Chapter Four. Site Management

Walden briefly decompresses in the staffroom before plunging back into a day of meetings. She ends with site manager and Keymaster Todd Cartwright, who reports failing boilers, likely asbestos, and budget delays, and notes the Great Key sensed the morning’s magical disturbance. Todd’s respect for the Marshals irks Walden, but his warning—fix problems before they explode—lands.

Crossing the quad at day’s end, Walden savors the school’s life and quietly resolves to harden defenses if Old Faithful is stirring. She steels herself to act decisively.

Early next morning, Walden chairs a faculty meeting: she alerts colleagues to Old Faithful’s movement, urges up-to-date wards, risk assessments, and advance notice to Marshals, and covers exams, observations, and curriculum items. Ezekiel adds guidance for working kindly but firmly with registered sorcerers.

Walden then observes Ezekiel’s Year Eleven Invocation lesson. He runs a tightly managed, student-led ethics discussion on using magic on people, consent exceptions, and edge cases. The class demonstrates strong engagement and diverse contributions.

Prompted by Ezekiel, Walden delivers a focused mini-lecture on demonic personhood: demons are magical, not biological, life; intensely asocial predators-prey; language-capable only by terrifying inference; and participants in invocations via consent-driven contracts. She reframes safety as risk calculus and ethics as complicated by power imbalances and demons’ non-social nature.