First appearance: S2E3 — A Lovers’ Quarrel — Lethe v Sorry · watch it on YouTube
Strixhaven is a great university of magic somewhere out among the worlds the Grandmaster pulls her champions from. No Deathmatch has ever been fought on its grounds, but it keeps turning up in the champions’ stories. For one pair of champions it was the place their love story went wrong. For others it is a handy measuring stick: if you are good at magic, you say how you rank against Strixhaven.
Description
Strixhaven is divided into colleges. Lorehold is one of them, and Sorry still carried its emblem on her shield after graduating. There are potion classes, essays to write and tests to pass.
By Sorry’s account, the coursework was “based solely on… regurgitating information.” That suited her nicely. Her one spell, comprehend languages, only works if she physically touches the writing, and she does that by eating the paper. Her old partner Lethe wondered aloud how she ever graduated, and suspected the professors simply “couldn’t actually find the papers to grade.” When Lethe asked whether she meant literally regurgitating, Sorry answered, “Sometimes.” Not every paper stayed down: “that one essay on bugbears… kinda didn’t sit very well.”
Being told you “wouldn’t fit in to Strixhaven” was enough to send Lethe running.
History
A Lovers’ Quarrel
Strixhaven first came up in S2E3 — A Lovers’ Quarrel — Lethe v Sorry, when two former lovers were pulled into the Void to fight in a snowy winter town the Grandmaster had let them use. It started with teasing. Lethe mocked Sorry’s paper-eating study habits and asked how she had ever made it through school. Then the fight took a strange turn. A shop in the town carried Lethe back to the week the Witchlight Carnival came to Strixhaven, when Lethe had waited outside Sorry’s potion class. The memory hung over the scene like an overlay of the old campus and only made Lethe angrier. They planted their glaive and waited. “Waiting, I love it,” said the Grandmaster.
The Sorry who answered was a version who had grown up without Lethe in her life. She was confident, grinning, sword drawn, with her Lorehold shield on her arm: “I’m here. You called? Bring it.” Lethe assumed she was still at Strixhaven, or perhaps a teacher by now. Sorry was offended by the first guess: “No, I graduated! Why do you have to insult me like this over and over again?” When the Void grabbed her she had been on a dungeon field trip with younger charges: “There are little ones that are probably wandering around lost without me.” She did not think much of the job: “I’m not an adventurer… I’m a glorified babysitter.”
Then the truth came out mid-fight. Lethe had wanted to ask Sorry to come with them in the carnival. But Sorry had said Lethe wouldn’t fit in at Strixhaven, and Lethe heard that as we don’t fit together. “So I left.” Sorry lowered her sword with tears streaming down her face and told Lethe what she had really meant all along:
“Of course you don’t fit in at Strixhaven. You’re better than all of them.” (Sorry)
Name-Dropping in the Arena
Strixhaven came up again in Season 3’s “Homunculus,” where Alfucius the Everbright woke in the Void to face Coen. He was a wizened old man in flowing purple robes and a very pointed hat. He bowed low before the Grandmaster and listed the company he had kept, including the librarians of Candlekeep, the black staff of Waterdeep, and “the magic weavers of Strixhaven and Eberron.” None of them, he insisted, was as powerful as her.
In the S3E17, Season 3 Finale - Soot Mustam v Huey Leatherface, Huey Leatherface used the school as a landmark. He introduced himself as “the best dang artificer in this side of Strixhaven.” He makes potions and “little tinkery things,” throws them “real good,” and carries a blunderbuss called Old Bessie. He went on to face Soot Mustam in the season’s last fight.
Notable Figures
- Sorry: graduate of Strixhaven’s Lorehold college, who ate her papers to read them.
- Lethe: Sorry’s former partner, who left after believing Sorry meant they didn’t fit together.
- Alfucius the Everbright: an elderly wizard who claimed to have served alongside Strixhaven’s magic weavers.
- Huey Leatherface: a self-described top artificer from “this side of Strixhaven.”