Alfie paused as he stepped onto the wyrm.

“This is a bit more like it,” he said to himself.

The interior of the prospective students’ carriage resembled the interior of a spacious coffee shop more than the inside of some giant serpent. There was plush leather seating everywhere, a coffee and tea station with an assortment of complementary cakes and rolls, low tables, soft lights, and a few more private booths with tables.

“What’s that, mate?” Will asked over his shoulder.

“Nothing. Just commenting on how this is nothing like what I expected the inside of a giant snake to look like.”

“Oh yeah? It’s the undead bit. Let’s them keep the wyrm animated while hollowing out and renovating its insides. C’mon.”

He led the way to a booth and slid into the window seat.

Quest Complete!

Catch the Wyrmline from Down Street Station

Rewards:

100xp

Earth Shard x1

+100xp

Progress to Earth Fortifier Level 3: 210/400

Alfie sent his second Earth Shard into his subspace and settled into the seat. Will glanced at him and cocked his head.

“What was all that about?” he asked.

“Complete a quest and got one of these shard thingies along with some experience points,” Alfie replied.

“Oh, that’s neat,” Will said offhandedly.

“Didn’t you get one? Sharpe gave me two when I met with him.”

“Not all of us are so lucky to have a personal invitation from the provost himself. Hold onto that shard, though. Might be worth something at the school.”

The journey was fairly uneventful. Apart from the sumptuously appointed carriage, everything was much the same. Alfie and Will kept mostly to themselves, as this seemed to be what all the other first-year passengers were doing. Some of the thirty or forty or so were chatting politely amongst themselves, others were listening to headphones, and others still were reading. More than a few had simply closed their eyes in an attempt to get a little shuteye. The carriage was pretty full, but there were still a number of empty chairs dotted about the place.

Alfie helped himself to a cinnamon scroll, more because they were there than because he was hungry. Will, on the other hand, stayed wedged in the corner of the booth and devoured a chicken, brie, and cranberry baguette, a slice of treacle tart, and three cups of tea.

With each stop, Alfie hoped to catch a glimpse of something weird or eldritch, but every station they pulled into looked just like every other station. Eagle Lows did appear to be underwater, but the water was so clear that Alfie only cottoned onto this fact when a line of hurrying merpeople and adaro swam past the window.

The first few were tube stations, but when the conductor’s voice crackled through the antique speaker and announced that they would shortly be pulling into The Inbetweeny, the train burst out into the sunlight.

Beyond the windowpane stretched rolling hills of green grass and arable land, dotted with small towns and villages.

How fast has wyrm this been moving? Alfie wondered.

There was no trace of the city now. It was like they had left the gray of metropolitan life and emerged into an ocean of green countryside.

With the warmth of the sun coming through the tinted windows, the patchwork of soothing green beyond them, and the rhythmic tinkle of the wyrm’s undulations, Alfie soon slipped into a stupor. His eyelids drooped down to half-mast. His vision unfocused.

Dimly, as if through a wad of cotton wool, Alfie heard the announcement for Epiphany Station. It was only when he felt Will kick him under the table that he roused himself from the land of nod.

“Oi, whatssabigidea?” Alfie mumbled, heaving his eyelids open.

He saw what the big idea was at once. Two people—sinister-looking punk types with outrageous mohawks and more metal in their faces than the average cutlery drawer—had come strutting into the first-year carriage.

“Elves,” Will muttered under his breath.

“What? Is that, like, a gang or something?” Will hissed.

“No, elves,” Will whispered back, barely moving his lips.

Alfie watched as the two elves—one female and one male—swaggered with affected arrogance down the carriage. The woman picked an orange out of a fruit bowl on the coffee station and took a bite out of it, peel and all. She chewed casually for a while, swallowed, and then spat some pips out onto the ground and tossed the orange over her shoulder.

Alfie observed the other members of their carriage trying studiously to ignore the elves. Alfie didn’t blame them. The pair were rangy, not bulky, but they had bad news written all over them.

They prowled around the carriage for a while, just being intimidating as people like that so often are. Alfie had seen it a hundred times. They were fishing for a bad look or a smart word, which they could then use to kick off in no uncertain manner.

Then they spotted Will.

“Oi, oi, Saveloy!” the woman shrieked. “Corym, look who it is!”

