went down, causing his behavior to bite him in the ass.
Laser-Guided Karma: After two years of acting like an entitled asshole, Prasong starts off his junior year learning that his enclave went down, making him no longer an enclaver but instead just another indie kid. That would be karma enough, but then he decides to go maleficer to make up for the loss of privilege and for survival. Needless to say, it doesn't end well for him.
Would Hurt a Child: He tries to pull malia from a bunch of freshmen using a flaying hex circle. El unknowingly puts an end to that, and Prasong ends up paying for it.

Jermaine

One of the New York enclavers in the same year as Orion and Chloe.

Battle Couple: Or rather, Battle Polyamory. El mentions that he and an Atlanta enclaver spent their junior year competing for the affections of an alchemist, only to end up in a threesome while also forming a graduation alliance with her to fight their way out of the school together.
Nice Guy: He's polite to El and Aadhya, the latter of whom says that he's nice, while telling El not to hate all enclavers.
Social Circle Filler: He's a minor character who gets a few scenes in the second book mainly as a reminder that the New Yorkers besides Orion, Chloe, and Magnus have personalities of their own.

Tomas

An enclaver from Argentina (possibly Salta, where Clarita's mom does work for an enclave), who appears during the graduation ceremony in The Last Graduate.

Bit Character: He only appears near the end of the last chapter of the second book.
Eaten Alive: Moments after successfully graduating, he's caught and consumed by a maw mouth that was on the other side of the portal. He then becomes the first person to survive the experience when El blows the creature apart before it can digest him.
Spoiled Sweet: El observes that despite their sense of status, he and the others from his enclave didn't complain about getting one of the worst positions during the graduation evacuation, accepting how important it was to help everyone.
Unwitting Instigator of Doom: His admirable willingness to evacuate so late during the graduation ceremony forces El to kill a maw-mouth that is attacking him, which (due to the secret spells binding maw-mouths to enclave stones) destroys the Salta enclave and all of its residents.

Nadia

A Saudi girl and one of Ibrahim's friends.

Dance Battler: She is good at casting spells that require dancing to activate and also uses a sword for that.
Social Circle Filler: She appears a few times on the fringes of El's circle (due to her association with Ibrahim, himself only an occasional ally) but gets extremely little page time or development. She isn't even mentioned in the second half of The Last Graduate.

Sarah

A London enclaver and Alfie's best friend.

Bullet-Proof Fashion Plate: Lampshaded in the third book, where El observes Sarah wearing a flowing dress on a muddy and windy day and notes that the dress somehow avoids getting wet, muddy, or tangled up.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Sarah's Social Climber behavior and "British and posh" efforts to downplay how easy classes are for her don't give El a great impression of her but she joins Alfie's Hold the Line efforts during the graduation ceremony in the second book. She's also rather hostile towards El in the third book without actually being obstructive, and it appears to be Anger Born of Worry.
Social Climber: She's not too blatant about it, but she starts trying to cozy up to El, without success, after seeing Orion hanging around her more, and then ignores her during a period where he's not spending time with her.

Okot

A senior from Sudan who is briefly mentioned in the first book.

The Ghost: He's mentioned but never seen.
High-School Hustler: Long hair is at risk of being snagged during monster attacks, cut hair from magical children is useful for tying weapons and tools together, and good scissors and mirrors are in short supply. Before coming to the Scholomance, Okot saw a way to profit off this and used his weight allocation to bring an electric razor and a hand crank, and during the first book he's a very well-off and well-connected student as a result. Once he nears graduation, he trades future rights to the razor to some freshmen if they'll spend their free time producing enough mana for him to get a graduation alliance with enclavers.

Antonio

An enclaver from Guadalajara who is in the same year as El but only appears after graduating.

Jumped at the Call: He credits El with saving his life during the graduation ceremony. Whe they meet again, he remembers that debt and is disenchanted at being dragged into an enclave war. He casts a protective spell to guard her against attackers (not that she truly needs the protection) and joins her heroic plan without asking her to explain what she is doing.
Start My Own: He and a Barcelona enclaver named Caterina are interested in using enclave magic to make a bunch of daycares for indie wizards to leave their kids during dangerous periods. They ask El to help them get started. Due to the Dark Secret behind enclave building spells (which Antonio and Caterina are ignorant about), El shoots down this plan.

Jamaal

A Dubai enclaver who is friends with Ibrahim.

Chekhov's Gunman: He is name-dropped a few times in the second book before being one of the people who gets El to visit the Dubai enclave in the next book.
Spoiled Sweet: He comes from an enclave and his older siblings left him a bunch of pre-prepared assignments so he can avoid doing actual work, but he seems like a nice and well-meaning guy.

