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Stonecrop Fine Arts Institute is a small private art school located in northern England (in the approximate vicinity of Manchester).

Long ago, the Stonecrop Institute watched over and guarded against Fair Folk activity in the north of England, but that mission is long forgotten. The nearby Fair Folk present a threat—but nowhere near the most pressing one. The Masters long ago turned to ancient magics of blood and sacrifice to keep the fey creatures at bay, weaving them into the works of art they and the students create. Good art takes blood, sweat, and tears, and Stonecrop takes that saying literally. The sorcerers’ rituals poison the earth and produce monsters from the woods and moors that prey on students and local people alike—the ones who aren’t sacrificed in the name of sorcerous art.

History[]

Before becoming a school, Stonecrop was a priests' residence, known as Stonecrop House. The Stonecrop Trust took possession of the building and its large, semi-wild estate in the early 1800s and purchased nearby Athelbarn shortly afterwards. The original vision of the Institute was that it would serve as a retreat for working artists and writers whose interests skewed more toward the arcane and obscure. Those artists were more interested in local history than most and drew extensively on the folklore and legends of the region for their work. They walked the moors and found places of power where the Fair Folk touched the land. They tugged on those strands of magical legacy — and the Fair Folk tugged back.

The Romantic artists, poets, and writers cooped up in Stonecrop soon learned how dangerous the wild country they lived in could be. Beings from the heart of the woods and under the hills made tempting promises: come visit with us and see more clearly and feel more deeply than you ever have before. Listen to our stories and make finer art than any mortal could alone. They associated with the Fair Folk so much that the lines between worlds began to blur, and it became easy for their fey muses to walk among them. The Fair Folk are not kind. The ones that preyed on Stonecrop ripped reason from human minds and replaced it with deep, obsessive passion; the kind of drive that makes an artist lose touch with reality and work themselves until they break.

After a generation of human lives in which the fey treated Stonecrop like their playroom, the humans resisted. They drew on sorcerous power, doused in blood and rooted in stone and earth, to draw and enforce hard boundaries between their world and the Fair Folk’s. They drove their erstwhile muses back beneath their hills and established traditions — like Walking the Stones — to ensure they never came back.

As the decades crawled past, art and magic became inextricably intermingled at Stonecrop. Statues carved from local stone are human-made repositories of power; novels and screenplays encode powerful magics within their prose; artists paint landscapes and portraits with local mud and their subjects’ blood and through their depictions assert control over their subjects; musical performances are rituals. Even as the practice of sorcery expanded, its purpose diminished. The sorcerers of Stonecrop, known as the Masters, forgot about their dangerous muses and sought power for its own sake. And an ugly sort of power it is: one that draws on ancient pagan traditions and powers them with blood and sacrifice. Good art comes from suffering, and it needn’t be the artist who suffers.

In the mid-20th century, Stonecrop went from an artists’ retreat to a fully accredited educational institution, offering degrees in various creative disciplines in exchange for a certain amount of public funding.

Structure[]

Stonecrop is a fairly small school, with between one and two hundred students in each cohort. Its major attractions are the absolute peace and quiet, the dramatic moorland setting, and the talented guest lecturers it brings in every year. Celebrated visual artists, writers, and musicians teach for a semester, then spend another six months, all expenses paid, taking advantage of the solitude to work on their art. Some of those guest lecturers are also sorcerers, sharing knowledge with the Board. The rest are just a cover for those occult activities.

As little as possible is spent on the institute’s educational mission. Most of Stonecrop’s annual income goes to fund visiting lecturers and what’s left is spent covering up disappearances, strange deaths, and the other traces of the sorcerers’ activity. The introduction of tuition fees to British education in the early 21st century meant the Board finally deigned to spend some money on modernizing its campus and facilities, and Stonecrop’s reputation as an undergraduate destination improved immediately.

Stonecrop’s academic year is divided into three terms: Michaelmas, Lent, and Summer. Michaelmas runs from early September to mid-December; Lent from early January to the Friday before Easter; and summer term begins two weeks after the end of Lent term and runs until the beginning of July. Stonecrop’s terms are dictated by and named after Christian festivals, but the Institute itself holds no religious leaning. This is simply an unexamined convention of British private education, and a nod to the house’s origin as the home of Catholic priests.

The institute’s character changes throughout the year. During the Michaelmas term the campus is raucous, with at least one party in progress somewhere at any given time. After the midwinter break it’s quieter; it’s cold and windy, and the long nights and short days incline people to introspection and a focus on their art. Summer term is taken up by assessments and exams, and there’s a feverish intensity to the collective mood. Other institutions have similar tonal shifts throughout the year, but they’re more pronounced at Stonecrop; the seasons exert a stronger influence. Those raucous parties have a way of getting out of hand, leading to acts of inebriated excess that leave people injured or humiliated. The late winter reflection leads to battles with severe depression and self-doubt. And the fervor of the summer term blooms into violence at the slightest provocation.

