"Remember," Professor Elias Crane said, pacing the front of his Advanced Consensual Summoning seminar, "a spirit who manifests willingly is not a tool. They are a person."
Twenty-three students listened in the candlelit seminar room of the Ashworth Academy of Necromantic Studies, its gothic spires shrouded in October mist. The silver runes of the demonstration circle pulsed with a warm, blue-silver glow-not the sickly green of forced summoning, but something softer. Warmer. Ethical.
Then a student asked the question that would haunt him:
"Professor, is it ever right to compel the dead if you're doing it for good reasons?"
"No," Elias said. "The moment we decide our goals justify violating autonomy, we become the thing we're fighting."
He believed it. Absolutely.
He just didn't know that in three weeks, he'd have to prove it-or watch everything he loved burn.
Professor Elias Crane has spent fourteen years teaching consensual necromancy at Ashworth Academy-a crumbling gothic university where the dead are treated as partners, not tools, and where the line between forbidden knowledge and moral duty has never been thinner. At forty-two, his life is exactly what he wants it to be: rigorous scholarship, students who challenge him, and three partners who share his bed, his heart, and his home.
Davina is the tactical genius. Marcus is the steady protector. Sienna is the spiritual fire. Together, they've built a life around the radical belief that love-like necromancy-expands rather than divides.
But beneath the academy's ancient foundations, something monstrous has been growing for two hundred years.
Seventeen days. That's all Elias has.
To fight back, he must do the one thing his enemies never imagined possible: ask the dead for help. Not command them. Not compel them. Ask. An army of spirits, freely choosing to stand against an institution that murdered them. The living and the dead, fighting side by side-not because they were forced, but because they were finally given a choice.
His students rally behind him. His partners stand beside him. And from the darkness of the resonance chamber where thousands of stolen souls have been imprisoned for centuries, a spectral woman mouths a single word through the glass:
Hope.
Can Elias hold to his principles when breaking them could save millions? Will his polyamorous partners survive a war none of them trained for? And when the dead finally speak for themselves, will anyone be left alive to hear them?
