ALDERGATE
By Juno Reyes
Some schools cut students loose at graduation. Aldergate cuts them out of themselves.
Every gift should cost something.
About the series
ALDERGATE is a completed-arc, seven-book dark academy fantasy about a school that finds gifted teenagers, promises to teach them, and quietly harvests them: burning out the gift at graduation and taking every memory tied to it, so the graduates walk out polished, smiling, and hollow. The school calls it mercy. The students who have figured it out call it what it is, and they meet in the dark to plan around it.
Cass Mercer is seventeen, her gift is unlocking, and her own graduation date is already scheduled. Across seven books she and a found family of brand-slippers descend level by level toward the thing the school was built to contain, learning that the deeper truth is worse than the lie, that some students want the wipe for reasons that are not stupid, and that the only way to stop a system that spends children is to unlock the bargain it runs on.
What the series promises, and keeps: powers with an honest price. A mystery engine where every planted secret has a payoff book. Endings that grab, on every chapter and every book. Deaths that stay dead, because dread has to be earned. A slow-burn romance whose obstacle is not a misunderstanding, it is a ceremony that will make two people forget they ever mattered to each other. And a final book that answers everything.
Read in order, start to finish. The doors open one at a time, and the last one is worth the wait.
What you’re in for
- Priced magic
- Graduation erases you
- Dark academy
- Found family
- Slow-burn romance
- Permanent deaths
- A mystery that pays every debt
- Short chapters, live tension
- Upper YA
- A finale that answers everything
Reading order
Read in order; each book is a complete movement of one closed arc.
- Book 1:
The Undersong
Coming soonAldergate Academy finds gifted teenagers, promises to teach them mastery, and takes it all back at the ceremony that ends their schooling: the power, and every memory tied to it. Cass Mercer opens locked things. Her suppression brand stopped working two years ago, and she has faked the ceremony pain ever since. Then the Provost changes the ritual and stands watching her row.
- Book 2:
The Settled
ForthcomingThe Board sends an Assessor with a thirty-day mandate: read every brand on campus, one by one, and find the student the instruments felt in the chapel. Cass has thirty days to be no one. Out in the tidy houses where the school keeps its graduates, the Settled are not as empty as the school swears.
- Book 3:
The Last Escape
ForthcomingCass Mercer has a name, a trail, and a brother she is trying to haul back out of the dark one memory at a time. When the crew slips the walls and follows the old escape route down off the mountain, they think they are chasing freedom. They are being led.
4 more books are planned to complete the series. They appear here when they are finished.
About the author
Juno Reyes writes fast, dark fantasy about schools that lie, gifts that bill you later, and kids who read the fine print too late. The flagship is ALDERGATE, a seven-book dark academy fantasy. Start with The Undersong. The doors open in order.