The city of Aldemar, capital of the human kingdom. The kingdom itself doesn't really have a name. After all, there's only one kingdom in the world, so why does it need a name? Just "The Kingdom" is enough, I suppose. It sounds kind of arrogant if you ask me, but it's not like it changes anything and I don't really care.

Three hundred years ago, humans and the wulvari fought some huge war and a lot of people died. It lasted a really long time, too. So long in fact that people don't even remember what started it. If you ask any of the humans I'm sure they'll say it was the wulvari's fault. Not that there's anyone around here that can say otherwise. I'd like to find out the truth, but I doubt I ever will. It won't help my current situation any, either. The only reason I know this much is because I read it in a tattered old book I found in a dumpster behind the academy.

Yeah, I live in the streets, but it's nothing to be surprised about. I'm a wulvari after all. My name is Fen. Not that impressive of a name, but it's not bad, I think, considering I made it up myself. I'm the only wulvari in the city as far as I can tell. My earliest memory is waking up in the street wrapped in a dirty cloth with no parents, family or anything of the sort to be found anywhere. Not the slightest clue why I was in a human city, either. It was a miracle I survived those days considering how young I was. I don't know my birthday, but I couldn't have been any older than four years old; scampering through alleyways like some kind of criminal. Every day I had to look for anything I could eat from garbage piles or anything else I could find. That torn up, dirty old cloth is what really saved me, I think.

I wrap that cloth around my head like a hood and let the rest drape down behind me like a cloak. This covers the pointy ears on top of my head and hides that big bushy tail, too. Apart from my ears and tail, I look completely human. Blue eyes, scraggly dark hair down past my chin and I'm happy to say I've managed to keep my skin free of scars and things. Even if it is a little pale from hiding in the shadows all the time. I got good reason to hide, though.

If anyone so much as glimpses my ears or tail they'll scream "Wulvari! Wulvari!" and here come the guards. I always hear them long before I see them with their clanking armored boots stamping on the cobblestone streets. I have to admit their uniform looks impressive with that big blue tabard with the royal crest across the center and the shiny steel chest plate, gauntlets and boots. They even have these big swords that look strong enough to cleave a monster in two if they tried. But they never use them, or at least I've never seen it.

Why bother when they've got magic? Magic was the thing that made my people lose that war so long ago. I'm not really bitter about it. Whining about history isn't going to save my butt today. But boy, is magic ever a pain. I can usually outrun the guards. It's the fireballs and lightning strikes and who knows whatever else that I have to worry about. Still, I have to thank whoever trains these guys, because their aim is terrible. I can't get too cocky, though, because one of them got lucky a few weeks ago and singed my tail. Man, that stings. Why did I have the bad luck to be dumped here?

I was rubbing a pretty nasty lump I got from some flying rock spell that hit my back one day when I overheard two guys talking about some place called the "Academy". It's full name is the "Royal Magic Academy" and everybody who's anybody sends their kids there to learn how to read, write, and a whole bunch of other stuff. But the real draw is, of course, magic. If there was anything I wanted to learn, it was how those guards kept making my life miserable. Maybe I could give them a real surprise when I started tossing that crazy stuff back at them one day. If not that, at least a weakness or something so I could stop just running away all the time.

It took me a while, but I found the academy in the north side of town where all the rich people live. It was pretty hard getting there with my tattered old cloth showing that I clearly didn't belong there. But I made it and quickly started doing the only thing I was good at: digging through the trash. It wasn't long until I found an old beat up book that some kid tossed out. It wasn't even all that damaged! Such a waste.

I was hoping that this thing would tell me what I needed to know about magic, but then I hit my first big problem. I had no idea how to read. It's really really hard to learn how to read with no one willing to teach you. I came up with the idea to hang around inns and taverns looking for people who were reading and tried to look over their shoulders at the paper. This way I could match the sounds to the letters and maybe teach myself how to read. It didn't go nearly as well as I had hoped.

First off, not a lot of the common people know how to read. Well, actually they know how to read well enough to read signs and that's pretty much all they need, so why bother with anything else? So I had to find people who looked rich enough that they might actually need to know how to read. Then I had to catch them actually doing it... out loud. And those kinds of people really don't like it when you get close to them and look over their shoulder. Especially not when it's some grimy street kid who couldn't bathe even if he wanted to. It took me a very long time (and a lot of painful lumps and magic burns) to finally get good enough to read the front cover. But my bad luck struck again. It was a math book.

I didn't give up, though. It had enough words in it that I could continue using it to learn how to read. I taught myself some math on the side and that was loads easier once I finally got reading down. I had nothing better to do so I was reading that thing all day long. I actually started to like learning this stuff. I even learned how to talk better, too. I spent every day sneaking back to that dumpster looking for a new book, with not much luck. I finally found a new one, about a week later. It was the history book, I mentioned earlier, later followed by a math book with much harder math in it. I didn't really care what it was and just kept reading. I had even forgotten why I had come to that place to begin with.

A long time went by like this when my luck finally turned around. I had finally found a book about magic. It was called "Basic Spells for the Beginner". Everything around me seemed to just stop at that moment as I stared at the cover. Nothing else mattered because I finally found that one thing that could finally turn my life around. It was grimy and covered in some kind of slimy gross thing that I hope was food at one point, but to me it was the most glorious treasure I had ever seen. But I wasn't allowed to bask in my moment of victory for very long. Because, once again, my bad luck came back with a vengeance... and it brought friends.

"Dammit! It's that wulvari kid, again! Get him!"

"Aw, crap..."