55 pages • 1-hour read
The Last Graduate
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Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Vipersac”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence and illness.
It is the first day of Galadriel “El” Higgins’s senior year at the sentient magic school known as the Scholomance. Her day starts with a letter from her mother warning her to stay away from fellow student Orion Lake. El destroys the letter, then leaves very early for breakfast so that she can avoid getting the rotten food that is generally left for latecomers. When she enters the cafeteria, she feels the oddness of having actual friends like Lui, who asks her if anything is wrong. El doesn’t say anything about the letter and instead forces a smile, which is an odd sensation for her. Over breakfast, she sits with her allies and friends and again feels the strange sensation of being someone with power and popularity.
Later that day, El makes her way to a class but is disgusted when she realizes that all the other students—including Sudarat, a girl from the Bangkok enclave—are first-year students. A cousin of Liu’s is also present. El grabs the safest seat in the room and tries to ignore the first-year students’ vulnerable seat positions. No teacher appears, but the term schedules do. Although El sees that she has a heavy academic load, she also notes that because the current class is a long one, she will be able to store a little mana—magical energy that is created through effort or creative activity. However, she remains suspicious about this situation because she cannot figure out what the catch is—and there is always a catch at the Scholomance.
With the first-year students eying her, El analyzes the space in order to avoid any places where maleficarias—the resident beasts of the Scholomance—might hide. (Maleficarias, also called “mals,” constantly try to kill the magicians in the Scholomance in order to devour their mana.) Despite El’s precautions, a vipersac (a mal that shoots poisonous darts to kills its prey) slips through one of the vents. The inexperienced first-years cower behind a big desk, trapping themselves. Despite the Scholomance ethos—protect oneself first, no matter the cost to others, especially first-years—El saves Liu’s cousin by telling him to follow her out of the room. He does, and all the first-years except for Sudarat follow him. El then risks her own life to save Sudarat as well.
Suddenly, Orion bursts in to defend everyone. He asks El if she is all right, and a part of El is unhappy about Orion’s appearance. If he had attacked the vipersac, El, Sudarat, Zheng, and Orion himself would have been killed in the crossfire. Orion doesn’t understand that El has preemptively saved his life as well. Realizing that she has expended mana in her efforts, El feels foolish for engaging in heroics. (Orion, on the other hand, generates mana whenever he kills mals.)
Chapter 2 Summary: “Cushions”
As time goes on, El discovers that all her classes place her in situations that make it almost impossible to generate mana. (For example, mals regularly attack the class with the first-years.) After several rescues, El finally tells Sudarat that she will have to give El mana if she expects additional rescues during class. Sudarat runs away in tears, and El later learns that something has destroyed Sudarat’s enclave. This development leaves the Bangkok enclave students with no other mana except whatever they can generate in school. As a result, even if the Bangkok enclavers make it through graduation, many of them are likely to die when they emerge from the Scholomance. El and others suspect that in the world beyond the Scholomance, a hidden war is raging between the enclaves, with the powerful New York enclave being the one most likely to have destroyed Bangkok.
The New York enclave has offered El one of its rare, guaranteed spots, so her friends Aadhya and Liu suggest that El ask the New York enclave for mana. (El originally turned the New York enclave down because her plan is to continue as an independent wizard after graduation.) Now, as the three girls talk, they reason that the school is targeting El specifically. They also realize that the mals are hungry because Orion has been killing the smaller mals on which the bigger ones feed. (Hungry mals will make it more difficult for students to survive the graduation ritual at the end of the term.) Orion has also protected students, blocking the mals from their prime source of mana. The girls also reason that the school cannot afford to let someone like El live because the spells she can make as a Dark Sorceress could potentially consume large quantities of mana, further depleting the school of the mana it needs to exist. However, both Liu and Aadya refuse to abandon their alliance with El.
