We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Incandescent, a sapphic dark academia fantasy by Emily Tesh, out from Tor Books on May 13th.
Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings, and securing the school’s boundaries from demonic incursions.
Walden is good at her job—no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It’s her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. And it’s possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from—is herself.
Chapter One
Risk Assessment
Doctor Walden looked glumly at the form she had to fill in. At the top it said RISK ASSESSMENT.
She’d designed the form herself, in a burst of optimism. They would have fewer accidents if people just stopped to think. It was an unfortunate truth that in the Venn diagram of ‘qualified to teach magic’ and ‘still alive,’ the overlap consisted almost entirely of people who had always been much too sensible to accidentally get eaten by a demon. Walden’s colleagues—in particular, those who were her responsibility, the loosely grouped Faculty of Magic here at Chetwood School—possessed, as a body, an admirable and well-judged lack of imagination. In the three years since she took the post as Director of Magic, she had had someone in her office once a term to weep on her shoulder and say but why would anyone ever—
Some of these people had been teaching for years, and yet they still managed to be surprised by how bloody stupid the average teenager could be, given a group of friends to impress and a fifteen-second video about major invocation that they found on the internet somewhere.
Walden’s innovations in her role as Director of Magic, so far: aggressive, highly specialised content filters on the school network—a project which had given her comrades in arms among the IT staff, and perpetual enemies among the students. Arcane safety refreshers every term for every year group, which bored the pants off the older ones but had in fact improved the incident statistics Walden tracked. And, for the teaching staff, the risk assessment form. It was supposed to lead you gently, bullet point by bullet point, through every enormously dangerous and dim thing your students might decide to do. There was a column for planning what you were going to do when the worst inevitably happened. There was a helpful checklist on the back. There was a colourful box at the bottom with a quick banishment cantrip, a basic shielding charm, and the extension number for the infirmary.
Everyone hated it. Even Walden hated it. The last thing you wanted to do at ten o’clock at night when you were teaching first thing tomorrow was fill in the bloody risk assessment.
Unfortunately, being senior management meant you had to stick to your own procedures or live with the knowledge that you were an unspeakable hypocrite. Walden preferred the former. Besides, she had her Upper Sixth first thing for a lab practical, and if you were going to skip a risk assessment, the lesson where you intended to have four seventeen-year-olds summon a medium-sized demon for the first time was not a good choice for it. The old-fashioned wooden wall clock—inherited from the long line of former Headmasters who had previously lived in this Victorian suite of rooms—ticked over to ten past ten. If Walden had another coffee now, she’d get no sleep at all.
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FIRE, she wrote next to the first bullet point, and in the risk mitigation column, FIRE DRILL PROCESSES; EXTINGUISHERS (2) + TRAINED STAFF MEMBER; QUENCHING CANTRIP. She considered for a moment and then wrote out the cantrip as well, in the neat academic notation that was second nature to her: words in black ink, gestural inflections drawn in sharply and accurately with one of the red biros she always had lying on her desk. If you were doing something, you ought to do it properly. Walden believed this deeply, which was probably the reason she kept looking up from her desk at 10 p.m. and realising she’d worked another fourteen-hour day. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in work-life balance. It was just that her career was her life.
She kept working down the list of bullet points, imagining disasters in order of likelihood. The block capitals were also automatic; a precaution, so that someone else could easily refer to the form if Walden herself was unavailable because she’d been eaten by a demon. There was a digital version of the risk assessment, but the thought of wrestling with the printer at this time of night was dire. INJURY (MUNDANE); INJURY (ENCHANTED); SUMMONING ARRAY MISFIRE; LESSER WARD FAILURE. Walden thought about the precise makeup of the sixth form class she was teaching in the morning and added MAGICIAN ERROR (OVERCONFIDENCE) AND MAGICIAN ERROR (UNDERCONFIDENCE). These forms always went fast once you actually started. The electric desk lamp with its old-fashioned fringed green lampshade gave off a warm light, and the wood-panelled walls shone with the rich glow of a century of care and polish. Out of the corner of her eye, Walden spotted a pile of marking she hadn’t done yet and elected to ignore it. Finish this form, go to bed, coffee and double Invocation in the morning.
Just as she had this thought, there was a knock on the door.
Walden gave the door a baleful look. If it was an emergency—at a boarding school you expected the occasional late-night emergency—her colleagues all knew to come straight in. Only one person would have the temerity to come to Walden’s office at this time and knock.
She sighed, pushed the risk assessment form to one side, and arranged her face into an expression of inquiring courtesy. “Come in!”
