All he had to do was explain this to his students. As a faculty member he was also expected to conduct independent research, but until he could come up with a problem that was worth researching, teaching was what he did. He did it five days a week, a lecture at nine and then Practical Applications at two.

At the same time he settled back into the rhythm of life at Brakebills, which wasn’t so different as a professor than it had been as a student. He didn’t have homework anymore, but he had to spend his nights preparing lectures, which was fine because he didn’t have much else to do anyway. He held himself appropriately aloof from his students, and so far the other faculty, appropriately or not, left the new fish to his own devices.

Little things had changed. Rumor had it that Brakebills had acquired a ghost, and though Fogg hadn’t seen it himself—it wasn’t clear who had—he was bursting with pride about it. Apparently all the old European institutions had them, and in those circles a magic school hadn’t really arrived till it was haunted. The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.

Which sounded interesting, but so far the resulting offspring had been either predictably derivative (in fiction) or stunningly boring (nonfiction); hybrid pairings between fiction and nonfiction were the most vital. The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren’t breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program. The library committee had an epic secret meeting about the ethics of literary eugenics which ended in a furious deadlock.

Quentin could feel himself slipping back into the thick, rich, comforting atmosphere of Brakebills, like a bee drowning in honey. Sometimes he caught himself thinking about what it would be like to stay there forever. And he might have done that if something hadn’t interrupted him: his father died.

It caught Quentin off guard. It had been a long time since he’d felt close to his father. He didn’t think about him much, or his mother. It had never even occurred to him that his father could die.