The Problem with Maw-Mouths
Jun. 29th, 2022 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schnikeysWhat's the deal with maw-mouths?
No, really. They're the dread of every enclave, the biggest monsters in the graduation hall of the Scholomance, the "greater evil" for which "if you've got a choice, take the something else". And yet —
Assuming we're taking El's exposition at its word here: why? Why, if there's a threat bigger than any other mal in the world, would no one have spent much time studying the reproduction of maw-mouths? It's not that maw-mouths aren't studied at all:
Something isn't adding up here.
MAW-MOUTHS
Let's start with a recap of what we know about maw-mouths themselves, both from in-story events and from personal accounts.
(Note that while we know El is a highly unreliable narrator in many ways, I'm going to assume, unless otherwise noted, that if her narration states something about maw-mouths, it's accurate. Given El's general obfuscating pessimism, she's more likely to be accurate about maw-mouths than she is about many other things.)
What do we know about maw-mouths? We know that they're in theory impossible to kill, although Dominus Li managed in the Shanghai enclave and El managed on her own, and the mortal flame cleansing at least took a few layers off of Patience and Fortitude. We know that they eat wizards and other mals, just like every other mal, and they consume humans by shredding them. We know that once they have a hold on their prey, they don't let go, unless someone takes the place of their prey. We know that a wizard can physically survive inside the bounds of a maw-mouth provided they're shielded. We know that a maw-mouth has a core, and that's what you need to target if you're trying to kill a maw-mouth (which implies you can't just blast it from the outside). We know that when killed, at least one maw-mouth dropped "a grotesque lump that looked like a deboned chicken, except a person instead, a body that had been crushed into a fetal position." We know that one can use killing spells that target entire rooms of individual people to kill them. We know that even enclaves fear them.
On a different note, let’s talk about malia! What turns mana into malia? What does malia actually do?
MALIA
(“Rotting on the inside”, hm?)
So. Mana comes from effort, and from life, and from belief (judging by how offerings from mundanes can feed maleficaria). You can pull mana nonconsensually from a weak living thing like, say, a hill of ants without significant reprisal, but anything with the power to resist will claw at the mana thief, which taints the mana and turns it into malia. Excess malia usage physically impacts the user; El doesn't give explicit details, but "shriveling" and "cav[ing] in on himself in a nice final grotesque rush" are fairly evocative. It is possible to recover from malia usage, but it requires some combination of abstinence, spirit cleansing, and/or good works.
Gosh, that weird deboned chicken thing that came out of the maw-mouth was pretty grotesque too, right?
Let's take a quick left turn. What do we know about enclaves?
ENCLAVES
(Hm... what happened a few weeks before induction day?)
So, we know that the natural way of making an enclave is to have a bunch of wizards in one place for somewhere on the order of two to four hundred years, depending on how long a wizard generation is, and to have those wizards systematically entering and exiting that one place in specific locations. The result is a special space floating in the void where magic is much easier to do, tethered to the real world. Strict-mana enclaves exist. The first artificial enclaves came about five thousand years ago. Modern enclaves take much less time to build, and the process of making one is very closely guarded.
Interestingly, we do hear specifics of what happened one time when a group got their hands on enclave-building spells.
How strange. Right after they learned the enclave-building spells, there was a huge argument? After which several of them went so far as to renounce magic entirely?
(How interesting, that they walked away.)
I don't remember where I put an exact quote, but we also know that El has started translating the Golden Stone sutras, including a spell about starting to coax the enclave into the void.
One more subject: what do we know about the void?
THE VOID
BRINGING IT TOGETHER
So, to recap:
1. No one "seems to know" where maw-mouths come from, not even El, who studies everything, despite the fact that maw-mouths are exceptionally dangerous enclave-killing mals.
2. People eaten by maw-mouths do not die. Presumably this remains the case when a maw-mouth eats another maw-mouth. We do not hear about any other maleficaria eating maw-mouths.
