The school's wild neighbors — tended, studied, and (mostly) befriended.
The bestiary is both a place — the menagerie’s records hall — and this catalogue: the creatures of the Silver Wood as the school’s beast-tenders understand them. Every entry below is fictional; the deep roots who “wrote” them are fictional too.
The school's post, its first-year spellweaving practice partners, and its unofficial mascots. Wingspan of a hand, wings like frost on glass, drawn to moonlight and kind intentions. They carry letters in tiny silver tubes and never deliver to the wrong tower — the one famous misdelivery (cycle 1398, a love letter to the headmistress's office) is officially a legend and unofficially true.
Great antlered deer whose coats shine like moonlit water. The house of the silver stag's emblem and the school's wardens of the deep wood fringe. They tolerate beast-tenders, ignore everyone else, and appear at graduations with suspicious regularity. Hunting them is the school's oldest and most absolute prohibition.
Floating lights the size of thimbles, in blue, green, and gold. They light the campus paths after dark, herded gently by the wisp-keeper. Wisps are curious, playful, and unbeatable at wisp-racing — the student club has never won a race against one, which is rather the point.
There is exactly one moon-badger at the school: Tunnels, very old, very grumpy, resident of the burrow under the roots' dormitory stairwell. He approves of Professor Oakenshade, tolerates the groundskeeper, and judges everyone else. Earning Tunnels' approval is beast-tending's hardest exam; nobody passes on the first attempt. His estimated birthday is a school holiday.
Small birds whose feathers hold actual starlight — they glow faintly on moonless nights. They nest only in the oldest silver-barks of the deep wood and vanish at the sound of raised voices. The nightingales consider a starling sighting the highest compliment a walk in the wood can pay.
Enormous owls camouflaged as silver bark; you will walk past a dozen without seeing one. They are the school's unofficial night watch — nothing enters the grounds after dark without a bark-owl knowing, and the ward-keepers have learned to read their calls.
A shy, otter-like creature of Moonmirror Lake, glimpsed as a ripple that reflects the wrong sky. The archive holds eleven sightings in six hundred cycles. The beast-tenders leave it alone with great respect and a little envy.