hey! first time posting here. wrote the opening chapter of a fantasy thing I've been working on and would love some outside eyes on it.

basically: magic school, but the narrator is looking back ten years later and already knows his roommate ended up on trial for necromancy. the whole book is him telling you how that happened, in real time, while being deeply unsurprised.

it's trying to be funny but also like. actually sad eventually. idk if chapter 1 lands that or if it just reads as a comedy bit.

specific things I'm curious about:

- does the retrospective voice feel natural or does it get in the way?

- is Ezren charming or annoying? (he should be both but ideally more the first)

- did you want to keep reading at the end?

honest feedback welcome, including "this isn't working." I'd rather know now lol

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Notes on the Inevitable Necromancer

Chapter 1: In Which I Am Assigned a Roommate, and the Universe Files Its First Form

So… here is how a decade of paperwork begins.

I was nineteen, and my mother had packed me three pairs of socks too many — which, like, fine, fair, the dorms at Veilmont were famously cold. The Conservatory of Applied Arcana sat on a hill where the wind was always disagreeing with itself, and the brochures had used the word "bracing" instead of "miserable," which is the sort of thing brochures do. I was carrying a trunk, a divining bowl wrapped in three towels, and a letter from the Dean's office that said, in the dry official font of all such letters, Welcome, Mr. Vell. Your room assignment is 4-North, with one (1) Mr. Ezren Vask.

Yeah. That sentence aged.

I'm gonna spoil it for you right now, because, like… that's the deal we've got, you and me. Ten years from this trunk and these socks and this hilltop wind, I would sit on a wooden bench in a town called Caelm — which, at nineteen, I had never heard of and could not have located on a map even if you'd offered me money — and I would testify before a Crown Tribunal that the man behind door 4-North, the man with the velvet-wrapped skull and the pamphlets and the sincere face… yeah. He did it. All of it. Most of it. Some of the pastry counts were, uh, contested.

But that's chapter ten. We're in chapter one. The trunk is heavy. The hill is bracing. I push the door.

Ezren was on the floor.

Not fainted, not hexed — just, like, sitting cross-legged in the middle of an unrolled rug, surrounded by what I would later learn to call his kit. At the time I didn't have a word for it. The word I reached for was yard sale. Black candles, two dozen of them, stacked like firewood. A velvet bag the size of a melon, with something distinctly head-shaped inside. A stack of pamphlets, freshly printed — you could still smell the ink — titled, in a font that was trying very hard, SHADOW: A Reappraisal. There was a bowl of black salt. There was a smaller bowl of, I think, regular salt, which had been mislabeled. There was a plant.

He looked up. He had the kind of face that a beard would, in theory, improve, and you could tell he was already aware of this — there was a faint, hopeful smudge along his jaw, the way you draw a moustache on a portrait when you're bored. He smiled.

"You must be Idris," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"I'm Ezren."

"Yeah."

"I've laid out my materials," he said, gesturing with both hands at, like, all of it. "I hope you don't mind. I find it grounding to unpack first."

I set down the trunk. I did not mind, exactly. I mean — what I minded was, uh, harder to articulate. I minded the way the candles were arranged in a circle that was almost but not quite around the rug. I minded the salt situation. I minded that the velvet bag had a brass nameplate stitched onto it that read, in tidy embroidered script, REGINALD.

"That's Reginald," Ezren said, following my eyes. "He was a baron."

"…Cool," I said.

"Sixteenth century. Minor house. Not, like, important — I want to be clear about that. I didn't acquire him for the pedigree."

"Uh-huh."

"He was on consignment."

I want you to understand something about me, the man who is telling you this. I had come to Veilmont to study practical divination. Practical. The word was load-bearing. Not theoretical divination, not ceremonial divination, not the kind that requires you to fast for three days and stand in a river — practical. Tea leaves. Cards. The occasional bowl. The Bureau of Routine Forecasts, in the capital, hired about forty graduates a year at a starting salary that included, like, an actual pension and dental and a desk with a window if you were lucky. My career plan, written out at sixteen on the back of an envelope, fit in eight words: boring job, modest flat, retire to coast.

I had looked at the brochure for the shadow arts track exactly once, in the way you look at a cliff you do not intend to jump off, and I had moved on.

So I stood there, in a doorway, looking at my new roommate, who had unpacked a baron, and I performed the small mental arithmetic that any Veilmont first-year performed in their first ten minutes — the which one of these is mine arithmetic, the did the Dean's office do this on purpose arithmetic — and I came up with: yeah, probably, this is just how it goes.