3. When El kills the library maw-mouth, the last thing left is a small, grotesque, fetal core.
4. Malia causes flesh deformation.
5. Enclave-building spells are a closely guarded secret.
6. Directly after the Pune circle learned the enclave-building spells, their group imploded.
7. Things can be coaxed into the void unobjectionably — El would have certainly mentioned something suspect about the sutras she's already translated — but we do not yet know how the entrances to the enclaves are forged.
8. The disappearance of the Bangkok enclave lines up directly with El's execution of the library maw-mouth.
9. Indirect exploitation of another entity's mana does not produce flesh-deforming malia.
10. Exposure to the void warps people.
11. All anyone hears from the victims of a maw-mouth is screaming.
Relevant sidebar: I don't know about the themes of the bulk of Naomi Novik's formally published works, but I do know that a few of her fanworks explore Ursula K. Le Guin's short fiction piece The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, where the idyllic, utopian city of Omelas's prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single, innocent child. While the original short story merely presents the philosophical illustration of the ethics of the ultimate scapegoat — how unacceptable is it, to make one person suffer unimaginably in exchange for the happiness of everyone else? Could you even enjoy the results? — Novik often asks a different question. Namely, maybe the original thought experiment of Omelas is a real dilemma... but in real life, who ever stops at just one child?
That's what an enclave is metanarratively, an organization that takes a fully reasonable desire — safety and comfort — and keeps walking along the path to chewing up indie kid after kid to fuel the great pyramid with unearned luxury at the top.
But mechanically, in the world of the Scholomance, how is it that these enclaves get made?
More specifically, how are the entrances made?
Imagine this: a modern enclave has started coaxing their chosen location away from the real world and into the void. They really don't want to forge proper entrances: that takes ten generations of wizards walking back and forth, back and forth in one location! Who has time for that?
Why not take just one wizard — a child, even, one who won’t be missed — and shove them into the dark?
To be clear, I don't know exactly how an artificial entrance is made. I do know that given the hints and narrative framing we have, all signs point to modern enclave entrances being made by doing a ritual that uses a wizard as a core to brute-force a connection between an enclave and the real world through the void. Somehow, that core performs the function of ten generations of wizards going back and forth, back and forth, without all that pesky time and effort.
And even though no one's getting psychically clawed by the misery of that core, it's still malia. Something warps the core: maybe it's just the ritual itself, something about the spell. Maybe it's exposure to the void. Maybe it's the aimless malia born of all that suffering. Whatever the case, the core person becomes grotesquely mutated. Whatever the reason, the core starts pulling in other people, perhaps to help it keep the entrance open. Perhaps the spell starts with several children right off the bat, like a quattria. Perhaps the spell to make an entrance births a maw-mouth right away, or perhaps it's a consequence of a core that's been let loose. Whatever the case, a maw-mouth is the result.
Of course "no one knows how maw-mouths reproduce". Who would admit that? Who wouldn't want to look the other way? They're safe in their enclaves. No one can kill a maw-mouth. No matter how terrible they are, no one would want to, especially if by now most of the maw-mouth cores of all the modern enclaves have been drawn to the Scholomance and eaten by Patience and Fortitude. They're out of the way and eating the predators glutted on indie kids.
But if, by some ludicrous chance, someone did manage to kill a maw-mouth —
— it would make sense that perhaps the maw-mouth core of a newer enclave's entrance, that hadn't yet been caught and eaten by Patience or Fortitude, might have been destroyed in that event. It would make sense that that new enclave might suddenly, say, drop off into the void.
SHANGHAI ENCLAVE
The biggest question with this theory is the Shanghai enclave and Dominus Li. It's the only other recorded example of a maw-mouth being killed.
