Hasdrubal's Tale

Afterthoughts

Emily is the undoubted star of the Schooled in Magic series, but I always intended to do a handful of spin-off stories and novellas that elaborated on earlier backstories or showed what other characters were doing when Emily wasn’t there. It isn’t easy to write such stories as they must work towards a known outcome, rather than a natural stopping place, and they must show the featured character as a younger person who can and will grow into the person we know and love. It also risks destroying what sympathy the reader had for the character, either through depicting them as idiots or showing them as older people in younger bodies (in much the same way Jean-Luc Picard, sent back to his younger days in Tapestry, comes out as a terrible prig rather than a teenager.

It was easier to write this story, in a sense, because there was such a gulf between the past Hasdrubal and Void and their future selves. There is no doubting they made a terrible mistake, in hopes of converting a demon into their personal source of power, and they drew different lessons from the experience. Hasdrubal chose to concentrate on teaching the next generation, while Void moved to work for the White Council and then, later on, for himself.

I do intend to write one more story set in this period, the story of how Hasdrubal defeated Grandmaster Boscha and took control of Whitehall (as you can tell, the school changed a lot between this story and Emily’s arrival), but that story will come later (probably in one of the Fantastic Schools collections).

There are two other points that should probably be mentioned. I left it vague if Emily ever found the letter — she certainly didn’t find it before the events of The Right Side of History — and I left Void’s true name unmentioned. But if you know anything about the historical Barcas of Cartage, you can probably figure it out.