The Ink That Bleeds Both Ways

Nineteen-year-old Soren Ashveil arrives at Velmoor Academy cursed with the Devouring Mark — a sigil slowly consuming his soul — and one year left to live. His only hope is Cael Mori, a sharp-tongued scholarship student whose rare sigil affinity can quiet the Mark on contact. Despite a disastrous first meeting, the two are drawn into an uneasy research partnership, and gradually into something more intimate, as they struggle to untangle genuine feeling from magical compulsion.
Unable to find answers at the Academy, they travel north together to seek the legendary Archivist. Along the way, Cael confronts a painful family history — their mother was destroyed by the guild for researching alternatives to complete severance — and both characters reckon with the impossibility of knowing where the curse ends and love begins. The Archivist offers no cure, only a mirror: severance-hunger is inherent to love meeting limitation, and the only path forward is choosing to live with that ambiguity together.
Returning through the world with that understanding, Cael and Soren make their way to Aldenmere, where they collaborate with a sympathetic physician to publish research confirming that severance-hunger stabilises through acceptance rather than severance. The guild retaliates, but the work spreads. The story closes with Cael completing hismother's suppressed research, reuniting with his long-institutionalised mother, and the two of them — Cael and Soren — committed to the ongoing, unresolved, chosen work of remaining.