The Shanghai enclave was a thousand years old, well within the range of time where artificial enclaves became possible. If malicious constructs tend to make a beeline for the people who made them, the logical assumption is that the maw-mouth which attacked the Shanghai enclave was the maw-mouth of at least one of the entrances, perhaps all of them, if one ate all the other ones. Yet the Shanghai enclave is very much still in evidence, connected to the real world. It’s odd that Li picked all independent wizards, and it’s interesting that so few people witnessed the occasion, but for now, let’s take the account at its word.
If this theory is correct, there are a few possibilities:
1) Shanghai was a natural enclave, and thus had no maw-mouths.
2) The maw-mouth corresponded to the entrance(s) to another enclave, which Li Shan Feng and company obviously wouldn't care about so much.
3) The maw-mouth corresponded to just a few of the entrances to the Shanghai enclave, so they had others to keep them tethered.
4) The maw-mouth corresponded to all of the entrances to the Shanghai enclave, but Li and company brought the means to quickly forge another entrance.
The last is by far the most alarming possibility, but it would possibly be relevant to the next book, since the Scholomance got knocked into the void and Orion (and Patitude) are still in there. We gotta go get them at some point!
One last piece of potential evidence:
What are some of the most prominent features of a maw-mouth?
And what's on the cover of The Golden Enclaves?
[Description: A doorway flanked by wrought-iron gates, with the outlines of tall buildings in the bottom half. In the top half of the doorway and radiating from the outside are the outlines of human eyes.]
Yeah.
Anyway, can't wait for September!
No, really. They're the dread of every enclave, the biggest monsters in the graduation hall of the Scholomance, the "greater evil" for which "if you've got a choice, take the something else". And yet —
"The maw-mouth I’d killed had been a small one, maybe budded off one of the big ones or however they spawn—no one’s spent much time studying the reproduction of maw-mouths as far as I know." (TLG)
Assuming we're taking El's exposition at its word here: why? Why, if there's a threat bigger than any other mal in the world, would no one have spent much time studying the reproduction of maw-mouths? It's not that maw-mouths aren't studied at all:
"For further reading, see the seminal literature by Abernathy, Kordin, and Li in the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, who discovered that it was possible to direct a communications spell to even a long-digested maw-mouth victim and receive back a response, albeit nothing but incoherent screaming." (ADE)
Something isn't adding up here.
MAW-MOUTHS
Let's start with a recap of what we know about maw-mouths themselves, both from in-story events and from personal accounts.
(Note that while we know El is a highly unreliable narrator in many ways, I'm going to assume, unless otherwise noted, that if her narration states something about maw-mouths, it's accurate. Given El's general obfuscating pessimism, she's more likely to be accurate about maw-mouths than she is about many other things.)
"Because I usually have to sit in the front rows of Maleficaria Studies, I have an especially good view of the graduation day mural centerpiece, featuring the two gigantic maw-mouths who have pride of place on either side of the gates. They’re the only mals that have names: ages ago some New York enclavers started calling them Patience and Fortitude, and it stuck. They remain purely decorative, though; we don’t study maw-mouths in here. There’s no point. There isn’t any way to stop a maw-mouth killing you. If you get out the gates quickly enough, they don’t get you. Or if something else kills you first. That’s the only practical advice the textbook offered about them: if you’ve got a choice, take the something else. But once they’ve got you, even a little curl of a tentacle around your ankle, you’re not getting away. Not on your own." (ADE)
"The half page on maw-mouths in the sophomore-year textbook also informed us in clinical prose that no one is certain what happens to those consumed by maw-mouths, and there is a substantial school of thought that believes their consciousness never actually ends and they just get exhausted into silence. For further reading, see the seminal literature by Abernathy, Kordin, and Li in the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, who discovered that it was possible to direct a communications spell to even a long-digested maw-mouth victim and receive back a response, albeit nothing but incoherent screaming." (ADE)
"The one and only way to stop a maw-mouth is to give it indigestion. If you rush into the maw-mouth on your own, with a powerful enough shield, then you have a chance to get inside before it can start eating you. In theory, if you manage to reach the core, you can burst it apart from there." (ADE)
"Those two are so big, they don’t move around anymore at all, and they rarely eat students except by accident. They spend graduation day eating up any other maw-mouths that unwarily come in reach of their tentacles, and the biggest other maleficaria." (ADE)
