The professors lecture on your death in their history courses. You prefer it that way—anonymous, invisible, just a groundskeeper at Veilstone Academy. The legendary adventurer died with the rest of the Cinderbrand Company. The person who tends the hedges is no one at all.

That careful anonymity shatters when three students cross the Pale Veil on a dare and only two return.

The Thornwood shouldn't exist. A forest corrupted during the Sundering War, where paths loop back on themselves, seasons bleed into adjacent clearings, and pale figures watch from distances that don't resolve correctly. Your company sealed the thing at its heart. That seal cost everyone you loved. You know the forest's geometry, its rules, its horrors.

You may be the only person capable of bringing Edmund Ashworth back alive.

But retrieving him means revealing yourself. It means skills you've spent years forgetting, instincts you've worked to bury, a blade wrapped in oilcloth beneath your floorboards. The official search parties have already failed. The surviving students are desperate enough to investigate their rescuer. Professor Thorne watches you with a soldier's suspicion—he knows what a veteran looks like, even one trying to hide. And Headmistress Solveig has been watching far longer than you realized, patient as a woman playing chess against someone who doesn't know they're in a game.

Something is testing the seal. Something that wears reality like an ill-fitting coat. The Thornwood is stirring, and it remembers.

This is a slow-burn scenario of buried identity and creeping wrongness—academic tension giving way to folkloric horror as the forest's corruption spreads. Navigate faculty suspicion and student desperation. Reclaim skills you hoped to forget. Confront survivor's guilt given terrible form.

A student is dying in a forest that consumed everyone you loved. Your anonymity or his life—you cannot protect both. And deep in the Thornwood, something is waiting to see which you choose.