El’s lack of mana and her refusal to rely on malia (power derived from another wizard by coercion) leave her with the unpleasant option of asking New York—which is still eager to recruit her—for some spare mana from their hoard. El approaches Chloe, the one New York enclave student who persists in trying to recruit and befriend El despite El’s habitual rudeness. El is explaining her situation to Chloe when suddenly, an enormous creature camouflaging itself as Chloe’s luxurious pile of cushions attacks and nearly kills them both. El kills the mal. Orion arrives just as she performs the spell, but he cannot intervene because Choe collides with him as she tries to run away, leaving El alone to defend herself.
That night, El helps Liu to cut her hair. Liu’s long hair is the result of her creation of malia from the deaths of mice that she smuggled in with her. However, she now decides to stop using malia, so she gives Aadhya and El each a mouse to serve as a familiar. El names her mouse “Precious.” Using Liu’s hair and a sirenspider leg bone donated by El, Aadhya intends to make a spell-amplifying lute; the instrument will help them to survive graduation, and it will also be valuable beyond the Scholomance.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Leskits”
Chloe agrees to El’s proposal and hands over a power-sharer so that El can access some of the New York enclave’s mana. In return, Chloe asks to join El’s graduation alliance. With no fair means of declining, El accepts the request. El hates even the appearance of engaging in the deal-making that the enclavers habitually do, so she feels uncomfortable with this advantageous alliance. Orion congratulates her and flirts with her before abruptly cutting the conversation short. Now that El has so much mana, it is easy for her to dispatch a pack of leskits (furry, clawed mals). However, Orion, who is just on the other side of the room, gets credit for the kills.
Orion can no longer kill enough mals to dump the mana he gains into New York’s pool of mana. When Orion asks another member of the New York enclave for mana, El realizes that with all the mals focusing on her, Orion has lost his source of mana; since he is the source of all mana for the other New York enclave members, they, too, have lost much of their mana.
El also learns that no one else has suffered attacks from mals, which means that the school is targeting only her. To prevent the New York students from learning the truth about their diminished mana supply, El starts a rumor that she is the one preventing Orion from hunting—she supposedly fears him getting hurt. The rumor takes advantage of the fact that no one in the New York enclave wants people to know that Orion is the only person who has been building mana for them. For the first time, members of the New York enclave have to work like everyone else to build mana. When El and her alliance try to build a trap for mals with Orion nearby and ready to kill them, the plan fails.
When a mal attacks El, she uses La Main de La Mort, a spell that can kill the user if it is not pronounced with absolute precision. The spell works, causing the mal to wink out of existence. However, the spell has the same effect on that part of the school, which only rights itself and seals off the damage because El sustains her belief that the school will recover. El’s dramatic spell shows everyone the powerful darkness of El’s power. More people begin to avoid her, but the members of her graduation alliance refuse to abandon her.
Despite these setbacks, El does gain some advantages from having access to mana from New York. Having a large supply of mana allows her to make rapid progress on her work with spells and languages. She spends most of her time translating the Golden Stone sutras from Sanskrit to English, neglecting her other schoolwork. She plans to decipher the Golden Stone sutras and give the translation to anyone who wants an enclave. In return, she will insist that the recipients allow her and others to stay in their enclaves for a time. By upending a system in which only the rich and powerful can afford enclaves, El might be able to destroy the systems of enclaves—just as her grandmother predicted that she would.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Midterms”
People begin to treat El differently and watch her every move now that they know the true extent of her powers. People realize that the Scholomance has two once-in-a-generation talents—Orion and El. El believes that her and Orion’s simultaneous presence in the Scholomance is the universe or the school’s way of addressing an imbalance in the natural order of things. Orion alone would be enough to tip the balance of power in favor of New York, and enclaves in the West are desperate to gain some advantage as they face the rising power of enclaves like Shanghai.
The revelation of El’s power is enough to tip the balance in favor of New York even further—if New York can recruit El. The Shanghai enclave students begin spying on her, and New York enclavers see El’s relationship with Orion as confirmation that she will go to New York after graduation. New York enclavers are enthused about her dangerous reputation and have continued to allow El to keep the power-sharer. However, she bitterly resents the fact that they are planning her future for her.
