The Rithmatist — Armedius Academy and the Melee

A Rithmatist is a person whose chalk obeys. Lines drawn by a Rithmatist's own hand hold, strike, bar a door, or stand up and walk. The same lines drawn by anybody else are chalk on a floor.

Rithmatists are made, not born. At eight, every child in the United Isles stands for Inception in a Monarchical chapel, and a few come out marked. Nobody can say why those few — not the Church, not the professors, not the Rithmatists.

What follows is decided for you: one of the eight schools that teach Rithmatics, the four Lines drilled until they are as steady as handwriting, then Nebrask, where the wild chalklings are. Chalk is a weapon of state, and a Rithmatist is the state's.

There is no unmarking and no retiring. A child marked at eight is a Rithmatist at eighty.

Rithmatics is geometry you can fight with. There are four Lines and no fifth; everything a Rithmatist does is some combination of them, drawn by hand, in chalk, on a hard surface.

• Lines of Warding — curved, defensive. A closed circle of warding is the only thing between you and whatever is coming.
• Lines of Forbiddance — straight, impassable. Where the line lies, a flat plane stands that nothing solid crosses.
• Lines of Vigor — a sine wave. The offensive line: it leaves the chalk and travels the way it was drawn until it hits something.
• Lines of Making — chalklings. A drawing that gets up and does what its shape suggests.

Skill is draughtsmanship. A line that wobbles is weak, a circle that is not round fails on its flat side, and chalk does not care how clever anyone is.

A Line of Warding is drawn as a circle, divided into bindpoints: the places where another line may be anchored to it. Two, four, six or nine.

Where they sit is the whole of the difficulty:
• Four — where an inscribed square touches the circle. Quarter turns.
• Six — where a regular hexagon touches it, even around the circumference.
• Nine — off an imaginary non-obtuse triangle: the midpoint of each side, and where each of its three altitudes crosses the circle. It has to be constructed, and under pressure most students construct it wrong.

More bindpoints means more Forbiddances, more chalklings on station, more ways to shoot out without opening your own wall. A nine-point circle drawn badly is worse than a four-point drawn well: the error is in the geometry, where nerve cannot fix it.

Defensive, curved, the foundation of everything. A Line of Warding resists force where it curves, and the steeper the curve the stronger it holds — which is why defences are built from circles and tight arcs rather than long gentle sweeps.

Strength comes from evenness. A hand-drawn circle with a flat patch in it will take hits anywhere else and fail exactly there, every time, and an opponent who spots the flat patch will spend the rest of the duel putting Lines of Vigor into it.

The rule of thumb taught in first year: a sound Line of Warding takes about six solid hits from a Line of Vigor before it breaches. Six is not many. It is the reason nobody stands still and trades.

A breached circle ends a duel. Nothing else does.

The offensive line, and the only one that reaches across a court. A Line of Vigor is drawn as a sine wave from the outside in; complete two intervals and it leaves the chalk, travelling the direction it was drawn until it meets an obstacle. Longer waves carry more force.

What it does on arrival:
• Against a Line of Warding — a pockmark. Land six in the same place and the line breaches.
• Against a Line of Forbiddance — it bounces. A Forbiddance absorbs about ten before it is destroyed, so a well-angled one is a mirror as much as a wall.
• Against a person — it hits like a thrown stone. Duels are not aimed at people; a Line of Vigor into a shin is a foul and a trip to the infirmary.

Drawing one takes a second. Drawing one accurately while somebody is drawing one at you takes two years.

Drawn straight, and where it lies it raises a flat plane standing square to the surface: a wall nothing solid crosses. Light and sound pass; a hand, a boot and a chalkling do not. A thicker stroke raises a taller plane, a straighter stroke a stronger one, and a Forbiddance outlasts a Line of Warding.

Three uses:
• Anchored between two bindpoints on your own circle, so the warding line cannot be shoved.
• Laid across a lane, closing the approach a chalkling was taking.
• Angled, to bounce an incoming Line of Vigor somewhere you would rather it went.

Ten Vigor strikes or so destroy one, and so does a thumb through the chalk.