Will let out a groan from under his breath. The two elves stumped over and came to a halt next to the booth.

“How do you know all of these types of people?” Alfie asked Will casually, determined to show these two idiots that he wasn’t afraid of them. He knew that if you gave those kinds of thugs an inch of fear, then they’d take you down a mile of bad road.

The male elf, Corym, cocked his head to the side and looked at Will.

“Oh, don’t be modest, Savage,” he said in a voice as rough as sandpaper, though with a surprisingly refined accent. “Tell your pal here how we know one another, hm? Tell him how you’re a bit of an infamous thief among low-level street criminals. A bit of a likely lad who has had a checkered past.”

Will had gone bright red. Alfie could see many of the others in the carriage watching the performance out of the corners of their eyes.

“Who are you?” Alfie asked bluntly. “And what do you want?”

“Why don’t you make the introductions, Savage?” the female elf said, her words coming out like honey-coated razor blades.

“Corym, Alixya, this is my mate, Alfie,” Will said.

“I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, Alfie,” Alixya said sweetly, “but I wouldn’t want to lie.”

Alfie smiled with an effort.

“What brings you in here?” Will asked.

“Oh, you know how it is, Sav,” Corym said, sitting himself down next to Will while his companion continued to stand.

“Actually, I don’t,” Will said.

“That’s right,” Corym said slowly. He wagged his finger in Will’s face. “You naughty little sausage, I heard you’ve been a little… AWOL.” He slapped his hand down hard on the table with a bang that made a couple of the people nearest them jump. Alfie saw there was a scarab beetle inked inexpertly on the back of the elf’s hand.

Alfie could feel adrenaline flooding through him like ice.

“There’s been a bit of an upheaval in the community,” Alixya said. “A few of the big players in our line of work have gone missing in recent months.” She leaned forward and squashed a crumb with her finger. “They’ve left a lot of power gaps, see?”

“I see,” Will said. “So there’s all these opportunistic thugs going around trying to carve out turf, right?”

“We prefer ‘criminal entrepreneurs’,” Corym said.

“Oh,” Alfie said, “so you two plonkers are trying to hold up or rob people on travel routes you might not have had access to before. Is that how it goes?”

The female elf let out a high-pitched titter.

“Hold up? What d’you think this is, the Wild bloody West?” she said.

“No, no, no, nothing like that,” Corym said. He put an arm around Will. “We know better than to rob innocent travelers. That’s extremely impolite. Illegal some might even say. No, we’re here on a recruitment drive.”

Will leaned back and sideways, the better to take the punk elf’s profile in.

“Recruitment drive? Recruiting for who?” he asked.

“Now that would be telling, Savage, my old mucker,” Corym said. Alfie saw his arm tighten around Will’s neck and pull him closer. “The real question is: what in the hex do you think you’re doing riding in here? Are you on a job? Were you about to pickpocket this poor dimwit opposite you?”

“I’m going… to Aetherbright,” Will said, trying to make himself more comfortable without being overly forceful.

“Aetherbright must really be lowering its standards if they’re letting the likes of you in,” Alixya sneered. “Or maybe they’re just running out of sacrificial lambs?”

Even through the red mist that was rising inside of him, Alfie wasn’t sure what to make of that.

Sacrificial lambs? At a school? What was that supposed to mean?

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The elves were already talking on, trying to convince Will that he should come with them, join with them, and use his skill set for something bigger than the hopeless and ridiculous crusade that Sharpe was going to try and shove down the throats of his new converts.

Alfie didn’t know what any of that alluded to, but he did know he didn’t like the two elves.

Corym leaned in, as if he was divulging a big secret, and said, “Listen up, goblin-breath, there’s a time, not too far off now, when there’s going to all kinds of opportunities going around. You take my word, that when that time comes, you’re not going to want to be anywhere near that sewer pipe of an academy. Who knows, even your normie friend here might want to think about joining us?”

“You know what?” Will said. “I might just take you up on that offer, Corym—once me and my mate Alfie here have popped on up to the Academy and given it the old once-over, obviously.”

Alfie recognized what Will was doing: trying to play it cool while not showing that he was scared. He knew what giving a point-blank no to these two idiots was likely to mean.

Alfie saw the expression on Alixya’s face alter slightly; her lips parted, and she ran her tongue along her teeth. She adjusted the set of her feet and her shoulders.

