student life

Up with the moon, down with the sun — a day (and night) in the life.

Elves are nocturnal by inclination and the school is honest about it: classes run from dusk to the small hours, with the deep night reserved for starlore, spellweaving practice, and — officially — sleep. “Officially” does a lot of work in that sentence.

Dormitories

Students live in tree-tower dormitories, one per house, grown (not built) from silver-barked heartwoods around the campus circle. Rooms are small, round, and smell faintly of rain; each has a window-box garden, and the roots’ tower famously has a moon-badger burrow under the stairwell that everyone pretends not to know about.

• Roommates are assigned by lantern-draw in the first year, chosen afterward.
• Curfew is moonset, loosely enforced, widely negotiated.
• The quiet hours are the two hours after moonrise — for study, letters home, and listening to the nightingales practice.

Dining

The refectory is the hall of echoes’ lower hall, and meals are the school’s great social engine:

• Moonrise supper — the main meal: mushroom and barley stews, silverwood salads, honeyed everything. The roses’ herb gardens supply the kitchens.
• Midnight tea — a rolling, informal affair; the urns never go cold.
• Dawn breakfast — for the early risers and the frostmoths heading to bed.
• Feast nights — every full moon, each house cooks for the whole school in rotation. The stags’ moon-pies are legendary; the frostmoths once served an entirely white meal in honor of a lunar eclipse.

Dietary notes: the kitchens handle everything the wood provides — vegetarian by default, with moon-trout on feast nights and gnome cheese on exchange weeks.

Clubs and societies

• the dueling society — polite dueling, weekly brackets, enormous house pride.
• the archive choir — nightingale-led; sings the founders’ names at every festival.
• the wisp-racing club — exactly what it sounds like; the wisps always win.
• the bridge-builders — the unofficial society behind the 100+ bridges; membership is by contribution of one bridge.
• the midnight kitchen society — technically unsanctioned, universally beloved, responsible for the best moon-pies.
• the observatory society — frostmoth-heavy; publishes the termly sky-chart.
• the exchange table — hosts the gnome and dwarf exchange scholars; teaches them the school songs, learns their card games.

The night markets

On every new moon, students set up stalls on the silver lawns: secondhand spellbooks, pressed moonflowers, silvercraft trinkets, last term’s notes (annotated, priced by usefulness), and the midnight kitchen society’s contraband pastries. The headmistress officially “does not see” the market. The groundskeeper officially collects a stall fee of one pastry.

Traditions

• the ribbon — every student ties a ribbon in the founders’ grove on arrival; it stays until graduation’s unbinding.
• the bridge dare — cross every bridge in one night before graduating (unofficial, mildly frowned-upon, universally attempted).
• Tunnels’ birthday — the moon-badger’s estimated birthday, celebrated with great solemnity and a mushroom cake. The date moves every year; nobody knows why.
• the silent night — once a term, the whole school goes without spoken magic from dusk to dawn. The nightingales say it’s the most beautiful night of the term.