Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

[The book is leatherbound, without a title, and beaten over many years of abuse despite the brass-inscribed wards of protection, longevity, and forbearance. A few pages appear to be missing, especially at the very front of the journal, as if several pages were intentionally torn away—the remnants of where they were initially attached to the binding is still present for several, despite apparent water damage and age. The first entry begins on the very first page without preamble.]

Let's skip all the bullshit, yeah?

You're reading this because the school gave you this book, or you found it in the library. So I promise, I'll make it worth your while to read this with the only thing that matters. Information.

I don't want to be forgotten. Graduation is soon, and chances are I'm not going to survive it. Without an alliance, I'm just one more idiot in the masses. So the deal is simple. You read this book, learn who the hell I am, pretend it matters so that I can wake up again tomorrow and face a cold, unfeeling world with the false comfort that somebody, somewhere, will know who I am, and that even if I die, I won't be forgotten, and I'll give you some insights into my specialty. Give you a few tips to turn it to your advantage. It might be the difference between life and death.

I'm Carmine Carroll. Hopefully you care enough to remember that. If I'm lucky, forty years from now, someone reading this will even recognize it. But I doubt it. All in all, this is probably the only thing someone might remember me for, some frantic formulae on Artifice scribbled in the margins of a half-destroyed journal. The last legacy of one more loser in the Scholomance.

But I’ll get on with it. You probably have enough existential dread without borrowing trouble.

Even if you're an Alchemist or an Incanter, knowing a bit about Artifice can only help. I can teach you about how to make some of the things I'm most proud of, and likely of more interest to you and your survival, some of the things I'm least proud of.

Like the Burner. If I make it out of here, it'll be thanks almost entirely to that little atrocity. It's a shit thing I've done, I won't deny it, and there's a terrifyingly large chance it won't even get me out of here. But I had to try, and I'm not sorry to anyone it got killed, or worse. It was them or maybe me, and it's probably terrible, but I'll take a chance at life over someone else's having a better one any day.

But thanks for getting this far, and I'm sorry that you didn't get a book from somebody better than me. I'll give you a taste of what I'm offering, so you can go into this little deal of ours eyes wide open. I can be that decent, at least. Then, I guess you'll decide if this is all worth it, and huck my little diary into the Void if it isn't.

On second thought, you probably won't do that. The school wouldn't like it, and pissing the Scholomance off is a good way to get a few extra mals coming your way.

But here's the directions for an artifice that might just save your life. A fairly straightforward shield bracelet, but I've made a few changes to the formula and the spellwork that goes into it. 

And to any readers out there who know a thing or two about artifice, feel free to write in the margins, make recommendations to anyone who might come after you. Maybe this will become more than just my tombstone. Maybe it'll become a sort of… cooperative survival guide, that gets handed off to a bunch of kids, one after another.

That'd be a nice legacy to leave behind, even if the first person in that sort of chain doesn’t benefit much. But it’d be a pretty shit thing to do, to back out now. I already set out my terms, after all.

*****

Hungering Shield Bracelet— I don't care if it's annoying that I just give them straightforward names. Chances are I'm dead, and you can call this anything you want, honestly, but I'm of a mind that it's better to know what it is before you gather all the materials and perform all the math.

Ingredients:

• Leather strap (easy enough to acquire from Shop classroom, have someone watch your back)
• Does not need to be leather, but recommended. Sturdy, and not magically disruptive to anything else in the formula. Unless you're Artifice track and know what you're doing though, I recommend against making any substitutions in the formulae I lay out that I don't explicitly state are okay.
• Silver, (preferred) or similarly magically active metal, at least 8 oz., 12 preferred for best result. Hard to get, outside the start of term rush or high-price trading, unless you're Artifice track—Scholomance should supply for more difficult projects, just a matter of saving up any spare materials over time.
• Gold to insulate the different enchanted parts from one another, 4 oz. should do it, 5 to be safe in case of screw ups. Same issues in acquisition as silver.
• Eye from something—something conceptually perceptive, even if not through their eyes, is best. Guard dog, bird of prey, something like that. Better if magically active, chimera or homunculus in shape of appropriate animals work. Sight-based hunting mals work too. In worst case, human eye. Even for juiced-up maleficers who get a kick out of it, human eye is a bad material to use—people aren't as perceptive as we like to think. But magically active is best. Probably last option most likely—no shortage of options in the Scholomance.
• Tooth from something. A strong mal would be best, but the whole point is avoiding getting hurt, so if you can't grab one safely, or get someone else to, a weaker one works pretty well too. Worst case, pull out a tooth of yours with some pliers, and use the spell in the margins here to grow it back. Not as effective, but as long as it comes from something magical it'll still work well enough.
• Your own blood, only a few drops needed. Better attunes the shield to you, eases start-up mana requirements. Makes very difficult for others to use, so if making for others, need their blood—preferably given willingly and knowingly.

As you've most likely guessed by now, judging just from those prep notes, I'm not very popular. Otherwise I'd be making bracelets I could trade, or that might get me into an alliance. People don't like me much though. Maybe I bother them, I don't really know. When people find excuses not to talk to you, you run out of chances to ask why nobody's talking to you.

Anyway. These will keep the mals off of you, and the best part is that they're reactive—they'll auto-activate if a spell or physical attack is aimed at hurting you. It doesn't help for things not explicitly looking to harm you, like if somebody accidentally drops something on you, but seeing as maleficaria are always malevolent, and any of them within twenty feet of you is doing anything it can to kill you, it also doubles as a mal detector.

The issue is the power consumption, but that's where one of my better ideas comes into play. All mals have magic. The whole reason they come after us is that they just want more , enough to actually channel it properly, or to sustain their unstable forms. This shield drains them of that magic to power itself. Any energy—malia or mana—that comes into contact with the shield with the intent to hurt you or eat you gets channelled to powering your shield, and the same happens if a mal makes physical contact with your shield, or in the worst case if it's out of juice, with your skin.

Far from a perfect solution. Burns out quickly without constant attacks on you, so a savvy mal might hang back and let you exhaust all your mana, but can be deactivated forcibly if it's burning through your own mana supply rather than an accumulated one from attacks. Issue is once it's deactivated, the materials burn out, so more of a back-up defense, or if you have some big fat power-sharer like the Enclavers.

Theoretically, it could protect you from a maw-mouth indefinitely. My advice is not to fucking test that though. An infinity of torment isn’t worth sating my or your scientific curiosity.

To construct, take the silver and melt over a flame—preferably mortal flame, if you can get access or summon it to burn away any mana based impurities beforehand, but obviously that's way more dangerous…

*****

My first days at the Scholomance were as terrifying as my worst, later on. There's something about being young, about being small, that makes the world more intimidating in ways beyond just sheer size. The shadows seem deep enough to swallow you whole, the Scholomance more uncaring and impenetrable in nature than it truly was, and of course, the mals hungrier. Stronger.

That last one, sadly, was as true as it was false. On the one hand, the Mals had almost certainly eaten as well as they ever would, during the most recent Graduation, and should have been fat, happy, and lazy after that, and those that weren’t were dead, killed by the desperate wizard children trying to claw their way towards the exit, to freedom, and to a life that they had a fair chance of living. But The Scholomance conformed to expectations in a big way. Worry about a monster under your bed, and you're more sure to find one. Check around the corners in the halls, and the one time that you forget to, something will jump out at you, or just wait for your panicked eyes to miss them on your latest one and rip your face off. And when you're small, and weak, and alone, you fear all those things and more, and they're bigger and badder for it.

No wonder barely half the Freshman class ever survives to Sophomore.

I had to contend with a few mal attacks, of course, but I was smart enough to stick to the indistinct herds of Freshmen wandering from one class to another, and so when one of us was taken, I was lucky enough not to be the one. And back then, when all we knew to expect were monsters with teeth and anger and hate, that's what we got. Nothing more subtle that would mark us with some spit and come for us later, nothing that would jab us with a poison that paralyzes us over the course of days, nothing that implants its young, and waits for them to chew their way out from our core.

Just monsters three times our size, hairy and thick with muscles, and with fangs bigger than our hands.