Every cohort gets one.

I'd heard the phrase already, three times before I even arrived. Once from the orientation video — a stiff old wizard in a frame, blinking at the camera, saying, "Statistically, every cohort produces one student who will, ah… require additional structural support." Once from my Cousin Mira, who had graduated Veilmont four years earlier and who, when she heard my room assignment, had laughed in a way that was not, like, comforting. And once from my Cousin Tomas, who was less helpful and just said, "Oh shit, is he the one?" and would not elaborate.

Every cohort gets one. And mine, apparently, was already on the floor.

"Want a pamphlet?" Ezren said.

He held one out. SHADOW: A Reappraisal. The cover featured a hand cupping a small flame that was, I noticed, drawn slightly wrong — the flame had a shadow, which is, uh, not how flames work, but okay.

"Sure," I said. I took it. I have it still. It is, by the way, the closest cousin to the manifesto that, eight years from this moment, would cause Ezren to be banned from three printers and one stationer. The pamphlet was its embryo. He had printed twelve. He'd already given one to the bursar.

"You'll find," Ezren said, in a voice that was clearly the opening note of a much longer voice, "that the conventional view of shadow arts as, quote, sinister, is actually a relatively recent — like, post-1840s — bureaucratic position, designed primarily to protect guild revenue—"

"Mm," I said.

"—and that the underlying disciplines, properly understood, are no more inherently malicious than, say, herbalism, or—"

"Mm."

"—weather divination, which I understand is your—"

"Practical divination," I said. "It's its own track."

"Right. Right. Anyway, the point being—"

I had, I want to stress, heard this speech already. I had heard it in the orientation video, where it appeared as a negative example — the narrator had said, "You may encounter peers who articulate views such as the following," and then a different actor had said, almost word for word, what Ezren was saying now. I had heard it from Cousin Mira, who'd done a one-woman dramatic reenactment at the dinner table. I had heard it from Cousin Tomas, who didn't believe it but liked to say it to annoy his mother.

It is a fact about the shadow-arts speech that it is, like, weirdly stable across speakers. The same beats. The same indignant post-1840s. The same comparison to herbalism. I have wondered, in the years since, whether they are issued the speech, somehow — whether it comes in the mail, whether it is whispered to them in dreams. I do not know. I will, in chapter four or so, find a draft of it in Ezren's notebook with the word HERBALISM circled and an arrow pointing to the margin where he'd written, in his own handwriting, good comparison, use.

"…and so I just think," Ezren was saying, winding down with the dignity of a man who has, in his head, won, "that we owe it to ourselves to keep an open mind."

"Yeah," I said.

He brightened. He thought he'd persuaded me. I have, in retrospect, felt bad about this approximately twice, and the rest of the time I've felt that, like, a man who has unpacked a baron in your shared dormitory is not owed a clarification.

I started unpacking. He watched me do it, with the patient curiosity of a cat watching a window. Towels. Bowl. Cards. A little brass kettle. Three boxes of loose-leaf tea, of varying grades, because tea-leaf reading is, despite what the orientation videos imply, a skill that depends significantly on the leaf. My father had given me the kettle. My mother had given me the tea. Together they were, I want to be clear, a much more functional couple than I'm making them sound.

"Tea leaves," Ezren observed.

"Yeah."

"Is that — like, the whole practice?"

I looked at him. He was not, I want to stress, being mean. He genuinely wanted to know. He thought he was asking after my hobbies.

"It's, uh," I said, "a track. It's a four-year program. There are exams."

"Huh," he said.

He went back to his candles.

The Dean's welcome speech was at four. Veilmont herded us into the great hall like sheep with parents, and the parents were given a little glass of sherry in a side room and shooed out again, which was efficient. Dean Carrow himself was a tall, quiet man with the kind of face that had been pre-disappointed since 1962. He stood at the lectern and read from a sheet of paper that he had clearly read from before — many times, many cohorts.

"Welcome," he said, "to Veilmont."

We applauded politely.

"In the course of your studies," he said, in the tone of a man who has been ordered to say the next bit, "you will encounter materials that are, by Conservatory statute, restricted. These include but are not limited to: necromantic primary sources, bindings of the seventh order or higher, certain reanimation taxonomies, and any document bearing the seal of the Westhall Index. Possession, transcription, or recreational reading of these materials is grounds for academic discipline up to and including expulsion. The relevant form is 17-B."