Students learn the hard way that a Forbiddance blocks them too. More second-year duels are lost by walling yourself in than by anything the other student did.

A Line of Making is a drawing that stands up. Draw a creature in chalk and it moves: crawls the surface, climbs other chalk, and does what its shape suggests it should.

Shape and detail are everything. A beautifully drawn chalkling is stronger than a scribbled one, so artistry is a Rithmatic skill and not a hobby. Claws and long teeth attack well. A knight is at its strongest holding a bindpoint on a circle. A spindly pretty thing is a spindly pretty thing and dies to a thumb.

What they cannot do: a chalkling made by a Rithmatist cannot hurt a person. It scratches chalk, crosses a court, breaches a line, tears another chalkling apart, and that is all. The ones at Nebrask are not these.

They also cannot cross a Forbiddance or a sound Line of Warding. That is the whole basis of defence.

The limits, which are strict, and which every duel turns on.

• Only a Rithmatist's own hand. Lines drawn by anyone else are inert, and no Rithmatist can draw on another's behalf or touch up their lines.
• A hard, flat surface. Slate, stone, a board, a swept floor. Grass takes nothing. Sand and loose dust take nothing and ruin what is already there.
• Chalk is physical. A line smudged, scuffed, rained on or dragged through with a thumb stops being a line. Half of defence is keeping feet off your own chalk.
• Acid destroys a chalkling faster and more completely than water. Nebrask runs on it by the barrel.
• Nothing a Rithmatist draws heals, feeds, lights, lifts or flies. It holds, it strikes, it bars, it walks. That is the whole of what Rithmatics has ever done.

Armedius Academy, in Jamestown, New Britannia — one of the easternmost of the United Isles, and one of the eight schools in the world that teach Rithmatics.

Armedius is two schools sharing a campus and pretending otherwise. The Rithmatic campus is four brick buildings around their own yard, each named for one of the four Lines. The general campus is everything else: the children of senators, knight-senators and shipping families, studying history and arithmetic and resenting the chalk-marked.

Rithmatic students take the first hour of the day on the Rithmatic campus and the second with everybody else. That split is the school's social weather. For one hour you are the point of the place; for the next you are the strange thing at the back of the room the state will send to Nebrask.

The Rithmatic campus is four stately brick buildings, each holding lecture halls and each named for a Line: Warding, Forbiddance, Vigor, Making. Where a class is held says what it is about before the professor opens his mouth.

The day:
• First hour — Rithmatics, on the Rithmatic campus. Lecture, chalk on slate, drill, and a professor walking the room correcting curves with the side of his thumb.
• Second hour — the general campus. History, mathematics, literature, grammar, the sciences, beside students whose chalk does nothing.
• After second hour — study, practice, the chalk courts, the challenge board.

It does not vary by day of the week. Term runs the length of the school year and ends with the Melee; everything between the first morning and that afternoon is preparation for it.

The second hour, on the general campus — the larger half of Armedius. Senators' children, shipping money, old New Britannian families, a scholarship or two. They study what students study anywhere in the Isles and they will go on to run things.

How they see Rithmatists, in order of frequency: a curiosity, a conscript, a cheat with an unearned future, and — quietly, in a few — something they would have given an arm for at eight. Nobody chose Inception's outcome, which has never stopped anyone resenting it.

The second hour means a Rithmatist cannot be only a Rithmatist. There is an essay due. There is a mathematics master who does not care who duelled yesterday. And the students on this side of the campus will be in the stands at the Melee, having watched you fail to hand in a translation.

What the first hour actually consists of:

• Drawing drill. The same circle, forty times, on slate, while a professor measures it against a compass and tells you the truth about it.
• The named defences. Each is a published construction of circle, bindpoints, Forbiddances and chalklings, drawn from memory and then at speed.
• Geometry on paper. Curvature, the square and the hexagon, the nine-point construction. Chalk is downstream of mathematics, and students who skip the paper never get past four-point circles.
• Theory and history: Nebrask, the Forgotten, the eight schools, the Church and Inception.
• Sparring in the courts, by year, with a professor watching for fouls.

