What Is the Tower of Fangs?

The finest school of black sorcery on the continent, and the villain of the first act.

The Tower of Fangs is the academy that rules sorcery on the continent of Kiesalhima: a fortress school that takes in gifted children, orphans among them, and trains them as black sorcerers, the battle mages of Orphen's world. Its best graduates contend for the rank of Court Sorcerer, and its best teacher was Childman, whose class held a run of prodigies at once: Azalie, Leticia, and a boy named Krylancelo Finrandi.

The Tower is also the institution that broke the story open. When its experiment with the Sword of Baltanders turned Azalie into the dragon called the Bloody August, the elders moved to protect the school's name rather than the student: the incident was covered up and the dragon marked for death. Krylancelo renounced his name, took the street name Orphen, and walked out. Every journey in the twenty novels is, in one sense, an argument with this building.

INSIDE THE TOWER

How the school works

Black and white

Sorcery in Orphen's world divides by purpose. Black sorcery is the destructive art, taught at the Tower; white sorcery is the healing art. The split explains the school's character: it is a military academy wearing a university's clothes.

Childman's class

Orphen, Azalie, Leticia, Hartia, Comicron and Forte all passed through one classroom. The novels keep returning to that class because the Tower's golden generation became its scattered opposition, its loyalists and its ghosts.

The Uoar class

Alongside the regular curriculum, the Tower kept the Uoar class, specialists in what the setting bluntly calls stabbing: sorcerer assassination. The English title of the whole series, Sorcerous Stabber, lives in that word.

The name he left

Krylancelo Finrandi was one of the candidates to become a Court Sorcerer. Renouncing the name was renouncing the career, the rank and the institution in a single act, which is why his old classmates keep using it: to them, Orphen is a runaway, not a name.

What Is the Tower of Fangs?

INSIDE THE TOWER

THE FIRST WORD