"But that was the only thing I could do, the only thing anyone could do; the only thing at all, because you can’t kill maw-mouths. When a maw-mouth comes at an enclave, even their goal is defense: hunkering down, closing up entrances, driving away other mals, so the maw-mouth moves on to hunt somewhere else. The greatest wizards alive can’t kill maw-mouths, and they won’t even try, because if you try and you don’t kill it, it eats you and it keeps eating you forever." (ADE)
"There was a thing left on the floor a few feet away from me, a grotesque lump that looked like a deboned chicken, except a person instead, a body that had been crushed into a fetal position. Then that broke apart too into gobbets and sludge, leaving the whole hallway drenched in blood and bile and the last bits of rotting flesh." (ADE)
What do we know about maw-mouths? We know that they're in theory impossible to kill, although Dominus Li managed in the Shanghai enclave and El managed on her own, and the mortal flame cleansing at least took a few layers off of Patience and Fortitude. We know that they eat wizards and other mals, just like every other mal, and they consume humans by shredding them. We know that once they have a hold on their prey, they don't let go, unless someone takes the place of their prey. We know that a wizard can physically survive inside the bounds of a maw-mouth provided they're shielded. We know that a maw-mouth has a core, and that's what you need to target if you're trying to kill a maw-mouth (which implies you can't just blast it from the outside). We know that when killed, at least one maw-mouth dropped "a grotesque lump that looked like a deboned chicken, except a person instead, a body that had been crushed into a fetal position." We know that one can use killing spells that target entire rooms of individual people to kill them. We know that even enclaves fear them.
On a different note, let’s talk about malia! What turns mana into malia? What does malia actually do?
MALIA
"Then the power gets tainted and you’re getting psychically clawed as you try and yank away their mana, and often enough they win." (ADE)
"Darling Jack’s already stealing life force from human beings, so he’s going to start rotting on the inside within the first five years after he graduates. I’m sure he’s got grandiose plans for how to stave off his disintegration, maleficers always do, but I don’t think he’s really got what it takes. Unless he comes up with something special, in ten years, fifteen at the outside, he’ll cave in on himself in a nice final grotesque rush." (ADE)
(“Rotting on the inside”, hm?)
"Most wizards have to work at it to steal power from a living thing. There are rituals, exercises of will, voodoo dolls, blood sacrifices. Lots of blood sacrifices." (ADE)
"Just before she went off to school—we don’t talk about it much, but I’m fairly certain that’s why she went to the Scholomance—she acquired an evil stepdad, literally: one of those cautious professional maleficers, on the edge of shriveling." (ADE)
"I’d told myself it was just common sense—going maleficer meant dying young, grotesquely." (ADE)
"“He would’ve needed some kind of consent to get power out of another wizard. Most maleficers do.”" (ADE)
"Chloe agreed with me, for that matter; she’d gone sickly pale, for good selfish reason: when a construct goes malicious, one of the first people it heads for is its maker, and anyone around them who might have contributed to its creation. It creates a tidy vulnerability that helps the construct suck out their mana." (ADE)
"“It’s negative malia if it’s anything,” I said. Occasionally, a repentant maleficer comes to Mum for help, someone like Liu was on the way to being: not the gleefully monstrous ones but the ones who went partway down the road—usually to make it through puberty alive—and have now changed their minds and would like to go back. She won’t do spirit cleansing for them or anything like that, but if they ask sincerely, she’ll let them join her circle, and generally once they’ve spent as many years doing the circle work as they did being maleficers, they come right again, and she tells them to go and make a circle of their own somewhere." (TLG)
"Which wouldn’t hurt me in any obvious way, not the way outright maleficers get hurt. If Prasong’s little freshman-flaying scheme had worked, his anima would’ve been scarred so badly he’d probably never have been able to build mana of his own again even if he’d spent the rest of his life trying to atone and purify himself. That wouldn’t happen to me; I wouldn’t even get black nails and a faint cloud of disquiet, like Liu had, punishment for sacrificing a couple of defenseless mice to survive on. Maleficers got that kind of damage because they were yanking mana out of something that was actively fighting them, resisting them. That’s what turned it into malia. But when you got someone to hand you their mana—it didn’t hurt. You could trick someone, pressure them, lie to them, all you wanted. It wasn’t going to damage you in any way that anyone else would ever see.
