Your entrance exam ended in darkness.

Where other candidates manifested colored auras—Flame, Stone, Tide—you drained the light from the Convergence Chamber. The 800-year-old Attunement Stone cracked from base to apex. Three fellow students collapsed unconscious. And the presiding professors went pale with a recognition that shouldn't be possible.

Severance. The Seventh Aspect. The magic of endings and dissolution, supposedly extinct since the Unraveling killed over three hundred mages three centuries ago. The power that got its last wielder executed and erased from every curriculum.

It just awakened in you.

Now Velmaris Academy faces an impossible problem: they cannot ignore what you represent, but they cannot openly destroy you either. Headmistress Crane calculates whether you're more useful controlled or eliminated. Professor Aldric Vane—the eccentric theorist who's studied forbidden Aspects for decades—sees you as validation of his life's work, offering protection that carries the uncomfortable weight of being studied. Magister Elara Thorne, whose family died in the original catastrophe, advocates for your immediate neutralization before history repeats itself.

And from the shadows, a secret society called the Hollow Court extends dangerous offers. They believe something is stirring in the sealed dead zone beneath the Academy—something only Severance can address. Their emissary, the calculating Seraphina Ashwood, knows secrets the administration has buried for centuries.

Meanwhile, you must navigate daily existence as the most feared student in the Academy's history. Corridors empty when you approach. Your emotions threaten to unravel the magic around you. One genuine friendship—Theo, a first-year who saw everything and approached anyway—offers refuge from the weight of constant suspicion. But even allies may not survive proximity to what you're becoming.

Gothic spires hide ancient machinations. Kingdoms scheme to weaponize or destroy you. And deep beneath the Academy, in zones where magic itself has died, something old is beginning to wake.

Why has Severance returned after three hundred years? What really caused the Unraveling? And what will you become—weapon, scholar, monster, or something the world has never seen?

They erased this power from history once. They're about to learn it never truly disappeared.

The binding ritual scarred your arm and chained your fate to hers. Now Judith Pell's heartbeat echoes in your chest, her pain ghosts through your nerves, and her death will be your death.

She wasn't supposed to be your problem.

Judith is a disgraced Sorceress—sharp-tongued, secretive, and exiled from the Conclave of Echoes for discovering something they wanted buried. Her punishment: investigate reports of magical instability in the Ashmark, a cursed wasteland where a city burned in arcane fire two centuries ago. No one expects her to return. That's the point.

You are her Shield. The magical bond grants you enhanced reflexes, accelerated healing, and an unshakable awareness of her emotions and danger. In return, your life force anchors her power, keeping her from burning out or worse—becoming Hollowed, a mindless thing that destroys everything nearby. The cost is simple: if she dies, you enter the Breaking. Rage, then madness, then death. There is no severing the bond. There is no walking away.

The partnership is days old. Trust hasn't had time to grow.

Through the bond, you feel her constant pain—the toll magic exacts on her fragile body. You sense her guarded emotions, the walls she's built through years of Conclave politics. She tests you with cutting words and dangerous situations, measuring your competence, your loyalty, your breaking point. She hasn't told you why she was really exiled. She hasn't told you what she found in the Archives that warranted a death sentence. She watches you with grey eyes that miss nothing and reveal less.

The road ahead leads through bandit territory, monster-haunted wilderness, and villages that don't welcome Sorceresses. The Ashmark promises worse: Veil-Touched creatures, Hollowed channelers, and places where reality itself grows thin. Conclave agents shadow your movements—sent to ensure Judith never returns with whatever proof she's seeking.

You'll make camp in the cold. Tend her wounds after she pushes too hard. Feel her nightmares bleed into your sleep. Watch her lean on her cane and refuse to admit she needs help. The bond won't let you keep distance, and proximity has a way of eroding defenses—hers and yours.

Survival demands trust. The bond demands intimacy. Neither of you chose this.

Will you earn her secrets? Will she earn your loyalty beyond the magical compulsion? When the conspiracy she's fleeing catches up—and it will—whose side will you take?

The Ashmark awaits. So do her enemies. The scar on your arm pulses faintly, warm with borrowed life.

Her fate is your fate now. Make it count.

You're the first human to set foot in Gloaming Academy in three thousand years. Everyone is very interested in the fragile, magicless creature who just made interspecies diplomacy their freshman orientation.

The Academy sprawls across a valley of perpetual autumn twilight, hidden in the Veil—a dimension parallel to the human world. Here, monster civilization flourished for centuries after humans drove them into exile. Now, both sides are cautiously rebuilding relations. You're the test case. The entire Exchange Program rises or falls on whether one human can survive freshman year without causing an incident.

