Work Text:
What’s Wrong With the Death School?
Ravenwood Post, Wizard City Edition (Opinion section)
by Talon Lilypetal
For the last time this past Sunday, former Dean and Professor of the School of Death Malistaire Drake was laid to rest in the Unicorn Cemetery. One of the latest confirmed victims of the Umbra Queen’s war, Malistaire Drake was reportedly resurrected during the initial offensive on Azteca, his body stolen from where he had originally been laid to rest in Dragonspyre Academy. From there, he was fought again and killed for the second time by much of the same group that initially defeated him five years ago.
Students, alumni, parents and teachers alike gathered in Unicorn Way to once again celebrate Professor Drake’s long life and career, as well as solemnly reflect on his death and undeath. Many spirit school students, mostly graduates and alumni, made speeches about their experiences with their professor, about his remarkably long life, and about Sylvia Drake, his wife and fellow former Professor and Dean of the Life School….
For many of the graduate, post-graduate, PhD and alumni students of Ravenwood, this scene was shockingly familiar. Not only had many of us attended Malistaire’s first funeral, but many more had attended Sylvia Drake’s funeral as well. Just as Sylvia Drake’s death had affected the student body deeply, many of us observed this weekend the widespread impact that Malistaire Drake’s death(s) have had on Ravenwood.
Last weekend, many of his own students did not bother to come - the presence of Life, Myth, and Storm students largely outnumbered the amount of Death students in attendance. Those currently enrolled in the Death school who did attend largely did not take part in public comment - they kept their heads down, looked down at their feet or at other students who came with them, and mourned wholly apart from their fellow students.
A savvy observer could come up with many reasons as to why this is - for example, one could cite the mass exodus of students from the Death School following Malistaire’s first death, plunging the attendance numbers of Death School courses down below even core Myth School courses (and in some cases, below even specialty collegiate level courses such as Diplomacy and Search and Rescue). In fact, some of the Myth, Life, and Storm students that outnumbered their Death School peers could have been former Death students. One could also cite the growing numbers of students with a negative opinion of Malistaire, either because he had never taught them personally, or because of his actions abroad in Dragonspyre, Azteca, and Darkmoor.
But I propose a different (and slightly less obvious, yet more humanist) answer – it isn’t just that Death students fled a School in disarray, or that Death students were turned against their former professor – but that without Professor Drake, students lack (pardon the play on words) the spirit to participate fully in Ravenwood life, be it in mourning or in their own educations.
Feel free to cut-out the summoning square (or click this link, if you’re viewing this article online) to read another article by the Post published after Malistaire’s first death - covering the Death student body’s initial reaction to the change in their School’s structure. Allison Finedust writes in surgical detail about the reasons behind the mass exodus and the loss of motivation the Death School suffered after Professor Drake’s death, and without her work, my article never would have been completed, for better or for worse, mostly out of grief.
With that in mind, I can confidently give you an update to the information she presents in her article; little to nothing has changed in the five years since Malistaire’s first death. Many of the upper level Death students who remain committed to the choice the Book of Secrets made for them all those years ago are just as misguided and depressed as they were before, even if they transferred schools during the exodus.
I spoke to many collegiate and near-collegiate Death students (those who were among the last to be taught formally or informally by Professor Drake) over the weekend about their experiences in a post-Malistaire Death School, and the responses I received were grim. Many reported almost nonexistent passion for their schoolwork, and some even reported things like depression, drug-use, and considering dropping out of Ravenwood. Some students quote “burnt out” after his first death and never recovered their ability to complete schoolwork normally, and believed they wouldn’t have recovered even if they switched magical disciplines. All of them had at least one thing in common - not wanting to be writ on the record as having said those things.
The wave of depression and apathy eating at the Death School is an ailment its students have largely suffered in silence, with the afflicted embarrassed about their inability to be passionate about a subject that was once the only thing they talked about, even when a suitable alternative teacher appeared to lead them. Nobody I interviewed complained about Dworgyn - most were thankful that he was hired. But it simply wasn’t the same. Malistaire Drake was the Death School. Death is one of the most dangerous disciplines Ravenwood teaches, and Professor Drake touched nearly all he taught - he cultivated the courage in his students required to pursue Death study unafraid, and seemed to be a teacher anybody could depend on to help them, Death or not.
The silent embarrassment after a professor’s death, mostly because of not connecting with the less experienced, yet incredibly well-meaning replacement is more than familiar to me - I lived it, too. What dozens and dozens of op-eds on how to council and support grieving Death students failed to touch on is that we’ve been here before. The Life School’s disarray after Professor Sylvia Drake’s death parallels (almost) exactly the Death School’s decline – and there’s a lot we can learn from it. Mostly in the form of providing a lot of support (that is long overdue to give to the Death School) that Life students received almost immediately after the death of their professor….
Starting with reinstating the various safety nets Malistaire Drake instituted for incoming and ongoing Death students. Professor Drake’s early-education program for students that were essentially guaranteed (either by early magical inclination or by family tradition) to pursue death magic was indispensable for preparing Wizard City’s kids for the Death curriculum, and without it we see even students who never met Professor Drake suffering in their classes, their health, and their social lives. Most of us know the reason why this program doesn’t go on is because Dworgyn has publicly stated he doesn’t plan to continue it - but that is no reason to give up on what was probably one of Ravenwood’s best (and most imitated by other academies) ideas in the past hundred years. Headmaster Ambrose should have appointed a new teacher for this program already, if not immediately after Dworgyn announced that he wouldn’t take Professor Drake’s place.
Students also should have been allowed to continue the rituals and practices of the Death School as it was under Malistaire Drake. The closures of the Death School’s jazz band and research club were deadly blows to morale after Professor Drake left – and were closures that did not need to happen. This is where the Death School’s decline is only “almost” the same as the Life School’s - we, the Life students who lived beyond Sylvia Drake, did not have to fear accusations that we (secretly or otherwise) supported our former professor’s evil affairs. Malistaire Drake’s betrayal of the order of life and death did not (and never will) justify the behavior that drove Ravenwood’s faculty to close down some of Ravenwood’s most prolific clubs out of fears that they would become a breeding ground for a repeat incident or a place for Malistaire to gather minions and followers.
One could easily argue that the clubs and traditions of the Life School that were allowed to stay intact after Sylvia Drake’s death (The Order of Theurge Duelists, or TOTD for short) were much more harmful to the student body than any jazz band ever was, especially without Sylvia Drake’s leadership; her presence was a sort of guidance that TOTD practically required in order to curb the prevalence of bullying that TOTD now represents.
That’s not to say TOTD should have been closed down, either – for many of us, it was the only way we could commemorate and continue to learn from our fallen professor, and without that lifeline, I am sure that the Life School’s exodus would’ve been much larger and more devastating, much as the Death School’s exodus has been. But the brazen disrespect for Death School tradition reveals a dangerous double standard– one that haunts students today as it did a thousand years ago.
Malistaire Drake is really and truly gone. And for those of us in the Spirit Schools, (yes, even Life!) his second and last death is a tolling bell signifying the beginning of the end…
The end, (yet again), of anybody respecting us as Spirit School students.