I hate this place. It's like an abusive relationship. I know I'm less likely to die here, even if only by a few degrees, but this place tears at you. Constantly being on edge, constantly checking over your shoulder, and always running, and running, and praying you're not the slowest, all while secretly hoping that you are so you can just rest, just stop , and not have to add another fresh dying scream to the library you cycle through every night before sleep…

I hate this place. If I ever get out, I might just come back to tear it down. All the magical kids in the world would be worse for it if I did. But… I don't know. This place is making me into someone who doesn't care too much for that, so long as I break this oversized torture chamber.

Maybe that's why I won't make it out of here. It knows that if I do, I'll dedicate myself to breaking it.

But this has been… a Hell of a digression. Sorry, reader. I'm not exactly a novelist, if you couldn't tell. But I'll try to be more coherent from here on. As an apology, here's the next recipe.

Heh. I kind of like that. 'Artificing for Dummies.' Just making a foolproof cookbook, so even the worst chefs can make something edible.

God, I miss my mom's cook

[There is no further writing or punctuation on this page. There are small spots where the paper seems wrinkled and slightly stained—likely from teardrops. This transcription continues two pages later, such that the author is writing on the left page, and unable to see what they've last written. The recipe begins without any reference to the previous entry’s contents.]

Chapter Text

Sorry, still not the Burner. That one is going to need a bit more investment before I’m ready to reveal the biggest atrocity I’ve ever scraped together. Hopefully not the biggest I ever will. If I make something worse, something that can threaten wizardkind everywhere and be the magical equivalent of a nuke between Enclaves, it means I got out, and had the time and resources to get it made. I wouldn’t mind being a monster if it means living.

This one is a smaller one that I’m pretty proud of. We all know how risky showers can be, especially if you don’t have a regular ally to watch out for you when you do it. Most of us can’t risk more than one every three or four days. Outcasts like me tend more towards once every two weeks, maybe even less often if you can’t get a shower buddy. Usually I can’t bribe anyone into it unless I stumble across something worth trading for ten minutes of their time.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a solution to cleaning up after yourself safely, or quickly. I still smell as bad and feel as gross as anyone around here. Only good thing on that front is that everyone else smells too, except for the Enclavers, so that’s not the only reason I’m a social outcast. If it were, I doubt any alliances would get made in here.

But the smell, as ubiquitous as it is inside the Scholomance, is as dangerous as not keeping an eye out sometimes. Plenty of Mals out there have senses that put a wizard’s to shame, and smelling like a locker room makes it easy for a lot of them to track you down and eat you when you’re not looking. After all, anything smart enough to track you is also smart enough to wait until you’re alone, and your back is turned.

Hence, I threw together a recipe to deal with the issue. My affinity usually works better with defensive items anyway, and transferring mana from one place to another, so conceptually, obscuring your scent to prevent attacks fits well enough that this wasn’t too difficult. I can’t just make the bad smells vanish though—when things get sent away, they go to the Void. If you’re already in the Void, they stay exactly where they were, and that goes for stinky air just as well as hungry mals

I actually have a theory, that some of the mals we get in the Scholomance were sent by inexperienced or stupid wizards just trying to shove the monsters they meet away . Makes sense that their transport spell would send them where a bunch of Mals are already going. But that’s a story for another time.

So that’s where this charm goes into play. I call it the Fume Fan, because I don’t have time to sweat about better names for things when I could be building artifices, or upping my mana stores. Essentially, it works by taking a small but constant draw on your body heat to supply it—sure it makes the nights a bit colder, but it beat spending your mana when you might need it to kill whatever comes after you because it can’t smell anyway, or whatever. Rather than erase your smell, or attempt to dampen it, it enhances it—spreads the stink around. If the mals smell you everywhere they turn, and at the exact same consistency, it doesn’t help them track you any. And it won’t make you any less popular, guaranteed—the whole damn school already stinks like hell anyway, and if it isn’t sweaty, greasy teens you’re smelling, it’s mal guts, or wizard guts, or wet metal, or…

There are a lot of stinks in the school. I really hope that if I get out of here one day, I can wash them off. Maybe take all my skin off with it just to be sure. It can’t have sunk down to my bones yet, right?

I’ll go into the recipe for the artifice itself next, but first you need to make the actuating and focusing fluid—basically, a sludgy potion that tells the artifice what smell it’s amplifying and spreading. It lasts for a while—you could get away with four months before refreshing and replacing the fluid, but I’d recommend keeping it to no more than ten weeks between replacements to keep it working at its peak.

