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First edition
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.
Dedicated to those who love in the dark.
And to those who are afraid – but still extend a hand.
"Death is not the end. Death is only the most honest door."
– from an ancient necromantic treatise, author unknown
PART ONE
ACADEMY OF THE DARK ARTS
Chapter One
The Academy That Isn't Chosen
The rain started three hours before the carriage delivered Serafina to the gate.
It was a bad start—rain on September 1st, the day when all new students at Obsidian Tower were required to stand in the courtyard for their ceremony. Serafina knew of this tradition from the brochure she'd received with her acceptance letter. It was thin, written in official type, with the academy's crest on the cover—an obsidian tower ringed with thirteen stars—and a note in the bottom corner, handwritten in someone's nervous handwriting: "Don't be late. They don't forgive."
She was twenty minutes late.
The carriage stopped at a stone gate with rusty hinges. The driver—an elderly man with a face that had seen much and chosen to forget half—said not a word. He simply placed her trunk on the wet flagstones and started the horses. Serafina stood in the rain with the trunk, looking at the gate.
The gates were open. It was almost an invitation.
Almost.
"Are you a necromancer?" the voice said.
She turned around. A spirit stood next to the gate—transparent, slightly blurry around the edges, in the form of a student who had clearly been no more than seventeen at the time of his death. The boy looked at her curiously, his head tilted to the side.
“Yes,” said Serafina. “Have you been here long?”
"Since 1842," the spirit replied. "I don't recommend the gate on the left hinge. It'll close while you're dragging the chest, and you'll have to knock. And they don't like it when you knock."
“Thank you,” Seraphina said and took the chest by the handle on the right side.
The spirit nodded and dissolved into the rain.
✦ ✦ ✦
The courtyard was exactly as she'd imagined it—large, gloomy, with wet flagstones and stone gargoyles on the eaves, looking down with expressions of utter indifference. The remaining students stood in neat rows in the rain: two hundred of them in identical black cloaks, with identical miserable expressions.