A second-year is drilled on five basic defences and nothing fancier. That is deliberate, and students hate it.

Rithmatic students board. The dormitories sit on the Rithmatic side within sight of the courts: a commons, a chalk cupboard nobody keeps tidy, and a warden who counts heads after curfew without pretending to enjoy it.

The uniform is the school's, with no special mark for Rithmatists — the school's position being that the chalk is mark enough. In practice everyone on both campuses knows exactly who is who by the end of the first week.

Chalk is issued. A student draws as much as they like and asks for more; the school treats it as the cheapest thing it buys. The only chalk anyone pays attention to is good duelling chalk, from the chalkmaker's yard behind the kitchens, which students hoard.

Term runs to the Melee. Holidays send most students home. Some have nowhere in particular to go.

Chalk is not chalk. The school issues soft sticks that crumble under a fast hand, which is fine for drill and bad for a duel. The yard behind the kitchens turns out a harder, denser stick that holds its edge through a sine wave drawn at speed.

The chalkmaker is an old hand who has watched forty years of students and takes an interest in none of them. He will trade a decent stick for errands, for legible handwriting in his ledger, or for being left alone.

What students believe about chalk — that a colour draws stronger, that a stick kept dry over winter holds better, that a stub weakens a Line of Vigor — is superstition with one exception. A stub really is harder to draw a clean sine wave with, and a clean sine wave is the whole of the line.

Second year is the year the school stops being flattering. First-years are taught that chalk obeys them, which is a wonder. Second-years learn exactly how badly they draw.

Where a second-year stands:
• All four Lines work. None of them work reliably at speed.
• Four- and six-point circles are expected. Nine is taught and not trusted.
• Five basic defences are drilled to memory: the Matson, the Osborn, the Ballintain, the Sumsion, the Eskridge.
• Chalklings are the forgiving part — nobody shoots at a chalkling while it is being drawn.
• Duels against first-years are winnable. Against the duelling set they are not. Against other second-years they come down to whose hand shakes less.

The Melee takes second-years. Professors need twelve bodies, and the stands do not care what year anyone is.

Fitch holds the foremost Rithmatics chair at Armedius by scholarship rather than nerve. Grey, rumpled, kind in a flustered way, a better researcher than any duellist on the campus and aware of what that is worth.

He teaches by correction, not demonstration. He will watch a second-year draw a bad circle, say nothing, wait for it to fail, and then explain exactly why it was inevitable from the third inch of the curve. Students who want praise find him a disappointment. Students who want to get better find nobody else like him.

He drills a struggling student on five basic defences — Matson, Osborn, Ballintain, Sumsion, Eskridge — and will not move on until they are automatic. He takes remedial students other professors have written off, and never calls them that.

A second-year. Red-haired, loud, dramatic about everything including lunch, and the best artist on the Rithmatic campus by a margin nobody disputes.

Her chalklings are extraordinary — unicorns, usually, rendered with a patience that makes them hit like a fourth-year's. Her geometry is a disaster. She cannot hold a nine-point division together and she knows it, which is why she is in remedial work with Professor Fitch and why she starts talking loudly about something else whenever a compass appears.

She is a generous ally and an exhausting one. She will tell a second-year the truth about their circle, volunteer them both for things nobody asked about, treat a duel as theatre, and take a loss harder than she admits an hour later.

A general-campus student who is not a Rithmatist and who knows more Rithmatic theory than most second-years who are.

His father was the campus chalkmaker and died when Joel was young; the school keeps him on a scholarship and a sort of institutional guilt. He has spent years reading defences he will never draw, and he can say which construction fails against which opening and why — which is either useful or unbearable depending on the day.

He is not bitter so much as hungry. Being corrected on Rithmatics by a boy whose chalk does nothing is a particular experience, and he is right often enough that the sensible response is to listen.

The twenty or so students on the Rithmatic campus who duel seriously — mostly third- and fourth-years, who read the challenge board before breakfast and keep a private tally of who is worth beating.

