Uncle Mortimus always said I had wizard blood. I guess I never properly believed him until this morning.

There I was, sat at the breakfast table, with my cereal and my orange juice, and the toast had suddenly decided to levitate. It would dance just out of my hands when I tried to take a bite.

It was almost as if it was aware that it were in danger of being eaten, and it hoped to avoid it, thank you very much. All I did to deserve such disloyal toast was to concentrate half my mind on the object, and be in a slightly bad mood.

Strange things tended to happen when I got in a mood.

I’m short for my age, with reddish brown hair. None of this helps with the bullies one bit.

I’m 12 now, but on my 10th birthday I think I made the wheels disappear on the skateboard of a boy I didn’t like very much. All I know is, at one point the skateboard had wheels, and then I got really really angry, and then there were none. Nick Epov’s skateboard then swiftly turned into a plank of wood while he was going about 15 miles an hour on it. You can guess what happened next.

Was he a bully? Yes. Did he deserve the 15 stitches and the split skull he received as a result of my little trick? Who knows.

“Uncle Mortimus…my toast is floating!” I said with an obvious note of distress in my voice.

But Uncle Mortimus didn’t think it was strange in the slightest. His reaction was one of annoyance more than anything.

“Ethan - stop playing with your food. It’s your first day at St. Judes today and we shan’t be late,” said Uncle Mortimus.

Incredibly annoyed, I eventually let the toast fly free and escape into the pantry. Guess I’ll just go on an empty stomach.

I heard Bastabus roar from downstairs. He would miss me when I was gone.

Bastabus is a pygmy dragon, native to parts of Australia. He’s perpetually angry, bitey and flamey, and if I’m not awfully careful when I play with him, I’ll get burnt to a crisp.

Bastabus lives in the dungeon - a separate floor of Uncle Mortimus’ house that’s underground and hidden from the rest of the street. Just like the invisible fourth floor above, where Uncle Mortimus keeps all his magical and dangerous trinkets. I’m not allowed to go onto the fourth floor, but I sneak in all the time.

Uncle Mortimus is a kind old man. He’s not really my uncle, but he’s looked after me ever since my parents died in a car crash when I was young. He was my father’s best friend back when they went to St Judes back in the dark ages. St Judes is the best-known school for witchcraft and wizardry in Australia.

He’s tall - freakishly tall. He’s also portly, with a big round belly, a bushy long beard and he wears typical wizard robes made from a rich brown velvet - though they are usually messy looking with traces of jam or soup or whatever he’d been eating that week.

Uncle Mortimus is clumsy, but a very talented wizard. He’s an inventor of magical trinkets - this is how he makes enough money to support us both. Things like Aura bracelets, which bestow on its user a magical protection against some of the worst spells around, sell quite nicely, giving him enough money to keep Bastabus fed with as many raw chickens as he can eat.

Uncle Mortimus didn’t like teleporting - he says that it’s dangerous. So even though everyone else will be arriving at St Judes a minute after they decided to go, we were schlepping it in his 96’ Holden Commodore VS. He had fitted the Commodore with magical pistons made from Albaraster - Ivory from the horn of a unicorn - allowing the car to fly, and fly faster than the speed of light. Which meant the entire car rattled like a jerry rig the entire way there, and I would have to be very careful not to chip a tooth.

We live in Mosman, a beachside suburb in Sydney. No wizards around here - just investment bankers and celebrities trying to live a quiet life away from the limelight. Uncle Mortimus’ house has been there for hundreds of years - long before Mosman became as ritzy as it is now. His house looks it, too. It’s overgrown with vines on the outside - but that’s just how he likes it to appear. On the inside, it’s all clean lines and German appliances, with breathtaking wood trimmings and an angular architect-designed interior. Coming from magic has its upsides.

“In the car, now! We’ll be late for the ceremony,” grumbled Mortimus. He bipped the remote lock from his keychain.

I lumbered outside with my overstuffed suitcase and hoisted it into the boot. Overstuffed in the sense that it had far more inside it than a conventional suitcase would normally accomodate, since it was a magical suitcase, and the insides were as big as you wanted them to be. I could pack the entire contents of Uncle Mortimus’ house inside there if I wanted to - but the problem would be whether I could actually lift the thing afterwards (I couldn’t possibly). Magic was funny. It gives you all sorts of innovations but not without obvious drawbacks. Shouldn’t the case be light as a feather? Apparently not.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

There’s a mountain range in Australia called The Great Dividing Range. Specifically because it divides one large part of the state from another. But a little-known magical quality of this landmark is that is not all it divides. It also divides the magical world from the non-magical.

That’s where we were headed to right now.

Mortimus turned the key and the ancient vehicle groaned to life. The car sputtered, and then slowly Mortimus pressed the accelerator, pushing the car along at a slow, then brisk pace.

“By cripes, I almost forgot the invisibility cloak!” Said Mortimus, as he flicked a switch on the dashboard. We were now invisible - an essential optional extra for a car that flies in a town populated predominantly by non-magic folks.

Then he pressed the magical overrider switch (a big red button I was never to touch), and the machine slowly lifted off the ground, letting off a strong thrumm sound as it transferred from petrol to magic as its fuel.

