“Affairs of the Arcane: Love, Lies & Interdimensional Entanglements at the Retreat”

Filed by Raine Solara, love-drunk and scribbling under the glow of a flickering tiki torch.

They say the Retreat is a place for healing.
But it’s also a place for beautifully doomed romance.
Where the wine is strong, the base emotion louder than your regrets, and the hearts?

Always freshly bruised.

Raine Solara, crouched behind a gravestone, notebook in one hand, lizard in the other (briefly).

The cemetery at the Retreat is meant to be solemn — a garden of shadows, roses, and memory.

But lately, it's crawling with lizards. They’re the Exes. Yes, those exes.

A page in the altar book suggests a failed spell may have transformed unworthy lovers into silent, reptilian sentinels.
“He said he wanted to be near me forever. I obliged.” — Entry, p. 91

Here are two of the Retreat’s most whispered romances — strange, wild, and too real to be made up (but also maybe made up anyway):

G, THE SOUTHERN BOY
("Too Charming, Too Polite, Too Good to Stay")

First seen outside the Hollow Tree, feeding breadcrumbs to a cat that may have been a hallucination.

Anjelikka has a collection of postcards with exes

Wore cowboy boots, a wide smile, and the kind of voice that made you forget your own birthday.
“Ma’am, I reckon you’ve been running from yourself so long, you forgot you had legs.”
He taught Anjelikka how to two-step and how to leave before you’re left.

They had a thing. A soft, summer-night thing.
Then he vanished after a thunderstorm. Some say he left. Others say he dissolved into the sky like fog.

🪦 There’s a note near his grave:
“I didn’t want forever. Just one more porch swing goodbye.”

THE ALIEN ELF
("Shayth’rien of the Fifth Veil” — or just “Shay”)

Tall, glowing, with lilac-colored eyes and earrings that changed with his mood.
Claimed he was here on a diplomatic mission… but somehow spent most nights shirtless in the Basement Club, sipping stolen gin and quoting old Earth poetry.

Anjelikka was reportedly seen stargazing with him from the roof of the chapel.
Their love was ethereal, dramatic, and linguistically confusing.

“He kissed in geometry. I responded in metaphors. We were never on the same planet — but we kept orbiting anyway.”

He left her a gift: a fountain pen so she could write postcards from the Retreat.

Casey admitted she tried to flirt with Shay but got flustered when he spoke in harmonic tones and levitated her drink.

Dandy insists he knew it wouldn’t last. He told them so. Over lentils.

“Some loves are like postcards — beautiful, brief, never meant to be returned.

G was a sigh.

Shay was a storm.

Both still show up in her dreams, barefoot and glowing.

Maybe that’s all some people are meant to be.”

Was it you, dear reader, pulled into the Retreat’s web without realizing you checked in?