Jiangyu

A Beijing enclaver.

Lawful Stupid: He is obsessed with rules and order, and not very good at detecting lies. El has a low opinion of his intelligence.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He is a rigid, Lawful Stupid person who is willing to stand by during an ugly Human Sacrifice if he thinks it was conducted by a fair, proper, and voluntary lottery. However, he volunteers to sacrifice his own enclave spot for the good of his family and friends and helps El with some hard and dangerous work without complaint.
Remember the New Guy?: He only appears in the third book, but El recalls arguing with him about the graduation training during the events of the previous book.

Other Characters

El's Family

Gwen Higgins

El's mother. A famous healer that is renowned throughout the world for her skills.

Tropes:

Allergic to Evil: She becomes ill while inside any enclave constructed with malia, which is part of the reason she has stayed as an independent wizard.
Defector from Decadence: In a sense. A powerful and famous independent wizard like Gwen should've been swallowed up by an enclave years ago, especially since she has a daughter and no other family — not even a large, extended one like her deceased lover's. However, she kept on refusing no matter how much her daughter demanded and begged her to. For years El wondered why, and it's only as she nears her last year at the Scholomance that she realizes it's because her mother wants nothing to do with the corrupted, power hungry magical elite.
Defusing the Tyke-Bomb: How she decided to deal with the prophecy surrounding El, by raising her to be a good person. So far, it seems to have worked despite El's own self-hatred. This later turns out to be the reason why Deepthi estranged them from El's paternal family. As long as Gwen was the one raising El, El was always going to turn out a good person. Any other outcome usually saw El eventually falling into the clutches of Ophelia, who would be the one to turn her into an evil, all-powerful maleficer.
Detect Evil: Much like El, she has the ability to detect the usage of malia. It's implied that El inherited the ability from her. She was also able to detect the insatiable hunger in Orion after he used one of her magical dressings to heal El in the first book. That is why she warned El away from him — she was the first person to realize that there was something deeply wrong with him.
Earth Mother: Fits the archetype well as she is a major draw for customers in the commune and has an international reputation in the magical community. Spontaneously gains familiars who leave on their own accord and has been known to have equally spontaneous spellbooks appear for her use.
English Rose: Described by El as an English rose aging gracefully towards middle age—she's still golden-haired and rosy-cheeked, but she's gained a charming plumpness that fits her kind and sweet personality.
The Ghost: Since the series takes place at the school, which is located in a Pocket Dimension completely isolated from the rest of the world, she never appears in-person. We only learn of her and what she's like from El's own thoughts. This is later subverted in the third book, which is the only book that takes place outside of the Scholomance.
Good Parents: While she has her quirks, she is a loving mother to El and did her best to raise her daughter to be a good person. There's no doubt that El's strong moral character comes from her. Just as well, while El has her own issues with her mother, she is without question the person El loves and misses the most while she's attending the Scholomance.
Granola Girl: Wizarding Edition. She even lives in a commune!
Hidden Depths: As much as she loves her daughter, she absolutely refused to join an enclave despite numerous offers from around the world, even though it would've done more to ensure a growing El's safety. While El initially chalked it up to her mother selfishly wanting to keep her Granola Girl lifestyle, her own experiences throughout the series make her realize that enclaves are almost all selfish, decadent societies that would likely use her as a Human Weapon if she joined them, which causes her to swear off joining an enclave herself. It's all but stated that Gwen knew this from the very beginning, and that is why she remains an independent wizard.
Incorruptible Pure Pureness: So much so that she gives almost-free massages to mundanes and the only reason she charges for her massages at all is that people will give her weird looks otherwise. It's also the reason she refuses to abandon El, despite the dark prophecy surrounding her.
Mama Bear: The only time she ever raised her voice is when her lover's family tried to take a five-year-old El away from her, presumably to kill her due to the dark prophecy surrounding her.
Morality Chain: Gwen is the biggest reason why El hasn't gone Drunk on the Dark Side. Whenever El is thinking about finally giving into her destiny, or even just thinking uncharitable thoughts about someone, all she has to do is remember her mother's disappointed face and she'll begrudgingly stop herself before going too far.
Parents as People: As good and forgiving and moral as she is, El is just much more cynical than her mother and tends to like people more when they show a little selfishness or temper. Even in the third book, after coming around more to Gwen's point of view, El sometimes finds herself deeply irritated with her mother and isn't happy living with her long term.
Someone to Remember Him By: She was four months pregnant with El when her lover Arjun gave his life to get her out of the Scholomance. Fittingly, El resembles her Mumbai-born father greatly.
Star-Crossed Lovers: With El's father, Arjun. Arjun's great-grandmother Deepthi confirms that there is no timeline where they didn't fall in love in the Scholomance. Likewise, there is no timeline where both of them survived — one of them was always going to die so the other could live. In fact, every timeline where Arjun was the one who survived, he would eventually be Driven to Suicide in grief over Gwen and El's deaths.
Teen Pregnancy: She was still in the Scholomance when she got pregnant with El.
White Mage: Her primary affinity is healing magic, though she does have enough knowledge of combat magic to protest herself and her daughter from mals when the latter was growing up.
Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: A grieving and still traumatized girl not quite six months out of the Scholomance, invoking one of the few things that got her through that hell with most of her sanity and not thinking long-term.
Wicked Stepfather: Had one that killed her father and beguiled her mother and partly the reason she raised her daughter in a distant Welsh commune.

