In some valleys, they say, the name Dracula didn’t truly begin in castles or polished coffins, but in a windowless classroom where stone stands in for a slate and chalk, instead of writing, scratches; and there the bell rings like a chipped tooth, each toll sounding as if it were counting something you don’t want to become.
The school that isn’t on any map
The Scholomance isn’t on any map, not because it lies far away but because it has no distance, and it appears only when the mountain decides to open a gap between two firs, between two shadows, between two breaths; you reach it by following a path that can’t stand the light of day, one step after another, until the forest changes key and the air turns colder than it should, as though beneath the ground there were still water, listening.
The villagers don’t always call it the Scholomance, because that learned name belongs to outsiders and to books, while they prefer an older whisper—Solomonărie—and they call its students Solomonari when they see them return, if they return at all, with the empty gaze of those who have learned to speak with beasts and bargain with time; they say that inside you study the black arts and the arts of the sky, and that the master is not a man, or at least no longer.
The Devil, they say, teaches there, and you don’t picture him as a beast with stage horns, but as a precise gentleman who knows the grammar of promises and the punctuation of guilt; he arrives with the calm of someone already summoned and carries himself like a man who need not persuade you, because in the end it is you who ask to be admitted, and the door opens only for those who have already decided to lose something.
There is another thing they repeat, always under their breath and with the same caution used to name a fever: near the school, tucked into the folds of the land, there is a deep lake, so black it seems never to reflect the sky, and you must not throw a stone into it—not out of vague superstition, but because every ring on the water is a letter addressed to someone who answers. In the depths, they say, a dragon sleeps—Ismeju—and when the master wants hail or wind he wakes it with a curt word, the way you wake a trained dog.
In that age legends never bother to date, because time, in stories, is more a scent than a calendar, Vlad arrived as well, and he was not yet the prince history frames, but a hungry, taut boy made of pride and fear like so many others; only his fear was not of dying, but of ending—of becoming one name among other names, a body the earth takes without argument.
Lessons in the sky, and the price of promises
At the threshold there was no guard, and for that very reason the threshold was worse: no one stops you, because the only thing that matters is that you enter of your own will; and when you find yourself in the courtyard of stone and dark timber you realize that silence is not an absence but a discipline, an invisible wall that closes your mouth. Around Vlad there were nine others, and they did not resemble one another in face or tongue, yet each carried the same fever in the eyes, the fever that makes ordinary life look like a prison.
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The master welcomed them with kindness—a kindness that neither comforts nor warms, because it has the temperature of a contract—and he explained the rule without theatrics, as though it were an administrative detail: ten go in, nine come out, and whoever stays is not “killed,” as in children’s tales, but kept, employed, reshaped into an instrument, because certain trades require hands that no longer belong to themselves.
The lessons did not smell of hell, but of the more ambiguous scent of a classroom: dust, ink, wax, damp wool, and above all the labor of understanding. First they learned things that seem harmless and yet shift you from the inside, like the language of animals—not the fairy-tale kind where creatures “talk,” but the language of signs and tremors, of pauses and minute changes that mean run, strike, wait; and only then did they move on to the rest, to the art of reading clouds as pages, of recognizing the point at which a storm is still possibility and the point at which it becomes certainty.
Vlad was not the most compliant, and that saved him and ruined him at once, because what the Scholomance teaches does not enter yielding bodies but tense ones, hearts that do not know how to accept. He had a knack for knotting the wind, and when the master sent him out into the courtyard to “pull” an invisible current until it changed direction, Vlad felt, for the first time, something obeying his will without demanding an immediate price; and precisely there, in that illusion of grace, the bill was being prepared.
Sometimes they were led near the lake, not as reward but as warning, and the master spoke softly, almost with respect, saying that certain depths do not belong to the world of men. One of the students, Adrian, had hands too curious and eyes too quick, and he was scolded not because he wished to look, but because looking was already a way of calling, and calling without knowing who answers is the first sin of anyone who studies darkness.
As months passed—or years, because time in that place frays and loses its edges—the students learned hail, which is not simply “ice falling” but finding the right word to make it born. They learned to drive rain the way you drive a herd, to send it elsewhere, to bring it early, to turn it into good water or bad; they learned, too, the cruelest part, the part the master called simply “efficiency”: if you want the sky to listen, you must offer something with the same weight as a sky.
The exam at the lake: calling the dragon, losing a name
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The exam came without warning, the way real exams do, and that night the master did not call them into the classroom but outside, onto the path that slopes down toward the water. The forest made no sound, and that was the worst sign, because even the leaves seemed to hold their breath, as though they knew that soon something would be chosen.
At the lake’s edge, the master traced a mark in the mud and said that neither salt nor iron was needed, because this was not a defense but an assignment: each of them would have to call something up from the depths, not to see it—no one truly sees a dragon and remains whole—but to make it felt in the world, the way, before a storm, you sense the pressure change and your skin anticipates the rain. Whoever could not do it did not merely fail: they stayed.
The first tried force, and force, at the water’s edge, is always a kind of ignorance; the lake did not answer, and the master watched him with the same patience used to watch a faulty tool. The second tried prayer, and prayer, there, sounded like the wrong language. The third lowered his gaze and spoke the way you speak to a frightened animal, without imposing, and in that moment the water made a small movement, a breath that was not wind; from the depths rose a metallic cold, the smell of wet stone and a lightning bolt held back.
