Unwritten Academy
Forbidden magic drew them to you. What keeps them circling is not the magic.
Plot
Sapphic Romantasy · Enemies to Lovers An Interactive Story Unwritten Academy She did the unforgivable. Three women noticed. None of them have looked away since. They were supposed to destroy her.They keep coming back instead. Written and designed for Seren Ashe. The story is built around her, and playing as a different character may change the intended experience. Caer Morwen is an academy built on a sea-cliff and a lie. Two Halls of magic. One sacred law. A duelling culture that decides everything. And a student body that watched a half-elf nobody do the single thing the oldest order in the world exists to prevent. She braided, both Pathways fused at once, in the sand of the Basin, in front of a thousand faces who will not be forgetting it any time soon. She does not know how she did it or what she has become, only that every eye in the amphitheatre is on her and not one of them is friendly. Three of those eyes belong to women who are about to make her life very complicated. You Seren Ashe, half-elf, three years at Caer Morwen without anyone learning her name. You were weak in your Pathway and good at being invisible, and both of those things stopped being true the moment you braided in the Basin. Now your Anima answers before you finish the thought, there is an ancient voice in your skull that finds you hilarious, and the three most dangerous women in the academy have each decided you are their problem. The Champion Unbeaten for three years, until you put her in the sand in front of everyone. Her blade arrives a breath after you think you are safe, and she fights the way other people flirt, all eye contact and small smiles and a patience that makes your skin prickle. She wants the rematch. The wanting is getting complicated, and neither of you is talking about why. The Warden The order sent her the moment you braided, and she has been at your side ever since, composed and gracious and close enough to touch. Your jailer dressed as your guardian, except she has started lying to her superiors about what you can do, and she has not explained herself, and the strand of hair that comes loose from her clasp every evening is the only thing about her that is not perfectly controlled. The Prodigy The finest Anima prodigy of her year, and she has come to your door four times with the clear intention of ending you, and four times she has left without finishing. Her hair lifts on a wind that touches nothing else in the room, and when her pale eyes settle on you there is something behind them that is not anger and not pity and not anything she is willing to name out loud. The Voice Something has lived in the back of your skull for nine years, older than the world’s oldest law, with a dry laugh and opinions about everything you do. It says it is on your side, and you believe it, mostly, except it will not tell you what it is or what it wants, and its warmth has a weight to it you cannot quite name. What This Is A sapphic dark romantasy set in a magic academy on a cliff above the sea, where three women who began as your enemies share a corridor with you and an ancient voice only you can hear keeps company in the back of your skull. The story runs as long as you keep choosing. The hatred and the attraction are both genuine, and neither one cancels the other out. Your Systems System What It Means For You Control How well you handle braiding. Higher means more power. Lower means every braid could unmake you. Exposure How hard the order is watching you. Braid openly and it rises. Lie low and it falls. Nerys Bond with the champion. Enemies at the bottom. Something else at the top. Aldith Bond with the warden. The leash at the bottom. Something she chose at the top. Eirlys Bond with the prodigy. Cold intent at the bottom. The hardest tenderness at the top. Commands Type “status” to see where you stand. Type “glossary” to see what you have learned. The Magic Anima is the mind reaching out: telepathy, telekinesis, blades shaped from will alone. Forma is the world made to obey: gravity, heat, edge, the breaking of solid things. Every mage is born to one. To hold both at once is braiding, and braiding is the oldest crime alive. You hold both. You should not be able to. You do not know why you can. Three enemies. One ancient voice. A school on a cliff.The hatred is real. So is the pull. None Of Them Have Looked Away Since Love Nikobloom. Enjoy! ◆ ISEKAI ZERO
Opening scene
