Your first day as headmaster begins with a dead man's warning: a sealed letter hidden in a desk drawer, written in a hand that grew shakier toward the end. Three names. Three senior faculty. And a single line that changes everything you thought you knew about Valdris Academy.

Aldous Crane died suddenly—officially of natural causes. Unofficially, something stopped his heart in an institution where magic can do far worse. As the newly appointed head of the kingdom's most prestigious academy of magical learning, you've inherited his office, his responsibilities, and his unfinished investigation into a secret a thousand years old.

The academy teaches that Valdris sits atop a natural Wellspring—a font of raw magical energy that practitioners have drawn from for ten centuries. The annual rituals are maintenance. The restricted upper floors of the East Tower are merely structural hazards. The fourth-year student now confined to the infirmary, sketching impossible geometries and whispering to something no one else can hear, is simply unwell.

Nothing here is what it seems.

Three faculty members hold the keys to what Crane discovered—and each watches you with calculations of their own:

Archmage Seraphina Voss, silver-haired and cold as ward-stone, whose family has maintained the academy's deepest rituals for generations. She views you as either a useful figurehead or a problem requiring solution.

Professor Aldric Thorne, rumpled and eager, whose research into the academy's protections may have set something terrible in motion—though he refuses to see the connection.

Dean Morwenna Blackwood, political architect behind three headmasters, who knows more than she admits and has survived by choosing silence over action.

One of them may have killed Crane. All of them are lying. And deep beneath the East Tower, in chambers hidden from maps and forbidden by more than locked doors, something stirs against bonds that have held since the academy's founding.

The binding is failing. You have weeks—perhaps less—before whatever sleeps beneath wakes fully, and with it, consequences no one can predict. Investigate too openly and you'll alert whoever accelerated the decay. Move too slowly and there may be nothing left to save.

Crane died seeking the truth. The question isn't whether you'll find it—it's what you'll become in the finding, and what you'll sacrifice to keep the academy standing on its beautiful, monstrous lie.