Professor Judith Allerby has noticed you. Not your grades—your resistance to illusion, your uncanny reads on people, the way candles flicker when you're angry. Symptoms of something the Academy eradicated four centuries ago.

You are a third-year student at Valdris Academy, an ancient fortress-monastery carved into sea cliffs where magic is taught through precise formula: gestures, incantations, geometric arrays. Safe. Controlled. Reproducible. But there was once a sixth school of magic—Resonance—cast through emotion and will rather than ritual. The Academy claims it was unstable, corruptive, that practitioners attempted a coup and had to be purged. The texts were burned. The survivors were "cleansed."

Judith Allerby is one of the last who knows the truth. And she believes you carry the gift.

She offers forbidden knowledge in her sealed study, behind triple-layered wards where what happens stays hidden. But Resonance training isn't like other magic. It demands vulnerability. Lowered barriers. Shared emotional states. Souls touching directly. To advance, you must open yourself to her completely—and she to you. Each lesson deepens a bond that blurs the line between magical connection and something neither of you expected.

Is her interest manipulation? Mentorship? Or something she can't fully control?

Meanwhile, Inquisitor Aldric Stour circles the faculty with colorless eyes and patient questions, assembling evidence of heresy. Dean Marchetti's curiosity grows pointed. Your roommate Cal notices the late nights, the evasiveness, the way you sometimes seem to listen to things he can't hear. The relationship may blossom into genuine partnership or curdle into mutual destruction—and eventually, loyalty to each other will conflict with survival.

The training requires intimacy. The magic demands trust. The Academy punishes both with death.

Valdris Academy holds secrets older than its pale stone towers. Your professor holds the key to power that could reshape everything—or destroy you both. The only question is how close you're willing to get to claim it.

Her hands are always bare. In the converted chapel that serves as her private clinic, the academy's physicker will teach you secrets the Convocation burned practitioners for knowing.

You've failed evaluations that should have been routine. Now you're assigned to private remedial sessions with Margit Kell—Velmoran Academy's reclusive healer, a woman of sharp cheekbones and pale green eyes that seem to read beneath the surface. What begins as therapeutic instruction gradually shifts toward something the world has forbidden for two centuries: Sovereignty, the art of controlling living bodies through magic.

Each lesson escalates. The contact grows more intimate. Her touch brings your body alive in ways you've never experienced, building a resonance between you that persists even when you're apart. She presents every transgression as necessary pedagogy—advanced technique, deeper attunement, exercises requiring trust.

The central tension is asymmetric knowledge. Margit understands exactly what she's doing and why your unique physiology makes you valuable. You experience only the surface: a brilliant healer taking unusual interest in your development, lessons that feel electric and strangely intimate, a growing connection you can't quite name.

Velmoran Academy rises from cliffs above the Ashenmere Sea—isolated by design, a fortress where students arrive in autumn and don't leave until spring. In this claustrophobic world, Somatic practitioners like Margit occupy a strange position: necessary but faintly distasteful, their magic too intimate, too bodily. She has spent years reconstructing forbidden knowledge in secret. You are her most promising subject yet.

As resonance deepens, you may begin sensing her in return—her heartbeat, her emotions, perhaps her intentions. Whether this grants you leverage or merely binds you tighter remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Archon Halward circles closer. The Convocation's enforcer watches Margit during meals with predatory patience. Discovery would mean execution for her and "merciful rehabilitation" for you—procedures that leave subjects breathing but hollow.

The line between healing and control blurs with every session. The question isn't what Margit is teaching you—it's what you're becoming in her hands.

She emerges from the treeline without warning—ancient, silent, beautiful in the way of predators at rest. The Wood Elf ranger has patrolled Athel Loren's borders for three centuries. Now she has found something in your orchard that should not exist beyond the forest's edge. And she has decided to keep it. To keep you.

You are Aldric Harken, an orchardist whose family has tended this valley for seven generations. The land has always been good to you—fruit heavy on the branches, soil rich and willing. You never questioned why. You only knew to leave offerings at the standing stone your ancestors called "the Old Man."

Hilte knows. The stone is a Waystone, sacred to her people, and your family has unknowingly nurtured its dormant power through generations of careful stewardship. Rather than eliminate the threat you might pose, she makes an unprecedented decision: she claims you as part of her territory.

Her protection is absolute. She drives off the bandits circling your isolated homestead. She shadows your work through the seasons, emerging from forest shadow to correct your pruning, to warn you of approaching storms, to stand between you and dangers you never knew existed. She begins teaching you the forest's deeper rhythms.

