Five disciplines, four lesser arts, one rule: master the basics of all before you master one.
The school year is measured in terms of the moon (see calendar & festivals): three terms — waxing, full, and waning — each about four moon-months long. Students take all five disciplines every year, specializing only in their final two years.
The written grammar of magic. Runes are carved — into wood, stone, silver, ice — never merely spoken, because a spoken rune is a promise the air can't keep. First-years learn the thirty-six common runes; graduates know over two hundred, including the nine "quiet runes" used in warding. The runetower's walls are the advanced textbook.
Taught by: Professor Eldermere Voss (see [faculty](/faculty)). Hardest exam: carving a working ward-rune blindfolded.
Reading the sky: navigation by the constellations, the moon-count calendar, weather-sense, and the careful, limited art of foresight. The frostmoths' home discipline, taught at midnight on the starspire. Foresight is taught with heavy ethics — the future is read, never written.
Taught by: Professor Selene Istar. Hardest exam: predicting the night's cloud cover a week in advance, to the hour.
The living pharmacy of the Silver Wood: growing, gathering, and preparing the plants that heal, that harm, and that simply glow beautifully. The thorned roses run the herbarium terraces; every student keeps a personal plot from second year on. The nightshade garden is locked, the moonflower beds are not.
Taught by: Professor Briar Thornwhistle. Hardest exam: identifying forty dried specimens by scent alone.
The practical art of shaping moonlight and will into effect: light, warmth, mending, messenger-lights, and — at the advanced level — weather-touch and ward-weaving. First-years practice on moonmoths in the roofless weavery; graduates weave the lantern festival's sky-show. Governed strictly by the [laws of magic](/magic).
Taught by: Professor Corvus Nightwing. Hardest exam: the silent weave — a full working with no spoken word and no rune.
Care, study, and diplomacy with magical creatures: moonmoths, silver stags, glow-wisps, moon-badgers, and the shy starlings of the deep wood. The deep roots' discipline, taught half in the menagerie and half in the field. Graduates can calm a startled stag, read wisp-light, and — legend says — once talked a dragon out of the observatory hill. (The archive neither confirms nor denies.)
Taught by: Professor Wren Oakenshade. Hardest exam: earning Tunnels' approval. Nobody has passed on the first attempt.
Students graduate by the light of a full moon at the lantern festival, in a ceremony called the unbinding: each graduate’s student-ribbon is untied from the founders’ grove and retied to their own wrist, to be worn until it falls off naturally — usually within a year, though alumni are known to “lose” theirs and quietly tie on new ones for decades.