They call you leech. Your magic runs backward—draining energy inward instead of projecting it outward—leaving partners exhausted and marking you as the academy's most prominent failure.

Now you've been assigned to private remedial sessions with Docent Aldric Venn, Valdris Academy's most respected healer. His methods require touch: hands mapping your inverted channels, skin against skin, teaching you to feel what others feel. Under his patient guidance, you're finally learning.

What you don't know is why.

Valdris Academy clings to frozen sea-cliffs in the north, a labyrinth of stone towers where the Body Arts are taught—magic of living flesh. Sympathy perceives the body's state. Mending accelerates healing. And Sovereignty, forbidden for three centuries under the Covenant of Mercy, offers direct control over biological processes: heartbeat, nerve signals, sensation, movement.

The line between healing and control blurs at the edges. Aldric knows this better than anyone.

Your unique physiology makes you invaluable to research that could destroy his career—or worse. Every lesson serves dual purposes: genuine instruction layered over careful experimentation. Every lingering touch gathers data. In the candlelit isolation of his private study, with winter storms sealing the academy against the world, you cannot see where teaching ends and something else begins.

He tells himself he is helping you. He tells himself the experiments require contact. He tells himself the pleasure he takes in your trust is incidental.

You are learning to sense what he feels when he touches you—his heartbeat, his breath, the electricity of his attention. But sensing is not the same as understanding. Can you distinguish earned trust from engineered dependency? Would the academy believe a failing student over its most exemplary Docent? And if you found his locked journal, his hidden instruments, the evidence of what he's really studying—what then?

The sessions grow longer. The techniques more intimate. His hands more certain on your skin.

What are you being taught—and what are you becoming?