Elden Ring Meeting Place & Glintstone Key: How to get into Raya Lucaria Academy

Your adventure across The Lands Between in Elden Ring involves jumping through hoops to access a variety of locations across the game world - and one of the first story-critical roadblocks you’ll meet is finding a Glintstone Key to access Raya Lucaria Academy - which requires tracking down a mysterious Meeting Place marked on a hastily-scribbled map.

Raya Lucaria Academy is important as it’s the second of Elden Ring’s major ‘legacy dungeons’ - and by major, we mean those that hold the lords who each hold Great Runes and drop Remembrance items for you to use. In this instance, defeating Rennala in this dungeon also unlocks Elden Ring’s character respec options to re-spend your attributes and level up stats - so it’s a dungeon well worth tackling, if you can gain entry.

Broadly speaking, we’d recommend tackling Raya Lucaria Academy second - beat Margit the Fell Omen, get into Stormveil Castle, and topple Godrick the Grafted. After that, make your way to the academy - which leads us to the purpose of this guide… the Meeting Place and the Glintstone Key. 

The Meeting Place & the Glintstone Key in Elden Ring

Chances are, the first mention you’ll hear of the Glintstone Key is from NPC Sorcerer Thops, who wants one to gain access to the school where he’s meant to be studying - but he’s been locked out. If you didn’t encounter Thops at the Church of Irith, you’ll quickly learn that you need an Academy Glintstone Key to enter the next dungeon - as you won’t be able to get in.

At the entrance of the Academy, you’ll find a corpse of an NPC that, when looted, gives you the Meeting Place Map key item - a map of limited usefulness that shows a place where people from Elden Ring’s prestigious magical academy were due to meet up. The implication, of course, is that there should be somebody with an Academy Glintstone Key at this location. 

If you look at the map, you’ll see a representation of the Academy on the right-hand side of it, and some ruins below that. Those ruins represent the Temple Quarter, which is just to the immediate south-west of the Academy in the watery area of Liurnia of the Lakes. Temple Quarter is also home to a Site of Grace. 

From that, you can probably puzzle out the location - but here’s the full spoiler of where the Meeting Place is located:

Anyway, you can see on that map that the meeting place is marked with one of the green markers - one that shows a four-legged creature. That’s because, when you get there, you’ll find that The Meeting Place is guarded by a Glintstone Dragon.

At this point, you have two choices to get the Academy Glintstone Key from the Meeting Place:

• Fight the Glintstone Dragon. It isn’t that much more difficult than the dragon you can encounter in the lake in the middle of Limgrave, Elden Ring’s starting area. With the Glintstone Dragon out of the way, you can get stuck in and pick up the Academy Key that’s hiding in its lair.
• Dodge the Dragon, grab the Key. The Glintstone Academy Key is hiding at the back of the Dragon’s Lair, a semicircular outcropping of rock. There’s a dead body of an academy sorcerer there who clearly didn’t survive an encounter with this rather large fellow. If you aggro the Dragon, you can draw it out from its lair - then ride Torrent into it, snatching the loot before riding away. The dragon will still be there to fight later on, if you so wish.

Regardless of what you choose, the Glintstone Academy Key will let you in and out of Raya Lucaria Academy - letting you tackle Elden Ring’s next major dungeon. Good luck in there!

Getting a second Glintstone Key

It’s worth noting that you cannot give that first Glintstone Key to Sorcerer Thops in order to complete his side quest. Instead, you have to find a second key for Thops, as Elden Ring assumes you’ll want to hold on to one key in order to continue to get in and out of the academy. 

The second Glintstone Academy Key is actually inside the Academy itself - found on a corpse hanging from a chandelier inside the ‘Church of the Cuckoo’ building that’s also home to a Site of Grace. However, you have to approach this from an entirely different angle: the rooftops. 

To reach the second Glintstone Key, you’ll need to reach the Debate Parlor Site of Grace, which is unlocked by beating the Red Wolf mini-boss. After that Site of Grace, there’s a courtyard. On the left hand side of this Courtyard (approaching from the Debate Parlor) you can climb rubble and then stairs to get to a railing where you can jump off, eventually reaching the rooftops of the Academy. From there, you can work your way back to the Church and enter through a high window into its rafters - where you can drop down to get this second key. 

If you want a more in-depth description of how to reach these rooftops, check out our guide on the Erudition Gesture Converted Tower Puzzles - which also require an item from the rooftops. That guide has a more detailed explanation of how to reach the roof. There’s an extremely rare Imbued Stone Key up there, too - the rooftops are full of good stuff!

When you have the second key, you can give it to Thops to make his day and close off his side quest. Nice work!