El refuses to share her dream of Golden Stone enclaves with Aadhya and others. Aadhya warns El that if she does not announce some kind of plan, people will assume the worst of her. Aadya also reminds El that it is possible to be a good person without going to the lengths that El’s mother, Gwen Higgins, does with her selflessness. Aadhya tells El that Orion’s attentions to her are strange because Orion himself is strange—he doesn’t even recognize the people he meets every day because he isn’t interested in anything other than killing mals. El is the only exception to his social indifference. El starts to wonder about the nature of his attraction to her.
Further complications arise along with the midterm grades. In the Scholomance, the school year has two parts—the first part, during which grades are important, and the second part, during which preparations for surviving graduation are the students’ sole concern. Strategically, it would make more sense to prepare all term for graduation, but the Scholomance has a built-in system that prevents students from neglecting schoolwork. If students fails their courses or do not complete their academic projects, they die. Likewise, if they are assigned remedial work and do not finish it, they die. Additionally, the fact that the valedictorian is virtually guaranteed a seat at an enclave becomes an extra incentive to perform well academically. El knows that she has neglected her studies, but she fortunately gets solid grades in her assigned classes, and the school even creates a course in Sanskrit and gives her an A with a commendation for excellence, thereby recognizing the work that she has done on the sutras. Orion, on the other hand, is so obsessed with hunting mals that he receives poor grades and remedial work.
El’s dramatic, potent magic appears again when Cora, an artificer student who also failed her project, receives a terrible wound that will make it impossible for her to survive graduation. El convinces her classmates to participate in an altruistic healing spell. Such an endeavor is unheard of in the dog-eat-dog world of the Scholomance, but the spell works, and afterward, El’s reputation for powerful magic is dramatically enhanced.
More bad news comes when El, Aadhya, and Liu practice their routine for surviving the graduation hall. When their efforts fails and attract larval mals, Orion excitedly pursues the monsters. Later, El realizes that Orion hasn’t completed any of his artificer assignments because he has been hunting mals. When his project fails, she saves him in a dramatic fashion, and her first-year students help as well.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
In these opening chapters of the novel, Novik engages in world-building that fleshes out the Scholomance’s status as both a setting and a sentient character in its own right, thereby providing a cruel yet supervisory presence that is otherwise lacking in a world in which the young characters are focused on the challenges of Coming of Age Without Adults. Although the Scholomance is inherently deadly, this high-stress environment is designed to evoke a range of conflicts amongst the adolescents trapped within its boundaries. Thus, although the surroundings are thoroughly fantastical in nature, the main characters face many dynamics that are typical of that developmental stage, and furthermore, they must do so without immediate guidance from responsible adults and mentors. The one form of adult guidance that El has access to is the advice she receives from her mother, who urges her to stay away from Orion Lake, and El begins the book by ignoring this injunction. Without the guidance of responsible adults, the teens and children of the Scholomance are shaped instead by the central reality of the Scholomance, and the primary lesson of this setting is that even the smallest mistake can end in death.
As El and her fellow students struggle to survive and thrive within this unforgiving setting, they must contend with The Moral Implications of Survival Tactics and choose whether to adhere to the Scholomance’s Darwinian approach to survival or band together into strategic alliances. Ultimately, the students’ determination of right and wrong is shaped both by the Darwinian ethos of the school and by their own organically developed codes of ethics. El, for example, instinctively claims the safest seat in the seminar room that she shares with the vulnerable first-years, but she also chooses to save Liu’s cousin and Sudarat from the attacking mal, and her altruistic actions reflect that she harbors a stronger moral compass than she initially lets on. Thus, El has a strong sense of right and wrong despite the school’s influence and the looming threat of her grandmother’s prophecy.
Notably, El’s strong moral compass is born of her friendships with other students, and she develops a found family amongst some of her fellow students and relies upon these connections to make choices that benefit others as well as herself. For example, her relationships with Liu and Aadhya give her a sense of belonging that she has hitherto lacked. El never takes these relationships for granted; for example, she forces a smile for Liu despite her own discomfort because she is slowly coming to understand that bonds of friendship are reciprocal and go beyond the bounds of strategic alliances. Similarly, El is there as support when Liu makes the difficult decision to cut her hair. In this way, although El has little experience in sustaining friendships, she gradually learns how to be a good friend, and she benefits greatly from Aadyha and Liu’s support, which helps to shape the choices that she makes later in the novel.