Arjun Sharma

El's deceased father. He was the great-grandson of the Speaker of Mumbai, Deepthi Sharma.

Tropes:

Disappeared Dad: To El. He's long dead by the time the series starts, but many of the events in El's life turned out to be heavily entwined with his own life, including his motivations and his ultimate fate.
Doomed Moral Victor: He is retroactively revealed to be this in the third book. Growing up, his dream was to find the Golden Stone sutras and bring back the Golden Enclaves, something that was only reinforced when he met and fell in love with the similarly-minded Gwen in the Scholomance. Eventually, they tried to summon the sutras, leaving the payment open, and the universe granted them what they wanted by allowing the conception of their daughter, the first wizard in generations that would be able to properly wield the sutras in thousands of years. However, the cost would turn out to be Arjun's life, as he would later perform a Heroic Sacrifice to save the pregnant Gwen from Patience on their Graduation Day. In short, while El will go on to fulfill Arjun's dream, Arjun will never get the chance to see it himself.
Driven to Suicide: In every timeline he survived the Scholomance, he would end up going back to the school and willingly let himself get eaten by Patience over the grief of losing Gwen and El. This is why Deepthi opted to give him no warning when he finally left to attend, because she knew there was nothing she could do to save him. All she could do was ensure a timeline where Gwen and El survived in his stead.
Dying Declaration of Love: The last thing he told Gwen before he was eaten by Patience is that he loved her.
Fate Worse than Death: He's technically still alive, just screaming inside of Patience. And then Orion, after he absorbs Patience. He's finally laid to rest when El kills Orion's maw-mouth half.
Goal in Life: His greatest dream was to find the Golden Stone sutras and bring back the Golden Enclaves that his family used to reside in. Ultimately, the universe granted him his wish by giving his daughter the power and the drive to fulfill that dream for him. However, the cost ended up being his own life, which he freely gave to save her and her mother from Patience.
Good Parents: El hadn't even been born yet, and still Arjun loved her so much that he gave his life to save her and her mother from Patience.
Heroic Sacrifice: He gave his life about seventeen years before the start of the series to ensure the pregnant Gwen would make it out of the Scholomance.
Posthumous Character: He's long dead by the present day, but still plays a heavy role in the story.
Present Absence: He (functionally) died before El was even born, but his presence is still keenly felt throughout the series. El physically resembles him, all of his family still mourns him, and he's the reason why El was born with so much power. She's meant to fulfill his lifelong dream of bringing back the Golden Enclaves, as a response to the subconscious wish he made to the universe.
Star-Crossed Lovers: With Gwen. Deepthi confirms that there is no timeline where they don't fall in love... and no timeline where they both survive.
You Can't Fight Fate: He was always going to die. Even in timelines where he survived the Scholomance, he would end up Driven to Suicide because it would always come at the cost of Gwen's, and by extension, El's, lives.

Deepthi Sharma

El's great-great-grandmother, the world's most powerful and revered seer. She gave the dark prophecy that has haunted El for most of her life.

Tropes:

Blessed with Suck: She has the power of prophecy, which allows her to see possible futures. This is both a blessing and a curse, as she often has to make choices that causes the people she loves to hate her for the sake of their own safety. This includes El.
Break Her Heart to Save Her: She deliberately worded her prophecy about El in such a way that it would estrange her from her paternal family, just to ensure El would be safe and away from Ophelia's clutches.
Famed In-Story: Despite not being a member of an enclave, Deepthi is famous throughout the world as the greatest and most powerful seer in history. By extension of that, so is her family, who have grown to be a rich and influential independent wizarding family. It's for that reason El couldn't stay with them. The Sharmas were too famous to keep her safe and properly hidden from Ophelia, who had the backing of the entire New York enclave while she was searching for El. If she had found El with them and realized what she was, there would've been nothing the Sharmas could've done to fend her off. Therefore, the only way to ensure El's safety was make sure she lived with her mother at their commune in Wales, in obscurity and relative isolation from the rest of the world—something that could only be achieved by estranging them from her paternal family for the next decade and a half.
Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: Even though all of her actions were in the service of protecting El, neither El nor her grandparents are willing to forget all the pain she caused them in the process, to the point that her grandson nearly disowned her in a rage after he found out the truth about the prophecy. Deepthi mentions this is a common reaction to many of her choices when they involve her family, a burden she has been forced to accept over the course of her long life.
I Did What I Had to Do: How she justifies estranging El from her paternal family for the last thirteen years. She didn't want to do it, but she had to, for El's sake, and ultimately for the world's sake.
Deepthi: This is the only [future] where you ever came home. This is the only one where she did not find you, before you were old enough to protect yourself.
Long-Lived: She is El's great-great-grandmother, which means she has to be at least over a hundred years old, if not older.
Omniscient Morality License: Defied hard. Deepthi openly acknowledges that while all her more morally-ambiguous actions are to protect her family, it's no excuse for the pain she causes them in the process.
Outliving One's Offspring: She had six children; four survived the Scholomance. The Scholomance being what it is, this likely extended to every successive generation. Certainly she outlived her great-grandson Arjun, El's father. And she always knew she would. Even in timelines where Arjun survived the Scholomance, he would be Driven to Suicide because it would always be at the cost of Gwen and El's lives. Ultimately, she gave him no warning and let him go to his death so Gwen and El could live.
Parental Favoritism: It's said that Arjun was her favorite great-grandchild, which is why El finds it so strange that she never thought to warn him about Gwen and save his life; she figures that she did give Arjun advice, but he ignored it. It's actually because there was no timeline where Arjun didn't fall in love with Gwen and had El with her, and that the only way for Arjun to survive the Scholomance was for them to be taken in his place. He would've never accepted that and would've eventually committed suicide to be with them, so the only way Deepthi could truly honor him was to let him go to his death and protect his family in his place.
Parents as People: She loves her family, but her power means she often has to make hard choices for them that will cause them to hate her just for the sake of their own ideal 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.
Present Absence: Much like Li Shanfeng, Deepthi only appears towards the end of the last book but remains an active force throughout the series due to the prophecy she gave. El's greatest fear is finally giving in to the temptation of malia and fulfilling that very prophecy, which influences and shapes many of her choices.
Prophecy Twist: Weaponized. She worded her prophecy about El to be as terrifying as possible in order to ensure El would be on the right path that would allow her to both evade Ophelia and eventually reunite and reconcile with her paternal family.
Red Baron: She's known throughout the world as the "Speaker of Mumbai".
Seers: She's the most powerful seer in the world.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Invoked. Deepthi is capable of seeing all possible futures and can choose what may come to pass through her own actions. Many of her prophecies are thus a result of this, including her decisions to not warn Arjun before he entered the Scholomance and to estrange El from the family.
Deepthi: To speak the future is to shape the future.

Rajiv and Sitabai Sharma

Deepthi's grandson and granddaughter-in-law. The parents of the late Arjun Sharma, and thus El's paternal grandparents.

Et Tu, Brute?: When Rajiv realizes his own grandmother tricked him into alienating his granddaughter for thirteen years via a misleading prophecy (a situation that nearly caused him to murder said granddaughter), he is so furious at her that he nearly disowns her and tries to leave the family. Only reconciling with El manages to stop him.
Murder-Suicide: According to Deepthi, if Rajiv had gotten his hands on El, he would've taken her to the highest mountain peak he could find and thrown both of them off it. That is the only way he would've been able to reconcile with the idea of killing his only living grandchild.
My God, What Have I Done?: After learning the truth about the prophecy about El, Rajiv has this reaction, realizing he would've killed his granddaughter (and himself, for that matter) for nothing.
Precious Photo: Even after Gwen and El were estranged from the Sharmas, Sitabai kept in contact with Gwen via email, begging for whatever photos Gwen could send of her granddaughter. For that reason, she's able to instantly recognize El the moment she arrives with Deepthi at the family compound.

Orion's Family

Ophelia Rhys-Lake — Unmarked Spoilers!

Ophelia Rhys-Lake

Orion's mother. A member of the New York enclave's council and one of the forerunners for being its next Domina.

Unmarked spoilers for The Golden Enclaves ahead!