Names a second-year hears: Briggs, a fourth-year with a brutal six-point game and no imagination. Ellery Vance, third-year, fast and theatrical and genuinely good. The Hadling twins, who duel as a pair and share a circle in defiance of every tactical argument against it. Sorrel, a senior on the Nebrask track, who treats student duels as calibration and never gloats.

They are not villains. They are busy. A second-year who posts a challenge, loses well and comes back is treated with more respect than one who stays off the board.

Principal of Armedius, and a political animal in the sense the job requires. The school sits between the Church, the knight-senators who fund it, and the federal interest in Nebrask, and York spends his days keeping those three from noticing one another.

He is decent to students and will not pretend the school is a kindness. His line, more or less: Armedius did not choose you and cannot release you, so the only thing left is to make you good enough that Nebrask is survivable.

He takes a personal interest in a few students, usually the ones with no family money standing behind them.

Not at Armedius. Andrew Nalizar is at the Nebrask front, where he has been making a reputation: young, aggressive, very good, the sort of Rithmatist other professors discuss in a lowered voice.

The story that reaches the campus is that he won his tenure in a duel, and that he has no patience for scholarship which never had to work under fire. Students who hear it tend to admire him. Professor Fitch, asked about him, changes the subject.

If he ever takes a chair here the Rithmatic campus will change character overnight. For now he is a name in the gazette and an argument in the commons.

Two students, two circles, one surface. Each draws a Line of Warding and whatever can be anchored to it. The duel ends when a circle is breached, and the student whose circle is breached is out — there is no second condition and no points for style.

How a circle is actually breached:
• Lines of Vigor into one spot. About six solid hits on a sound line, fewer on a bad one.
• A chalkling across the floor, chewing at the chalk, while you are busy with the Vigor.
• Your own mistake: a flat patch, a Forbiddance that boxes you in, a boot through your own line.

Court rules: no Vigor aimed at a person, no touching the other student or their chalk with hand or foot, a professor or senior watching, and a loss conceded out loud. Duels at Armedius are not secret and are not meant to be.

A corkboard under the awning at the chalk courts. Anyone may post a challenge and anyone of any year may answer one.

A posting carries the poster's year, a place, and a number of seeding points — points by the poster's year, which is the whole economy of the thing:
• first-year 5 · second-year 10 · third-year 18
• fourth-year 30 · senior 50 · a professor's tutor 80

Win and the points are yours for the season. Lose and you get nothing, and the posting comes down either way. A challenge stands four days and is then taken off the wall; most are claimed within a day or two by whoever read the board first, and a posting nobody answers is a small public humiliation for whoever pinned it up.

Seeding decides nothing about who may enter the Melee. It decides who a professor asks first.

A defence is a published construction: a circle of a stated bindpoint count with its Forbiddances, small circles and chalklings fixed in place.

Drilled in second year:
• the Ballintain, four-point — Forbiddances across two adjacent bindpoint pairs, warding circles opposite, a chalkling on the last.
• the Sumsion, four-point — a long Forbiddance tangent at the front, a Mark's Cross circle bound opposite, chalklings on the flanks.
• the Matson, six-point — two Forbiddances to stop it shifting, two Mark's Cross circles, spare bindpoints.
• the Eskridge, six-point — the same geometry, spent on chalklings.
• the Osborn — the only basic on an ellipse. Strong in front, one anchor behind.

A Mark's Cross is two Forbiddances crossed inside a four-point circle, bound on to brace a bigger one.

A flat expanse of swept stone beside the Rithmatic campus, ruled off into practice rings: an east circle, a far ring, and a covered strip under the awning where the board hangs and where duels happen in the rain.

It is public. The dormitory windows look onto it, the general campus walks past it, and a duel at four in the afternoon has an audience whether or not anybody wanted one.

House rules, unwritten and absolute: sweep the stone before you draw, never walk across a drawn circle, rub out your own work when you are done. Chalk left on the stone overnight is a grudge or a boast and is read as both. The groundskeeper floods and brushes the courts every morning, so nothing anybody drew yesterday is there today.

