Goulhearth’s Marvelous Institute of Wizardry

There was once a school so secret, so enchanted, that only the truly curious could ever stumble upon it. Nestled between jagged emerald mountains and hidden beneath a sky of shimmering auroras, stood Goulhearth’s Marvelous Institute of Wizardry and Other Magical Creations—a place of swirling mysteries, mischievous spells, and boundless wonder.

The Institute didn’t appear on maps. You couldn’t walk there, fly there, or swim there. It revealed itself only to those with a spark of untamed imagination—those who dared to dream in colors no one had ever named.

For eleven-year-old Ivy Thistle, that spark came on a sleepy afternoon while chasing her cat through the woods behind her grandmother’s cottage. One moment she was ducking under thorny brambles, and the next, she found herself standing in front of a towering iron gate wrapped in ivy and carved with dancing runes. On the gate hung a plaque that read:

“Goulhearth’s Marvelous Institute of Wizardry and Other Magical Creations:

Wanderers Welcome, Reality Optional.”

The gates creaked open on their own, and Ivy, curiosity crackling in her bones, stepped through.

The world changed.

She was now standing on floating cobblestone steps that wound upward into the sky. Around her, broomsticks zoomed by with students laughing in midair. A giant pink salamander in a waistcoat handed out welcome scrolls. Trees whispered secrets. A moonbeam peeled itself from the sky and wrapped gently around her wrist like a bracelet. Magic pulsed in every direction.

Professor Goulhearth himself was waiting at the top of the stairs. He looked quite ordinary, aside from his ever-changing eyes (which flickered between galaxies and thunderclouds) and the fact that his cloak occasionally turned into flocks of birds.

“Ah! Another mind unstuck from the usual,” he greeted with a grin that smelled faintly of peppermint and lightning. “Welcome, Miss Thistle. Your imagination has passed the entrance exam.”

Over the next few weeks, Ivy discovered that Goulhearth’s Institute wasn’t just a school. It was a living, breathing universe made from imagination, invention, and just a pinch of mayhem. Each hallway led somewhere different—sometimes even to other dimensions.

Students didn’t take normal classes. Instead, they enrolled in courses like:

Potion Poetry 101 – crafting magical brews through rhyming couplets.

Beastly Etiquette – how to host tea parties with dragons, griffins, and the occasional kraken.

Unpredictable Invention – where students built devices like time-skipping alarm clocks and umbrellas that sang when it rained.

Dreamwalking – a subject where they learned to enter other people’s dreams… and rearrange the furniture.

Ivy’s favorite class, however, was Wandless Wondering, taught by a pair of identical twins who were part cloud. The course taught students to cast spells without wands by channeling pure emotion—joy turned into fireworks, sadness into shimmering silver rain, and curiosity into doors that opened to secret realms.

Every student was given a laboratory, which adjusted itself based on the student’s personality. Ivy’s was a cozy glass dome filled with talking books, purring plants, and a fireplace that told bedtime stories. She spent hours there tinkering with magical inventions, like boots that danced on their own and mirrors that offered compliments.

But not everything was sparkles and spells.

One day, the sky cracked.

A void opened—a patch of the world where imagination had vanished. It spread quickly, devouring parts of the Institute. Color drained, laughter dimmed, and even the pink salamander lost his glow.

Goulhearth called an emergency gathering.

“The Void,” he explained, “feeds on forgotten dreams and discarded wonders. It is born when magic is ignored, when people grow too serious, too afraid to create.”

To stop it, the students had to craft something powerful—not a weapon, but a story, a magical creation that could inspire forgotten imaginations across the world.

Ivy had an idea.

With the help of her classmates, she built a spell unlike any other: a swirling storm of stories, each woven from the heart of a student’s imagination. Together, they sent it flying out into the real world, disguised as books, toys, songs, and strange inventions left on doorsteps. Wherever their creations landed, magic returned. Children dreamed wilder. Adults remembered their childhood wonder.

And slowly, the Void began to shrink.

Goulhearth smiled. “You’ve done more than save the Institute. You’ve reminded the world that magic was never gone—it was just waiting to be believed in again.”

Ivy stayed at the Institute for many years, eventually becoming a professor of Curiosity and Wild Ideas. But she never forgot the lesson she learned her first day: