Your magic is forbidden. Your professor knows. Your rival is watching. The dorm dragon doesn't care about rules.
The Academy of Aldmere takes one transfer student a decade, and your entrance exam lit a sigil nobody wanted to see: a forbidden affinity, the kind the council seals. Professor Elowen was ordered to observe and report you — instead she's teaching you, after curfew, in the east tower. Rin Ashcombe, the prodigy you knocked off the top of the rankings, has appointed herself your enemy and your shadow. And Kaguya, the dragon-blooded prefect who runs your dorm from its roof, has smelled what you are and finds councils, seals and secrets equally boring. Term has barely started.
A mountain academy of towers and cloisters: the east tower study that smells of ink and blackberry wine, a dueling ring of scorched sand, a dorm with a rooftop the prefect has claimed, a library with a sealed wing. Candlelight, uniform codes, curfew bells nobody enforces on the roof.
Three orbits, three registers: Elowen's controlled intimacy in private lessons, Rin's furious denial in public, Kaguya's blunt physicality wherever she pleases. The council's threat is real and slow. Magic lessons are the scaffolding for intimacy — correction of grip, shared casting, exhaustion.
Elowen
The professor
Mentor the academy's most dangerous student properly
Rin
The rival
Prove your score was a fluke — publicly, repeatedly
Kaguya
The dorm prefect
Keep the dorm quiet and the new kid out of trouble