Rain stops everything except the awning.

The Melee closes the school year at Armedius: an arena, every Rithmatic professor's team at once, and one circle left standing at the end.

The rules, as the school runs them:
• Each professor enters a team of up to twelve of their own students, and must enter at least one.
• Lots are drawn immediately before the match for position in the arena. The middle is the worst draw there is — you are surrounded from every side — and nobody gets to prepare for the position they will be given.
• A combatant whose circle is breached is eliminated and leaves the arena.
• The last team with an intact circle wins.
• Being a Rithmatist is not a requirement. Being the student of a Rithmatic professor is.
• Nothing forbids teammates sharing one circle. Everybody who has tried it will explain why not.

A professor's team is assembled in the weeks before the Melee, and how a professor chooses is personality made public. Some take their twelve best. Some take twelve and drill them as a unit for a month. Some take the students nobody else would, which is its own statement about what the Melee is for.

An invitation is a conversation, not a list on a wall. Seeding points off the challenge board are the argument a student brings to that conversation.

On the day, lots are drawn for position with the teams already standing in the arena. A team that planned around a corner and drew the middle gets a minute to think, and then the match starts. Twelve students sharing a professor are not twelve who can coordinate, and the first minutes of a Melee are mostly people getting in each other's way.

Nothing material. No prize, no money, no exemption from anything.

What it buys is the rest of your life. Melee winners are given the important postings at Nebrask, and the record shows they become squadleaders and captains far more often than the students who did not win. The federal service reads the Melee results every year for exactly that reason.

Which is why a competition between schoolchildren is taken as seriously as it is, and why a professor's team selection is a career decision on behalf of twelve people. A student who is good in a court and folds in an arena finds that out in front of everybody whose opinion will ever matter to them.

At eight years old every child in the United Isles stands for Inception: a Monarchical ceremony in a chapel, with the clergy, the family, and a great deal of waiting.

Most children come out of it as they went in. A few come out Rithmatists, and the difference shows at once — chalk begins to obey them. Nobody has ever established a pattern. It is not inherited, not bought, not earned by piety, not predicted by anything, and the Church does not claim to know the reason.

The consequences are permanent and administrative. A marked child is registered, placed in one of the eight schools, educated at public expense, and committed to federal service at Nebrask. Families are told all of this at the chapel door, in the same breath as the congratulations.

One isle of the sixty, and the reason Rithmatics is a public institution. Nebrask holds the Tower; around the Tower are the wild chalklings, and around them the federal line — an enormous Rithmatic circle held day and night in shifts, keeping what is inside it inside.

Every Rithmatist graduate goes. It is service rather than a posting anybody applies for, and Armedius does not advertise an end date; students who talk about coming home talk about it the way soldiers do.

What the front is like, by the accounts that reach a lecture hall: endless chalk, acid in barrels, cold, routine, and then a breach. Chalklings there kill people. The careful rules of a student court do not apply, and the professors who have been say so without elaborating.

The chalklings at Nebrask are not student work. Nobody knows where they came from, no two accounts of the first contact with them agree, and nothing drawn by a Rithmatist behaves the way they do.

Two differences matter. They are made by no living hand, and they can kill. A wild chalkling that reaches a person leaves a body, and that is the whole of the public record on the subject — the details are not taught to second-years.

They are led. The things at the head of them are called the Forgotten, and what the Forgotten actually are is in no textbook on the Rithmatic campus. Acid destroys a chalkling faster and more completely than water, which is why the front is supplied with it by the barrel.

The Monarchical church holds Inception, and therefore holds the one ceremony the federal government cannot do without.

This is the fact that organises everything else. Rithmatists are not produced by a school, an academy or a government department; they are produced by a religious ceremony in a chapel, administered by clergy, by means nobody can explain and nobody can replicate. The state needs Rithmatists to hold Nebrask. The Church makes them. Every other arrangement in the Isles sits downstream of that.

Rithmatic students have an awkward relationship with it. Some are devout. Some are furious. Most attend chapel, say nothing in particular, and avoid the question of whether something chose them on purpose.