“Ah, come on, Savage,” Corym said, unexpectedly loosening his hold on Will’s neck. “I was humoring you before. There’s no way the likes of you snared an invite to Sharpe’s elitist, toffee-nosed, overblown institution. You expect me to believe that you’re going in, too?”

“He is,” Alfie growled, his hands bunching into fists under the table.

The elves ignored him.

“You know that this is the end of the line for you, don’t you, Savage?” Corym continued softly. “Are you really trying to tell us that you’re planning on joining up, is that it? Don’t be ridiculous! You’re going pop along with us now, hm? Maybe we can take you along to meet our… employer. You might be surprised to find out who he is.”

Alfie could feel the fury building in him, but he was also intrigued by what these loudmouths were saying. They were the kind of fools who would spill good information just for the sake of sounding like they knew what was going on.

Will, trying to diffuse the situation, said, “I told you, Corym, cheers for the offer, but I’ll be going along to Aetherbright Academy with Alfie here.”

“Listen here, you dumb little bastard,” the female elf snarled suddenly, jutting her chin out aggressively, “why d’you think we’re in here, eh? You reckon that a couple of career criminals like us are just chancing it? You think we hopped in here hoping to take advantage of a couple of losers who’d have no money on ’em worth speaking of anyway?”

Will rubbed his bruised face subconsciously. The attention of everyone else in the carriage was fixed on them now.

“No, no, no, Savage, we haven’t been sent to do no pocket picking or bag snatching,” Alixya spat. “We’ve been sent special, like.”

“Careful, Alixya,” Corym said.

“Sent to recruit us some young blood and fresh talent. Mages who might fancy joining a group of individuals who want to see things run differently, see? Different than they are now, I mean.”

“What’re you on about?” Will asked.

Alixya jerked her thumb at Alfie, and he saw she had the same scarab tattoo on her wrist as Corym had on the back of his hand.

“Can’t tell you much more than that, Savage,” she muttered. “But that won’t matter. You’re coming with us!”

“If the Academy goes pear-shaped,” Will continued doggedly, “or it’s not my cup of tea, I’ll definitely consider your—”

The crack of Will’s forehead bouncing off the table was loud enough to make everyone else in the carriage look up or around. One girl let out an audible soft scream.

“Hey!” a gangly youth, who’d been reading a paper near the front of the carriage, said. “Why don’t you leave him and hex off?”

That was enough for Alfie. He grabbed the wrist of the female elf, as she reached out for the dazed Will, and yanked her forward and off balance so that her own forehead clonked satisfyingly off the edge of the booth seat.

Alfie shoved the cursing female elf backward, and she tumbled over a coffee table. In return, he was rewarded with being seized by the collar by Corym and hauled over the booth table. The elf laughed in his face, raised one hand, and conjured a glittering mallet out of thin air. The mallet smoked in the sunlight coming through the train window, and Alfie could feel the cold radiating from it.

The male elf drew the magical weapon back. Alfie braced himself as the mallet came forward, but it went wide of his face and glanced off his shoulder. Will had grabbed Corym by the mohawk and hauled back on it, causing the elf to scream in pain.

Alfie spun around on the spot and fell. The point where the mallet had hit him on the shoulder of his jacket was frosted over. It had been such a glancing blow that he doubted it would leave even a bruise, but he could just feel the tingling burn of the magic through the material.

Not quite understanding how he managed it, but knowing that it would be advantageous to be able to pull it off if he could, Alfie summoned his Stoneskin into being. He felt the creeping rush of the defensive spell as it flooded across his skin like some particularly virulent form of supernatural psoriasis. Thus slightly more defended than he had been, he got back into the chaotic fray.

They fought it out—a bit of magic and a bit of good old-fashioned fisticuffs.

Will managed to extricate himself from the booth, thanks mainly to Alfie kicking the female elf in the back of the legs and then grabbing Corym around the head and dragging him forcefully backward.

As Will flopped over the back of the booth seat and into more open space within the carriage, Corym smashed Alfie backward into the coffee station. The wooden counter cracked Alfie in the small of the back, and he fell over it with a cry, landing hard on the floor.

He got to his feet as fast as his body would allow. He was just in time to see Alixya cover both her arms in blue flame and point at him, then Will showed what he was capable of as a magic user.