These friendships mediate El’s growing understanding of The Moral Implications of Survival Tactics. Because El’s moral compass is still developing at this point, a key part of that development can be seen in the tension that exists between her self-interest and her more ethical choices to act on behalf of others, even when she receives no clear benefit for doing so. Within the ecosystem of the school, many students—and particularly the enclavers—are willing to compromise their own sense of ethics to secure a measure of safety and power. While this ruthless approach is widely accepted as the logical choice, it soon becomes clear that El often takes a far more altruistic stance, and these atypical choices reflect the moderating influence of her mother.
El’s focus on ethical considerations can be seen in her choice to limit herself to using only mana and never relying upon malia to empower herself. This personal boundary arises from the influence of her mother, who has spent time teaching El the consequences of benefitting from the exploitation of others. For this reason, El repeatedly makes the choice to limit herself to mana, even when the school is pushing her to use malia. For example, El heals Cora’s arm wound because she feels sympathy for the girl, who will not survive the ravages of the Scholomance without a functioning arm. By convincing everyone to engage in the crucial healing spell, El inspires an act of pure altruism, since this particular spell requires that there be no benefit to the wielder. Notably, El learned this spell from her mother, so it is clear that Gwen’s influence is once again disrupting the status quo in the school.
Other students, such as Orion, are also faced with the choice between self-interest and altruism. Although most people in the school consider Orion to be a hero, his primary motivation in these early chapters is to kill mals, and he continues this pattern even when he recognizes that by killing so many mals and saving so many people, he is destroying the delicate equilibrium of the Scholomance’s “ecosystem.” Ironically, doing the “right thing” and saving people’s lives—an act that would be applauded in the world beyond the Scholomance—is nonetheless considered to be “wrong” in the brutal world inside the school, for the brutal, deadly context of the Scholomance inverts more conventional ethics.
However, even amid these tensions, Novik lays the groundwork for the novel’s broader exploration of The Tension Between Individualism Versus Collectivism. El has been a loner for the past three years of her stay in the Scholomance, so she has learned to emphasize self-reliance instead of making alliances with others to survive. Although El is now in an alliance-turned-friendship with Liu and Aadhya, she rejects most other opportunities to connect with others, as when she declines the invitations of the New York enclave. El rejects the enclavers in part because she sees them as exploiters of solo students, but she is also motivated to reject them because she wants to maintain her independence. However, in spite of her isolationist stance, she begins to see the benefits of relying on others, and her initial willingness to rely on her allies soon becomes a broader willingness to rely on her classmates, as when she leads them in the healing spell for Cora.
Thus, Novik rejects the simplistic notion that individualism is selfish and collectivism is generous, and her portrayal of the enclaves reflects her more nuanced approach. The enclaves are the ultimate form of collectivism in the Scholomance, for they are designed to protect large numbers of wizards and engender cooperation across enclaves. However, despite their ostensible collectivism, the enclaves blatantly hoard mana and talent to the point that they lessen the chances of survival for independent wizards and their children. The destruction of Bangkok enclave, which is currently presumed to have been carried out by another enclave, shows that the ultimate impact of the enclaves’ type of collectivism may well involve wholesale murder and the theft of vital resources.
In this way, Novik makes it clear that the choice between individualism and collectivism is based upon political considerations, and this is why El begins to intervene in the rigged system that exists both within and beyond the Scholomance. As the protagonist, El is one of the primary disruptors of the divide between individualism and collectivism. She spends all her time translating the Golden Stone sutras because she is driven by a desire to carve out a place for herself, and she also wants to make the safety of enclaves available to everyone. Ultimately, her desire to bridge the gap between individualism and collectivism threatens the foundation on which her society rests—just as her grandmother predicted.
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