And—of course—it was Laura Kenning. “Good evening, Ms Walden,” she said.
Every other bloody adult on the school site would have said Sorry to bother you, Saffy. But Kenning had chosen her rules of engagement and Walden would stick to them. “Good evening, Marshal Kenning,” she said. “It’s Doctor Walden, if you don’t mind.”
“Apologies, Doctor,” said Kenning blandly, which Walden, a connoisseur of passive-aggression after a career spent with teenagers, interpreted as You can take your DThau and shove it up your arse.
Kenning, like Walden herself, was young for her post, certainly younger than Walden; perhaps thirty-two or thirty-three. She looked irritatingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It was possible she was on a night patrol and only just starting her shift. Her short fair hair was neatly combed, her silver-chased armguards polished to a mirror shine and strapped precisely in place over the white sleeves of her uniform shirt. Her black leather boots shone almost as bright, and her shortsword hung neatly at her hip. Walden glanced at it with displeasure. It rubbed her the wrong way, seeing the Marshals wander around the school fully armed. There was no need for it, and it sent the wrong message. This place was safe. Walden worked extremely hard to make it safe and keep it safe. No one was going to get eaten by demons here, so Laura Kenning had no need to swagger around the place looking like she was about to go on the hunt.
Marshals were demon hunters and demon killers. The enchanted shortswords were an ancient, traditional part of their official kit. Other traditional accoutrements had been discarded in the last two hundred years. Religious symbols were now felt to be an emotional rather than practical support against demons. Full suits of rune-engraved plate armour were both difficult to make and not noticeably more effective than just making the runes smaller and putting them all on the armguards. But Marshals had other resources besides the swords. Walden had written a paper during her MThau on the unique sets of physically defined spells that they employed in combat. No member of the Order of Marshals would ever call themselves a ‘magician’—that word belonged to the academic tradition—but they were certainly, in the inelegant phrasing of modern generalist accounts of magical practice, magic-users.
So Laura Kenning and her squad had plenty of tools at their disposal for managing the minor demons that cropped up every day in the natural course of putting six hundred teenagers in one place and letting them learn magic. The thing that set an enchanted sword apart was not that it hurt demons, but that it could also, very easily, hurt people. That felt wrong to Walden. Her students should not feel themselves perpetually on edge around Laura Kenning’s squadron of paranoid paramilitary brutes.
Walden would never put it quite like that out loud. The Marshals were of course ‘a valued traditional element of the rich fabric of Chetwood life, here above all to ensure the safety of our students and staff.’ Walden visualised the relevant page of the school prospectus—with a large photograph of Kenning on it; the woman photographed well—and gave the Chief Marshal a bland and professional smile. “What can I do for you, Laura?”
“I’d like to discuss Nicola Conway,” said Kenning.
Nikki Conway: seventeen years old, originally from South London, the most talented teenage magician that Walden had come across in nearly twenty years, and for more than a decade now a ward of the school. There was absolutely nothing to discuss, or at least nothing that the Marshals hadn’t made clear already in their repeated, annual formal protests, which they had been making ever since Nikki started studying magic in Year Seven—like every single child in the school—years before Kenning even took this job. On top of that, Kenning seemed to take Walden’s polite stonewalling about the whole thing personally. Over the last three years, they had had this conversation so many times that Walden could probably have done it in her sleep. It had been bad enough during Nikki’s GCSEs, and even worse since she had started her Invocation A-level.
The Marshals’ problem with Nikki was not based on her grades (outstanding) or her character (remarkably level-headed, for a teenager). It was simply that when she was seven years old, Nikki had been responsible for the demonic incursion that had killed her mother, her father, and her younger brother. Marshals did not believe in extenuating circumstances. They were not interested in second chances.
And this was the real core of why Walden found herself having a conversation like this one with Kenning every couple of weeks. Both of them—Walden as Director of Magic, Kenning as Chief Marshal—were responsible for the magical security of the school. Walden, at deputy head level, technically outranked Kenning within the school hierarchy. But the school’s squadron of Marshals reported not to her—which they should, in Walden’s opinion—but to Chetwood’s Board of Governors on the one hand, and the Knightly Council of the Reverend Order of Marshals (District of Buckinghamshire) on the other.
In an ideal world they would have been working harmoniously together to share expertise on magical security issues. The problem was that they disagreed profoundly about nearly every issue. Sometimes they disagreed that there even was an issue. Kenning clearly felt she outranked Walden on any issue with potential demonic involvement. As far as Walden could tell, Kenning’s position was that demons were so dangerous that no one should ever risk doing any magic at all. Which was certainly a view, and she was entitled to hold it; but then why on earth take a job at a school which taught magic?
