Strixhaven University welcomes you. Begin your magical studies on a faraway plane, encountering new friends, mysteries, and dangers, in this fantastical dark academia.
This special first edition hardcover includes a Command Tower Magic: The Gathering card with all-new Strixhaven artwork—while supplies last!
Eula Blue was supposed to be a mage. That was before the war came—before the fight for the Multiverse devastated Eula’s home, and with it her hopes for a magical education.
But the destruction of the war also brought something new: the ability to travel to other planes. And when Eula receives an invitation to study magic at a distant school called Strixhaven, she leaps to take it.
Eula’s journey brings her closer than she ever thought possible to her fellow students, including the mysterious Segante, a boy whose secrets Eula longs to share. But not everyone is thrilled by the arrival of the new class, and Eula and her new friends quickly become targets.
To make it through their first semester, they’ll have to fight for their place in this new world—or else they’ll be dead before their final exams.
Release date:
April 7, 2026
Publisher:
Random House Worlds
Print pages:
432
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The shout comes a bare breath before the sound of crumbling masonry. Eula Blue, unwilling cleanup worker and self-trained shield mage, throws her hands over her head, a dome of pale, misty light forming around them as the rest of her team presses in beside her. This has happened often enough that they’ve learned the safest place to be during a collapse is as close to Eula as possible.
The bricks raining down from above hit her shield and bounce harmlessly off, clattering to the pavement. The impacts stop. Eula holds the shield, watching the sky until she’s sure the collapse has finished, then releases it and lowers her hands at the same time, sending the last of the dust and grit to join the rest.
Her foreman is already striding toward her. He’s a big, barrel-chested ogre, a Riveteer by birth and allegiance, and he was openly dubious about allowing her to join the cleanup crews after the Invasion. “What good is some soft-handed little wannabe Obscura going to do?” he’d asked, and the other recruits had laughed, and any chance Eula would have been willing to try looking for another job had died. It was cleanup or nothing.
Not that she likes the work. If she’s being honest with herself, she hates it. It’s all hot, muggy Caldaia air and physical effort, and tears in her clothes that she can’t afford to have properly mended. But the work needs to be done, and her family needs the money, and so here she is.
The foreman waits until he’s only a few feet away, the rest of her crew already back to work collecting broken glass and shards of Phyrexian exoskeletons from the street around them. Elias is picking up the bricks that fell on them. They’ll leave this stretch of New Capenna better off than they found it if it kills them—and based on what just happened, it still might.
“Blue,” says the foreman brusquely. “You think about my offer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Make a choice yet?”
Eula composes her face. She needs this job, at least until she can save enough to hire a private tutor. There’s always work to be done in New Capenna, but if you don’t belong to one of the five Families, there are things much worse than cleaning up the streets. She was lucky to get this position, and she managed it only because the foreman’s sister was a friend of her brother’s when they were her age; that tenuous connection got her onto the crew when the foreman would have preferred another Riveteer.
Of course, the Riveteers don’t tend to produce shield mages, and her talents have saved her coworkers often enough to attract attention that she wasn’t necessarily looking for.
“I’m still discussing it with my parents,” she says, as neutrally as she can.
Not neutrally enough. The foreman frowns. “This is a big opportunity, you know. Could open a lot of doors for you.”
“I’m aware, sir.”
“They may not be the doors you were hoping for, but with Park Heights gone, I don’t know the Obscura will be opening their doors anytime soon. You could make a name for yourself among the work crews if you wanted to get serious about this.”
“I know, sir. Thank you, sir.”
The foreman looks at her carefully, but she controls her face, refusing to let her true feelings show. She did her primary schooling in Park Heights, at the best elevator school her parents could buy her way into. She should be halfway through her first year of university right now, learning how to bend the law to her own ends, courted by the Brokers and the Obscura alike. Instead, she’s here, cleaning up the wreckage of the campus she’s been dreaming of for most of her life. This isn’t what she wanted. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.
This isn’t right.
The whistle blows, signaling shift change. With this many workers in need of a paycheck, there’s no overtime available, for anyone. Eula trades neutrality for a bright smile, tipping her cap at the foreman before she says, “I’ll see you tomorrow, sir,” and she’s off and running.
