sources

Nothing here is sourced from fact — but everything came from somewhere.

This is a fiction site, so there are no citations in the scholarly sense. Instead: an honest account of what fed the invention.

Acknowledged influences

• The school-story tradition — the houses, the sorting ceremony, the feasts, and the inter-house cup belong to a long lineage of boarding-school fantasy. This site’s versions (the Sorting Lantern, the moon cup, the midnight kitchen society) are original riffs on well-worn furniture, used knowingly.
• Tolkien’s elves — the woodland setting, the long reckoning of years, the old tongues. The moon-count calendar and the “guests of the wood, not owners” ethic are in direct conversation with that tradition.
• Moon folklore — the moon’s phases structuring time, study, and magic draws on real lunar folklore across cultures: the idea that the moon governs rhythms is ancient and human, not invented here.
• The bestiary tradition — medieval bestiaries catalogued real and imaginary animals with moral notes; this site’s bestiary catalogues imaginary animals with house notes.

What the site is not

• Not an adaptation of any existing fantasy property — no borrowed names, places, or plots.
• Not a parody or pastiche of any specific school-story franchise; the furniture is generic to the genre, the building is original.
• Not a claim about real folklore — the “old tongues” and “moonwater” are invented, not drawn from any living tradition.

The images

See the image captions for credits and context. Illustrated character art is a dramatization.

The character

The Vizlings app card description — “elf school,” verbatim — is the seed the whole world grew from. The owner’s supplied character art (if any becomes available) will be treated as the visual canon; until then, the AI-generated art here is explicitly dramatization, not official.