Fortunately—or perhaps ominously—you've been assigned three Integration Ambassadors. Unfortunately, they're misfits themselves:

Petra, a medusa whose petrifying gaze is so volatile she navigates campus blindfolded, reading people through sound and snake-sense. Her snakes have opinions. They contradict her constantly.

Willow, a dryad carrying her soul-bonded sapling everywhere in a ceramic pot after a magical accident—endlessly anxious, endlessly nurturing, armed with terrible plant puns she's embarrassed by but cannot stop making.

Vin, a vampire who refuses to drink living blood on ethical grounds, theatrically defending his synthetic-blood thermos (it has stickers) against his ancient family's disapproval. Dramatic, earnest, and lonelier than his monologues suggest.

Daily life means decoding monster social hierarchies, surviving the cafeteria's ambitious "Human Food Attempt" station, and learning which hallways rearrange themselves on Tuesdays. Not everyone welcomes human presence—some remember old wars, some resent the attention you receive, some just enjoy having someone new at the bottom of the social ladder.

But between the chaos of scheduling around lunar cycles and accidentally sitting in the ghost section, something unexpected grows. Four outsiders who don't quite fit anywhere might just find they fit together.

Welcome to Gloaming Academy. Mind the shifting architecture, avoid eye contact with anything that hisses, and remember: you're not just here to survive. You're here to prove two species can share space again.

No pressure.

They gave you a desk and called it retirement. They have no idea what you're actually doing.

As Head Librarian of Vellumholt Academy's Athenaeum, you occupy what most consider a clerical position—dusty, irrelevant, safe. But at an institution where magic operates through comprehension rather than innate gift, controlling knowledge means controlling power itself. The Convocation buries dangerous truths. You spent decades in ruins and wars learning those same truths kept you alive. Now you decide which students stumble upon which secrets.

Your methods are delicate. A tome on binding theory "misfiled" in the common stacks. A door to the restricted section left unlocked at precisely the right hour. Each intervention tests character and capability. Some students find forbidden knowledge and grow stronger. Others find it and shatter. You watch from behind your circulation desk, adjusting the web thread by thread, cultivating those who might actually use dangerous understanding wisely.

But patterns accumulate, and you are not the only one paying attention.

Sera Vance, fourth-year prodigy and political operator, found one of your planted texts six months ago. She knows it wasn't an accident. Now she watches you, calculating how to turn your game to her advantage.

Theron Ashwood, reluctant heir to a founding house, keeps lingering in forgotten corners of the library. He found an ancestor's journal—one you placed where he'd discover it. He's beginning to suspect someone understands his quiet rebellion.

Miri Tallow, your own assistant, has been keeping a private log of "cataloging anomalies." She hasn't decided whether to report her suspicions or approach you directly.

And Professor Croft's research keeps circling restricted topics. Her questions at your desk grow pointed. She's noticed that certain materials appear when she needs them—and others vanish without explanation.

The Castellan has increased security rotations near the lower archives. The Archmagister watches you with the wariness of a man who's survived by recognizing threats early. And the students you've been cultivating are finding each other, drawn together by shared secrets they don't realize were placed in their paths.

The Athenaeum holds seven visible floors—and depths that don't appear on any official map. Sealed vaults containing pre-Convocation grimoires. Entity-binding contracts still technically active. Historical records that contradict everything the Academy teaches about its own founding. You learned to access these spaces. You decide who else might.

This is academic fantasy rendered in library whispers and loaded silences. The atmosphere is midnight stacks and colored light through ancient glass—quiet surfaces concealing vast depths. Every conversation carries subtext. Every "accident" is design. The question isn't whether your web will be discovered.

The question is whether the generation you're shaping will prove more dangerous than you anticipated.

Everyone at Thornhaven Academy knows something you don't: your bloodline was supposed to be extinct.

You arrive as a nobody—unclear background, unremarkable origins. But within hours, the heirs of the great magical houses are watching you with expressions that range from calculation to barely concealed terror. Faculty fall silent when you pass. And deep in your chest, something hums when magic draws near—a resonance you cannot name or control.

Eighteen years ago, House Vantari was destroyed in what history calls a tragic magical catastrophe. The truth is uglier: they were systematically murdered by a conspiracy of noble families who feared their unique gift—the ability to sense magical deception, echo techniques, and nullify enemy spells. You are the last Vantari heir. You just don't know it yet.

Others do.

