The Aumbry Years
Dark academia at a school for keeping the dead
The Aumbry teaches its students to keep the dead without taking them. Five books, five years, and one student nobody knows where to place.
Year One
Senne arrives on foot, with her grandmother carried under her collarbone and no clan of her own. The Aumbry reads each newcomer and sorts them by the soul they carry. It cannot place her, and the word that goes round the hall means broken. Year One ends on the Night of Names: keep one stranger's dead through one vigil, and wear the proof as your first dark mark.
How it began
Before any student came there was a ruin on the high ground above a drowned valley, and a dying keeper who meant to fill it. The Founding of the Aumbry is the story of that founder and what the building cost him. It is the origin story, not a campus novel, and the saga reads fine without it. The house takes its name from the aumbry, the keeping-cupboard in its oldest wall.