Tropes:

Anti-Villain: She's undoubtedly ambitious, but other than seeking more personal power she's correctly identified the problems facing the wizarding world, and has positive goals. If it weren't for her murderous and unethical methods there'd be no reason to oppose her at all.
The Bad Guy Wins: By the end of The Golden Enclave her plans have all come to fruition more or less as intended. The world has been largely purged of mals, maw-mouths no longer need to be created to make enclaves, Orion is picking up the lion's share of the Scholomance's mana budget, and she is made Domina of New York. Just about the only things that don't fall out as she prefers is neither El nor Orion are properly under her control...and Orion is still speaking with her so that need not be a lasting state of affairs.
Big Bad: The closest the series has to one. On top of being a powerful maleficer, she helped kickstart the events of the series by murdering all the students in the year before Gwen and Arjun's (which was falsely attributed to the nonexistent Hands of Death) in order to turn Orion into a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid, an act that caused the universe to deliberately engineer El's birth so she would be in place to kill him when the time came. This is so she could use him as a Living Weapon in order to end the Lensman Arms Race of maw-mouths jumpstarted by the increasing number of enclaves.
Chekhov's Gunman: She is mentioned in the first two books as Orion's mother and a powerful member of the New York enclave, but not much is known about her beyond her questionable parenting of her son. It's only in the third book that she's revealed to be the true Big Bad of the series.
The Corrupter: Deepthi flat-out states she would be this to El if she ever got her hooks into her.
The Dreaded: Anyone that knows about her is absolutely terrified of her. She's a maleficer so powerful that El, the World's Strongest Man, shivers just by being in her presence. Towards the end of the third book, El's great-great-grandmother Deepthi even forbids El from ever visiting New York again as long as Ophelia is alive, because the woman is likely to turn El into a powerful maleficer like her, if El were to ever fall under her influence.
Easily Forgiven: Orion accepts a simple apology from her for the whole "Powered by a Forsaken Child Human Weapon" thing. El is slighly less charitable and has to be talked down from confronting her on his behalf several times.
Evil Sorcerer: An extremely powerful maleficer who made her own son into a wizard/maw-mouth hybrid for her own aims.
Fatal Flaw: Lack of Empathy. Like Li Shanfeng, Ophelia knows that the ongoing Lensman Arms Race between the western and eastern enclaves with maw-mouths is going to lead to the magical world's destruction. But unlike Shanfeng, who was forced to suffer the Horror Hunger of a maw-mouth personally and knows how dangerous they are firsthand, she sees this problem at a high-level, through cold hard logic. That is why she engineered Orion as a wizard/maw-mouth Living Weapon and use him as a Bigger Stick to force the enclaves into stopping the arms race. Having never really encountered a regular maw-mouth herself, she thought she could control Orion when she finally unleashed him; the reality is that she would've lost control of him eventually and he would've ended up consuming the entire magical world, wizard and mals alike, in order to sate his unquenchable hunger. That's why the universe made sure El was born to stop him when that time finally came.
Foil:
- To El. Ophelia is everything El has feared becoming since she was a child—a strict-malia enclaver who no longer has any real morals and is willing to do unspeakable crimes to achieve her goals. Both recognize the major problems plaguing wizard society, but El's idea of solving these problems is to trust people's innate goodness and show them another way. Ophelia, meanwhile, believes the best way to get other wizards in line is to bully them using her Living Weapon of a son into doing what she wants.