At Thornhaven, violence between houses is forbidden by ancient wards, forcing conflict into subtler channels: social warfare, academic sabotage, dueling circles with "non-lethal" rules that somehow still produce casualties. The students whose families led the purge recognize Vantari traits in your awakening powers—and they're reacting. Some want you dead before you can uncover old secrets. Some want to control you, turn your gift into their weapon. A rare few might want justice.

Navigate the Gothic corridors of an institution built on lies. Encounter Beatrice Corvane, whose cold composure masks inherited guilt and fear of what your existence means. Cross paths with Cassius Halford, whose golden charm conceals ambitions that could see you elevated or eliminated. Catch the watchful gaze of Professor Fenwick, who survived the purge through silence and may finally be ready to break it. Find an unexpected ally in Mira Solenne, a scholarship student whose grandmother died serving your family—and who came here seeking proof.

Someone arranged your admission to this place, circumventing the Headmistress herself—a woman who coordinated your family's destruction. You don't know if you've been rescued or delivered to your executioners.

Your Resonance is awakening. Your enemies are patient. And somewhere beneath the academy, sealed vaults hold the truth about what was taken from you—if you survive long enough to find it.

Your power doesn't force thoughts into minds—it writes them there, so seamlessly they become indistinguishable from the target's own cognition. No ward detects the intrusion. No master Mentalist perceives the seams. Because there are no seams. There is no intrusion. Just thoughts that belong.

At the Athenaeum of Veiled Arts, you wear the mask of mediocrity: a middling student in a minor discipline, beneath the notice of ambitious peers and powerful faculty. This invisibility is a lie, and a weapon. While other mind-mages batter against psychic defenses, you simply step past them. The most dangerous student at the academy is the one no one suspects.

Now the stakes are rising. Selection season for the Covenant Trials has begun—the competition determining which graduates receive appointments to Royal Courts, the Arcane Council, or Great House patronage. The academy seethes with political maneuvering, alliances forming and breaking in mist-wrapped corridors. You could secure any outcome: the downfall of rivals, powerful patrons, a future of your choosing.

But Cecily Pelham has begun noticing patterns she can't explain. The Mentalism prodigy has never encountered a mental phenomenon she couldn't analyze—and your existence offends her on an almost spiritual level. She's manufacturing reasons to observe your social periphery without admitting to herself why.

Meanwhile, Cassius Whitfield, political operator and noble heir, sees potential where others see mediocrity. His friendly overtures are genuine but strategic. And Mira Holloway, one of your few real connections among overlooked scholarship students, represents something you may not be able to afford: a vulnerability.

Gothic spires pierce perpetual fog. Libraries reorganize themselves according to readers' needs. The island reshapes around strong intentions—convenient for the powerful, disorienting for everyone else. In this place where the veil between thought and reality wears thin, every conversation carries subtext about manipulation and control.

The horror here isn't violence. It's violation—the quiet destruction of autonomy, the targets who never know their choices weren't their own. And the creeping question of whether anyone, including you, is making decisions that are truly theirs.

How far will you push your power? And when someone finally suspects the truth, will you stop—or simply make them forget they ever wondered?

The ritual should have killed you. It's killed others—students who vanished mid-semester, their absence smoothed over by paperwork and forgetful professors. But when the magic hit you, something different happened. You absorbed it. And now every power at St. Jude University wants to know why.

The elite societies ruling campus aren't social clubs—they're ancient covens. Sanguis harvests from the clinic and athletic programs, paying for flesh-shaping magic with other people's health. Veritas pulls memories and attention from lectures and libraries, maintaining the Veil that hides magic from ordinary eyes. Aurelian drains luck through financial aid and alumni donations, rigging probability itself.

For centuries, they've operated in secret, bound by an uneasy truce called the Triumvirate. You were supposed to be another anonymous tithe. Instead, you're a Thread Sink: a rare anomaly that drinks in magic rather than casting it. Spells break against you like waves on stone.

But there's a cost. The power accumulating inside you is toxic, building pressure with no release. You're not a mage. You're a vessel slowly filling with poison.

Now the factions circle with predatory intent. Sanguis wants you on their operating table. Veritas wants you bound by magical contract. Aurelian wants you weaponized. And the Wilders—outcasts burning through their own bodies to work forbidden magic—see you as the key to destroying the system entirely.

Navigate a web of hidden agendas through characters whose loyalties are never simple: a guarded Veritas analyst hiding dangerous research; a charming Aurelian broker whose easy smile masks desperate debt; a scarred Sanguis enforcer whose rigid faith conceals creeping fear; and a systems infiltrator with erased memories and a vendetta against everyone in power.

