Page 1: "Tanner Fable and The Arcane Gift"

Phase 1: Enroll at the Academy

My shoes are scuffed again. Even at my best I still look like a village girl. I shove a curl of wild red hair out of my face and tuck back in my loose shirt tail.

I’m standing at the doors. Everything I’ve wanted is within a turn of those all too perfectly polished, bronze handles. My heart thunders in my ears. The sound is so loud I worry the other kids will hear it. I wipe the forming sweat off my brow. Archimedes purrs and digs his claws into my shoulder as if commanding ‘forward,’ but I can’t get my fingers to stop shaking.

I stumble back. “Deep breath, foxtail.” I can hear my mom’s voice in my head as if she were standing right beside me, hands on my shoulders. “Remember: there’s no bears in the boxwoods.”

I hear a low, thick bellow, and the crisp shadow of large, flapping wings fall over my shoulders as they pass overhead.

There may not be bears in boxwoods, but there are dragons in castles!

I blink my eyes shut and spill inside, slamming the door latch closed behind me.

The numerous books and countless hours of my careful study could not have prepared me for this. Hundreds of chattering students in colored robes seem to glide through the crowded halls. My eyes wander up from the marbled floors to the white stone columns to the gold-framed vaulted ceilings so high it makes my head spin.

I duck as an owl comes swooping in overhead, then jump back as a piece of levitating, out-of-control luggage goes skeetering past my face. The well-dressed chaos bounds from wall to wall like a trapped fledgling lightning bird.

“Tanner Jane, right?” a melody sings from behind me.