These emotional tides are a side effect of the Masters’ magic. Each season lends itself to certain acts of sorcery. Autumn is creative and fruitful; winter, a time for patience and restraint; and spring and summer are fierce and passionate. The Masters perform those magics in abundance, affecting the nature of the place and its prevailing emotions.

The Stonecrop campus is an ugly juxtaposition of the main building’s dark grey stone and the brutalist concrete and glass additions made in the mid-1960s. Teaching and administration takes place in the main building. Student facilities and dorms are pushed out into the newer buildings (which are in poor condition after decades of hard use). Even in summer, it’s a cold, damp place. By far the most appealing part of the campus is the grounds, home to numerous formal gardens from the rose garden to the herb garden.

The curriculum’s narrow but deep. The focus is on practical creative works, with a skeletal set of humanities courses to complement them. Just about any art or artisanal craft can form the basis of a degree at Stonecrop, from sculpture, to writing, to film. Digital art and design have become major growth areas since the mid-2010s; people sometimes expect study at Stonecrop to be a step back to different age, but it’s thoroughly modern in its use of new techniques and technology — even if, when the power goes out during a long winter storm, it can feel like being back in an earlier, more perilous time.

Stonecrop may be an institution with a venerable history and deeply-held traditions, but it’s home to a population of entirely modern, forward-looking students. They’re alert, politically active, and deeply curious. They want to know the reasoning behind the university administrations’ decisions — why lecturers and professors like Gabriel Holdstock do next to no student-facing work, or why a relic like Sir Qeith Eugende won’t make way for someone younger and more progressive to run the institute. Some dare to ask whether art as troubling as the pieces on display in the Mortimer Gallery is problematic. Most troublingly, they want to know where the money goes. They ask these questions publicly, amongst themselves, to friends and family, and online.

Campus Locations[]

  • Aldcliffe - The nearest village to Stonecrop, about a half-hour walk away, and the most frequent victim of many of the surrounding supernatural denizens' schemes.
  • The Boggart Hole - The oldest area of woodland on the grounds, also known as Vernouth Clough.
  • Halls of Residence - Also known as the 'seven dwarfs' for their squat, ugly appearance. The mandatory living accommodations for all students.
  • Hedge Maze & Rose Garden - A complex maze of hedges, dead ends, concealed openings, and bridges with a dense rose garden with a crumbling well in the middle of it.
  • The Mortimer Gallery - Used for student exhibitions, displays of graduate work, and to display the faculty’s own greatest triumphs.
  • Stonecrop House - The mostly-medieval house at the core of the campus and the building after which the rest of the Institute is named.

Campus Staff[]

  • Sir Qeith Eugende: Chancellor of the Institute since the late 1970s and de facto leader of the Masters.
  • Gabriel Holdstock: Tenured professor who nevertheless spends very little time teaching.
  • S.B. Ronson: An illustrator, graphic designer, sorcerer, Master, and — most of the time — a wolf.
  • Casper Leek: The curator of The Mortimer Gallery. He sees the art every day and knows there’s something terribly wrong with it. Eugende’s paintings make his skin crawl. Symonds’ sculptures evoke a kind of flight instinct. They repulse him, and twenty years of that sensation builds a certain amount of resentment. He’s taken to stealing archived works and selling them. It makes him feel a little more in control. He doesn’t know he’s unleashing magically charged works of art into the private collectors’ market.
  • Tay Shah: There are instructors like Tay in every university. Overworked, underpaid junior faculty getting increasingly resentful of their tenured colleagues who do half as much work for salaries orders of magnitude better than their own. Tay’s talented. She knows that. She makes audio soundscapes and teaches music production, sound engineering, and an absurd number of other courses because they each pay a pittance. But for some reason, the people who matter won’t pay her any attention.

Campus Students[]

  • Nell Westchester: A talented ceramicist in the final year of her undergraduate degree. Nell’s work mixes local earth with clay for a unique material. She uses materials harvested from around the school in the firing process (a kind of Raku firing). Her tie to the land around Stonecrop’s particularly deep and the Masters keep a watchful eye on her, considering her a potential new member.
  • Stu Foster: Former international under-18s rugby player and now a big, intimidating man. Stu’s a painter with a fascination for the occult that’s opened him up to the presence of ghosts around him. He’s another one the Masters are watching, but for different reasons. A student who can talk to ghosts could learn a lot about the Masters’ activities and cause a lot of trouble. They might have already dealt with Stu except he’s dating Aaron Mackenzie (a fairly new Master), who’s kept him safe so far. Stu’s still on thin ice.
  • Daria Blythe: Daria hates Stonecrop. She would have left during her first year, except she’s from a town an hour away and gets a sizable scholarship as a local student. The place is spooky, her classmates get more creepy every term, and some of the faculty make her skin crawl. She’s a writer and poet, but Stonecrop strips her of inspiration. She’s never accepted any of the weirdness around her, and if somebody — a cell of Hunters, say — started poking around, she’d be more than happy to help them.
  • Ffion Llewellyn: A third-year graduate student and one of the younger Masters.

Notable Alumni[]

Gallery[]

References[]

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