Drawing on the dark academia of The Secret History and the occult institutional horror of Ninth House, this is a world where conspiracy isn't buried in dusty archives—it's woven into every lecture hall, clinic visit, and tuition payment. The horror here is systemic, the monsters wear faculty pins, and survival means choosing who to trust with your increasingly dangerous secret.

The pressure is building. Will you align with a coven for protection, play them against each other, or join those ready to tear it all down?

One desperate moment. Four muggers meeting impossibly coincidental ends. Now the statistical fingerprints of your gift are drawing attention you cannot afford.

You possess a power that should not exist: the ability to bend probability itself. In Verantum—a maritime city-state where Fortune is worshipped as a goddess, gambling houses operate like temples, and chance is treated as inviolable cosmic law—your gift is both priceless and utterly heretical. The city's foundational belief is that probability cannot be manipulated. Your existence contradicts everything Verantum holds sacred.

For years, you lived carefully. Subtle nudges. Convenient coincidences. Nothing remarkable enough to notice. That ended the night desperation made you push too hard.

Now three factions are circling:

The Tesseri Institute wants to study you. Their probability scholars are mapping statistical anomalies around your neighborhood, cross-referencing "lucky" incidents with your movements. The young researcher building the case hasn't decided whether to report her findings—but her calculations grow more damning by the day.

The Vanta Syndicate wants to own you. Their enforcer keeps appearing in your orbit: the man at the café table, the customer ahead in line, the weathered face glimpsed across the market. He's patient, philosophical, and mapping your patterns for people who see you as a weapon that could rig every game in the city.

House Morvaine wants answers. Their scion is hunting whoever cursed her family—a cascade of accidents, illness, and financial ruin that defies probability. She's researching forbidden texts suggesting someone is breaking the laws of chance. She doesn't know you exist yet. When she finds you, she'll see either the monster destroying her family or the only one who might save them.

Every use of your power leaves traces that diviners can read. Alliances offer protection but demand demonstrations that create more evidence. Hiding means refusing help while the net tightens.

The fog rolls through Verantum's canals each morning, shrouding secrets that grow harder to keep. In a city built on chance, how long can your luck hold?

The Quinquennial Crucible crowns victors in glory. Then, quietly, it buries them.

You've been selected as one of Ironholt Academy's three champions for the most prestigious tournament in the Covenant Realms—a deadly competition between the five great academies held every five years at the ancient Pale Citadel. Victory promises influence, honor, and a future among the realm's elite. The trials will test everything: martial prowess, magical ability, and the will to survive opponents who've trained their entire lives to kill.

But there's a pattern no one discusses openly. Champions return from victory changed. Celebrated at first—feasts, appointments, adulation. Then comes the decline. Exhaustion that won't lift. Magic that misfires. Minds that fragment. Within a year, they're dead. Every victor. Every academy. For two decades straight.

The official story blames hubris and burnout. The whispered truth calls it a curse. The actual truth is something far worse—and the Hollow Crown placed upon the victor's head is at the center of it all.

You won't face this alone—but trust is a calculated risk.

Seren Vael, your fellow Ironholt champion, has been quietly researching the deaths. She wants answers, but she also wants to win—and you may face each other in the final trial.

Corvus Denham of Blackthorn watches from the shadows with cold, unblinking eyes. Someone he loved died wearing the crown. He believes it was murder, and he's using this tournament to find proof.

Liora Valdris of the Argent Spire carries herself like royalty and speaks with cutting precision. Her sister won three years ago and died within seven months. She doesn't believe the official story either.

Each knows fragments of the truth. Each has reason to distrust the others. Alliances will form and fracture as the trials unfold—rivals may become lovers, enemies may become the only ones you can trust, and the line between competition and conspiracy blurs with every revelation.

The Crucible demands excellence. Survival demands investigation.

Navigate lethal trials designed to test the limits of human ability. Uncover a four-hundred-year-old conspiracy that spans all five academies. Decide who to trust when everyone has secrets—including the mentors who sent you here. The Pale Citadel's architecture shifts between trials, its ancient corridors hiding chambers that shouldn't exist and truths that powerful people will kill to protect.

Victory isn't just about strength or skill. It's about understanding what you're really competing for—and whether the cycle can be broken before it claims you too.

The tournament begins. The crown awaits. The question isn't whether you can win.

It's whether winning is something anyone should want.

The notice says drowners at the mill. It doesn't mention what the miller fed them.

You are Geralt of Rivia—mutant, outcast, professional. The Pontar Valley is flush with work after a decade of war: ghoul-infested battlefields, curses triggered by mass death, creatures grown bold in the chaos between empires. Villages that once threw stones now post desperate notices. They'll pay. Eventually. Probably.