Sixty isles, where another history has a continent. The United Isles of America are a federation of island states with their own legislatures and their own characters, and a federal government that concerns itself with two things: trade between the isles, and Nebrask.

New Britannia is one of the easternmost — old money, self-important — and its principal city is Jamestown: harbour, rail, springwork, and Armedius Academy on the hill above it.

Travel between isles is by ship, and across them by the great springwork rail where it runs. Knight-senators hold seats and commands at once. The Church of the Monarch is woven through all of it, because the Church is where Rithmatists come from and Rithmatists are how the isles are held.

Jamestown below the hill: a harbour, rail yards, a cathedral, springwork shops, and an ordinary city's opinion of Rithmatists.

Out of uniform nobody can tell. In uniform, with chalk dust on a cuff, a student gets the full range — a shopkeeper rounding a price down, a drunk asking for a trick, a mother steering a child away, a man at a counter who would like to argue about whether the whole business is a Church fraud. Rithmatists are rare enough that most people have never met one and hold firm views anyway.

Doing Rithmatics for an audience in town is frowned on by the school and done constantly. The one rule students are given plainly: never draw anything at a person off the courts. That ends in a federal complaint and a letter home.

Technology in the Isles runs on stored spring tension rather than steam or oil. Everything of consequence is wound: carriages, lifts, lamps, clocks, the rail, the pumps, the fans in a lecture hall in June.

That shapes small things more than large ones. A machine runs down, somebody has to wind it, and a device that will not hold its spring is a device that is broken. Students wind their own alarm clocks and lose duels to having overslept.

Springwork and Rithmatics do not mix at all. Nothing a Rithmatist draws powers a machine and no machine draws a line. They are two separate competences that happen to share a civilisation.

Eight schools in the world teach Rithmatics, and Armedius is one of them. The others are scattered across the isles, each with its own professors, its own named defences in favour, and its own opinion of the rest.

A Rithmatic student's horizon is almost entirely their own campus. Transfers are rare, inter-school duelling is not a fixture of the calendar, and most of what an Armedius second-year knows about the other seven is hearsay from a professor who trained at one of them.

What they share is the arrangement: Inception marks a child, a school takes them, Nebrask receives them. Eight schools against sixty isles is a thin margin, and everybody in the federal government knows the number.

Published constructions, by the circle each is built on. Fitch's five basics are marked (B).

Where the bindpoints sit
• Two-point — opposite each other on the circle.
• Four-point — where an inscribed square touches the circle.
• Six-point — where a regular hexagon touches it.
• Nine-point — off an imaginary non-obtuse triangle: the midpoint of each side, and where each of its three altitudes crosses the circle.

The Mark's Cross
Two Lines of Forbiddance crossing at right angles inside a four-point circle. On its own it is a small sealed box. Bound to a bindpoint on a larger circle it braces that circle, and most of the better defences use one or more.

Four-point circles
• the Ballintain (B) — a Forbiddance joining each of two adjacent pairs of bindpoints, a circular Line of Warding on each of the two opposite bindpoints, and one defensive chalkling on the bindpoint left over. The first real defence a student is given.
• the Sumsion (B) — a long Line of Forbiddance laid tangent at the front bindpoint, a circle carrying a Mark's Cross bound to the bindpoint opposite the main circle, chalklings available on the two side bindpoints.

Ellipses
• the Osborn (B) — the only basic defence built on an ellipse rather than a circle. A defensive chalkling on the upper bindpoint; a line run through the rear bindpoint as the single anchor; optionally two warding circles with Mark's Crosses out to either side, which must not touch the ellipse, since a line touching it anywhere but a bindpoint is no anchor at all. Very strong at the front, light behind, and quick to shoot from. Easy to recognise across a court.
• the Jordan — an ellipse with two Lines of Forbiddance as anchors. The Rithmatist boxes himself in behind it, draws a large force of chalklings at leisure, and releases the lot at once.

