Dean Fogg lit more candles in assorted brass candlesticks, making a circle within their larger circle. They couldn’t have been more than fifty yards down, but it felt like they were a solid mile beneath the earth, entombed alive, forgotten by the rest of the world.

“In case you’re wondering why we’re down here,” Fogg said, “it’s because I wanted to get us outside the Brakebills Protective Cordon. That’s a defensive magical barrier that extends out from the House in all directions. That inscribed brass hatch we opened was a gateway through it.”

The darkness swallowed his words as soon as he uttered them.

“It’s a little unsettling, yes? But it’s appropriate, because unlike me you’ll be spending the rest of your lives out here. Most years, the point of coming down here is to scare you with ghost stories about the outside world. In your case I don’t think that will be necessary. You’ve witnessed firsthand the destructive power that some magical entities possess.

“It’s unlikely you’ll ever see anything as bad as what happened on the day of the Beast. But remember that what happened that day can happen again. Those of you who were in the auditorium that day, especially, will carry the mark of it forever. You will never forget the Beast, and you can be sure it won’t forget you either.

“Forgive me if I lecture you, but it’s the last chance I’m going to get.”

Quentin was sitting opposite Fogg in the circle—they had all taken seats on the smooth stone floor—and his mild, clean-shaven face floated in the darkness like an apparition. Both bottles of whiskey reached Quentin simultaneously, and he gamely took a sip from each, one in each hand, and passed them on.

“Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic,” Fogg said expansively. “It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a little too perfect, don’t you think? If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

“Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

“But somewhere in the heat of magic that boundary between word and thing ruptures. It cracks, and the one flows back into the other, and the two melt together and fuse. Language gets tangled up with the world it describes.