"With Changelings it's children, so if you have to choose between letting a trolley run over a Changeling or an Erinye pick the Erinye, but aside from that no, not anyone in particular."

"Do you like, carry insurance that covers getting them back after - or can you not tell who it was -"

"Their body is transformed into the body of the Erinyes who was slain, they don't leave a corpse. I have a living will that if I'm in mortally horrible condition and nobody has a curative that'll take care of it before I actually die I'm to be ritually sacrificed for something, because that delays the process by a hundred years and then my family can just use normal resurrection magic on me."

"...ritual sacrifice comes up a weird number of times in conversations about witch magic. I'm not saying wizards never do it but it's not, uh, standard."

"It's not standard among anyone with a smidge of an ethic but there are a lot of cases where it can come up and sometimes those are relevant. I wasn't actively creeped out by it before this conversation but it is, objectively, somewhat concerning that we have more ritual sacrifice in our magic system than you do." 

"There are Hespatian Families where it absolutely is standard. Honestly I suspect it would be more standard if not for the Veil, which, uh, is an argument in its favor if not a decisive one." 

"Draining mana from people - or even from, like, complex enough animals, anything past bugs - is called 'maleficing', among wizards, and it is not unheard of because it's a very quick way around the effort- and suffering-based mana generation standard, but it's also incredibly threatening because if a fight with a maleficer starts they will get more powerful while their opponents get less powerful and so it is in everybody else's interests to put down an even slightly unstable-looking maleficer situation immediately. Pisa is an enclave that makes an institution of, like, rat-level maleficing, and they make people a little nervous but they keep a handle on it consistently enough that they can carry on with it."

"I don't think I've ever heard of anyone managing to sacrifice another witch during a fight. --Except maybe Outsiders, and everyone does in fact crack down on those hard. Not just for that reason though."

"This is one of the main reasons most witches tend to associate with factions, of one size or another, to one degree or another. Being a student at Arcadia is one factional connection; having a family of mostly witches is another; every witch friend you make is one very small faction. And the more total factional weight you have, the more likely it is that if you go missing, somebody is going to try hard enough to find out what happened that they succeed, and the more likely it is that enough people are going to come down on them for it to hurt."

"Huh. I don't think I'd describe wizard politics that way but then again I have only been exposed to Scholomance-internal wizard politics and that somewhat peripherally."

"I think our politics are probably shaped by the fact that most people are never targeted for human sacrifice."

"Most wizards never have a maleficer come after them specifically either."

"--Right, but maleficaria do all the time, and we don't have as many or as dangerous monsters either."

"Oh, gotcha. All wizards have maleficaria come after us all the time."

"I look forward to seeing how wizard politics change going forward once we perform armageddon on the mals and introduce immortality-inducing magic."

"It'll be great! Maybe we can do magic in public!"

Sigh. "That one we have no such avenue to fixing, on our end."

"It'd be a way for you to be cooler."

"Goodness knows we're a little short on them, though perhaps with all the energy defending against mals suddenly freed up there will be a magical Renaissance, stranger things have happened."

"Maybe you and that girl with the Void affinity can get somewhere on void-ships and/or finding destroyed enclaves."

"Oooh, yeah, I should text Lucy's mom and see if they made it out. ...not sure what practical use void ships would have in the absence of mals?" Bella pulls out her phone to put in the number from Lucy.

"They went out with Manchester, right?"

"Void ships could be used to go from place to place! Like regular ships."

hi lucy and wilbur's mom this is bella, rumors of my death greatly exaggerated, how are you and yours

"Void ships could carry things in them! Things that might be awkward to haul through a portal other people were using. I do agree that the priority goes way, way down if the honeypot works, though."