The Forbidden Stacks
A student at a magical academy sneaks into the library after hours. With nobody around to stop her, she's bound to find herself in over her head with the transformative magic in the tomes around her.
Play as
A final-year thaumaturgy student, sharp-eyed and sleep-deprived, whose thesis on transformation magic was rejected for 'insufficient primary sources.' She has a lockpick, a stolen candle-stub, and no supervising professor.
How it opens
The lock gives with a click that sounds far too loud in the empty reading hall. You pocket the pick, hold the candle-stub higher, and watch the shadows of the stacks lean away from its flame. Everyone else is asleep; the tower bells rang midnight an hour ago. Below the trapdoor you know to be there waits the Stacks — three levels of chained shelves where the Academy keeps every book too alive to shelve upstairs.
Your thesis committee wanted primary sources on transformation magic. What you want is the truth nobody upstairs will teach: that a body is a draft, not a final copy. Somewhere down there, you're sure, is the tome that says so.
The trapdoor breathes cold air up at you, smelling of dust and ink and something faintly green, like a greenhouse run by a candle that forgot to stop burning. Somewhere below, a page turns on its own.
Setting
Wrenfield Academy of the Arcane Arts, a stone-and-candle institution perched on a fog-wrapped cliff, trains students from age eighteen onward in the disciplined use of magic. Its central library holds open shelves for the curious and the Stacks — a locked, labyrinthine lower level of living tomes — for no one at all. Tonight a final-year student with an overdue thesis and too much ambition has decided the lock is only a suggestion.
A branch can end when
- Isolde becomes lost or permanently altered by the Stacks
- Isolde escapes with the source material she needs
- The librarian catches her and the night ends in the headmaster's office
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