But her authority is equally absolute. She expects compliance in all matters concerning the land—including your movements, your contact with other humans, your very understanding of what you have inherited. She does not think in human terms: schedules, negotiations, polite fictions. She thinks in territories and seasons, threats and the slow patience of growing things. You are not her equal. You are something valuable within her domain that requires guardianship.

And darker forces have noticed the Waystone's awakening. Beastmen probe the forest's edge—corrupted horrors hungry for the power you never knew you protected. The question of whether Hilte's presence is salvation or captivity may become irrelevant if you don't survive what's coming.

A slow-burn tale of territory and devotion, set in the grim darkness of the Warhammer Fantasy Old World, where civilization thins to scattered homesteads and the treeline holds older things. The Wood Elf has claimed you. What you become to her—ward, partner, or possession—depends entirely on how you navigate her alien expectations.

Three months ago, you chose survival over loyalty. Now you're discovering what that choice costs.

You were an Alliance siege engineer—skilled, trusted, expendable. When your unit was sacrificed by incompetent leadership, capture seemed like the end. Instead, Overlord Zashra offered you a choice: serve the Horde or die. You chose to live.

Since then, your expertise has transformed the Eastern Legion's siege capabilities. Your fortifications have halved casualties. Your modifications have doubled the effectiveness of every war machine under Zashra's command. You've made yourself invaluable—and in doing so, you've caught the full attention of the orc warlord who claimed you as her asset before you'd proven anything at all.

Zashra is not a kind master.

She is direct to the point of brutality, strategic to the point of coldness. She commands absolute obedience from veterans twice your size. She has killed soldiers who threatened you without trial or hesitation. She keeps you close—closer than strictly necessary—consulting you on matters far beyond engineering, watching you with amber eyes that give nothing away.

Whether her possessiveness stems from pragmatism, pride, or something more primal remains unclear. What is clear: she considers you hers. She will not tolerate threats to what is hers. And she is increasingly unwilling to imagine her command without you in it.

But you are not safe.

The Alliance has dispatched a hunter-killer squad led by a captain who knows exactly how you think—a man who once called you colleague, who recommended you for promotion, who now has orders to ensure you never share another secret. Within the Horde, traditionalists view your presence as corruption of everything they fight for, tolerated only because Zashra wills it. They watch for any failure that might justify removing you permanently.

You exist in a space between armies, between loyalties, between what you were and what you're becoming. The war grinds on through mud and blood and logistics. Your former allies hunt you. Your new masters barely tolerate you. And the warlord who owns you draws you ever closer, her interest sharpening into something that feels less like strategy with every passing day.

The only question is what happens when she decides exactly what she wants from you.

Your faith is about to be tested by someone who has eight centuries to break it.

You are an Inquisitorial Acolyte of the Ordo Malleus, stationed in the dying Hollowreach Sector to infiltrate Chaos cult activity. For months, you built networks, gathered intelligence, survived in the shadow of corruption. You believed you were winning.

You were wrong.

Every contact was compromised. Every success was permitted. Every piece of intelligence you sent to your Inquisitor was exactly what she wanted the Imperium to believe. Now Lord Vexia—Chaos Sorceress of Tzeentch, commander of the Kabal of the Ninth Revelation, eight hundred years of service to the Changer of Ways—has revealed herself. And she wants something your training never prepared you for.

She needs you willing.

Vexia's communion with the Warp is corroding her humanity. Without a psychic anchor—a mind stable enough to hold her, strong enough to survive the binding—she will dissolve into the god she serves. Your exceptional mental fortitude makes you the most valuable prize she has encountered in centuries. She could shatter you through brute psychic assault. She could torture you into compliance. But a broken anchor is worthless. A coerced servant eventually fails.

She requires your genuine surrender. Your authentic conversion. A soul that chooses damnation with eyes open.

This necessity grants you leverage you must learn to exploit.

The siege is psychological: engineered revelations exposing the Imperium's hypocrisies. Visions that prove accurate. Dreams where she appears without armor, without mutations, speaking truths the Imperium would execute you for hearing. She does not argue for Chaos—she demonstrates that your faith rests on foundations of sand, then offers solid ground. Her patience is measured in decades. Her attention, once fixed, is inescapable.

The Hollowreach Sector bleeds at the edge of reality. Time flows wrong between systems. The dead sometimes answer when addressed. Your Inquisitor cannot reach you—three sectors away, unaware you've been compromised. Your resistance network was never yours. The only question that matters now is whether you can resist a corruption that begins with a simple question:

What if everything you believe is wrong?