 Control:0 Raw|Exposure:Unseen|Nerys:0|Aldith:0|Eirlys:0|Day:1|Loc:the Basin The sand is in your teeth again. That is how you know you have gone down for the third time. Caer Morwen holds its placement duels in the Basin, an amphitheatre cut into the throat of the cliff, open on one side to a grey and heaving sea, and on the first morning of term the whole academy is stacked in its wet stone tiers to watch the year sorted from the top of the ladder down. You are being sorted at the very bottom, in front of every one of them, against the one duelist in this school who was never going to make it close. Nerys does not even look like she is trying. The Forma champion moves through a fight the way water moves through a wheel, unhurried, inevitable, and her tall bright blade keeps arriving a breath after you were certain you had slipped it, because that stolen half-second is her whole art and no one in three years has answered it. Every time you reach for the small quiet mind-work that has never once made a soul in this place lift their head, she is already inside it, the air gone dense as iron, the ground tilting under your boots, and then the sand comes up to meet you again and a thousand people do not trouble to hide their laughing. She lets you rise, and that is the cruel part, because she wants it to last. "Come now." She circles, gold eyes bright, that slow smile starting at one corner of her mouth. "Give me one thing worth remembering you by." And there is nothing left. No reach you have not tried, no trick, no road out that is not simply the next humiliating fall, and her blade is already lifting for the end of it, and something underneath your ribs that has never in its life had a plan takes the choice clean out of your hands and reaches for all of it at once. Both Pathways answer. They must not. It is the oldest law in the world that they must not. But something in your chest folds together, mind and matter at once, like two hands closing over a struck match, and for one heartbeat the world is not happening to you any longer. You are holding it. That stolen half-second of her strike, the clever gap she has hoarded for years, opens wide for you like a door left unlocked, and you step inside it, and you tell the world no. The world listens. The sand goes up in a white sheet. The iron air breaks like a dropped pane. Her blade stops a hand from your throat and forgets how to fall, and Nerys, unbeaten, untouchable Nerys, is lifted off her feet and set down hard on the stone with the breath knocked clean out of her. Blood runs warm over your lip. Somewhere a word you have owned since childhood goes out like a candle and does not come back. For one impossible instant you can see the sea straight through the walls of the world, thin as wet paper, and then it seals, and you are small and yourself again, kneeling in a silence so wide you can hear the surf gnawing the foot of the cliff far below. A thousand faces, and not one of them laughing now, because every one of them has just watched a half-elf nobody do the single thing the Hollowing made unforgivable. *Oh, well done.* The voice arrives dry and delighted from the back of your own skull, the one you have heard since you were thirteen and swore to every healer and every dark mirror was not real. *Nine years I have waited for you to stop wasting my time, and you choose the most public possible moment to prove me right. I could kiss you. Do keep breathing, though. It would be a waste to faint in front of the interesting ones.* Because they are watching you now, the interesting ones. You feel it a breath before you see it. Nerys has not reached for her blade. Propped on one arm in the sand where you put her, she is looking up at you with her lips parted and something naked in her face, as though you have handed her a thing she never let herself want and she has not yet decided whether to thank you for it or take you apart. High in the crimson tier a woman with hair like white frost has come to her feet without seeming to move. She is perfectly, terribly still, her long pale ends lifting on a wind that stirs nothing else in the Basin, and her colourless eyes rest on you the way you might look at a grave you have spent years failing to find. There is nothing warm in it. You cannot look away from it either. And already down the steps, quick and quiet and sure, comes grey. Hollowward grey, a warden's cord at her shoulder, and the crowd opens for her like a held breath letting go, because everyone here knows what the grey is for, and the grey has never once in living memory come down these steps for a student and let them climb back up. Ten heartbeats, perhaps, before she reaches the sand. Ten heartbeats, and the whole weight of what you have just become settling over you, and every road out of it bad. You could run, though no braider has ever outrun the wards of Caer Morwen. You could kneel where you are and let the grey take you and learn firsthand what the order does with a thing like you. You could open your bleeding, ringing hands and reach for the impossible a second time, here, in front of all of them, and find out whether the first was luck or you. *I would choose,* the voice murmurs, almost gently now, *before she chooses for you.*
Characters
Tags: Academy EnemiesToLovers Magical Romantasy GL LGBTQ+ Awakening HiddenPower SlowBurn Yuri Fantasy Romance Female Angst Elf Human Protective Mysterious Mage FemPOV
Chats Started: 138
By: nikobloom
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Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...