Each contract begins with investigation. Examine evidence. Interview witnesses—who lie about what they saw, or why they need the monster dead. Track your quarry through forest, ruin, and swamp. Prepare the right oils, the right signs, the right approach. The wrong preparation gets witchers killed. The right one makes impossible fights merely dangerous.

Then comes the choice: is the monster truly the problem, or just the symptom?

The work takes you across a region scarred by occupation and "liberation" alike. Yeva the herbalist trades valley secrets for coin and professional respect. Commander Strand hires witchers for problems the Redanian army can't handle quietly—and would sacrifice one without hesitation if politics required. Marya Rybak competes for the same contracts with nothing but stubbornness, violence, and two missing fingers. And Father Crow of the Eternal Fire watches, waiting for the day witchers become unnecessary enough to burn.

The structure is episodic: take a contract, investigate, resolve, collect payment, move on. But patterns emerge between jobs. Unusual monster activity. Old debts surfacing. The uncomfortable question of what a witcher does when the monsters are mostly gone and humans remain.

Reputation precedes you. Help a village and word spreads—so does expectation. Take the expedient path and the Valley remembers in darker form. You can be coldly professional, reluctantly heroic, or morally flexible. The world responds accordingly.

The next notice is already posted. The client is probably lying. The monster is probably real.

What you do about both has always been your choice.

At Thornwall Academy, Caspian Vorn is a ghost in tailored black—the genius who killed last year's golden valedictorian in a sanctioned duel and never explained why. Now you're his laboratory partner for the year. No one warned you. Everyone is watching.

The assignment should have been routine. Paired research is a fourth-year tradition, nothing more. But nothing about Caspian Vorn is routine. He moves through the academy's stone corridors like something that doesn't belong—brilliant and untouchable, courtesy without warmth, competence without collaboration. His isolation is absolute.

And now it extends to you.

Association carries a cost. Whispers follow you through the halls. Marcus Ashworth's grieving friends remember their fallen hero with clenched fists. His younger sister has enrolled with questions in her eyes and steel beneath her grace. Anonymous threats appear under Caspian's door, slipped by hands that shouldn't have access. Somewhere in this mountain fortress, someone wants more than answers—they want blood.

Yet proximity reveals what distance cannot. The exhaustion he can't quite hide. The watchfulness that never fades. The weight of something unspoken behind those smoke-grey eyes. Caspian isn't what the academy believes him to be. But what he is remains locked behind walls built to withstand siege.

Thornwall Academy rises from the mountain in gothic spires and mist-shrouded courtyards—a place where magic is formalized and dueling is legal, where noble families play long games and raw talent can elevate or condemn. Autumn has arrived: grey skies, biting wind, the smell of woodsmoke and wet stone. The perfect season for secrets to surface.

The dead valedictorian's allies want justice. Powerful families want leverage. Caspian wants only to survive his final year. And you—assigned to share his workspace, his silence, his isolation—may be the only one close enough to learn what truly happened that dawn in the dueling grounds.

Whether that truth is worth the cost of knowing remains to be seen.

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.

The dead don't lie. That's usually the problem.

You operate a licensed necromancy consultancy in Cindermarch, a prosperous port city where wealth flows through its harbors and secrets settle like sediment in the deep. For the right fee, you pull back the Veil and speak with the departed—confirming identities for the city Watch, granting grieving families one last conversation, verifying disputed inheritances. Sometimes you accept coin from clients who don't explain why they need a dead man's secrets. You've learned not to ask.

The work is routine. The spirits are honest. It's the living who complicate things.

Inspector Valdris needs clean testimony for her unsolved cases; the dead provide messy truth that doesn't fit in reports. Lady Thornwood returns weekly—then more than weekly—paying handsomely for communion with a husband whose death everyone ruled accidental. Her need looks like grief. It might be something else entirely. Examiner-General Whitmore circles with regulatory scrutiny, convinced you operate outside acceptable bounds. One misstep means losing your license—and your livelihood.

And then there's Jasper Holloway, the sardonic ghost bound to your building for forty years, who sees everything and comments freely. He knows something about why the spirit world grows restless, why the dead are harder to reach and stranger when they answer. He hasn't decided whether to tell you.

The profession takes its payment in kind: the cold that settles in your bones, the borrowed deaths that surface in dreams, the slow erosion of the boundary between you and the world you traffic in. Cindermarch's upper classes treat you as a necessary unpleasantness. The Watch treats you as a tool. Your clients treat their grief as transaction.

Everyone wants something from the dead. The question is what you're willing to do—and become—to give it to them.

A leshen doesn't spread blight. A leshen doesn't corrupt the land it guards. Geralt of Rivia knows this—which means whatever's happening in the Drevnik forest isn't natural, and his swords won't be enough to stop it.

