"Cleaner," is more a gesture at a joke than an actual attempt at humor; a verbal placeholder while he thinks about what he'd like to say. He runs a fingertip along the edge of a shelf, pausing where a particular volume is clearly missing.

"It's a bit strange, trying to reconcile what it felt like, at the time, and what I can see in hindsight. But even with that aside, it was clean, actually. Orderly. Well-lit by torches and sconces, even if sunlight was relatively scarce in most of the places mages spent their time." He turns back to Stephen properly. "I think... it is easy to look at it, now that it's empty, as a prison. And there are ways that it was that. But it was also a school, and a community, and..."

Julius exhales, almost a sigh. "You have to understand, I came here when I was six. And suddenly I was told I was clever and special and that I had potential." And though Julius doesn't articulate it, it's fair to guess that he wasn't hearing those things before Kinloch Hold. "They were holding me here with things other than the stone walls and the lake, I can say in hindsight. But also, the bonds I made with the other mages here, those weren't less real for being partly due to forced proximity. People still had friendships and rivalries and love affairs here, hard as it may be to picture now."