I’ll lay things out more smoothly for the actual artifice later, but I don’t have the energy for that for just the crap you put in to help focus it.

So for the solution—First, you’ll need a pretty hearty strip of your skin and some lye to dissolve it in—if the ingredient bins in the labs are out, raiding the bathroom for some of its soap will work, it’s about 80% lye. Once you’ve gotten a strip of your skin—preferably about four square inches, and about ⅓ inch thick, or approx. 100 mm square, and 8.5 mm thick (MUST be a single piece, but can go long or wide on cut to your preference) you need to mince it like you’re cutting garlic before dissolving it in lye. If you’re artifice track you’ll understand, if you’re not, focus on the fact that it works over how it does. Now, next step for the mixture…

*****

[This entry has minor blood spatters littered across it, as if written as the bleeding was slowing but not stopped. There are ineffectual attempts to wipe it away early on, but they stop as the entry goes on, the lettering growing more cramped and uneven as it goes.]

What else do I want people to remember me for?

[The line is scribbled out heavily, but still somewhat legible with effort.]

Fuck that. I just want to be remembered flat out, I don’t give a shit what for. So you know what? Yeah. I killed Jason Farrith. He was a fucking maleficer, best I could tell from the way his shadow wriggled and his eyes flashed red, he’d been one for a while. So I turned the tables on him. He saw me, one more fucking loser that nobody would miss, and tried to get me alone in the library. I let him.

He didn’t know I had a spell active sapping my mana because I knew. I knew I was the next target, because I was the last, most pathetic person alive in the whole school. There was no better prey around than me, so I knew if I saw him looking my way even once , he was close to making his move.

He got me in a study cubicle. Used a sleep spell I recognized on me, so I played along. I acted like I was knocked out, slammed my head into the table hard enough I probably broke my goddamn nose. Blood started gushing out over my mouth, and it was caked all over my goddamn face, and all I could think as he walked closer was thank God that I had my Fume Fan running, or the Mals would have come running at the smell of it.

Then he came closer, bold as anything, and I had my eyes ever so slightly open, believably, breathing deeply around the blood and getting it in my fucking lungs, and then I jumped him. I grabbed him by the fucking throat so he couldn’t incant any more, I dropped my mental defense spell, and I summoned a jet of flame right in the middle of his fucking esophagas, so he could choke and burn all at once, a spell I use when I need a fucking blowtorch does wonders on flesh.

And before he died, I… I took everything he had left.

I went fucking Maleficer, because it was kill or be killed, and waste not want not, and all sorts of other platitudes that don’t help me sleep any better. So now the Scholomance has another Maleficer to replace the last one, probably the most inept one its ever seen. He had some mana crystals as well, some of them were even full. I took everything he had that looked even remotely useful. Clothes included. He was a little bigger than me, but nobody’s clothes fit in the Scholomance anyway, and that meant his shirt was just my size. I could get the blood out with a household spell or two.

I didn’t care if people knew I killed him. I was already a pariah, and this just made me look like a dangerous pariah. Now people who wouldn’t talk to me anyway wouldn’t look at me like a target.

And with all that malia I’d stolen from him, and I didn’t even know how much of it was his, and how much of it was what he’d already gathered… I felt safe for the first time since I’d come into the Scholomance. Safe enough that I cried while I stripped his room of anything valuable.

I burned the letters from his parents. I couldn’t look at them, and he didn’t deserve to have people who missed him.

It was him or me. Him or me. That I chose me doesn’t make me a monster. It doesn’t, because I didn’t choose this. He did. He tried to kill me, and there was only one way to deal with that if you’re the target in that situation. If I hadn’t killed him, he would have tried again. Or tried someone else.

I just wish the malia didn’t feel so good. I don’t want it to be… like this. Like a warm shower and a sunny day and a calm nap. Something evil shouldn’t feel so good and so safe. I don’t want to be this. Once is enough. He was carting around a lot of power. It would last, and then I’d have my mana reserves and the ones he built up, and then… I’d be out. I could make it last. I have enough to survive. I don’t need to take any more malia.

*****