Stories passed between apprentices, staffroom whispers and margin notes. Rated in stars for believability.
Fiction. The diaries, legends, reports and some of the staff are invented. The academies are real.
Apprentices, after the examination
The legend says the founders hid their artefacts so well that they could not find them again themselves, and that the Founders’ Spell has only lasted five hundred years because nobody has been able to move anything. Selene says this is nonsense. Hollis says he has found a very old note under a floorboard that reads “left it by the serpents”.
Verdict: The serpents are real. The note, the Society suspects, is Hollis’s.
The staffroom on The Corso
Corvus and Selene have never met, yet they write to each other every week, his notes to her journal and hers to his. The legend is that the professor taught Corvus to write so that he would have someone to argue with, and then vanished so that Corvus would have to find someone else.
Verdict: Their letters are real, in the journals. The professor’s motives are not on record.
Members who read the margin notes closely
Wendell has never once got into the Headmaster’s sanctum. Crumpet, the legend says, has been in and out a dozen times, through a gap in the castle wall only a newt could fit through, and has never told Wendell because Crumpet does not want immortality, only flies.
Verdict: Newts are excellent at gaps. Crumpet is excellent at keeping secrets.
Hollis, quietly
Every evening Hollis sweeps a little pile of beach sand out of the stone corridor. The legend is that some of it slips through the fraying Founders’ Spell into the Shadow Realm, and that the darkness on the other side is very slowly turning into a beach.
Verdict: Sand gets everywhere. Probably not there.
First-year apprentices
There is a red bird in a cage in the academy, and every first-year asks about it. The legend says it is a firebird, and that it sings once, at the end of the examination, but only for a class that has passed. Selene declines to confirm this, which the Society takes as a yes.
Verdict: The cage is real. The singing, you will have to find out.
Magic University first-years
The professor, the legend goes, was halfway through the orientation talk when he vanished, and the talk is still going on somewhere, in an enchanted room, to an empty hall. Every so often, if you stand very still in the lecture hall, you can hear him say “and finally”.
Verdict: He never says “and finally” and means it. That part is true of every professor.