Which is why that’s what enclavers did. And then they pretended it wasn’t malia, but it was. There’s a long distance between cheating someone out of a scrap of mana they didn’t urgently need, and turning into a slavering murderous vampire who couldn’t do anything decent ever again, but it’s all on the same road. Mum taught me that, spent her whole life teaching me that, and it had taken a while, but the lesson had stuck." (TLG)
So. Mana comes from effort, and from life, and from belief (judging by how offerings from mundanes can feed maleficaria). You can pull mana nonconsensually from a weak living thing like, say, a hill of ants without significant reprisal, but anything with the power to resist will claw at the mana thief, which taints the mana and turns it into malia. Excess malia usage physically impacts the user; El doesn't give explicit details, but "shriveling" and "cav[ing] in on himself in a nice final grotesque rush" are fairly evocative. It is possible to recover from malia usage, but it requires some combination of abstinence, spirit cleansing, and/or good works.
Gosh, that weird deboned chicken thing that came out of the maw-mouth was pretty grotesque too, right?
Let's take a quick left turn. What do we know about enclaves?
ENCLAVES
"Anyway, when she did find them, it turned out his family was rich, palaces and jewels and djinn servants rich, and more important by my mum’s standards, they came from an ancient strict-mana Hindu enclave that was destroyed during the Raj, and they’re still sticking to the rules. They won’t eat meat, much less pull malia." (ADE)
"If a community of wizards live and work together in the same place for long enough, about ten generations or so, the place starts to slip away from the world and expand in odd ways. If the wizards become systematic about going in and out from only a few places, those turn into the enclave gates, and the rest of it can be coaxed loose from the world and into the void, the same way the Scholomance is floating around in it. At which point, mals can’t get at you except by finding a way through the entrances, which makes life much safer, and magic also becomes loads easier to do, which makes life much more pleasant." (ADE)
"There haven’t been a lot of natural enclaves, though. Good luck getting ten generations with enough stability in history to let you make one. Just because you’re a wizard doesn’t save you from dying when your city burns down or someone sticks a sword into you. In fact, even an enclave doesn’t. If you’re hiding inside and your entrances get bombed, your enclave goes, too. I don’t think anyone knows if you actually get blown up or if the whole thing just drops off into the void with you in it, but that’s a rather academic question." (ADE)
"On the other hand, you’d still rather have the enclave than just be huddled in a basement. The London enclave survived the Blitz because they opened a lot of entrances all over the city, and quickly replaced any of the ones that got destroyed. That’s now created a different issue for them; there’s a pack of indie punk wizards in London who survive by hunting out the old lost entrances. They pry them open enough to squirm into sort of the lining of the enclave—I don’t understand the technical details, and they don’t, either, but it works—and they set up shop in there for themselves until the enclave council finds them and chases them out and bricks the opening back up. I know a bunch of them because they all come to Mum whenever something’s wrong with them, which it often is because they’re shacking up in half-real spaces and siphoning off enclave mana through old murky channels, and mostly eating food and drink they’ve magicked for themselves out of it." (ADE)
"But London’s not a natural enclave, of course; none of the big enclaves are. They’re constructed. And as far as we know, the very first enclaves anyone ever built, about five thousand years ago, were the Golden Stone enclaves.
