The Founder's Vault - A Dark Academia Secret Society Thriller

Dark academia gothic mystery. Scottish Highlands secrets. A three-hundred-year-old lie finally coming undone.

A three-hundred-year-old floor doesn't lie. It just waits for someone to finally look closely enough.

High above a fog-wrapped Highland loch, the Aethelgard Institute has spent three centuries teaching its scholars to examine everything except itself. Julian Vance came here six years ago to build a career in structural epigraphy - and, though he never admitted it to himself, to walk the same corridors his grandfather once directed before dying in circumstances the Institute has spent seventy years declining to explain. He tells himself the stain on the library floor is nothing. Old varnish. The kind of story an institution tells itself so it never has to ask a harder question.

Archival cipher specialist Sibyl Ferrand isn't so sure. Once she starts looking too, neither is Julian.

What begins as one scholar's refusal to accept a convenient explanation unravels into a conspiracy reaching from a forged confession and a director who vanished from an unlocked tower, to a fortune built on a lie the Institute's own founder spent his life trying to bury. Altered ledgers. Hidden ciphers. A family's silence, kept for seventy years by people who told themselves silence was kindness. Aethelgard was never simply a school. It was built to keep a secret - and it has been keeping several ever since.

The deeper Julian and Sibyl dig, the more the Institute's carefully maintained history starts to crack: a director's fatal fall that was never an accident, a confrontation on a parapet three hundred feet above the water, a trial that drags decades of institutional cowardice into the light, and a reckoning that forces an entire community to choose between the silence it has always preferred and the far costlier work of honesty.

THE FOUNDER'S VAULT is a slow-burn dark academia mystery for readers who love fog-wrapped gothic settings, morally complicated institutions, and investigators who simply will not look away once they've started looking. It's a story about what old buildings remember, what they are built to forget, and what it finally costs to tell the truth.

Julian and Sibyl make an unlikely investigative team - a historian who reads what buildings don't say out loud, and an archivist who knows a cipher only stays hidden as long as no one asks what it's protecting. Neither set out to bring down an institution. They just couldn't stop asking one more question, until the questions became impossible for Aethelgard's Board to silence.

A clean read, start to finish: no explicit content, no graphic violence, no romance subplot. Just cold libraries, cliffside paths, candlelit archives, and the slow, satisfying unraveling of a conspiracy three centuries in the making.

Perfect for readers who love gothic academia settings, cipher-driven investigations, and slow-burn institutional mysteries - without the content some dark academia fans prefer to skip.

Inside these pages:
A remote gothic institute with three centuries of buried history.
A patient investigation built on ciphers, ledgers, and archival detective work.
A director's death never properly explained, and a grandson determined to finally explain it.
A founder's fortune built on a lie, and the reckoning it takes to tell the truth.
A clean dark academia mystery, safe for readers who want atmosphere and intrigue without objectionable content.

Step through the fog to Aethelgard. It's been keeping its secrets for three hundred years - and it's about to run out of places to hide them.

From dark academia author Pearl Shahana.