The next morning, Arty woke Archie up with a plate of bacon and took him to the stables. They thought much and spoke little, watching the breaking sun melt away the morning fog as they waited for the carriage. Once it arrived, Arty helped the driver, a short, mustached man with a working man’s disposition, put Archie’s trunk in the back, and then ran back to give Archie one last hug.

Archie barely kept his tears in.

He opened the door and stepped into the dark carriage with its closed curtains. The carriage was small, meant for a group of four that didn’t mind getting to know each other. From the last bit of light from the closing door, Archie saw his travel companion, another boy his age, tucked into the corner. The boy didn’t react to Archie. Instead, he just adjusted his head against the wall, brushing his bronze hair down for cushioning.

The door clicked shut, the light going with it as Archie’s eyes tried to adjust.

“You don’t know me,” a voice said in the dark.

“You’re right. I’m Archie.”

“No. You don’t know me.” Even less of a question than the first time.

Sain was a day or two north of Ambrosia City, technically part of The Platter, the same kingdom as the capital, but it sat in a weird spot of nothing between the plains of Kuutsu Nuna and the mountains of Khala. It saw little traffic from anywhere. It wasn’t a destination. Not since Petrichor fell out of favor. As such, Archie rarely interacted with people from outside of Sain. He wasn’t going to start with this one.

He rode in the dark, sneaking small peeks out of the curtain, all silent but for the bum-bum-bum-bum of the carriage wheels. At first, the carriage felt like a coffin, the motion making him nauseous. But once the initial excitement of travel wore off, the motion became familiar. Soothing. His eyes drooped…

…and opened to a flood of light. The driver stood in the open doorway.

“‘Ey, thought it betta to wake ya up now. Gots a rough bit of path ahead of us. Been some trouble on the road recently. Some giant lizards or somethings. Gonna use the last bit of movemash to get chrew it. Mind yourselves.”

A jolt of excitement shot through Archie.

Movemash!

Archie pulled the curtain open and stuck his head out the window. The driver hand-fed the horses some pale pemmican-looking mixture.

Movemash!

“Ey!” the driver yelled back at Archie. “All heads and limbs and such things in the carriage at all times. I ‘on’t get paid if you ‘on’t make it!” The driver fixed a carrot-and-a-stick to one of the horses and hustled to his seat. “Hold on to something back there,” he hollered. “The start can be a bit bumpeeeeeee—”

The carriage lurched into motion, reaching top speed in a second. And still it accelerated. The sudden change sent the other boy flying across the carriage and into Archie. They detangled themselves, an extra shove from the boy being put into Archie’s ribs for good measure.

Archie winced and looked out the window. A mosaic of greens and yellows went by in a blur. Forests turned to blobs, bushes smudged into nothingness. Archie’s stomach turned and his chest heaved involuntarily.

Better to look forward.

Movemash was a staple of Ambrosia—the fuel of the trade economy. From one corner to another, it could take a horse weeks to travel across Ambrosia in good conditions. Depending on the grade of movemash, that trip could be cut down to a matter of days. Of course, such a tool didn’t come cheap, and some of the largest guilds in Ambrosia made nothing but different grades of the fuel.

Archie didn’t know how it worked or how it was made, but he knew that it was expensive and that horses needed to be trained to use it. Supposedly, the movemash made them able to pass through other carriages without collision, but again, Archie didn’t know how that worked.

He just knew it made them go really, really fast.

After an hour at high speeds, the carriage slowed down to its regular pace. Archie peeked out the window again, amazed that the horses didn’t seem tired. A sixth sense hit the driver, who looked back and shouted, “Getcher head in! Gots an hour left. Should make it in time for a late lunch.”

Yellowed grass turned into fields of green speckled with homes. Stretches of trees became plots of dirt, wheat and corn sticking up into the sky. Homesteads multiplied into communities. Roads branched in every direction. Long, narrow strips of farms ran perpendicular to the road. A massive stone guardhouse stood upon a hill.

“We’re in the Roots,” Archie observed with a giddy smile. The other boy in the carriage grunted to show how much he cared.

Over a thousand years ago, Ambrosia settled on a mesa just a few miles from the sea. Decades later, when the first overhead map was created, it was noticed that the mesa had the vague shape of a tree. Over the years, the people made names for three distinct sections.

At the top end of the slope, just before the steep cliffs, the land widened like branches from a tree. The people took to calling the widened section the Crown—the Royal Keep’s presence helped to make the name seem even more appropriate. Some of Ambrosia’s finest attractions were found in the Crown—the Royal Keep, the Academy, Caviar Court, Labruscella, Restaurant Row, and more.

The thin, long section that rose from the grounds below up to the Crown was dubbed the Trunk. The Trunk served as Ambrosia City’s heart, pumping people up to the higher restaurants during the day and pumping them back down at night.

Finally, this left the flat area around the mesa where the rivers ran through—the Roots. Ambrosia City seemed to spill out from its mesa into a patchwork mixture of dense city and sparse farm fields.

Of the half million that called Ambrosia City home, the Roots contained most. And above them all, the Royal Keep’s bright blue stones could be seen towering tall.

