And then there were the other moments, when he was violently sick of Brakebills and everything and everyone in it, when it felt lame and pokey and claustrophobic and he was desperate to get out. In four years he’d barely even set foot off the Brakebills campus. My God, he was wearing a school uniform. He’d essentially just spent four extra years in high school! Students had a particular way of speaking at Brakebills, an affected, overly precise, quasi-British diction that came from all those vocal exercises, like they were just freshly back from a Rhodes scholarship and wanted everybody to know it. It made Quentin want to lay about him with an edged weapon. And there was this obsession with naming things. All the rooms at Brakebills had the same identical desk, a broad-shouldered black-cherrywood hulk that must have been ordered up in bulk sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was honeycombed with little drawers and cubbies and pigeonholes, and each of those drawers and cubbies and pigeonholes had its own precious little name. Every time Quentin heard somebody drop a reference to “the Ink Chink” and “the Old Dean’s Ear” he rolled his eyes at Alice. Sweet Jesus, are they serious? We have got to get out of this place.

But where was he going to go, exactly? It was not considered the thing to look panicked or even especially concerned about graduation, but everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin. The bored, bedraggled specters of Alice’s parents haunted him. What was he going to do? What exactly? Every ambition he’d ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity. This wasn’t Fillory, where there was some magical war to be fought. There was no Watcherwoman to be rooted out, no great evil to be vanquished, and without that everything else seemed so mundane and penny-ante. No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters.

It made it worse that he was the only one who seemed to be bothered by it. Lots of students were already actively networking with established magical organizations. Surendra lectured anybody who would listen about a consortium of wizards—whom he hadn’t actually heard from yet, but he was pretty sure they’d basically guaranteed him an internship—who spent their time at suborbital altitudes keeping a weather eye out for stray asteroids and oversize solar flares and other potential planetary-scale disasters. Plenty of students went in for academic research. Alice was looking at a post-graduate program in Glasgow, though the idea of being separated didn’t particularly appeal to either of them, nor did the idea of Quentin’s aimlessly tagging along with her to Scotland.