With a cry, the blond thief propelled himself across the space that divided himself and the female elf as if he had an invisible jetpack strapped to his back. He spear-tackled the elven woman around the waist. The fire along her arms winked out as she let out a great, involuntary, “Oooomph!” and both she and Will disappeared over a sofa.

Most of the other first years had gone into self-preservation mode and had ducked or hidden behind their seats. There were some of them, though, who attempted to get involved. The elves were not super strong, but it soon became apparent that they had more skill with magic than any of the inexperienced first years.

A gangly youth sprinted forward, showing keenness, but then he hesitated, clearly unsure of how to proceed. In recompense for his indecision, he was bowled over backward by a backhand blow of a magically-crafted ice club wielded with inexpert ferocity by Corym.

Things dissolved into a melee of the messier variety after that. The occasional spell was thrown, the infrequent magical weapon wielded, but mostly things were so close and cozy that it was fists and feet that got the biggest workout.

At one point in the battle, Alfie had run out of mana so was having trouble doing much else besides not cutting this fun little adventure short. He was thrown through the air by a thermal surge from Alixya, which shriveled the ends of his hair on one side of his head. He sustained burns of a different variety on his hands as he landed and skidded across the plush carpet.

He came to rest next to a young woman with wavy black hair who was hiding behind one of the overstuffed leather armchairs. The woman gave a little squeak of fright as Alfie’s crown cracked into the leg of the chair and arrested his slide.

“Ow,” Alfie said, rubbing the top of his head while Will yelled what sounded like every swear word he knew at the two elves.

The young woman was clasping some kind of little supernatural tortoise to her chest. The tortoise, which was an amber color and had eyes like black jewels, fastened its gaze on Alfie. Alfie squinted back at it. The old tortoise growled—something Alfie had been unaware tortoises could do—and then snapped its jaws an inch from his nose.

“Now,” Alfie groaned, “is not the time for that.”

“Oh, don’t mind him, his blast is far worse than his bite,” the young woman said. Her voice trembled, betraying her anxiety, and her eyes shone with fear.

Alfie wondered what she meant by blast, but then he looked at the turtle and saw its jet eyes glowing red.

“Blast?” he hissed.

“An earth magic spell he’s prone to cast when he’s—Oh no, bad boy!”

The last thing Alfie wanted just then was to have his face torn off by a cantankerous reptile. In his heightened state of combat, he once more felt something indefinable stir in him. Abruptly, the light faded from the little creature’s eyes. The daggers that it had been glaring at him were replaced by a look of surprise. At least, it looked about as surprised as a tortoise could look.

As Alfie got to his feet and peered out from behind the armchair, his vision was obscured by another pop-up.

Mana Replenished!

New Spell Learned!

Petrifying Gaze Level 1

“Thanks for that,” he said to the girl and her tortoise. “Looks like your little buddy’s blast is just what I needed.”

Alfie figured that, due to his own Earth affinity, the tortoise’s Earth-based blast must have somehow replenished his mana and earned him a new spell along with it. Whatever the case, he had gained something, and every gain was surely a good thing in this world.

“Time to finish this,” he muttered to himself as he saw Will zoom backward to stay out of reach of Corym’s icy club.

As he started forward, one of the other young men, a big guy with a thick neck and curly hair, stood up and pointed a small torch-like device in Corym’s direction. There was a bright pulse of light shot through with tendrils of electricity, and the pressure in the carriage changed as it was filled with the rending shriek.

Suddenly, part of the carriage wall was missing, exposing the bleached bone of the wyrm, and the interior of the train was filled with rushing air.

“Whoa,” Alfie said, goggling.

He flung himself back into the fray, utilizing his new spell: Petrifying Gaze. It was a strange feeling, a haze coming over his vision as he glared at Corym. The elf suddenly went rigid, his mouth slack, and his eyes distant. Alfie was about to follow this up with a stone-powered punch, but the effect wore off. He wasn’t sure whether the spell was just weak or whether elves had some natural resistances to magic, but he was forced to backpedal as Corym swung his ice club in a sweeping cut, and he tripped.

