The Scholomance was created one hundred years ago by the most wealthy and powerful among the European wizard community. A grand school existing outside of proper reality built to protect their growing children from the hordes of monstrous maleficaria that would like nothing more than to devour them for their rapidly growing Mana pools.
Things didn't quite turn out that way. The systems meant to keep the monsters out of the school broke almost immediately and attempts to repair them led to a lot of dead wizards and repairs that broke down a mere three years later.
And yet the school is still in use. Because a deathtrap that kills three-fourths of its students still provides better odds than anywhere in the outside world.
And so, every year over a thousand students are signed up for and sent to the Scholomance, some from the great and powerful enclaves which the school was built to protect, and the rest from independent families, who are mostly expected to act as easy targets to distract the monsters away from the enclavers.
You do not belong to either of these groups. Every so often a wizard is born to mundane parents. Usually, all these mundane born wizards can expect is to die alone and terrified in the jaws of a maleficaria, never even knowing that wizards exist, much less that they were one.
But every so often, the Scholomance makes a mistake and grabs a mundane born child like you. Their chances aren't considered to be all that much better than they are on the outside.
Nobody here expects you to live to see the end of first semester. Let's hope you can prove them wrong.
Things didn't quite turn out that way. The systems meant to keep the monsters out of the school broke almost immediately and attempts to repair them led to a lot of dead wizards and repairs that broke down a mere three years later.
And yet the school is still in use. Because a deathtrap that kills three-fourths of its students still provides better odds than anywhere in the outside world.
And so, every year over a thousand students are signed up for and sent to the Scholomance, some from the great and powerful enclaves which the school was built to protect, and the rest from independent families, who are mostly expected to act as easy targets to distract the monsters away from the enclavers.
You do not belong to either of these groups. Every so often a wizard is born to mundane parents. Usually, all these mundane born wizards can expect is to die alone and terrified in the jaws of a maleficaria, never even knowing that wizards exist, much less that they were one.
But every so often, the Scholomance makes a mistake and grabs a mundane born child like you. Their chances aren't considered to be all that much better than they are on the outside.
Nobody here expects you to live to see the end of first semester. Let's hope you can prove them wrong.