...
In the Mahabharata, he’s more or less a villain who builds a house out of wax to try and burn his prince’s enemies alive, so I’m not entirely sure how that squares with him being a heroic enclave-builder, but mundane sources aren’t always very kind to wizards." (ADE)
"Once wizards realized you could build enclaves, it became a subject of enormous and sustained interest, and artificers came up with methods that let you make better and bigger ones, and the Golden Stone spells got lost over time through disuse. I don’t know much about modern enclave-building, those spells are a very closely guarded secret, but I do know for definite you can’t fit the process into a single book less than an inch thick, even with margin notes." (ADE)
"After the scratcher attack, she even went to visit one. She wouldn’t look at London, but she tried this old place in Brittany that specializes in healing. She picked me up from school that afternoon and said, “I’m sorry, love, I just can’t,” and only shook her head when I demanded to know why. I told her flat-out I was going into an enclave after I graduated if I could get one to take me, and she just looked sad and said, “You’ll do whatever’s right for you, darling, of course.”" (ADE)
"“What haven’t I heard about Bangkok?”
“It’s gone,” he said. “Something took out the enclave, just a few weeks before induction day.”" (TLG)
"“… They don’t know what happened in Bangkok. And I don’t know, either. Everyone thinks I’m lying, but I don’t. I took my grandmother’s dog out for a walk and then we came back and the door—the door to the enclave didn’t work anymore. It was just a door to an empty apartment. And everyone was gone.”" (TLG)
(Hm... what happened a few weeks before induction day?)
So, we know that the natural way of making an enclave is to have a bunch of wizards in one place for somewhere on the order of two to four hundred years, depending on how long a wizard generation is, and to have those wizards systematically entering and exiting that one place in specific locations. The result is a special space floating in the void where magic is much easier to do, tethered to the real world. Strict-mana enclaves exist. The first artificial enclaves came about five thousand years ago. Modern enclaves take much less time to build, and the process of making one is very closely guarded.
Interestingly, we do hear specifics of what happened one time when a group got their hands on enclave-building spells.
"It went so well that they formed a long-term circle and kept going, their spells went on getting more and more powerful, and eventually the collection was so valuable they were able to trade just the one book to Jaipur for enclave-building spells.
Immediately after which, their group imploded into a massive internecine fight. Most of them died and a few went to Jaipur and a couple of others renounced magic and purged all their mana and went to live in the wilderness as ascetics, and that’s why there’s no enclave in Pune." (TLG)
How strange. Right after they learned the enclave-building spells, there was a huge argument? After which several of them went so far as to renounce magic entirely?
(How interesting, that they walked away.)
I don't remember where I put an exact quote, but we also know that El has started translating the Golden Stone sutras, including a spell about starting to coax the enclave into the void.
One more subject: what do we know about the void?
THE VOID
"It only works because it was built into the void. I’d explain what the void is, but I haven’t any idea." (ADE)
"Spellbooks wander off the shelves even in enclaves if you don’t have a really good catalog and a powerful librarian keeping track of them. I don’t know where they go when they’re disappeared, if it’s the same as the void outside our rooms or someplace different, but they don’t age while they’re gone." (ADE)
"If someone’s really determined and takes a running start [into the void], occasionally their momentum carries them a little further in before they can turn around, and when they do come out, those people can’t talk anymore at all, at least not in any comprehensible way. They make noises like they’re talking, but it’s not a language anyone else knows or can understand. They mostly end up dead some other way, but a couple of them have made it out of the school alive. They’ve still got magic. But no one else can understand their spells, and if they’re artificers or alchemists, the things they make don’t work for anyone else. Like they’ve been shifted sideways somehow." (ADE)
"I screamed even louder for the really special part when we flew out through the landing and into Todd’s room and, thanks to our collective momentum, overshot the edge. Half of us hung suspended for a moment just out in the open void, the yawning impossibility of it beneath us, around us, and I would have started screaming in a whole new way, but then the yanker went taut again, snapped us back in through Todd’s room, and dumped us all into the middle of the senior dormitory corridor." (ADE)
"As it was, I’d be yelling the last syllable of what was turning out to be my surprisingly handy supervolcano spell as I was jumping through the portal, or else I’d go toppling off into the void with the school. Oh well; if that happened, hopefully the accumulated mals would eat me before I had an opportunity to experience the full existential horror of being totally severed from reality." (TLG)
BRINGING IT TOGETHER
So, to recap:
1. No one "seems to know" where maw-mouths come from, not even El, who studies everything, despite the fact that maw-mouths are exceptionally dangerous enclave-killing mals.