And off we went - chasing the horizon to the west. It would be five minutes until we would make the Great Dividing Range flying at the speed of light.

The world looks funny at the speed of light. It actually doesn’t feel like it’s going particularly fast - except for the fact that the entire car is rattling like a canasta. It confusingly looks like you are going rather slow when you’re looking out the window. Funny that.

Before long, we were above The Great Dividing Range. I could feel the magic. It thickened the air into a soup-like consistency, and it felt like the car was wading through water. Multicoloured sprites and sparks flitted about this way and that, adorning the air with a sort of supernatural confetti. The mountains reached out from the ground and got so close to the bottom of the car that they almost grazed it with their peaks.

I looked to my left. I saw a bus, marked “St Judes First Years” on the front. It was filled with anxious-looking pre-teenagers with similarly overstuffed magical suitcases. The bus was old. One of those out-of-commission Sydney Transit buses that they retired years ago. The bus driver was a griffin. You don’t see those too often - particularly as a public servant. The griffin was huge - barely fitting in his driving compartment - its feathers poked out the windows and it looked particularly cramped, but determined to get the job done. A couple of the first years in the front seats were looking at the griffin as if it might turn around and eat them with its big angry beak. If the griffin went through a single other inconvenience, the look on its face said that it might.

“Hold onto your cloak!” Said Mortimus.

The car started shaking even more. Just ahead, a wormhole opened up. I looked over at the bus - a wormhole had opened up in front of them, too. I gripped the seat with white knuckles as the Commodore was pulled into the wormhole like a magnet.

“How is this any safer than teleporting??” I yelled. Mortimus didn’t hear me.

“I said…how is this any safer…” I said, but then a very strange thing happened.

My stomach felt like it flipped upside down inside my body, and then the entire car and us included were compressed into a tube the size of a miniature straw.

Then we were squeezed through, as if a giant was sucking us through the straw on the other side.

If you’ve ever been in a plane before and your ears popped - imagine your whole body popping, then unpopping, all at once. That description goes about half of the way of explaining the feeling I was experiencing.

The supernatural confetti began oscillating around us in a very angry fashion, and a shrill ringing in my ears threatened to burst my eardrums.

And then finally we reached the other side, and were spurted out like ooze from the miniature straw-like wormhole, and it took about a minute for all our bits to pop back into the right shape and size, and it felt absolutely strange like you would never believe. Like we were going from goop to a solid substance in about one second flat.

Suddenly, the entire landscape changed.

From seeing green trees and rocky mountain faces, now an entire city stretched out as far as the eye could see.

Huge stadiums reached into the sky - much larger than any stadium in the non-magic world. There they would play Dragonball - a cross between European Handball, lacrosse and football, except everyone rides dragons. Ethan had heard about Dragon ball matches from Uncle Mortimus - apparently it was a spectacle like nothing else on earth.

As they drove along, witches and wizards on broomsticks flew past on either side, as if they were in a traffic jam, but the only vehicles were wooden and straw. Every now and then, you could spot a dragon rider lumbering along slowly, careful not to scorch any of the others.

Slowly St Judes came into view. I saw a sprawling sandstone castle built into the side of a mountain. Dragons and broom riders dotted the sky around it, looking miniature in the distance like lizards and flies.

“What’s that bright purple thing around the castle?” I asked, noting what looked like a multicoloured aura.

“That’s the castles’ enchantment of protection. To keep everyone safe from bad magic.” Replied Uncle Mortimus, matter-of-factly.

“Bad magic?” I said worriedly.

“Oh don’t concern yourself. There hasn’t been any of that for decades. Safe as houses St Judes is.” He replied gruffly.

I noticed the bus following us in close succession. We were dilly-dallying and going a bit slower than the griffin would like, so he honked us.

“Oh go eat a pigeon!” Yelled Mortimus.

As they lowered into the castle grounds, the full beauty of the buildings came into view. I could hear hymns being sung by a beautiful choir in the distance, and a thick sweet floral scent drifted up from the rose gardens below.

Eventually Mortimus landed the car on a cobble-stoned driveway, and he pulled it up to a valet, where another griffin, this time dressed in a smart suit, took his keys and parked it for him. Griffins, it seemed, took a lot of the service industry jobs at St Judes.

There was a marble entranceway with a number of very official-looking witches and wizards standing by a large entrance. In front was a cordoned off area.

As we approached, one of the witches, wearing a tall pointy hat with a crescent moon stitched on the side, pulled out a note pad that floated in the air in front of her, with a quill that was ready to mark it.

“Name?” She said in an arch-english accent.

“Ethan Havelmeyer” Said Mortimus.

“Nonsense. The Havelmeyers are dead” Said the witch.

“I think you’ll find there’s one left.”

The witch looked at me down her nose and through a pair of very thick half-moon spectacles.

“Very well then.” She said, and the quill marked off a name in the notepad. “Wand-fitting is in the quadrangle. Will you be riding a dragon?” Asked the witch.

“Yes, yes he will, just like his father,” butted in Mortimus, before I even had a chance to speak.