Leigh Bardugo did not stop at one Yale secret society when she wrote Ninth House. The 2019 novel gives all eight of the university's real senior societies, the ones popularly known as tombs for their windowless stone buildings, a distinct invented magical discipline, and Scroll and Key, the second oldest of the eight, founded in 1842, gets one of the novel's more useful powers: portal and travel magic, letting its "Locksmiths" move between places instantaneously.
The choice fits the society's real reputation more snugly than most of the novel's other assignments. Scroll and Key has long been associated, in Yale lore rather than anything the society itself confirms, with connections and access, alumni who can open doors other people cannot. Bardugo's portal magic is a literalization of exactly that reputation: a secret society whose real power is popularly imagined as access becomes, in fiction, a secret society whose magic is literally about opening a way through.
As with the novel's treatment of Wolf's Head, covered elsewhere in this atlas, the point of recording this is not that Ninth House reveals anything true about Scroll and Key's actual activities. It almost certainly does not; the society's real business, whatever it is, is by design not public record. What the novel documents instead is the shape of the popular imagination around a real institution: which reputation a novelist reaches for first when asked to invent a magic system for a name everyone already half-associates with quiet, disproportionate influence.
Two real societies fictionalized in one novel, given two different magics, is itself a small piece of evidence about how differently the public imagines different tombs, even when it knows equally little about either one.