A Deadly Education characters

Also known as Galadriel Higgins, Galadriel

Appears from the start

A senior at the Scholomance, born to a Welsh healer and a father from an Indian wizarding family who died before she was born. Her magical affinity runs toward destruction and death on a catastrophic scale, and a family prophecy warns that she will bring ruin to the enclaves, so she deliberately starves that talent and gets by on stubbornness and painstakingly earned craft. Prickly, poor, and unaffiliated with any enclave, she resents the students who coast on inherited power while she scrapes for every scrap of mana. She goes by El rather than Galadriel.

Appears from the start

A boy from the New York enclave with a rare gift for sensing and killing maleficaria, the monsters that hunt students throughout the school. He has spent years saving classmates almost compulsively, which has made him the closest thing the Scholomance has to a celebrity. When he keeps rescuing El, she is more irritated than grateful, convinced his heroics are wrecking the reputation she has worked to protect. Earnest and a little lost when he is not fighting, he finds her hostility oddly refreshing.

First appears in chapter 2

An artificer with a practical, deal-making streak, skilled at building and repairing magical objects. She becomes one of the first students willing to treat El as a possible ally rather than a threat, trading favors and eventually agreeing to help craft a graduation weapon with her. Level-headed and quietly generous, she anchors the small circle of independent students forming around El.

First appears in chapter 3

An independent student from a large Chinese wizarding family, talented with music and with the mice she keeps as familiars. Under pressure to succeed for relatives who pooled their resources to send her, she has drifted toward the tempting shortcut of dark magic, but her growing friendship with El and Aadhya helps pull her back from it. Reserved and watchful, she proves a steady partner in their graduation alliance.

Also known as Chloe Rasmussen

First appears in chapter 5

A student of the New York enclave and one of Orion's friends, accustomed to the security that enclave membership and shared power reserves provide. Her easy assumptions about El cause friction at first, but through her El gets a real look at how enclave privilege works from the inside, and the two slowly begin to see each other differently.

Appears from the start

El's mother, a gentle and widely loved healer who raised her in a Welsh commune far from any enclave. She refuses to use dark magic on principle and has always urged El toward the same restraint, even as El's frightening affinity strains against that teaching. Though absent from the school, her love and her example shape every hard choice El makes there.