2. People eaten by maw-mouths do not die. Presumably this remains the case when a maw-mouth eats another maw-mouth. We do not hear about any other maleficaria eating maw-mouths.
3. When El kills the library maw-mouth, the last thing left is a small, grotesque, fetal core.
4. Malia causes flesh deformation.
5. Enclave-building spells are a closely guarded secret.
6. Directly after the Pune circle learned the enclave-building spells, their group imploded.
7. Things can be coaxed into the void unobjectionably — El would have certainly mentioned something suspect about the sutras she's already translated — but we do not yet know how the entrances to the enclaves are forged.
8. The disappearance of the Bangkok enclave lines up directly with El's execution of the library maw-mouth.
9. Indirect exploitation of another entity's mana does not produce flesh-deforming malia.
10. Exposure to the void warps people.
11. All anyone hears from the victims of a maw-mouth is screaming.
Relevant sidebar: I don't know about the themes of the bulk of Naomi Novik's formally published works, but I do know that a few of her fanworks explore Ursula K. Le Guin's short fiction piece The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, where the idyllic, utopian city of Omelas's prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single, innocent child. While the original short story merely presents the philosophical illustration of the ethics of the ultimate scapegoat — how unacceptable is it, to make one person suffer unimaginably in exchange for the happiness of everyone else? Could you even enjoy the results? — Novik often asks a different question. Namely, maybe the original thought experiment of Omelas is a real dilemma... but in real life, who ever stops at just one child?
"That’s all Todd wanted. That’s all Magnus wanted. They wanted to be safe. It’s not that much to ask, it feels like. But we don’t have it to begin with, and to get it and keep it, they’d push another kid into the dark. One enclave would push another into the dark for that, too. And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had." (ADE)
That's what an enclave is metanarratively, an organization that takes a fully reasonable desire — safety and comfort — and keeps walking along the path to chewing up indie kid after kid to fuel the great pyramid with unearned luxury at the top.
But mechanically, in the world of the Scholomance, how is it that these enclaves get made?
More specifically, how are the entrances made?
Imagine this: a modern enclave has started coaxing their chosen location away from the real world and into the void. They really don't want to forge proper entrances: that takes ten generations of wizards walking back and forth, back and forth in one location! Who has time for that?
Why not take just one wizard — a child, even, one who won’t be missed — and shove them into the dark?
To be clear, I don't know exactly how an artificial entrance is made. I do know that given the hints and narrative framing we have, all signs point to modern enclave entrances being made by doing a ritual that uses a wizard as a core to brute-force a connection between an enclave and the real world through the void. Somehow, that core performs the function of ten generations of wizards going back and forth, back and forth, without all that pesky time and effort.
And even though no one's getting psychically clawed by the misery of that core, it's still malia. Something warps the core: maybe it's just the ritual itself, something about the spell. Maybe it's exposure to the void. Maybe it's the aimless malia born of all that suffering. Whatever the case, the core person becomes grotesquely mutated. Whatever the reason, the core starts pulling in other people, perhaps to help it keep the entrance open. Perhaps the spell starts with several children right off the bat, like a quattria. Perhaps the spell to make an entrance births a maw-mouth right away, or perhaps it's a consequence of a core that's been let loose. Whatever the case, a maw-mouth is the result.
