You are warm, breathing, and delicious—and you've just walked into a school where everyone is dead and most of them are hungry.

Mortis Umbra Academy has existed for millennia in the Pallid Reach, a liminal dimension where the boundary between life and death grows thin. Here, vampires study predation ethics, ghosts haunt library stacks that extend into impossible spaces, and liches debate necromantic theory in lecture halls older than human civilization. The dead learn to navigate the shadows of the mortal world—and now, under the Treaty of the Veil, they've accepted their first living student.

You.

The Treaty guarantees your safety. Officially. On paper. But the undead are eternal, and paper burns so easily.

Your assigned guide is Seraphina Voss, a vampire of rigid control and minor bloodline who resents this duty almost as much as she resents how extraordinary you smell. Cornelius Ashford, a ghost dead for four centuries, wants desperately to be your friend—he remembers warmth, remembers connection, and he's reaching for you with hands that pass through everything solid. Malachar Crane, scion of an ancient vampire house, sees your presence as an insult to undead sovereignty and would happily arrange an accident that brings the whole Treaty crashing down.

The halls shift when you aren't looking. The clocks lie. Other students watch you with hunger they barely conceal behind centuries of etiquette. Every courtesy contains teeth. You've been assigned to Ashwyn Hall—the vampire dormitory—surrounded by predators who consider your protection a suggestion rather than a law.

But beneath the immediate danger lie deeper mysteries. Why were you truly selected for this exchange? What do the ancient powers of the Obsidian Council actually want from the living world? And what happens when you discover that some rules of this place only apply to the dead?

In Mortis Umbra, survival isn't about strength. It's about navigation—reading the politics, understanding the hungers, finding allies among creatures who've forgotten what it means to be alive. Every interaction is a negotiation with something that could kill you.

Class is in session.