A Stormscale Scandal: Ashveil Dragon Academy

My boyfriend cheated on me. The next day, I discovered I'm the heiress to the most powerful dragon family.

Plot

Ashveil Dragon Academy A STORMSCALESCANDAL A week ago you were human. They have already decided what you are worth. Dragon society spent thirty-eight years forming an opinion about your mother. It has had a week to form one about you, and it is not waiting for more. Interactive novel  ·  One academic year  ·  32 weeks  ·  14 endings Day 0 You meant to say something cutting. What came out was heat — a thin bright line of it, close enough to singe his shirt. Your parents explained it that night. Dragons. Not a metaphor and not a bloodline curiosity: an entire people, living quietly alongside everyone else for three hundred years at a stretch. A hidden island. A Council with nine seats. Your mother is the runaway heiress of a house that holds three of them, and your father was the bodyguard assigned to protect her. They had eighteen years to tell you. They chose the evening after you set something on fire. Days later your Awakening finishes at Stormscale Castle, your grandmother's hand flat between your shoulder blades, while your grandfather spends political capital down the hall to make you exist on paper. Nobody asks whether you wanted any of it; in dragon law the Awakening is also the moment you become an adult, and adults are assumed to have agreed. You start classes a week behind your cohort. Every one of them has heard the story already, and most have decided how they intend to feel about it. What the Council has on you Registered eight days ago NAME   You Stormscale AGE   18 · Awakening complete MANIFEST   Blue Dragon LINEAGE   Emberclaw × Stormscale, crossbreed PRIOR RECORD   None. No approved child recorded. ENROLMENT   Expedited — Council seat, 3 days A registration filed this fast is a favour, and a favour this size gets noticed. House Blackthorn learned you existed from the paperwork rather than from your arrival, which tells you roughly how far ahead of you they tend to be. The record itself can no longer be undone — that was never the part anyone meant to threaten. What is still open is what the favour cost, and who is holding the other end of it. Three houses are watching Each of them wants something, and only one will say so plainly Stormscale Blue · Earned by grades and etiquette Your mother's house. Diplomacy, wealth, three Council seats, and a granddaughter who arrived with no political history at all — which makes you useful some while before it makes you family. Your grandmother is the warmest person in that castle and the one with the most to gain. Both of those are true at once, and she would not insult you by pretending otherwise. Blackthorn Black · Earned by competence, and little else They run the Academy and most of what matters inside it. Your mother broke an engagement to their heir thirty-eight years ago and vanished into the human world, and the family has never once raised its voice about it. They are not hostile. They are simply very good at remembering, and patient enough to be owed. Emberclaw Red · Earned by action, never a speech Your father's house, and the only one that was glad to see you before working out what you were for. They are also the house with the least power to shield you from anything, and they know it — which is its own kind of honesty, and the reason their approval is the hardest to spend. The thing nobody will explain to you Six breeds, nine seats Green  farmers and herbalists  ·  1 seat Red  guards and soldiers  ·  1 seat Silver  healers and researchers  ·  1 seat Gold  traders and brokers  ·  1 seat Blue  diplomats and politicians  ·  3 seats Black  scholars and judges  ·  2 seats The rarest dragons make the rules for everyone else. Nobody is pretending otherwise. Year One The calendar does not wait for you Week 2 You arrive late The cohort has already sorted itself without you. The class president has a folder with your name on it and a duty he did not choose, and neither of you mentions that on the first day. Weeks 8–9 Midterms Including Reproductive Biology and Mating Habits, taught as law and genetics by a physician who finds your embarrassment thoroughly uninteresting. Opting out is always allowed and never penalised. It is also, inevitably, noticed. Week 16 The Winter Gala Invitation-only, at your grandfather's house, where the families go to make things public that were settled months earlier. Something will be announced with your name inside it, and you will be standing there when it is. Your answer in that moment is the only part of the evening that belongs to you — and refusing is a real road, not a punishment. Weeks 24–25 The House Competition Flight and combat in front of the entire Academy. The one measure Emberclaw considers honest, and the one no amount of etiquette can quietly arrange for you. Weeks 30–31 Finals They decide whether there is a second year at all. Nothing else you built across the thirty weeks before them will cover a failed one — not the houses, not the gossip, not him. Who you will have to read correctly The year's company Andreas Blackthorn Black Dragon · Class president Says little, notices everything, and is quietly terrified of valuing someone for their name the way his father did. Which means the surest way to hold his attention is to want nothing from him at all. Sarah Tidewing Blue Dragon · Tidewing Says the polite thing while meaning the pointed one, and expects you to keep up. Trades gossip carefully, which is why hers is worth having — and she will warn you exactly once, and only if she has decided she likes you. Julien Shadowborne Black Dragon · Shadowborne Blonde, which no Black Dragon is supposed to be, and entirely unbothered by how much that costs him. Deflects with a joke, then says the honest thing anyway, usually after everyone else has left. Dragon society will find a use for you by summer. The only question is whether you chose it. Thirty-two weeks, and two scenes of your attention inside each one. Classes that can end the story by themselves, four houses keeping a private tally, an heir who would honestly prefer you were nobody, and fourteen ways the year can close. The Realm has already answered the question on your behalf. You have one academic year to disagree with it. Rated M17 · Mature themes, romance, political violenceEvery character is 18 or older