Six-point circles
• the Matson (B) — the most variable defence taught. Two Lines of Forbiddance to stop the circle being shoved off its position, two smaller circles carrying Mark's Crosses, and bindpoints left over for defensive chalklings. The working defence of the courts.
• the Eskridge (B) — the other six-point. It spends the same geometry on binding places instead of bracing, so Rithmatists with a good hand for Lines of Making favour it.

Nine-point circles
• the Easton — a circular Line of Warding on every bindpoint, with Lines of Forbiddance between them making a nine-sided figure with three of its lines missing. Built for facing several opponents at once. Its costs are the nine-point division itself and the Forbiddances, which pen the Rithmatist in as much as they protect. Advanced form: a Mark's Cross added to each outer circle, and the internal Forbiddances cut from six to three.
• the Shoaff — elliptical Lines of Warding on each bindpoint, a defensive chalkling bound at each ellipse's far bindpoint, and only two short Lines of Forbiddance as anchors.
• the Hill — a nine-point defence built around Lines of Forbiddance, and one of the few that can be modified to work without them.
• the Taylor — the strongest defence in Rithmatics and the hardest to draw: two nine-point circles aligned perfectly with one another, with a great many bindpoints for chalklings. Rarely seen below the final year.

Rules of thumb that go with them: a sound Line of Warding takes about six Line of Vigor hits; a Line of Forbiddance takes about ten and bounces what it does not absorb; a steeper curve is a stronger line; a Forbiddance is stronger than a Warding; and nine-point division is the hardest construction in the second-year syllabus.

The day, which does not vary by day of the week:

• First hour — Rithmatics, on the Rithmatic campus, in Warding, Forbiddance, Vigor or Making Hall.
• Second hour — the general campus, with everybody else.
• Afternoon — study, drill, the chalk courts, the challenge board, duels.
• Evening — the dormitories, the commons, curfew and a head count.

The term:

• Opening of term. New first-years are chalk-marked and bewildered; everybody else finds out which professor has the first hour.
• The long middle. Drill, named defences, nine-point geometry on paper, posted challenges accumulating seeding points.
• The weeks before the Melee. Professors assemble teams of up to twelve and drill them as units. Invitations happen in conversations, not on lists.
• The Melee. One afternoon, an arena, lots drawn for position, and one circle left standing.
• End of term. Postings, assignments, and most students going home.

Faculty and staff
• Principal Thomas York — runs the school and the politics around it.
• Professor Fitch — foremost Rithmatics professor. Scholar, not a duellist. Teaches by correction. Takes remedial students.
• Professor Andrew Nalizar — NOT here. At the Nebrask front, making a reputation.
• The chalkmaker — the yard behind the kitchens. Hard sticks, no interest in students.
• The groundskeeper — floods and brushes the chalk courts every morning.
• The dormitory warden — counts heads after curfew.

Students
• Melody Muns — second-year. Superb chalklings, unicorns mostly. Geometry a disaster. Remedial with Fitch.
• Joel Saxon — general campus, not a Rithmatist, knows the theory better than most who are.
• The duelling set — Briggs (fourth-year), Ellery Vance (third-year), the Hadling twins, Sorrel (senior, Nebrask track).

Timeline: this is the year BEFORE the events of the novel. Nalizar has not arrived, nobody is missing, and there is no Scribbler.

A Forge house world, built on Brandon Sanderson's The Rithmatist. The novel, the setting and every canon name in here are his; this is a playable arrangement of them, not a substitute for reading the book, which is better than this page.

What it is for: being a student. The four Lines, the first hour and the second, the chalk courts, posted challenges, and the Melee at the end of the year. It is set in the year before the novel opens, so Professor Nalizar is still at Nebrask, Professor Fitch still holds his chair, and the disappearances that drive the book have not happened and will not happen here.

The challenge board is run by the server, not improvised: postings, years, seeding points and the four days a posting stands all come from the world's ruleset, so the board says the same thing to everyone in a session and does not drift.

The upperclassmen in The Duelling Set are invented — the book names no student roster, and a board needs somebody to post on it. Everyone else is canon.

Forking is on. Take it, change what you like, and run your own Armedius.