Tahvin spent years authoring an unforgiving world to escape his grief.

Dragged into Esseria by Phyllis, a character with questionable boundaries and exceptionally thorough contracts, he awakens in someone else’s body and his soul on the line.

Now called Ishara, he knows what monsters, gods, and disasters await him. Or would have if the world had followed his manuscript as faithfully as he’d envisioned.

His best chance of surviving lies with Aes, Ri, and Zin: three magical misfits dangerously close to expulsion. Their deal was simple. Help them graduate, and they’d help him. But between campus chaos, disastrous quests, and increasingly complicated feelings, keeping that promise could be harder than surviving the monsters.

Tahvin thought he knew who the characters of his world were meant to become. But he never expected to care so deeply for who they were. And in a world he filled with suffering, finding something worth living for might be his most dangerous plot twist yet.