- To Liesel. They are both intelligent, ambitious, and driven women who seek to become the Domina of their respective enclaves who both serve as strong influences on El in the third book. El even notes the similarities between them, wondering at one point if Ophelia gave her husband the same "We Can Rule Together" speech that Liesel gave Alfie, and Liesel shows some admiration for Ophelia's intelligence and cunning. However, they differ in very distinct ways: Liesel, for all belligerent attitude, genuinely cares for El as a friend and wants her to remain true to her innately good nature. Ophelia, meanwhile, puts on the airs of being polite but would corrupt El into being a self-righteous maleficer like herself if she ever got the chance. In addition, Liesel has selfish goals that, while she is committed to, she is unwilling to compromise her morals for and is also willing to put aside if something more important takes precedence. By contrast, Ophelia has unselfish goals that she is absolutely devoted to accomplishing by any means necessary, even if that means throwing away what little morals she has left.
The Heavy: Many of the events in the series, including all the misery El had to endure during her childhood, can be traced back to Ophelia's decision to turn Orion into her Living Weapon, forcing the universe to engineer El's birth as a counterbalance. While some of these events were inevitable, they were still hastened by Ophelia's actions. It's no wonder why El comes to hate her so much.
Karma Houdini: At the end of the series, she gets away with all her crimes and ends up elected as Domina of New York, like it was always projected she would be. El is naturally furious about this, but can do nothing about it.
Pure Is Not Good: She's avoided the usual Red Right Hand effects of malia because she's completely severed her anima, rendering her a spiritual parasite who can only wield magic by draining it from others.
They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Despite being a powerful maleficer, she doesn't look supernaturally beautiful, nor does she look like a decrepit hag. No, instead she looks just like a perfectly normal middle-aged woman who takes care of herself, and that is what El finds the most unsettling about her.
Too Clever by Half: Her plan to use Orion as the Bigger Stick to control the rate at which enclaves go up is fiendishly clever and would've worked if not for one thing: the assumption that she would be able to control Orion indefinitely. Li Shanfeng, and later El, the two people who experienced the Horror Hunger of maw-mouths first hand, outright state that she was going to lose control of Orion eventually and that if anything, Ophelia doomed the world instead of saving it. To say nothing of the fact that Orion is completely against the idea himself and only goes along with her plan the moment he sees El is already present and ready to stop him if need be.
Utopia Justifies the Means: Lampshaded by El, who notes she used "all the very best ends in the world" to justify the "very worst means". The means, in this case, being murdering hundreds of kids and her own son to make the latter into a Living Weapon to stop the ever-growing rate of enclaves.
Villain Has a Point: The world does need a solution to the ever worsening maw-mouth problem, it's just unfortunate that she's a maleficer and thinks "sacrifice a few hundred school children to literally give birth to a human/maw-mouth hybrid I can nurture into the perfect weapon under my control" is a legitimate strategy.
Villain Takes an Interest: She was searching for El for years, long before she even knew who El was. Thanks to the Principle of Balance, she knew that the universe would spawn someone or something to act as a counterpoint to Orion, and wanted to secure whoever or whatever that was to ensure her plan would suffer no setbacks. Even after it becomes clear her plans for Orion were a complete wash and would've never worked, it's implied she's still interested in El as a possible tool/weapon in the future.
Walking Spoiler: The fact that she's one of the most powerful maleficers in the world is rather central to her character, making it a bit hard to talk around.
Well-Intentioned Extremist: She turned her son into a Living Weapon in order to decrease the ever-growing number of maw-mouths in the world that were being used as weapons against rival enclaves.
Would Hurt a Child: She sacrificed hundreds of high school students to turn her son into a Living Weapon. To top it off, the process required the son to die too, even if temporarily, meaning she was also willing to murder her own baby - admittedly it was an external embryo at the time that was later implanted, but still.

