Founder's Academy

The Founder's Academy is the educational institution established by The Cabal — the council of the world's most powerful magical practitioners — as a structured means of transmitting their accumulated knowledge to the next generation. It is situated within The Vale, a semi-sentient valley that may or may not exist in the same dimensional space at all times, which gives the campus an atmosphere that students either find inspiring or deeply unsettling, often both simultaneously.

Admission is invitation-only and highly selective. The Academy maintains a student body of roughly 120 to 150 students across multiple levels: Novice, Adept, Journeyman, and the Wizard/Witch ranks. Students range from exceptionally talented youth to older individuals newly come to their power, which means the Academy's halls contain people at very different stages of life who nonetheless share the quality of having been identified as worth educating by one of the most accomplished magical minds in Aethoria.

The educational structure is tiered in an unusual way: higher-ranking students teach foundational courses to lower-ranking ones, with Masters focusing on advanced instruction. This means that a Founder's Academy education involves both being taught and teaching — the Academy considers both to be essential to genuine understanding.

The campus itself defies straightforward description. The central castle complex incorporates multiple architectural styles representing different magical traditions. Its towers vary in height and are connected by bridges made of stone, crystal, and living wood. The buildings appear to have grown rather than been constructed. The courtyards and gardens form geometric patterns that shift with the seasons and the positions of celestial bodies. The Vale that contains all of this is semi-sentient in ways that the Academy's faculty has never fully explained to students' satisfaction, which they seem to regard as part of the education.