The Culling Year

by Marlowe Sinclair

Romantasy Romance Dark fantasy

Ashloom Conservatory takes fifty applicants a year and buries some of them before the first lesson starts. She claws her way in on nothing but grit and a magic she has hidden since she was twelve, the raw, unbound kind the Conservatory executes on sight, the kind that once cost her the one person who ever tried to protect her. Then the rankings post: lowest of the year, bound for a full Culling Year to the coldest, most exacting First Thread the school has produced in a decade, a boy with every reason in his blood to want her gone. The trials that follow can kill them both. So can what he already knows and has not said. Rivals, forced together, learning exactly how much of the other's armor is real, while something neither of them will name keeps building in the space they refuse to close. Slow-burn, closed-door, and colder than it has any right to be, until it isn't.

dark academia, cold-then-charged, slow-burn rivals-to-lovers, always fade-to-black

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What players say

Played this

The school actually feels dangerous, which is rare: I have read enough academies where the deadly exams are mostly vibes. Here you genuinely keep track of who survives. Four stars because the cold love interest kept me at arm's length a little too long in the middle, but I think that is precisely the point.

Fenna July 2026

Played this

I thought I knew what I was getting into: fancy school, deadly exams, a handsome rival. What I did not expect was how breathless that first trial is, or how fast I cared about the boy on that railing before he had said a single word. Rankings as heartbreak, who knew.

Marieke July 2026

Played this

told myself just chapter one then bed. it is 2am and i just said "no" out loud to a screen. that last scene. that look. i have work tomorrow and i do not care.

quill.and.candle July 2026

What I appreciate most is that the lead actually does things: she schemes, she hides, she chooses. Not an object waiting for someone to save her. And the tension between the two of them builds through small things, a look, a hand that lingers too long, never through a lot of words. Exactly as it should be.

R. Voskuijlen July 2026

Played this

Fade-to-black and still the tension in those after-curfew corridors read hotter than half of what I have read explicitly this year. It is all in what they do not say to each other.

Bo July 2026

Played this

Five out of five for the rivalry, four for the pacing in the middle where I briefly lost track of the corridors. Otherwise entirely my thing: exams that actually matter and a boy who hates his own rules but keeps them anyway.

noor_reads July 2026

Played this

The school actually feels dangerous, which is rare: I have read enough academies where the deadly exams are mostly vibes. Here you genuinely keep track of who survives. Four stars because the cold love interest kept me at arm's length a little too long in the middle, but I think that is precisely the point.

Fenna July 2026
Played this

I thought I knew what I was getting into: fancy school, deadly exams, a handsome rival. What I did not expect was how breathless that first trial is, or how fast I cared about the boy on that railing before he had said a single word. Rankings as heartbreak, who knew.

Marieke July 2026
Played this

told myself just chapter one then bed. it is 2am and i just said "no" out loud to a screen. that last scene. that look. i have work tomorrow and i do not care.

quill.and.candle July 2026
What I appreciate most is that the lead actually does things: she schemes, she hides, she chooses. Not an object waiting for someone to save her. And the tension between the two of them builds through small things, a look, a hand that lingers too long, never through a lot of words. Exactly as it should be.

R. Voskuijlen July 2026
Played this

Fade-to-black and still the tension in those after-curfew corridors read hotter than half of what I have read explicitly this year. It is all in what they do not say to each other.

Bo July 2026
Played this

Five out of five for the rivalry, four for the pacing in the middle where I briefly lost track of the corridors. Otherwise entirely my thing: exams that actually matter and a boy who hates his own rules but keeps them anyway.

noor_reads July 2026

The Culling Year

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What players say