Of course "no one knows how maw-mouths reproduce". Who would admit that? Who wouldn't want to look the other way? They're safe in their enclaves. No one can kill a maw-mouth. No matter how terrible they are, no one would want to, especially if by now most of the maw-mouth cores of all the modern enclaves have been drawn to the Scholomance and eaten by Patience and Fortitude. They're out of the way and eating the predators glutted on indie kids.
But if, by some ludicrous chance, someone did manage to kill a maw-mouth —
"That a sorceress designed from the ground up for slaughter and destruction might just be able to take out the one monster no one else could kill." (ADE)
— it would make sense that perhaps the maw-mouth core of a newer enclave's entrance, that hadn't yet been caught and eaten by Patience or Fortitude, might have been destroyed in that event. It would make sense that that new enclave might suddenly, say, drop off into the void.
SHANGHAI ENCLAVE
The biggest question with this theory is the Shanghai enclave and Dominus Li. It's the only other recorded example of a maw-mouth being killed.
"That was pretty insane, since at the time the only other known cases of destroying maw-mouths had not been reputable, but on the other hand, they were playing for high stakes. Having an enclave isn’t a small thing, and it’s not like you can just decide to bang one up on a whim, much less one with a thousand years of history and wards behind it.
Reading between the lines, I could also tell there had been a case of ambition spurring the process, since “the future Dominus of the enclave, our coauthor Li Feng,” was the one who had organized the take-back. The entire group spent a year gathering mana, probably the equivalent of a thousand of my crystals. Li brought in a circle of eight really powerful independent wizards, all of them promised significant positions in the enclave if it worked, and he volunteered to go into the maw-mouth himself. He linked up with the circle and did it under all their layers of shielding, powered by all the gathered mana. It took him three days to finally destroy the maw-mouth. Two of the wizards in the circle died in the process, another two days later." (ADE)
The Shanghai enclave was a thousand years old, well within the range of time where artificial enclaves became possible. If malicious constructs tend to make a beeline for the people who made them, the logical assumption is that the maw-mouth which attacked the Shanghai enclave was the maw-mouth of at least one of the entrances, perhaps all of them, if one ate all the other ones. Yet the Shanghai enclave is very much still in evidence, connected to the real world. It’s odd that Li picked all independent wizards, and it’s interesting that so few people witnessed the occasion, but for now, let’s take the account at its word.
If this theory is correct, there are a few possibilities:
1) Shanghai was a natural enclave, and thus had no maw-mouths.
2) The maw-mouth corresponded to the entrance(s) to another enclave, which Li Shan Feng and company obviously wouldn't care about so much.
3) The maw-mouth corresponded to just a few of the entrances to the Shanghai enclave, so they had others to keep them tethered.
4) The maw-mouth corresponded to all of the entrances to the Shanghai enclave, but Li and company brought the means to quickly forge another entrance.
The last is by far the most alarming possibility, but it would possibly be relevant to the next book, since the Scholomance got knocked into the void and Orion (and Patitude) are still in there. We gotta go get them at some point!
One last piece of potential evidence:
What are some of the most prominent features of a maw-mouth?
"My whole body was clenched and waiting for it, and in the next flare of deep-red light I met half a dozen human eyes watching me, scattered over the thick rolling folds of the translucent, glossy mass that was just bulging its way out of the vent, many mouths open and working for air." (ADE)
And what's on the cover of The Golden Enclaves?
[Description: A doorway flanked by wrought-iron gates, with the outlines of tall buildings in the bottom half. In the top half of the doorway and radiating from the outside are the outlines of human eyes.]
Yeah.
Anyway, can't wait for September!