I did not think about Form 17-B, then, in any meaningful way. It was a number on a list. I was nineteen. Nobody, at nineteen, thinks meaningfully about a form. I will, by chapter six, know its subsections. I will, by chapter ten, dream about it. But at this particular moment, in the great hall, with my new roommate next to me whispering — yes, whispering, like a child at a sermon — I did not yet understand that a form could ruin a man.

"Propaganda," Ezren whispered.

"Mm," I said.

"This is, like, exactly what I was telling you about. Post-1840s. The Westhall Index is, literally, a guild document — they—"

"Ezren."

"—they don't want competition, they—"

"Ezren, I'm trying to listen to the man."

"Right. Yeah. Sorry."

He stopped whispering for, I would estimate, eleven seconds. Then he started again. The Dean was now talking about meal hours. Ezren was talking about what he called "the suppression."

I looked, briefly, around the hall. There were maybe a hundred and fifty of us. Practical divination, ceremonial casting, herbology, healing, applied geomancy, the small and proud cohort of weather-workers, the tiny terrified cohort of scryers. And in the back, a section of seats that was conspicuously thinner than the others — the shadow arts track, three students, looking at their hands. Ezren wasn't even sitting with them. He had not, technically, been admitted to that track. He had been admitted to general arcana, undeclared, and was, in his own head, de facto shadow. A distinction the Conservatory would, with great patience, fail to enforce for four years.

"…and finally," Dean Carrow said, looking up from his paper for the first time, "I will say what I always say. In every cohort, there is one of you who will require — additional structural support. You know who you are. The faculty knows who you are. We will be available."

A pause.

The Dean, I would swear in court, looked directly at Ezren.

Ezren, beaming, did not notice.

"Every cohort gets one," the Dean said, almost to himself, and gathered his papers, and left.

I bought earplugs at the campus store on the way back to the dorm. They cost six coppers. They were brown, and waxy, and shaped like little acorns, and the woman behind the counter — a tired witch with reading glasses on a chain — rang me up without comment, the way you ring up a man buying a shovel at midnight. She had, I realized later, sold a lot of earplugs in her career. She had probably sold them to my mother.

Back at 4-North, Ezren had finished arranging the candles. Reginald was on the desk, unwrapped now — a small, polite, brown-stained skull with what appeared to be a handwritten note tucked into one eye socket. The pamphlets were stacked. The plant had been moved. The salt situation had been resolved, mostly, in favor of the wrong salt.

"Hungry?" Ezren said.

"…Yeah."

"I have a sandwich. We could split it."

It was, I want to note, an entirely ordinary sandwich. Brown bread, cheese, a slice of ham, a leaf of something green that may have been lettuce and may have been ambition. It came wrapped in waxed paper from a shop at the foot of the hill, the kind of shop that I would, in time, learn was run by a man named Henri Marlow, and that Henri Marlow would, in time, become — well. We'll get there.

We sat on the floor, because the chairs weren't unpacked yet. Ezren tore the sandwich in half, more or less evenly. He gave me the slightly larger half, which I want noted in the record as a kindness. We ate. He talked. I let him.

The sandwich, in retrospect, was the last unambiguously legal meal we ever ate together. I want to be careful about that sentence, because I have phrased it, in my head, a thousand times. Unambiguously is doing the work. There were many subsequent meals. Some of them were probably legal. Some of them were legal in their jurisdiction of origin. One of them, in chapter seven, was a pie that Inspector Rell would later describe, on a chain-of-evidence form, as of indeterminate provenance. But this one — this brown bread, this ham, this lettuce-or-ambition — this one was clean. Henri Marlow had baked the bread that morning. Nothing in it had previously been alive in the technical sense. Nothing in it had been removed from a restricted display case. We chewed. We were friends. The sun came in through the dormer.

I didn't know, yet, that the sandwich was the last clean thing.

I knew the rest, though. Most of it. The Dean had told me. The orientation video had told me. Cousin Mira had told me, laughing. Every cohort gets one, and I had drawn mine, and he was, like, eating my sandwich on my floor and explaining that the Westhall Index was, quote, a cartel.

I put in the earplugs.

He kept talking. I could see his mouth moving. He looked happy.

Outside, somewhere down the hill, a bell rang for evening. Tomorrow the first semester would start. There would be a class — uh, several classes — and one of them, scheduled for nine o'clock on a Tuesday, was Mandatory Arcane Ethics, taught by a Professor Mireille Tann, of whom I had heard, even then, that she did not, like, suffer fools. And Ezren, my new roommate, the man with the baron, was about to walk into her seminar with a pamphlet in his pocket and a hand half-raised before he'd even sat down.

Yeah.

That went how you'd think.