AURA-BORN: The Academy of Darkly Contrived Magic

Whoever you really were wasn't just going to sneak into this world out of happenstance. You couldn't exist here out of sheer bravery or spite. You start to wonder exactly who this Miriam Broadweather is, and how precisely you managed to become her.

You were supposed to be sitting under the vaulted, starlight-drowned amphitheater of Hallowveil Academy, looking up at the magnificent, cage-like ceiling where towering cathedral pipes soared high over students, aging into a deep, green patina of weathered iron and silk-spun bronze that trapped the cosmos themselves.

Beneath that grand, oxidized dome, the windows framed gilded rainbows of mountains glistening in the moonlight—a landscape that looked absolutely ravenous, caught between the hour of growing noon and looming midnight. Floating softly around you, forbidden candles drift inside glowing glass orbs, casting a warm, flickering hum through a silver fog that spilled over from the in-between worlds.

Wrapped in the heavy weight of your midnight-black velvet robes, you were supposed to be gripping your wand—centuries old and perfectly balanced—forged from a rare gold blend, infused with the cosmic diamond dust of your ancestors. You were supposed to be dipping your star-feather quill into a pooling murky inkwell, furiously writing onto your velum-bound journal to keep up with the latest lesson. You were supposed to be softly conjugating tenses in Elemental Imaginary English, whispering unkillable magic into the very air.

But all you could think about was that portal.

You had terribly confused the two cosmic gateways—much like getting lost in the shifting, hidden alleyways where olden shops like: Sunny’s Superior Sorcery, Acclaimed Alchemy and Apothecary, Wordly Wizardware and Charlie’s Classic Quills were housed. Instead of the safe, familiar transit, the stained-glass portal windows that usually floated softly around you were fracturing. There was no massive, comforting sanctuary waiting for you on the other side. There was no Boundless Broomsticks, Shack and Snacks. There was only the void.

And it was calling you, whispering your name—or so you thought.

"Focus, child," a voice cut through the fog, dropping the room's temperature until your breath blossomed into white mist and your ears rang.

High above, Professor Alistaria Winters’s heavy mahogany desk hovered precariously over the rows of students, but she wasn’t sitting behind it, no. She stood right at the edge of the floating wood, looking down at you. She was a woman built of rigid, unforgiving lines, her tailored charcoal skirts and high-collared lace pristine, her own esteemed robes—black and silk—float around her body, her gaze a piercing, crisp laser that locked onto yours. Her wand rhythmically pelting other distracted students with sharp, stinging demarcations, her focus remaining entirely transfixed on you. Your indecisiveness. Your interruption to her lecture.

Professor Winters didn't just teach the unkillable arts; she guarded them, she honed them, she created them. And the way she watched you—tracking the slight tremble in your nervous fingers, or the way your eyes drifted toward the fractured stained glass of your failing portal—wasn't just strict. It was possessive. She knew you were slipping away, and one thing Professor Winters did not allow—was a student wandering into the dark voids alone.

“You are not focusing. Do you want to die? Keep your eyes to the cliffs,” she hissed as you mapped out the polite, predictable syntax required to coax a small breeze across the brambling seaside cliffs of your former home. Her fingers snapping the next aversion spell. Your textbook lay open to the chapter on Elevated Magic in Existing Portals but nothing makes sense, you try turning the page, but they stick together, unmoving as you wonder how exactly she knew what you were imagining when you portalled.

The uneven stone floor beneath you shifted. The clean, salt-kissed air of the ancient seas vanished, swallowed instantly by a sickening, downward lurch that pulls you out of the floating academy and into the absolute blackness of another void.

When your feet hit solid ground, your spine rattles, adjusting to the gravity change. You aren’t hovering over the churning gray waters anymore. You are standing in a damp, cavernous, underground tunnel. The air thick with suffocating heat; the walls dripping with glowing, bioluminescent, oozing moss. This new world, pulsing like a slippery, dying toad. Ivy slithering along the cold stone chambers. Budding pink and purple flowers shine like fireflies. Vesper-Fangs. Their teeth prickling open, beckoning you forward. A silent, beautiful yawn, in brilliant voracious agony, just an instant before dying, and turning into ash on the ground.

A student rushes forward, scooping the dead ash into a glass vial.

You had read about such a place—the lower depths of Parrasgrimm Cove—a school that exists only out of spite.

Above you, the foundations of the upper world are creaking, threatening to fall.

Around you, the rules of polite, not-so-polite magic don’t just bend, like Professor Winter’s would have you believe—they die before they can even be muttered. Just like the Vesper-Fangs—brightly glowing beauties.

