Drag across the black glass to scratch it bare. Every scratch pours umbra; a lone click barely registers. Some scratches strike a vein and pour far more, and if you scratch the mirror almost clean it bursts, a flood of umbra, before the tarnish creeps back. Umbra is meant to be spent. Your first Source, a Tallow Candle, seeps umbra on its own, and owning it unlocks the next: a Whispering Skull that has not stopped lecturing, an Inkwell of Night that writes complaints, up to a Void Throne that is empty, as far as anyone can prove. Studies and Refinements upgrade the mirror for the rest of the term. The seepage keeps gathering while you rest your hand, and while the game is closed.
Scrying, stoking your Sources and working your Disciplines all raise your apprentice level, and new Disciplines open as it climbs. Click an action and it runs on a timer. It keeps running while you are on another page, or away from the game altogether. Each action builds its own Attunement, so the herb you have harvested a hundred times comes faster and richer than the one you just found. Nothing is gathered for its own sake: Gravebotany's herbs and seeds go to potions and to Husbandry's plots, and Murkfishing's catch goes to the Refectory, which cooks it into the food your fights run on. Every Discipline has its professor. Foreman Durgan is mostly stone. Old Wem fishes with his beard.
After curfew your apprentice walks out and does the night's small murders. Pick a zone and the fights resolve on their own, for silver, gear and Marks. Set a food first and buy Reflex Gluttony from the Bursar, and your apprentice eats before dropping, so an errand can run all night. Clear every quarry in a zone ten times and the next one opens.
The best upgrade for each half lives in the other.
Umbra from the mirror raises your apprentice level, and the level opens Disciplines and spells.
The Refectory's dishes keep your apprentice alive on the Night Errands.
Spells are learned by hand and cast on the mirror, and one school of them, the Bindings, sets something to scratch it for you while you are away.
Potions brewed from your herbs strengthen the mirror, your Disciplines or your fights.
Sign the Indenture. Any mark will do. The Academy is not particular.
Scratch the mirror until you can buy the Tallow Candle.
When the Spell Room opens, trace your first mark at the Lectern, then cast it at the Detention Rat in the Proving Grounds.
Begin a harvest in Gravebotany and leave it running.
Close the game for a while. When you come back, the Welcome Back report tells you what the night brought.
The free demo is the first term of the real Academy, up to apprentice level 12: five of the fifteen Disciplines, six of the twelve spells, the Proving Grounds and the Night Errands. Your save comes with you into the full game. If the demo is already in your library, it is waiting there as Grimsorrow Academy Demo. Part two is spells, drawn by hand: the Lectern, the Proving Grounds, and why a masterful trace pays five times the practice.