Archie tried to pick out the Academy of Ambrosia to no success.

They made their way through the Roots and reached the large stone wall at the base of the mesa. Guards in padded Chef jackets and loosely fitted metal shoulders, the king’s standing army known as the Acorn Guard, waved the carriage through with no fuss. Thirty years of peace had made them complacent.

The white clay brick buildings made a maze of the Trunk. People packed into crowds in the winding streets while the birds had free reign of the red barrel tile roofing above. Vendors pushed carts of colorful fruit on ice through the crowds. Young boys jumped out into traffic, waving signs to push people to the wooden baking stands that lined the road. A flurry of people swarmed around in every direction.

And the noise! Nothing like Sain! A dozen conversations on every corner, just waiting for Archie to tune in:

“My reservation got canceled last week. Prince Waldorf booked the whole restaurant!”

“I heard Blue Orchards is working on apricots.”

“I’m rooting for Tataki today!”

“Have you been to Regal Rose? They call you ‘m’lord’ and at the end of it give you this rose that contains every flavor you ate that night.”

“They called it violin stew. Each time I took a bite, I could hear another violin. By the end, there was a full orchestra!”

Archie felt the excitement of a million stories unfolding before him. The carriage rumbled and stumbled through the crowd, getting slower as it got further into the city.

“‘Ey, you’re getting out here,” the driver shouted back at the carriage. “Can’t get through this bleedin’ crowd. Must be a tournament day.”

Archie stepped out into the crowd. With feet on the ground, he joined the mass of countless others in walking the streets of Ambrosia’s prized city.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The other boy stepped out behind Archie, cutting in front of him to retrieve his bags. “You don’t know me,” he said again before slipping away.

“I don’t know anyone,” Archie said with wonder as he looked around at all the unfamiliar faces.

The driver started to turn the carriage around.

“Hey!” Archie yelled. “What was that about a tournament?”

“Ain’t you ever heard of the IKC?”

“Wait, the IKC? Like, THE IKC? Like the Interkingdom Circuit IKC?”

“Like, has a match here nearly every week,” the driver said in a mocking voice. “Welcome to the city, kid.”

The driver waited for no goodbyes, shouting at people to clear out of the road as he whipped his reins.

Archie pushed through the crowd, grateful for the omnihandle in his trunk that had kept him from packing heavy pots and pans. A trunk of clothes and odd knicknacks was much easier to carry than a heavy one full of metal. Still, the amount of people overwhelmed Archie. There wasn’t even a restaurant in sight and still this corner held as many people as the busiest road in Sain during the busiest time of the year.

“Oi, you. You look hungry.”

Archie turned to the voice. A bald, overweight man worked at a stand displaying crates of fruit. He moved with city speed, faster than people in Sain. While still looking at Archie, he never stopped transacting. He reached his hand out to his side to collect a few bronze coins from a woman that grabbed a large bulbous blue fruit. The man shuffled the coins in his hands like dice, counting them just by shaking them. “Comon,” he called to Archie.

“Seen you get off the carriage,” he continued as Archie approached. “Must be hungry. All that travel. Where you come from?”

“Uh—Sain.”

“That’s a day north, eh?”

Archie nodded and looked at the fruit. All different shapes, resembling fruits he had seen before, but…different. “They’re all blue,” Archie observed.

“The real blue. Blue Orchards blue. Not like those cheap knock-offs.”

Archie looked from the fruit to the vendor, not understanding.

“You mean to tell me you never had Blue Orchards?” The man shook his head. Such a crazy notion. “Tell you what, first timer discount. An apple for five coppas.”

Archie pulled out five copper coins from his pocket and hesitated in front of the fruit. He thought it’d be easy to tell the difference, but staring at baskets of blue, Archie wondered which one was the apple. He started to grab one.

“Oi, that’s an orange. That’s eight coppa. Can’t you tell by the stem?” The man already moved on to face the next customer. As he spoke to the new customer, he blindly grabbed an apple and exchanged it with Archie’s coins.

“Oi, you there, haven’t seen you since last week!” he called out to another passerby. “Special offer for a returning customer—an apple for five coppas!”

Archie hustled out of the way as more people lined up at the stand. He looked back at the sign hanging over the stand. Barney’s Basket - selling certified Blue Orchards!

Archie bit into the apple. The skin was blue, but the inside looked like any other apple. Tasted like any other apple, too—maybe with just a little more tang.

“Hey, where’s the IKC?” he asked the vendor.

“You buying more?” the vendor replied, shooing him away.

“You looking for the IKC?” another man asked. Archie nodded. “It’s at The Serving Bowl.”

“Where’s that?”

Having to answer a second question made the man’s impatience match the vendor’s. City speed. “You some kind of hick?” He stabbed a finger up the Trunk. “Go that way until you see a building that could seat your whole backwater town.”

“Sorry,” Archie muttered under his breath while cursing in his head. Sain was a perfectly respectable size. Of course, perfectly respectable also meant it would take a hundred Sains to fill Ambrosia City.

