The Hallows Academy

Origins

The Hallows Academy grew out of necessity rather than design. From the founding of Black Hallows in 1862, the breeding facility required a continuous supply of trained workers — animal handlers who understood the behavioural needs of captive species, agricultural workers capable of managing Clivilian-adapted crops, veterinary assistants who could support the facility's small medical team, and land managers who could maintain the expanding network of enclosures and ecological restoration zones on the plains. For nearly sixty years, this training was conducted informally. Dr. Emiliana Greyson established the tradition of taking on apprentices in the settlement's earliest years, pairing young residents with experienced staff and passing down practical knowledge through observation and supervised work. The system functioned adequately for a settlement of a few hundred people, but it was fragile — dependent on individual relationships and vulnerable to the loss of any single expert.

By the early twentieth century, Black Hallows had grown to approximately nine hundred residents, and the breeding facility's operations had expanded to a complexity that informal apprenticeship could no longer adequately serve. Maxwell Black, who had led the facility's breeding programmes since 1903, recognised that the settlement's isolation — 140 kilometres from Grenzfeld, with no Portal access and limited contact with the wider region — made the structured transmission of knowledge an existential priority. If expertise died with its holders, the facility's work could be set back by a generation.

Establishment

The Hallows Academy was formally established on 6 March 1921. The name was chosen deliberately to reflect the institution's identity as something rooted in Black Hallows itself rather than borrowed from Earth traditions that the settlement's residents were now generations removed from. It was not a university, and it did not aspire to be one. It was a practical training institution, designed to produce the skilled workforce that the breeding facility and the settlement required.

The Academy was initially housed within the cliff complex, occupying a series of chambers adjacent to the facility's laboratories and veterinary surgery on the middle levels of the cliff face. The first intake comprised fourteen students drawn from the settlement's families, ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-two. The founding curriculum covered five core disciplines: animal husbandry and care, agricultural science, ecological land management, basic veterinary practice, and construction and quarrying techniques adapted for Clivilian conditions. Each discipline combined classroom instruction with practical placements within the facility and on the settlement's agricultural land.

Maxwell Black served as the Academy's first director, a role he held alongside his leadership of the breeding programmes until his daughter Helena assumed increasing responsibility for the facility's scientific direction in the 1930s. The teaching staff were drawn entirely from the facility's existing workforce — experienced handlers, veterinarians, and land managers who took on instructional duties in addition to their primary roles. For the first two decades of its existence, the Academy had no dedicated teaching staff at all.

Curriculum and Character

The Academy's curriculum evolved over the decades in response to the facility's changing needs, but its fundamental character remained constant: it trained people to do practical work, and it did so through a combination of structured instruction and hands-on experience that reflected the apprenticeship tradition from which it had grown.

The animal husbandry programme was the Academy's largest and most respected discipline, producing the handlers, keepers, and breeding technicians who staffed the facility's enclosures. Students spent the majority of their training working directly with animals under the supervision of experienced staff, learning feeding regimes, behavioural observation, health monitoring, and the breeding protocols that the facility had developed over decades. Graduates of this programme formed the backbone of the facility's operations, and families such as the Riveras produced multiple generations of Academy-trained handlers. Alex Morgan Rivera, born in Black Hallows in 1984 and later a Wildlife Biologist and Rehabilitation Specialist at the facility, trained at the Academy before pursuing more advanced study at the Greyson Institute.

The agricultural science programme trained the workers who maintained the settlement's food production — a critical function in a community that could not import staples from Earth and relied on its own cultivated land to feed both its human population and its growing collection of animals. The programme drew on the soil improvement techniques that Dr. Tobias Black had pioneered in the settlement's earliest decades and incorporated the successive adaptations that generations of Clivilian farming had produced.

The ecological land management programme trained the teams responsible for maintaining the facility's outdoor enclosures and the broader ecological restoration zones that Dr. Ivor Galloway's work had established from the 1960s onward. This programme grew substantially in the second half of the twentieth century as the restoration zones expanded and their management became increasingly complex.

The construction and quarrying programme was unique to Black Hallows, reflecting the settlement's distinctive geography. Students learned the techniques of working the basalt cliff face — carving, shoring, ventilating, and connecting the chambers that housed the settlement's institutional spaces — as well as the construction methods used for structures on the plains. This programme ensured that the physical expansion of both the settlement and the facility could continue without dependence on external labour.

For disciplines beyond the Academy's scope — advanced medicine, law, engineering, the humanities — Black Hallows residents historically travelled to Grenzfeld, 140 kilometres to the southwest, which maintained a broader educational tradition accumulated over its longer history. This arrangement reinforced the connection between the two settlements even as their formal relationship cooled, and it meant that many Black Hallows residents spent formative years in Grenzfeld before returning to apply their skills at home.

The Greyson Institute

The founding of the Greyson Institute in 1948 created a second educational tier within Black Hallows that was distinct from but closely connected to the Academy. Where the Academy trained the practical workforce, the Greyson Institute focused on research — genetics, evolutionary biology, ecological theory, and the study of Clivilian adaptation. Students who demonstrated exceptional aptitude at the Academy were encouraged to continue their education at the Institute, which provided the facility's scientific leadership with its next generation of researchers.

The relationship between the two institutions was complementary rather than hierarchical. The Academy produced the handlers, land managers, and veterinary assistants who kept the facility running day to day. The Institute produced the scientists and theorists who directed the facility's research programmes and advanced its understanding of Clivilian evolutionary processes. Both were essential, and the facility could not have functioned without either.

Post-2022 Transformation

The arrival of the CGRN in 2022 and the subsequent Bixbus-driven expansion of Black Hallows transformed the Hallows Academy as profoundly as it transformed the settlement itself.

The Academy's original cliff chambers, which had adequately served a student body of forty to sixty at any given time, were wholly insufficient for the demands of a settlement whose population surged from 6,500 to over 100,000 by the end of 2024. The Clivilian Ecological Seeding Programme alone required thousands of trained animal handlers, enclosure technicians, ecological field workers, and logistics specialists — roles that the Academy was uniquely positioned to train for, but at a scale that dwarfed anything in its history.

In early 2023, the Academy established its first satellite campus on the plains south of the cliff complex, housed in purpose-built structures funded by the Bixbus development programme. A second satellite campus followed in late 2023, and a third in 2024. The curriculum expanded to include new disciplines demanded by the Seeding Programme: species transport and logistics, biome enclosure design and maintenance, field ecology and release-site management, and climate-control systems operation. Teaching staff, historically drawn from the facility's own workforce, were supplemented by specialists recruited through Bixbus from settlements across the region and, in some cases, directly from Earth.

The expansion brought opportunities and tensions in equal measure. The Academy's original character — intimate, practical, rooted in the apprenticeship tradition — was difficult to maintain at scale. Long-standing instructors accustomed to training cohorts of a dozen students found themselves overseeing programmes with hundreds of enrolments. The influx of Bixbus-recruited teaching staff introduced methods and expectations that did not always align with the Academy's established culture. Some within the Black Hallows community viewed the expansion as a necessary evolution; others saw it as a dilution of the institution that had sustained the settlement's expertise for over a century.

By early 2026, the Hallows Academy operated across four campuses with a combined enrolment exceeding 3,000 students — a figure that was projected to grow substantially as the Seeding Programme scaled toward its 2030 targets. The original cliff chambers remained in use as the Academy's administrative headquarters and as the home of its oldest and most respected programme, animal husbandry, where the tradition of learning through direct work with living animals under the supervision of experienced handlers continued much as it had since Dr. Greyson first took on apprentices in the 1860s.