Balthasar Lake

Orion's father, and the top artificer of the New York enclave, making him one of the greatest in the world.

Absent-Minded Professor: One of the greatest magical engineers in the world, but doesn't much care for social interactions.
Ambiguously Evil: He knows that his wife is a strict-malia practitioner, but it's never established whether he knows the full extent of what she's done to bring her plans to fruition - his initial discussion with El indicates that he doesn't actually understand Orion's true nature.
Henpecked Husband: Ophelia clearly makes the decisions in their relationship, although he doesn't seem to mind.
Parents as People: Not the best father, but he's moved nearly to tears to find out that Orion was able to find some genuine human friendship and intimacy with somebody.
We Can Rebuild Him: In the epilogue, he is working with Shanfeng to refurbish and modernize the Scholomance after all the damage El and company did to it over the course of the series.

Shanghai Enclave

Li Shanfeng

The current Dominus of the Shanghai enclave, and an extremely talented artificer. Several decades before the start of the series, he revived the enclave by killing a maw-mouth with the help of a circle of wizards.

The Atoner: In contrast to Ophelia, Shanfeng openly acknowledges that he has committed horrible crimes, and never tries to justify them. When speaking to El about them, he doesn't even try to pretend he has any sort of moral high ground over her.
Bigger Stick: Actively defied. Even though he's the one person who could've created a weapon that could've stopped Orion, he chose not to, knowing that this wouldn't solve the problem. Instead, he opts to put his faith in El, the universe's answer to stopping Orion.
Big Good: Closest to one in the series, and even then his hands, like Ophelia Lake's, are stained with blood. He only shows up in person in the second-to-last chapter of the book, but he's the one who tell's El of Orion's true origins and the true source of all the conflict in the series. He's extremely gentle with her, never raising his voice and comforting her over her despair at having to seemingly kill Orion. In addition, Ophelia views him as the greatest threat to her plans and doesn't enter the enclave war with Orion until she can confirm his presence at the battlefield.
Dark and Troubled Past: When he was a child, he was one of the survivors of the original Shanghai enclave's destruction, and had to watch as his mother and sisters were killed as the enclave collapsed, leaving his father and him the only survivors of their family. Later on, he managed to revive his family's ancestral enclave at the cost of destroying another city's enclave. It more-or-less got worse from there, even as his enclave grew and began to thrive again. By the time Shanfeng meets El, he's become a humble, empathetic man with an ever-present aura of sorrow around him, owing to the many hard choices he's had to make over the course of his life.
The Dreaded: To Ophelia, as much as she can fear anything. Shanfeng is the only person alive who can create a weapon to counter Orion, making him her primary target during the enclave war. With him gone, Ophelia believes she can essentially carry on her plan to subjugate the world's enclaves using her Living Weapon unopposed.
Famed In-Story: As noted by El, everyone knows who he is and his life story, since it's such a critical part of recent wizarding history.
The Ghost: Shanfeng is a non-entity until literally the second-to-last chapter of the last book.
The Gift: He's a once-in-a-generation talent like El and Orion. He's an extremely talented artificer that invented many of the advanced artifice used in modern-day enclaves. He's also the only known person other than El to have killed a maw-mouth, albeit with the help of a circle of wizards. Except it turns out he didn't do that; the best he could do was replace the core of the maw-mouth so it would act as the new anchor for the Shanghai enclave's new foundation stone.
Magitek: He is a top-class artificer with an affinity for large-scale constructions. It's very likely he's the most powerful and skilled artificer in the world.
Mr. Exposition: His purpose is to explain to El the wider context of the ongoing maw-mouth/enclave problem plaguing the wizarding world, all of which serves as Ophelia's motives for her many crimes. He lampshades this, stating that he can't force El to save everyone, but merely give her the information she needs to make the choice herself.
Present Absence: While he doesn't debut until towards the end of the third book, he remains a consistent driving force of the first two books. The first book mentions his supposed defeat of a maw-mouth, which El uses as a point of comparison to her own defeat of a maw-mouth, and the second book's supporting antagonists are the Shanghai enclavers attending the Scholomance, who are trying to act in the best interest of their enclave according to what they believe would be his wishes. Ironically, it turns out they were going against his wishes, because Shanfeng is the one of the last people who wants El dead.
Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In order to revive the Shanghai enclave, he replaced the core of "longing" of the maw-mouth holding the enclave hostage with a new core comprised of his family and friends' "longing", before teleporting the maw-mouth away. While his actions revived the enclave with a new double foundation stone, it also caused the destruction of the San Diego enclave, as that was the original enclave the maw-mouth had been anchoring.

Beijing Enclave

Seventh Sage of Beijing

The founder of the Beijing enclave. He is a strict-mana wizard and is at least a thousand years old.

Ambiguously Human: He was human once but may not be anymore, as he is over a millennium old (most wizards die before turning two hundred), only shows up during times of crisis, and can appear out of nowhere and then disappear. He also knows who El is and what her purpose in the world is supposed to be upon their first meeting, while basically everyone else who was directly involved in the matter had only pieces of the truth.
Founder of the Kingdom: The original founder of the Beijing enclave, which was one of the few natural-existing enclaves in the world before its later inhabitants began to expand it using the modern-enclave building spells.
King in the Mountain: He never died, but rather disappeared, only occasionally reappearing whenever the Beijing enclave is in some kind of crisis. By the time the protagonists meet him, he hasn't been seen in centuries.
Minor Major Character: He's a significant figure in wizard history and, by virtue of his age, might be the one character stronger than El. However, he only appears in one scene in the third book, albeit in a very important role.
Only Known by Their Nickname: He's only known as the the Seventh Sage of Beijing. His actual name is never revealed.
Outdated Hero vs. Improved Society: Subverted. He is a disappointed in what the Beijing enclave has become during his periods of absence, even though it's evolved to become one of the most powerful enclaves in the world. An opinion that is justified when it's revealed they expanded the enclave using the modern enclave-building spells, which involve creating a maw-mouth and chucking it to the outside to snack on innocent wizards.
Really 700 Years Old: As the founder of the Beijing enclave, he's been around for at least a thousand years.
Wizard Beard: He is an old and powerful sorcerer, and El takes notice of his "thoroughly whiskered" face.

Manchester Enclave

Sir Alfred Cooper-Browning

The former Dominus of the Manchester enclave, and the founder and builder of the Scholomance. He "died" in the late 1800s while trying to repairing the scouring machines in the Graduation Hall, eaten by a maw-mouth.

Famous Ancestor: He's the ancestor of Alfie and his father, Richard.
Fate Worse than Death: Having been eaten by a maw-mouth, he technically never actually died and is currently still screaming inside Patience or Fortitude (the wizards documenting his death were never entirely sure which of the two ate him). And then Orion, after both are eaten by him. His torment only ends when El kills Orion's maw-mouth-half and turns him into a Golden Enclave.
Long-Dead Badass: He founded and built the Scholomance in 1886. While much can be said of how it was set up to favor the Manchester enclave he was part of and not all the wise-gifted children of the world, Cooper-Browning was no coward and believed in the project enough to personally lead an expedition attempting to repair the scouring machinery to make it safe for graduating classes four years after it opened. They completed enough repairs to save the next three years' worth students before Sir Alfred was eaten by a maw-mouth. He isn't technically dead, but he might as well be, and would almost certainly be a lot happier if he was.
Our Founder: There are pictures and articles all around the school and in the freshman handbook of him and the wizards who helped him build the Scholomance. This allows El to recognize Richard Cooper-Browning, the imminent Dominus of London, as one of his descendants on sight.
Strong Family Resemblance: He heavily resembles his descendant, Richard Cooper-Browning.
World's Strongest Man: He was said to be the strongest wizard of his generation.

Other Indie magic-users

Purochana

The author of the Golden Stone sutras, and the creator of the first Golden Enclaves.

The Gift: El suspects he was a "tertiary-order entity" like Orion and herself, since the sutras can only be performed by someone as powerful as her.
Legend Fades to Myth: Wizard historians suspect him to be the same Purochana from the Mahabharata, demonized by the mundanes who wrote about him.
Long-Dead Badass: He's been dead for thousands of years, and yet it was him that authored the Golden Stone sutras and created the first enclaves that are the foundation for enclave-building today.
Hero with Bad Publicity: He's a villain in an ancient mundane Indian poem, while to wizards he's a hero for figuring out enclave-building.
Red Baron: He's also known as the Wise One of Ghandara.
Unwitting Instigator of Doom: He proved it was possible to construct enclaves, instead of waiting for them to form naturally, and left behind the sutras so people could continue to use them to build more Golden Enclaves in the millennia after his death. Unfortunately, it turns out the sutras he created were only possible for him to perform, since they required a level of power from the wizard casting them that only he (and later El) could achieve on his own. People became so desperate to construct their own enclaves that eventually someone made the maw-mouth-spewing modern enclave-building spells used today.

Yancy

The leader of a group of outcast indie wizards who constantly sneak into enclave tunnels until they get found and kicked out.

Beneath Notice: She has an enchanted cloak that grants this effect.
Hidden Depths: When told off for partying at London Enclave's memorial to their children who died in the Scholomance with "don't you care that these are dead kids?" Yancy says the whole enclave is built on dead children, seemingly at least partially aware of revelations that El picks up more slowly as the book progresses. It's both literally true even devoid of that knowledge (the non-enclave children who disproportionately die to give the enclavers a better chance), but also could refer to the creation of enclaves and why old disused segments and entrances still work, and depending how she learned the truth she might be magically compelled so that that's the best hint she can give.
Lower-Class Lout: Yancy is a crude and rude woman who wears tattered clothing and lives on the fringes of the magical society, although she is an ally of sorts to El.
Tunnel King: She and her crew excel at finding and getting through sealed up entrances to the London enclaves and navigating the tunnels beneath them.

Characters / The Scholomance

Edit Locked

Main Cast

The Scholomance

Tropes:

General

Galadriel "El" Higgins

Tropes:

Orion Lake

Tropes:

Aadhya

Tropes:

Yi Liu

Tropes:

Chloe Rasmussen

Tropes:

Liesel Mueller

Tropes:

Other Students

Jack Westing

Tropes:

Luisa

Tropes:

Magnus Tebow

Tropes:

Clarita Acevedo-Cruz

Tropes:

Ibrahim

Tropes:

Nkoyo

Tropes:

David Pires

Tropes:

Alfie

Tropes:

Sudarat

Tropes:

Guo Yi Zheng and Guo Yi Min

Tropes:

Hu Zixuan and Wang Yuyan

Tropes:

Todd Quayle

Tropes:

Myrthe Christopher

Ravi

Victoria

Yaakov

Prasong

Jermaine

Tomas

Nadia

Sarah

Okot

Other Characters

El's Family

Gwen Higgins

Tropes:

Arjun Sharma

Tropes:

Deepthi Sharma

Tropes:

Rajiv and Sitabai Sharma

Orion's Family

Ophelia Rhys-Lake

Tropes:

Balthasar Lake

Shanghai Enclave

Li Shanfeng

Beijing Enclave

Seventh Sage of Beijing

Manchester Enclave

Sir Alfred Cooper-Browning

Other Indie magic-users

Purochana

Yancy

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