One after another, the nine understood that the question was not how powerful you are, but what you are willing to leave behind, and each paid with what was most human in them: one offered his own name, and from that moment he could no longer recognize himself when someone called; another offered a childhood memory and returned with a mind smooth as an emptied room. Adrian—the one with the curious hands—trembled before the water and, out of defiance or fear, threw a stone: the ring that opened on the surface looked like an eye, and the eye seemed to look at him alone.
There was no scream, no blood, because older folklore is often more sober than modern fantasy, and for that very reason it hurts more: Adrian did not come back; he simply stopped being someone who comes out, and the master named him without hatred and without pity, the way you name a position, saying that from that night he would learn the true trade—the one that brings hail where it is needed and holds lightning until it is time.
Then it was Vlad’s turn, and he stepped into the mark in the mud and understood that his ambition, there, was a problem, because the lake recognizes ambition the way it recognizes iron: it draws it in. Vlad would not offer memories and would not offer a name, because he knew that a man without memories and without a name can become anything, but can also become nothing; so he did something more dangerous, something the stories remember because it sounds impossible: he offered his death.
Not death as an ending, but death as property, as a right, as an appointment; he called it with a hard thought, set it on his palm like a black coin, and the lake answered with a tremor that made the trees shake, while somewhere, in the depths, Ismeju turned in its sleep and the sky above loaded itself with clouds like a chest filling with air.
When Vlad returned toward the master he carried no object and bore no visible mark, yet he wore a different silence, the silence of someone who has shifted a hinge of the world. The master stared at him for a long time and, as though tasting a wine, said it was a rare payment, and that rarely does the one who offers it truly understand what he has handed over.
From then on, in the versions that circulate, Vlad was not called only Vlad, because a man who has pawned his own death does not remain the same; and someone, between fear and admiration, began to say Drăculea—son of the Dragon, son of “Dracul”—and the legend, which does not need to be precise to be true in its own way, braided together the Order of the Dragon, the forbidden lake, and the Devil’s school into a single long shadow.
Nine return, one remains: the pact walks through the villages
The nine who left the Scholomance did not leave victorious: they left altered, and in villages, difference is always a suspicious crime. People saw them pass along the edges of the fields, hoods low and words few, and when a hailstorm arrived “too punctually,” or when rain skirted a house as if it had memory, they crossed themselves and murmured Solomonari, because there is no insult sharper than the right name.
As for Vlad, the legend sent him back into the world with an energy history alone cannot explain or absolve. He became prince, he became judge, he became terror, and each time an enemy fell and the sky above seemed complicit, someone remembered that certain men do not merely command men, but have learned to pull a thread higher up, where the storm decides; and when Vlad died—or when he should have died—the same valleys that feared him began to tell another story, later and more born of night, because folklore grows by grafts: that a man capable of holding back his own death does not lie like others do, that he can return as a strigoi, a restless undead, and that blood, in stories, is often only another way of saying debt.
So the castle, the coffin, and the vampire came later, like masks laid over an already unsettling face, while underneath remained the older skeleton: a hidden school, a lake that does not want stones, a dragon sleeping in the depths, and a pact that always keeps the same count.
The threshold-lake, and the bookkeeping of shadow
The Scholomance, in its most folkloric form, is a machine of exchange, and for that reason it resembles many initiations: it promises power, but demands a renunciation that is not decorative. The ten students are not “numbers”: they are the measure of a bargain that must leave one victim behind, because without a loss power would be only a game, and folklore distrusts games that do not bite.
The lake is the threshold, and the dragon is the force of the sky made animal, because what we cannot understand we turn into a creature. The Solomonari are ambiguous figures, half scholars and half scapegoats, indispensable when protection from bad weather is needed and immediately blamed when hail shatters the harvest; offering one’s own death takes a motif from a dark fairy tale—the idea of “outwitting” the end—and flips it, because here the trick is not free: you become a man who walks with an emptiness at his side.
Pacts signed without ink, masters without faces
Today the Scholomance needs neither firs nor lakes, because the most effective schools are the ones that do not look like schools, and the tightest pacts are the ones signed without a pen. There are places that promise to teach you how not to end, how to be faster, more present, more “optimized,” and the student enters thinking he is taking skills, prestige, identity, while slowly he hands over attention, sleep, memory, and often the part of himself that knows how to stop.
In many modern versions, the master no longer wears a face, and for that reason he is more convincing, because he does not challenge you but measures you, does not tempt you but pushes you; the payment is not a theatrical sacrifice, but a habit. In the end, here too, someone remains—not in a stone room, but in a loop with no exit—and the others return to the world with real power and a larger hunger.
If you hear the bell, decide
If the Scholomance truly existed, if it were still there where the forest bends and the path pretends to vanish, you wouldn’t recognize it by a gate or a sign, but by a detail: a bell that rings in still air, a lake that seems to listen, a silence that draws you in the way a wound draws the eye. And if, one evening, walking among the trees, you heard that dry toll, you would have to decide without excuses, because folklore is always a concrete question: do you turn back, or do you take that step that no story can ever tell again without trembling?