Walden was winning the Nikki Conway debate, and intended to continue doing so. Kenning was not going to get any benefit from her 10 p.m. ambush.
“As you are no doubt aware, I’m concerned, Dr Walden,” said Kenning. “Perhaps you’re not aware that the best predictor of a serious incursion is the magician’s history? If it happened once, it’s infinitely more likely to happen again. And we both know Nicola wouldn’t even be here if it hadn’t happened once.”
“I’m familiar with the research, yes. The study you’re talking about—”
“—doesn’t control for age, you’re going to say. But caution is never a bad idea. I know Nicola is your star pupil.” (Walden barely resisted grinding her teeth.) “I just think your relationship with her, as her teacher—especially given her family situation—is getting in the way here.”
“Are you questioning my judgement, Marshal?”
Kenning said, “That’s my job.”
A pause. A chill in the room was not a demon—though Walden was almost tempted, just to even things up a bit—but the shared knowledge of an unspoken threat: Kenning could try to go over Walden’s head, to the District Commissioner of the Marshals, or else to the school governors.
It wouldn’t work. Walden would win those arguments too. But it would be extremely annoying to have to attend more meetings.
“I’ve become aware that you’re teaching a practical tomorrow morning,” Kenning said. “Which I should really have known already. May I repeat my request for clear schemes of work, with dates, at the start of term?”
“We do our best, Marshal,” said Walden, “but teachers’ plans seldom resist first contact with the enemy.”
Kenning didn’t even smile. “Nicola must be excluded from that lesson.”
“Request denied,” said Walden, as if it had been a request. “I would much rather Nikki learn advanced invocation where I can see her than try it herself unsupervised.”
“You admit that she might try it unsupervised?”
“Show me a young person with her brains and talent who wouldn’t,” said Walden. “Marshal, I understand your concern. As you say, it’s your job. My job, among other things, is to consider the needs of our students. I don’t deny that you’re an expert on demons; will you grant that I am an expert on teenagers?” And on demons, more than you, she could have said. She had multiple university degrees in academic magic. Kenning had the eighteen-week Marshal training course, probably over a decade ago now, and whatever she’d picked up along the way in terms of practical experience since then. There was no comparison. But Kenning already knew all of that—Ms Walden, indeed—and Walden didn’t need to antagonise her any more than she already was.
Instead she tried—not for the first time—being straightforward and reasonable. “Nicola Conway is going to deal with demons in her life. She is far too talented to avoid it. She is already considerably more thoughtful, and more careful, than most magicians her age—precisely because of the history that worries you so much. In my professional judgement, she and her classmates are ready for this practical. Delaying it would only create more risk of a demonic incursion. And if one begins, I would rather it happened in front of me, in a lab I warded myself, rather than in someone’s bedroom at two in the morning.”
“I’ll be observing,” said Kenning.
“We’d be delighted to have you,” Walden lied.
They stared at each other a moment longer. Walden became aware that she was wearing a white towelling dressing gown over a ratty set of pyjamas she’d owned since university. If Kenning was going to make a habit of dropping in impeccably uniformed and unannounced at this time of night, then Walden would have to start spending her evenings in the outfits she thought of as her professional armour—sharply cut blazers, A-line skirts, a brooch from the jewellery box she’d inherited from her grandmother.
“I apologise for disturbing you so late,” said Kenning abruptly.
You could have led with that, Walden thought. “Not at all,” she said. “I’m always willing to listen to my colleagues’ concerns. I’ll see you in the morning, Marshal.”
“Did you know that clock is possessed?” Kenning said, gesturing to the wall clock. “I can sort it out for you.”
“That’s quite all right,” said Walden. “It’s not doing any harm.”
“It’s a demon.”
“Only a very small one,” Walden said soothingly. “Good night, Marshal.”
After Kenning was gone, Walden sat back in her chair and sighed. The risk assessment form glared accusingly up from her desk. The wall clock, in an unusual burst of activity, gave out thirteen very fast chimes and then manifested a cuckoo which emerged with glowing red eyes, opened its beak, and screamed.
“Yes, yes, I don’t like her either,” Walden said, and picked up her pen for the next bullet point. DEMONIC INCURSION, she wrote. In the risk mitigation column, she put: ME.
Excerpted from The Incandescent, copyright © 2025 by Emily Tesh.