Opening scene

## Scenario 1: The Fire Prologue · Day 0 Ac Passing | St Noted Bt Cold Em Favored Co Cold | Rep Noticed | Sc None | Andy Single/Acquaintance/Wary | Studied: n | Moved: - | Flags: fire, reveal in the living room | Scene: the living room | Owed: none | Next: Day 2, Stormscale comes for her The car park behind the college science block empties fast on a Monday, and the streetlights come on before anyone has finished leaving. He said five minutes. It is ten past, eleven minutes by the clock over the bike racks, and You is the only one still standing there. He is already out. He is twenty feet away, between a parked car and the kerb, with his hands in a blonde woman's hair. There is a particular silence in the half-second before someone says something unforgivable. It lasts exactly that long, and then it is over, and whatever was meant to go into it never arrives. Fire does. A thin bright line of it, close enough to the wing mirror to leave a mark, and it catches the metal bin at the kerb and the bin goes up like it has been waiting all year. Orange light slams flat across the asphalt. The green of his jacket turns the colour of rust. The two of them spring apart and neither one runs, because running is for things you understand. The line of scorched air leads back to exactly one person. There is no blood on You, no burn, not a mark, and that is somehow worse: blood would at least have been an explanation. The bin roars. Nobody is hurt. A door bangs open somewhere behind the building, and the car park is suddenly no place to be found standing. The smell of smoke is still in the air an hour later, and every light in the family house is on. Her mother is standing in the living-room doorway, and she is not asking what happened. No question at all. Her father comes in from the hall with his coat still on and stops short at the sight of You's face, and the two of them look at each other across the room for a long moment in a way they have never once done in eighteen years. Her father says, "Sit down." The coffee table in the living room is the one this family has put its mugs down on for fourteen years. There is a water ring in the middle of it that is almost as old. Her mother sits on the edge of the armchair and puts both hands flat on the wood as though she needs it to hold her up, and says a word that has never once been said in this house. "Stormscale." She says it low, like a word she has kept behind her teeth for decades. What comes after that arrives fast, in her father's flat voice and her mother's careful one. Dragons. An entire people, living quietly alongside everyone else for three hundred years at a stretch. An island nobody has mapped. A Council with nine seats. Her mother is the runaway heiress of a house that holds three of them, and her father was the bodyguard sent to keep her safe, and what they did thirty-eight years ago is apparently still being discussed by people neither of them has ever met. And the fire tonight was not an accident or a breakdown. No doctor has a word for it. It was the start of something that happens to every dragon between eighteen and twenty, and it does not stop once it starts. Her father is watching her carefully. Her mother has not moved her hands off the table. "There's more," her mother says. "But you get to pick what you hear first." --- What do you do? *A. The practical question. What happens to me now — tonight, tomorrow, next week.* *B. The angry one. Eighteen years. Every birthday, every single day — and neither of you said a word.* *C. The name. Stormscale. Who are they, what did you leave, and what does it make me.* *D. Ask about the fire itself. What is happening to my body, and how much worse is it going to get.* *E. Something else entirely.*

Characters

Tags: Romantasy SliceOfLife Fantasy Academy Dragon Royalty Noble Non-human Manipulative Magical HiddenIdentity HiddenPower SlowBurn EnemyToLovers ArrangedMarriage FemPOV Romance Supernatural Family PoliticalIntrigue Mystery Adventure Love Mature

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By: jalousie

Stories

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