Corym raised his foot to stomp down on him. In that moment before the pain was delivered, Alfie cast Stoneskin. Instantly, the spell gave Alfie a tortoise-inspired back and breastplate that covered the vulnerable parts of his body. It manifested itself not a moment too soon. The vicious stomping boot came down, and Alfie flinched. The only cry of pain, however, came from the lips of the stamping elf as the blow that should have broken one of Alfie’s ribs ended up twisting Corym’s ankle and making him lose his balance.

Alfie was on the cusp of congratulating himself, but when he tried to get up, he found that the armor he had crafted through Stoneskin made him about as agile as a beetle that had been overturned.

“Oh, come on,” he growled.

He tried to rock himself sideways but couldn’t.

“Bugger it!” he snapped angrily. With a more concerted effort, he managed to turn over. With even more effort, he got to his knees, then he regained his feet, and—

—the female elf clobbered Alfie over the back with some kind of fire spell that broke his new armor apart, dissipating the Stoneskin spell.

For the second time in as many minutes, Alfie was thrown through the air. This time he crashed into the big guy with curly hair, who was standing and fumbling with the gadget that had blown a hole in the side of the carriage. The guy fumbled the device as he and Alfie hit the deck. The device landed beside Alfie with a deceptively heavy thump on the carpet. Alfie’s elbow landed right in the curly-haired man’s groin.

The big guy let out a heartfelt moan.

“Ooooh, that hurt considerably,” he said through gritted teeth, clutching his tender parts.

Alfie didn’t waste his breath apologizing. He snatched up the device with desperate fingers at the same time as Alixya and Corym came together and started moving toward Will. Not knowing how to, or if he even could, use the thing, Alfie pointed it in their direction and squeezed it.

The device jerked in his hand, there was another bright pulse of light laced with tendrils of electricity, and the two elves were picked up and flung out of the hole in the carriage wall. For a moment, they hung suspended against the blur of color that was the rushing scenery.

And then, they were gone.

Alfie caught Will’s eye and nodded. Will, who was looking extremely windblown, nodded back.

“You can fly?” Alfie asked.

Will waggled his hand. “Air Caster,” he said as if that cleared things up.

Breathing heavily, Alfie looked around at the carnage. Many of his fellow first years, hearing the cessation of the grunting, swearing, and fighting, were peering out from their chosen hidey-holes.

Alfie tossed the flashlight-shaped magical doohickey back to the chap with curly hair, who had managed to prop himself up on one elbow.

“Thanks for that,” he said. “Handy.”

“Still needs a few tweaks,” the hefty young man said in a quiet voice, avoiding Alfie’s eye shyly.

“I don’t know about that,” Will said. “Seemed to do the job.”

“Sorry about getting you in the…” Alfie said, motioning at his own crotch.

Will guffawed. “I saw that. Right in the scrotum totem. I would have laughed myself sick if it hadn’t been for the whole thinking I was about to die thing.”

“Speaking of which,” Alfie said. “I wonder what happened to those two? I hope I didn’t…”

“Nah, you didn’t kill ’em, mate,” Will said. “I saw them hit a clump of bramble bushes. They’ll be scratched up good and proper and, with any luck, have a broken bone or two. But they’ll survive.”

There was a general discontented muttering at this from the assembled first years. Some of them were righting the furniture, while a couple of young women tended to the guy who had knocked his head. As Alfie watched, the young woman with the frizzy black hair came over and offered him a small pot.

“This is for where your face got a little frazzled,” she said. “And for your hands. I saw you got rug burn when you landed. That’s the worst.”

“Thanks,” Alfie said, taking the little ceramic pot. “What is it?”

“Just a general ointment I picked up in the Ignotus Markets. Good for stings, scrapes, burns, and acid sprays.”

As the girl with the black hair wandered away, cooing to her little, angry, now quite docile tortoise thing, Alfie puffed out his cheeks and slumped down in a chair. He opened the little pot and sniffed at it. It smelled like lemongrass.

All-Purpose Arcane Ointment

Encourages rapid healing and pain reduction

Alfie took some on his finger and smeared it up along his hairline where his hair had been slightly singed. Instantly, he felt a tingling, soothing sensation run across his skin. It was as he was wondering whether he’d earned any experience from the fight with the two elves that the golden text appeared before his eyes.

+150xp

Progress to Earth Fortifier Level 3: 360/400

“If the ride to it is anything to go by, Will, this school should be pretty interesting,” Alfie said.