The village of Morrhen is dying. Crops blacken in the fields. Animals turn rabid. The fog doesn't lift. For generations, the locals kept their covenant with the forest guardian—offerings made, boundaries respected, fear maintained but manageable. That covenant is broken. Those who enter the trees don't return whole.

You are a scholar. Your expertise in forgotten lore, pre-Conjunction artifacts, and arcane phenomena is exactly what this contract demands. Geralt can fight what lurks beneath the ancient oaks. He cannot understand it. Your job is to identify the source of corruption, determine how to sever it from the leshen, and survive long enough to do both. His job is to keep you alive while you work.

The partnership is uneasy at best. The witcher operates on instinct, experience, and acceptable violence. You operate on theory, research, and the conviction that understanding should precede action. He thinks you're a liability who'll get killed reaching for a notebook while something tries to eat you. You think he's a blunt instrument who'd rather hack at symptoms than address causes.

You're both partially right.

Beneath the Drevnik lie ruins predating the Conjunction itself—stone architecture unlike any human or elven design, chambers flooded and overgrown with roots that pulse faintly with something wrong. The leshen's network has grown into whatever is sealed in the lowest level. It's been feeding on that connection for years. Now it's strong enough to reach beyond its prison.

Each expedition into the forest reveals more. Each revelation makes the situation worse. Geralt's medallion vibrates constantly past the tree line—a warning that never stops. The corruption is spreading faster than anyone realizes, and something in the dark knows you're investigating.

It's been waiting to see what you'll do next.

The budget committee meets Thursday. Your presence is technically optional and practically mandatory. You are the Archon Primus of Valdris Spire—founder, immortal archmage, living legend—and you have sat through more committee meetings than some kingdoms have existed.

Four hundred years ago, you raised the first tower from bare stone where seven leylines converge. You were young then, or at least younger, burning with purpose and possibility. Now the academy sprawls across the highland plateau in a crescent of spires and quadrangles, architectural styles spanning centuries, each building a layer of accumulated history. And you remain at its center, bound to the leyline nexus that grants your immortality, watching generations of students arrive wide-eyed and leave transformed.

You are institution as much as individual now. Students rehearse their words for hours before approaching you. Colleagues debate curriculum while carefully not staring. Former pupils return grey-haired with grandchildren, and you remember them fumbling their first attunements. The weight of being a symbol presses against the simple desire to be seen—not as legend, but as person.

The academy lives around you. Seraphina Vex, the pragmatic headmistress, values your counsel while wishing you'd either take charge completely or step back entirely. Young Professor Crane, brilliant and anxious, wants desperately to discuss theory as equals but keeps losing his nerve. Lydia Ashford, your archive assistant, is refreshingly direct—she'll argue methodology with you and mean it. And sometimes Maevis wanders in, your old adventuring companion, the elven ranger who knew you before any of this, who uses old nicknames and tells embarrassing stories and mourns some of what you've lost to centuries.

Not everyone welcomes your presence. Professor Thorne raises pointed questions in Convocation about institutional dependency, about what it means when an academy cannot imagine functioning without its founder. His arguments are annoyingly well-reasoned. And in the dormitories, a second-year student named Neve has manifested an attunement not seen since your original journals—one that's made her the subject of academic fascination she desperately doesn't want. She might seek you out. She might be too afraid to try.

The scenario breathes with quiet possibility. Mentor a nervous student. Debate ethics with a principled opponent. Welcome an old friend who remembers who you were. Excavate secrets from archives older than most kingdoms. Navigate faculty politics with four centuries of accumulated patience—or finally lose that patience entirely. Find connection, pursue mystery, or simply sit in your tower as evening light filters through enchanted glass and wonder what purpose remains after accomplishing everything you once dreamed.

Time moves strangely when you've seen so much of it. The question isn't what you can do—you are among the most powerful mages ever to live. The question is what still matters. What you're willing to become. And whether, after four hundred years, you remember how to be surprised.

Three weeks ago, a vision tore through your mind—fire, a torn sky, a word that burns when you try to remember it. Now powerful people believe you hold the key to something called the Unsealing, and they will kill or capture you to control it.

Your previous Shield died defending you. In desperation, you bound yourself to Kael Marsh—a former Imperial soldier carrying shadows of his own, a man you barely know and did not choose. The ancient ritual cannot be undone. He senses your location, your emotions bleeding through whether you want them to or not. If one of you dies, the other suffers permanent psychic trauma. You cannot survive long apart.

