Serpent of Evil – The Student

he year: 1887 – The place: Cambridge University, England

Elinor doesn’t think much of marrying rich. She would rather go to university, still an unusual step for women in 1887. Girton College in Cambridge is an early university institution for women only. She wants to be accepted there.

But a gruesome encounter with a giant snake monster – invisible to other people – gives Elinor access to a completely different university institute: Royston College, a mage lodge disguised as part of Cambridge University with many rules and even more secrets.

Elinor is the first woman to be offered an academic education in arcane sciences: Magic. Only people with a basic talent for magic are admitted to Royston. Elinor’s fellow students include pure humans, but also hybrid beings with Fey heritage, inscrutable, unpredictable and dangerous, just like the Fey themselves, who roam the human world unrecognized as nightmare legends made flesh. But whatever they are, they are all men.

Of course, among all the men, there are also some that Elinor likes more than a little. But as the only female student, she has to keep her distance. – Not always easy and sometimes impossible.

In the face of considerable attempts at discrimination by some of her fellow students and professors, Elinor has to prove in an ossified male world that she is at least as good as her male fellow students. The academic demands are high: new languages, old languages, comparative history and religious studies, ethnology, philosophy, focus and the exercise of arcane power.

She is hunted by the evil summoner of the serpent monster, while at the same time a group of inquisitors from a fanatically religious secret society arrives in Cambridge to wipe out forever anything they deem demonic (fey) or heretical (magically gifted) – with deadly precision. In this murderous way, they want to turn humanity into their limited vision of “God’s children”.