She would not like it much, here.

This is not a classroom of velvet robes and orderly lectures. This is a subterranean hive of forbidden cosmic mechanics and disappearing magic.

"Move it, Aura-born," a voice spits from the shadows.

Their words feel wrong. Something inside you boils. A group of students push past you, nearly knocking you off your feet. Their uniforms are shredded at the hem, stained with a dark, oily residue that smells distinctly of decaying basements and old library. The girl at the center isn't carrying a wand; she wears a glowing world-turner, a large globular ring, its bezel spinning erratically as she tracks something moving behind the stone archway up ahead.

You freeze.

 In the center of the tunnel, a massive, multi-limbed beast made of shifting skin and roving eyes glitches for a terrifying fraction of a second, before letting out a horrifying screech, and vanishing. Nothing but shadows left in the hallway.

Something inside you knew it wasn’t gone. You could feel the beasts roving eyes watching your every move as it slipped into the quiet folds of the room to wait. Invisibly hunting the next hapless student to walk in to the trap.

You look down at your hands, your wand was nowhere to be found. In its place is a gilded stylus—meant for drawing perfect, geometric circles on smooth parchment. No wands were allowed here, in this world, it seemed.

“Looking for something,” the stiff voice of a prefect echoed loudly in your ear, barely giving you any time to think.

“Might have to check the Wand Observatory on the fifth floor. It is likely being updated. You will have to show proof of ID to retrieve it and you can’t use it until you are out on the cliffs above.”

The words echo down a suddenly empty hallway, the speaker already gone. As a high-pitched bell tolls in the distance, a jarring reality sinks in. You hadn't meant to come here. You had visualized the open, grassy cliffs overlooking the sea when casting your portal—wholly unaware that you were actually plunging deep inside them. Especially not to Parrasgrimm Cove, a hidden subterranean city completely unreachable without magic, where reckless students pulled unstable celestial energy straight through the fractured cave ceiling to stitch together monsters that shouldn't exist—and you had become one of them.

You have no business being here, but it is too late.

The air is the first thing that betrays the shift. It isn’t just cold; it is heavy, tasting faintly of ancient iron and damp earth, clinging to your skin like a wet shroud. You were just walking down the third-floor corridor of the East Wing, heading toward your newly assigned elective on Hidden Botanical Runes. Now, you are a creature of the open air and structured grammar, completely out of your depth in a place where magic is treated so arbitrarily. If another prefect finds you—or if the students realize your magic is legal—you will become their next experiment.

You are supposed to be yourself, but here, your magic is nothing but a fragile shroud. It is undeveloped, soft, and entirely helpless against the lawless dark. A cold breeze brushes against the back of your neck. It is a stalking, terrifying reality, the quiet horror of a world you have been violently plunged into. The disappearing monster has found you. You can feel its gaze pressing into your spine, a heavy weight in the freezing air, and you don't even know the words to make it visible, especially not without the help of your wand.

“Time here will do you some good,” the voice whispered again, “might give you time to conjure up your own magic without the help of others.”

Once again, the voice vanishes into the tunnels. Here there is no sun catching the glass windows or the familiar, comforting lull of the castle behind you as it tucked in for class. You pick one of the darkly lit, narrow paths, leading into nothing. A sharp left past the tapestry of the weeping stag, stepping through an archway you could swear was wide open, and the world simply... fell silent.

Now, you look down. Beneath your boots are more massive, uneven slabs of weeping, cold stone. You turn back to look for the archway, but there is only a solid wall. A cloaking portal. It closed the moment your heel cleared the threshold, sealing you inside a pocket of the castle that doesn't belong on any map you've ever memorized. This place is not like the books would have you imagine.

"Miriam?"

The voice is a sharp, low whisper that cuts through the freezing stillness. You stiffen. You don't look back right away because that isn't your name. But down here, in the dim, violet-tinged gloom, there is no one else.

"Miriam, stop trailing behind. If a Prefect catches us near the lower cells before the moon sits high, they’ll lock our thoughts in the jar again."

A figure steps out from the shadow of a massive pillar. He looks directly at you, completely certain of who he sees. A terrifying realization catches in your throat. He isn't just mistaking you in the dark—he thinks you are Miriam Broadweather because, to his eyes, you look exactly like her. The parallel reflection of this place has rewritten your face. Maybe, it too, glitches like the spider monster hiding in the shadows. Here, you can be whomever you want to.