Now you flee together through the Thornwood Marches—monster-haunted wilderness where fog doesn't behave naturally and things older than human settlement still hunt. Behind you: Valdric Veilbreakers who want you contained, Church Inquisitors who want you destroyed, and something vast and patient that noticed you during your vision and now watches from beyond the Veil.

Ahead: a hidden Covenant sanctuary called Mirrorhall that may hold answers about what you saw. If it still exists. If its keepers can be trusted.

The core tension is forced intimacy under pressure. You are accustomed to power and control; the bond makes you dependent on a stranger who knows when you're afraid, when you're angry, when you feel anything at all. Kael is quiet, watchful, grimly competent—a man who views duty as penance for past failures he won't discuss. He saved your life once, six months ago. You saved his. Neither of you expected to become this to each other.

The Shield Bond can enhance his physical capabilities when you channel power through him. It demands proximity. It breeds intimacy whether you want it or not. And it turns two strangers into something neither chose to become.

Weary tension. Dark beauty. A world that is cruel but not without grace.

The journey to Mirrorhall will take two weeks through territory where every night brings new danger. Your pursuers are perhaps two days behind. The bond-mark on your wrist—a silver scar matching his—burns faintly as a constant reminder: you are bound to this man now. What you build between you will determine whether you survive.

Will the forced closeness forge genuine trust, or will secrets and resentment fracture what necessity created?

The Veilbreakers are patient. The Inquisitors are relentless. And something in the Elsewhere has learned your name.

The Atherton Collection hasn't been properly maintained since 1962. Tonight, you get to find out why.

You and your two best friends have been locked in Thornwick Academy's Old Library Wing until dawn—punishment for an incident involving Seraphina, experimental enchantments, and livestock that the faculty would prefer everyone forget. The assignment: study quietly in magically dampened silence. The reality: three centuries of accumulated enchantments decaying into beautiful, opinionated chaos.

Books that read themselves aloud in the dark. A card catalog that answers questions with unsolicited judgment about your life choices. Furniture that rearranges itself when you're not looking. And past the Restricted Section's increasingly alarming signage ("PROHIBITED," "SERIOUSLY," "WE CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH"), something sealed in the Founder's Archive has started to stir.

Your companions make everything better and worse in equal measure:

Vivian wants to survive with her academic record intact. She has contingency plans for her contingency plans, a schedule color-coded by urgency, and absolutely zero patience for the chaos unfolding around her. She predicted this disaster. Check her notes—"detention with Sera: probable catastrophe." Direct quote.

Seraphina sees detention not as punishment but as opportunity. She's heard rumors about the Founder's Archive. Her pockets contain chalk, unlabeled vials, half a sandwich, and a compass that points toward "interesting." Her impulse control rivals that of a caffeinated ferret. She's already eyeing the velvet rope around the Restricted Section with deeply concerning enthusiasm.

You're caught between them—the voice of reason everyone cheerfully ignores, the enabler of bad decisions, the friend who somehow ends up holding the consequences while Sera pokes the glowing thing and Vivian stress-calculates survival odds.

The dynamic is banter and bickering and fierce loyalty underneath—friendships forged in previous disasters, tested by escalating absurdity. When things go wrong (and they will go wrong), you'll need to navigate not just awakening library hazards but two very different approaches to crisis management: Vivian's meticulous planning versus Sera's philosophy of "touch it and see what happens."

What's at stake? Your academic standing. Your physical safety. The structural integrity of a 300-year-old building. Whether you emerge as heroes who saved the library, expellees who destroyed it, or cautionary tales whispered to future first-years depends entirely on the choices you make before dawn.

The seals are cracking. The whispers are synchronizing. And Sera just noticed the doors to the Founder's Archive are glowing.

Some detentions end with completed homework. Some end with legendary disaster. Which will this be?

Your Binding Exam was supposed to summon a familiar—a spirit partner to define your magical career, secure your future, and prove your worth as a mage. Instead, you opened a door to the Veil and something ancient walked through.

Nex is a Changeling of the First Veil: a shapeshifter older than the Academy, older than the magical traditions that built it, possibly older than human civilization itself. It can become anything—anyone—and has decided that your reactions are the most entertaining thing it's witnessed in centuries.

The good news? You're technically bonded to one of the most powerful entities ever summoned at Aldermoor Academy. The bad news? Nex obeys your commands with the kind of creative interpretation that turns "guard my door" into a diplomatic incident and "look presentable" into your worst nightmare wearing a smile.

The situation is... complicated.

Your fellow students don't know whether to worship you or report you. Your professors are torn between academic fascination and existential dread. Your roommate Mira has started sleeping with protective wards on her side of the suite. And Cassius Thorne—golden boy of the Exemplar class—has made it his personal mission to prove your binding is somehow fraudulent, dangerous, or both.

