Athenaeum

An **Athenaeum** is an institution on Aerb. Not all Athenaeums teach magic, and not all schools of magic are taught at athenaeums.

The Empire of Common Cause has strict intellectual property laws, and the athenaeums hold a great deal of money and political power. They exercise these resources to maintain a monopoly on the study and teaching of magic. They offer scholarships.

## References

1. ↑ And that was it, just those three. We could have gone to Five Spires, or any other major city, and maybe bought some books there, but one of the things the Empire of Common Cause did was enforce intellectual property laws. The athenaeums had a lot of sway within the empire, which meant that they put some restrictions in place to ensure that magical learning was centralized. This was naturally ‘for the public good’ and just happened to increase power and profits to the lobbying body, which was a complete and total coincidence.
(The empire wasn’t actually all that strong or effective, for a lot of the same reasons that the UN wasn’t strong or effective, but the athenaeums were powerful enough that they could use the empire to propagate a legislative framework that almost all the member polities had implemented, or at least put token effort into implementing.
This was then backed up by the athenaeums wielding their power against the various polities of the empire when they tried to defect from ‘sensible’ intellectual property laws and/or certification schemes. Most of the athenaeums had scholarships and departments devoted to placement of their students, which meant that there was a carrot labeled ‘we’ll pay your young people to come here’ and a stick labeled ‘we won’t send you graduated mages’, but with a lather of diplomacy on top of that basic reality. On top of that, most of the athenaeums were filthy rich and nearly nations in their own right, which meant that they could (and did) use all of the standard tactics that corporations used on Earth, like pumping money into politics, having people write editorials complaining about a politician or policy, filing lawsuits, or doing other things like that.
So if you were a prospective publisher of books, you would look at running afoul of either the governments or the athenaeums, then look at how pitifully small the target market was, and then decide to do something else with your time. And it wasn’t like someone could really be expected to learn magic from a book anyway, not when even the simplest of magics took years of intensive, guided study to wield, let alone wield effectively.
This wasn’t to say that there were no books on those subjects. After all, as Stewart Brand said, information wants to be free. However, in a world that had no global internet, information on Aerb had considerably less desire to be free than it did on Earth, and the bootleg books and underground magicians were supposedly something of a rarity.
Where were we? Oh, right, trying to pick a place to go.)
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 37: "Paths"
2. ↑ Formerly known as the Sanguinary Estate, the Athenaeum of Quills and Blood, the largest part of the city-state of Sanguine, concerns itself primarily with blood magic, though it has an unusual split focus into more mundane aspects of education, particularly those regarding administration and management.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
3. ↑ Among the colleges at Speculation and Scrutiny are:

	* Keli College: entads
	* Wirisi College: inheritance and bloodlines
	* Pasu College: Animalia
	* Cerebral College: dream-skewered
	* Daniner College: ‘dead’ magics
	* Bats’aral College: exclusions
	—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
4. ↑ Eventually, the regional business that the salin had been working toward needed to be supplemented with lower-quality (but much more plentiful) trained humans, who became the first computers. Around that same time, star magic was independently invented and became an integral part of the burgeoning center of learning.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
5. ↑ Students at Claw come in all varieties, and the school itself, lacking a distinctive magic, has made bodily modification of all kinds its focus, whether magical or otherwise. Claw owns a great many body shaping entads, those which can change a person’s shape or other personal attributes, and on top of that, Claw is one of the few places in all of Aerb where the Empire of Common Cause permits soul magic to be used to alter bodies, an exception opened up just thirty years ago.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
6. ↑ In its heyday, Claw & Clocks was home to three separate time-related magics, which had all been united under a single institution: butterfly magic, clock magic, and revision magic. The former two were excluded, leaving revision magic to be taught alone, sometimes seen as the weakest of the triad. Opposite the time-related powers were the bodily magics, which in the beginning included various forms of lycanthropy, a number of specic magics, and fleshsmithing, a discipline shared with other centers of learning.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
7. ↑ The ‘Flesh’ in the title ‘Bone and Flesh’ refers to the magic once employed by the fleshsmiths, though fleshsmithing was excluded to the Pendleham exclusion zone shortly after the athenaeum changed its name.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
8. ↑ Ink and Ardor is passion magic and ink magic, unrelated to tattoo magic.
—Alexander Wales on Discord, 2018/11/27
9. ↑  To this end, Caerdall became the home to glass magic, dibbling, and conjoinery, all of which are now excluded. Of special note, Caerdall was a major institution of learning for soul mages during the time of the Second Empire until imperial forces declared soul magic a state secret and moved most of the relevant books and instructors to Lankwon
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
10. ↑ Might and Motion was originally founded as Rodyn a Horth, a conclave of wood mages whose reclusive island had favorable weather for a large number of different trees that their practice used.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
11. ↑ Steel and Sweat is steel, skin, and carapace

—Alexander Wales on Discord, 2018/11/27
12. ↑ Named after the famed mentor of Uther Penndraig, the Vervainium was founded by Uther as a place of study for flower mages in 18 FE
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
13. ↑ Pustule magic was a later addition, and somewhat unwelcome by the existing professors. It was, however, a natural fit, given the close similarities between the two magics in terms of how they’re practiced, and in spite of their different presentations and effects.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
14. ↑ Unlike other athenaeums, which ended up with two or three specialties through intentional merging, coincidence of application, or cross-pollination of technique, rune magic and star magic are essentially unaligned with each other.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"
15. ↑ The newly minted athenaeum took the name of Keys and Cloaks, the former a symbol of the sand mages, who still dealt almost exclusively in large buildings, the latter the attire of an air mage, who uses their cloak to help feel the winds.
—*A Brief Description of Aerb* Chapter 2: "Athenaeums"