Archie lugged his bags up the road. The roads weren’t that hard to navigate, but the stairs were murder, two or three steps for every hundred feet. It was said that while you’d almost never have to walk uphill to ascend the Trunk, you would have to walk up three hundred steps—but never more than five at a time.

But there was another way up the Trunk.

Archie spotted it and grinned with excitement.

A raised road—tall enough to have tunneled walkways running beneath it—ran along the main road of the Trunk. Every twenty feet, a metal frame extended another fifteen feet above the pathway, a bundle of little yellow ropes running on top of all of the frames.

But they weren’t ropes.

They were noodles that contracted and lengthened to maneuver Ambrosia City’s legendary tram system.

Archie heard the clunkclunk-clunkclunk-clunkclunk of the tramcar as it came up the Trunk, splendid with its green wooden base and domed cloth canopy. He rushed to the stairs leading up to the raised platform just as the tramcar arrived. He slipped past some waiting people and made it up one step before he was yanked back by his collar.

“No free rides,” the Acorn Guard stated. “One silver.”

Another pedestrian put a silver in the guard’s hand and went up to the tramcar.

“Does it go to The Serving Bowl?” Archie asked.

“Yes. Three stops from here.”

Archie dug into his pockets. One gold, six silver, and a couple copper. Only enough for a couple of meals and a night’s stay.

But Archie would only ever have one first day in Ambrosia City. And his luggage kept banging his knees. And this way he wouldn’t get lost. And he could rest his legs.

Archie put the silver in the guard’s hand and went up the stairs. Archie found his seat in the rows of benches amongst thirty others, the tramcar having enough space to accommodate thirty more.

The guard walked up the stairs and tugged a noodle that ran from one of the corner pillars of the tramcar all the way up, up, up the tracks and out of sight.

“Have a pleasant ride,” the guard said as the tram jerked into motion.

It started slow, but Archie didn’t mind. From up high on the raised road, he had the best view. When he had walked on the lower road, the buildings seemed random and squished together. But from up high, he could see the design of the city. The winding alleys and the sky bridges between buildings and the way that the higher the tram went, the cleaner the city got, the whiter the walls, the fewer roof tiles missing.

They made their first stop at a food market. Their second stop at a church. And then they turned a corner and he saw The Serving Bowl.

A massive arena had been built on a rock outcropping that came back toward the bottom of the mesa, causing the lower access of the arena to be blocked by cliffs. The tramcar stopped and Archie ran down the stairs into a massive plaza full of people. Above the crowd, two rows of champions looked over the masses, their likeness having been carved into massive stone statues.

Made of concrete, travertine stone, and flourishes of marble, The Serving Bowl stretched over a hundred feet into the air. Exterior archways lined three floors as the building curved into an oval. On the far end, toward the bottom of the Trunk, a sixty-foot marble statue of Ambrosia looked down on benches that seated twenty thousand, standing room that could host thirty thousand, and an assortment of private suites that lined the middle ring of the arena.

Archie zigzagged through the crowd and up to the arena. He stepped through a large open iron gate and was yanked back by a gloved hand. Archie looked up at a tall, grisled guard. The gate guards protecting the capital from invaders? Easygoing. But the guards in charge of protecting commercial interests? Archie quickly learned that they were not to be crossed.

“Ticket!” the guard shouted down into Archie’s face.

“I uh—I don’t have one?”

The guard sent Archie tumbling back into the plaza. He wondered where to get tickets, but he didn’t have to wonder for long.

“Tickets, get your tickets!” a woman shouted. Archie gathered himself and approached her.

“How much?”

“Two gold for the lower deck, one gold for the upper,” she chimed. Then, just to cover her bases, she kept going in a skeptical voice, “and twenty for the suites. No refunds.”

Archie shoved his hand into his pocket, feeling his dwindling supply of coins. He tried to think of a way to attend the fight without ending up on the street that night. He could—

“Hurry up, it’s starting soon!” the woman yelled. City speed.

He could figure it out later.

Archie exchanged a gold coin for a little paper ticket. He stepped through the gate and was yanked back again.

“You can’t bring that!” the guard yelled, nodding at Archie’s bags. “Get a temporary locker round the corner.”

“How much do they cost?”

“Oversized? Two silver for the match.”

That’d mean skipping dinner. But he was in for a gold already, so why not?

After depositing his luggage, Archie stepped through the iron gate and found a stairway marked by the number on his ticket.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please find your seats, we are about to begin!” a voice boomed from somewhere in the stadium. The words echoed across the plaza, louder than thunder.

Archie bounded up the stairs two at a time, nearly knocking someone over. He emerged near the top of the arena, a full but distant view of the arena floor on display. He squeezed into a small gap in the crowd, taking in the sight. The voice started again. Archie placed it from a tall, muscled man standing on the arena floor.

“Your attention please,” the man started. He wrung out every drip of drama from some words, breezing past others. “I am your host, Clover Albrecht, and it is my pleasure to welcome you all to The Serving Bowl for this IKC matchup! Now, who’s ready?”

The crowd roared.

“Put your hands together! It’s time foooooooooor—”