The Hundred Halls

Every autumn the brightest and the most desperate arrive in Invictus, the hidden city where magic is not a birthright but a curriculum — and where flunking out costs you the memory of ever having been magical at all. The Hundred Halls are its guild-universities, a hundred rival schools of sorcery, alchemy, and stranger arts, each guarding its own bargains with the powers behind the world. Enroll if you dare; the tuition is measured in years of your life, and the professors do not always intend for you to graduate. This is a single-author world — Thomas K. Carpenter's — but a wide one, spread across a constellation of series that each follow a different Hall and a different apprentice. The flagship run, The Hundred Halls, tracks the Silverthorne sisters, two penniless orphans who talk their way into the most lethal school in the city. Around it orbit companion cycles: Gamemakers Online, where the magic lives inside a deadly virtual game; The Reluctant Assassin; Aura Healers Hall; Stone Singers; Animalians Hall; The Crystal Halls; and the later-timeline Order of Merlin. The sub-series interlock, sharing streets, faculty, and consequences. What sets it apart is the teeth beneath the wonder. This is the magical academy for readers who want the tuition bill honest — faustian pacts, demons that keep their contracts, friendships that cost something. Newcomers should begin with the flagship series and its opener, Trials of Magic; it teaches the city's rules before the spin-offs start bending them, and every other Hall reads richer once you've walked the first one.