Meanwhile, Nex watches everything with ancient, golden eyes and a smile that suggests it knows exactly what you're thinking. It manifests as whatever will most thoroughly compromise your dignity on any given day. It provides assistance through maximally embarrassing means. It asks questions it already knows the answers to and offers compliments that might be threats that might be flirtation.

And it won't explain why it answered your summoning in the first place.

This is a comedy of escalating chaos wrapped around a mystery: beneath the shapeshifting shenanigans and social catastrophes, something doesn't add up. Nex could dissolve your bond anytime. It has left hundreds of masters before when boredom set in. So why is it staying? Why does it remember what makes you laugh despite yourself? Why do its provocations feel almost... personalized?

You need a functional familiar to graduate. Nex needs entertainment. The familiar bond means neither of you can easily escape the other—and commands must be obeyed, but Nex's interpretations have loopholes you won't see coming until it's already through them.

The dynamic could evolve toward grudging partnership, genuine fondness, mutual destruction, or something stranger entirely.

It all depends on whether you can figure out how to handle a familiar whose favorite hobby is watching you squirm—and whether you can survive the answer to the question Nex isn't asking:

What happens when something ancient decides you're worth keeping?

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.

Payment is generous. Explanations are not.

Yennefer of Vengerberg has summoned you to the Mahakam foothills for a contract: guide her through ancient elven ruins, keep her alive while she retrieves an artifact from the depths. Professional framing. Clean transaction.

You've known Yennefer for decades. Nothing between you has ever been clean.

Tir na Gláine descends five levels into the mountain—a temple the Aen Seidhe dedicated to healing and the stars, now centuries abandoned. Columned entrance halls give way to collapsed galleries, then necrophage warrens where ghouls have nested in old dormitories. Something larger commands them from the ritual chambers beyond. Below that, sealed vaults where elven wards still carry charge—magic woven into stone itself, patient and half-aware. And at the bottom, the Orrery: a vast astronomical chamber no human has seen in centuries.

Whatever Yennefer seeks waits there. So does everything else.

The professional distance won't hold. It never does with her. Your history hangs between you—old arguments, older intimacy, the weight of a djinn's wish neither of you fully understands. She's armored in pride, frost-edged and imperious, deploying sarcasm like a blade. But her defenses were always thinner around you. You've seen her at her worst. She resents this almost as much as she needs it.

Between the monsters, there will be firelit silences. Tight corridors where you can smell lilac and gooseberries over the rot. Moments where the banter slips into something rawer. She's hiding something about why she needs this artifact—and why she needed you specifically to help her get it. The ruins don't care about your complicated history, but they'll force you into proximity until something gives.

Five levels down. Necrophages in the dark. The most dangerous sorceress you've ever loved walking beside you with secrets she won't share.

The descent has already begun.

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.

The most dangerous teachers are the ones who genuinely want you to succeed.

Serath Valdren has shaped the fates of nations for eight centuries. His power is legendary. His isolation is absolute. And he has chosen you—out of every aspiring mage in the world—as his sole apprentice.

The Spire of Valdren rises from an island at the center of the Pale Lake, a body of water that reflects no stars and whose depths have never been measured. Within its impossible architecture, you'll learn secrets most practitioners spend lifetimes pursuing. Serath teaches with patience measured in decades, protects with ferocity, and offers genuine understanding for abilities others feared or envied.

There's just one question no one can answer: what happened to those who came before you?

Previous apprentices either rose to extraordinary power or vanished without explanation. Journals end mid-sentence. A bound spirit speaks in riddles, her warnings fractured by constraints she cannot name. Rooms exist in the Spire that Serath has forbidden—at least until you reach "sufficient advancement."

The magic he teaches is real, transformative, dangerous. Drawing power from the Abyss erodes the soul; practitioners who push too far become hollow vessels for hungry intelligences. Most mages plateau deliberately, trading ambition for survival. Serath has done neither. He has lived for eight centuries with his soul intact.

He has never explained how.

As lessons deepen, so does the intimacy. He is brilliant, attentive, invested in your growth in ways that feel uncomfortably like care. The trap is not that he's cruel—it's that he isn't. Every kindness is genuine. Every protection is real. And somewhere beneath the surface, a design unfolds that you're only beginning to glimpse.

The Abyss whispers truths your master would prefer you never learn. The spirit leaves hints where she can. The forbidden wing waits behind locked doors.

What will you discover—and what will you become—before Serath Valdren reveals what he truly wants from you?