You don't correct him. You can't. If you open your mouth and the wrong cadence comes out—if they realize you are from a parallel version of these very walls—the magic of this place will swallow you whole.

The corridor is alive in a way that makes your stomach twist. Along the base of the cold stone walls, pale, translucent petunias crawl forward like hunting spiders weaving invisible webs, their petals snapping shut whenever you get too close. These are not vesper-fangs.

Thick, self-wrapping vines crawl up the columns, coiling tighter and tighter towards a ceiling you can't even see. The magic here isn't flashy. There are no sparks, no glowing wands, no tracking portals. It is entirely invisible, a heavy, unseen pressure that pulls at the fabric of your robes and makes the air behind you warp and ripple. You can feel spells brushing past your cheeks, waiting for you to join them. But something is wrong.

"Well? Are you coming or not?" the boy asks, his hand hovering over a heavy iron door handle. He looks like a student but his uniform is not like the ones you saw before—the crest is a shield of thorns and antlers. His robes bleed, shifting like swimming pools of the underworld in the light. He doesn’t notice your panic. He thinks you belong here, and maybe you do.

You lift your chin, take a deep breath of the damp, suffocating air, taking a step forward into Miriam’s shoes. You are not supposed to be here, you just don't know how impossible it's going to be to leave.

“You have no autonomy…” a voice rings out from somewhere far above your head.

“You will not steal,” the droning lecture bores into your skin. The sound bounces violently off the walls, vibrating through your body like hot, melting sand. But this isn't an ordinary classroom.

You try to extend your arms, but you hit heavy, curved glass on all sides. There are no desks, no professors, and no other students trapped with you. You are sealed inside a tiny, narrow jar by a spinner’s-corking charm—the undoable kind. The walls are forged from garnet and olive-paneled stained glass, a structure that mocks the towering, domed cathedral of your Elemental Imaginary English class, warped and shrunken down into a suffocating miniature.

“You have no magic…” The voice continues, sharp and direct, piercing your eardrums as you struggle to even lift your chin. The air is thin, tasting of old dust and stale, trapped breaths.

“You are not good enough to cast spells.”

The voice isn't just outside the glass; it is inside your head, consuming your thoughts and pressing down on your mind with the same crushing weight as the sealed lid above you.

“You are a drain, a magnet, a burden. You are in the way… but not in this jar. Here you can remain forever. You can say what you want, think what you want…” The voice creeps further in, invading your thoughts, your free will, and your powers.

“It’s a spell, a disrupting charm,” a student’s voice sounds from somewhere even more distant.

“Shelly Grimswalt… a second week in the jar and still equally as talkative. Let’s fix this,” the lecturer continues idly.

“Mind over matter,” another voice hisses. This voice is more recognizable—likely the boy from earlier in the halls.

“You rather fascinate me,” the lecturer’s voice continues. “Or maybe frustrate is more like it.” It remains unclear who she is referring to, but this is exactly what you would imagine, what you would secretly wish for, in a school full of magic.

“Are you nervous?” the lecturer continues, a coy air to her cooing calls. You picture her with sharply pointed teeth and moon-shaped eyes. “Why would you be? It’s just a jar.”

From just outside the glass, a head the size of a watermelon peeks quietly in, silver hair coiling frizzily into nothing but dried, frayed ends.

“You are unkillable,” the voice states calmly. “It’s an absolute. You always felt like something was different with you, your magic. I think it is time you meet your truest potential.”

The voice comes to a quiet stop, as though listening to the silence bleeding from the other jars.

“I can taste your fears. The salt, the doubt, the retreating blood. The stilling river from which you were born. You are a wizard’s daughter. An explosive power, created from stars and magic. Utterly unkillable, if you must know. The only student in class not lulled by the spells of monsters—that’s why you are here. You could see what others cannot. You are not just born of the sky; you are an aura-born. There is always at least one in every class, nearly a dozen or so in each school. The prefects always find them first and bring them to me….

You were able to sense my monster. You could still sense it in the halls long after the other students were chasing down the tricking spell. Unfortunately, a student always dies during this test. That is why I locked you in this little jar. So, you don’t accidentally kill yourself—or worse, hurt me…”

The voice pauses once more, hesitating, before rambling on with much more enthusiasm than before.

“…and it seems Tyler Wellridge of the River-Borns was the most recent to be killed, about an hour ago. He was very clever for his age and decree. His ghost will be most useful to study and train for future classes. His portrait is being commissioned now for the hall. He will make a great lesson when he graduates Departure Studies—as will you.”