He pushes his own cap back as he watches her go, and he doesn’t try to call her back. She’s done her hours, she’ll draw her pay, and if she doesn’t want to go the extra mile, that’s no skin off his nose. It’s her family that needs the money, not his.
There’s always another pair of hands in New Capenna.
Eula puts his offer out of her mind as she runs. She can’t delay him forever, but she can have tonight, and the days since the school fell have taught her that time is the dearest coin there is. Once it’s spent, it’s gone, and even the Obscura can’t snatch it back for you.
She knows she’s the best shield mage on the work crews, which is easy enough when she’s the only shield mage on the work crews. Most of the shield mages in the city belong to the Brokers, and they’re too important to waste their time on petty make-work and physical labor. That’s the future her father wants for her, whereas she wants to join the Obscura in their dazzling dens of blackmail and illusion. She’s not your standard Obscura, but a shield mage is welcome anywhere. That’s why the Riveteers are willing to offer her a formal apprenticeship with their Family. They need her, and she needs them, and it could be so easy. All she has to do is say yes. They’ll give her more hours, more responsibilities, and the shining golden chains of admission to their Family at the end of it all. If she becomes a Riveteer, she can grant her family the stability they lost when Park Heights fell.
She can save them. She can give them security, authority, respectability, all the things Phyrexia took away. And all she has to give up is her own future.
Not that her future has ever been her own. The Brokers have never offered her father membership, but he’s always been their man, and he’s all but promised her to them if she masters her magic well enough. Her mother’s side of the family used to work for the Cabaretti. Most of them died with their masters when Park Heights fell. And here’s Eula, dreaming of the Obscura and knowing she’ll never have their attention the way she wants it. The way she needs it.
She moves fleetly through the Caldaia, the lowest level of New Capenna, where the Riveteers hold sway and the products of their endless industry are never far away. Before the Invasion, Eula had only ever come this low on dares and bets; she’d been a true child of the Mezzio, eyes fixed firmly on Park Heights, and she’d been sure nothing was going to stop her upward climb. There was no force in New Capenna that could contain Eula Blue.
Well, that had turned out to be true. There was no force in New Capenna. But there were forces outside it that didn’t care about her dreams or aspirations, and Phyrexia had brought her hopes for an education crashing down to earth, tangled in the wreckage of the school where she’d been intending to craft her future. Now here she is, one more child of the Caldaia gutters, caught between a lifetime of hard labor and preserving her slim chance at an escape in exchange for locking her entire family into that same fate.
She’s nineteen. This shouldn’t be on her shoulders. So Eula runs, temporarily free, racing toward an uncertain future.
Before Park Heights fell and took both her family’s fortunes and their neighborhood tumbling down with it, Eula knew exactly how her life was going to go. Now everything is uncertain, and she hates it, almost as much as she hates the tiny apartment she shares with her parents and younger siblings, who are young enough that they still view their new lives in the Caldaia as a long vacation from the expectations of the upper city, rather than a sudden and brutal limitation on their futures. Her older brother has his own place in a Riveteer neighborhood, more permanent, more secure, but the apartment she shares with the rest of her family is safe and quiet enough that Eula can sleep at night, and she wants to be grateful for that. She just doesn’t know how.
Resting her backside against a silvered stairway rail, she half slides, half rides it to the bottom of the granite stairs and trots down the last short block between her and home, slowing as she nears the door. She hates her job. She hates coming home almost as much. She’s never wanted to be an unhappy person, but she is now, because she hates it here.
Eula Blue is trapped.
She unlocks the door—no open doors this deep in the Caldaia—and lets herself into the crammed front room, packed with secondhand furniture and children’s toys. The air smells, as always, like boiled vegetables and whatever Mom’s roasting for dinner. She can’t think about food yet—she never can before she gets a shower—and all it does is turn her stomach.
“Eula?” Her father’s voice comes from the narrow doorway connecting the front room and kitchen. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Dad, it’s me.” Who else would it be? Unless someone’s lost a key, everyone else who lives here should be home by now.
“Can you come in here?”
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