Arenya Azural, overlord general, gazed at the battlefield. Discarded bodies lay around, evidence of their latest battle. What can I do, what can I do...? she wondered. She couldn't lose this, not with so much on the line! She contemplated further, before the solution struck her. A tactic she ignored far too often and for far too long.

"I castle," she said, switching her rook and king's places.

Arenya's father moved his bishop, deftly blocking the rook's path. "Checkmate."

Arenya frowned, looking at the board. "Sure enough..." She sighed and began resetting the chessboard. "I'm terrible at this game. Three wins to you, now."

"You were close, Ari! I'm sure you can find a Chess club at Cedric's and beat me easily one day."

Arenya picked up the last piece, then stood. "Maybe... I think I'll stretch my legs for a bit. See you in a few!"

The train was enormous, hundreds of cars long. There were cars with diners, cars to rest in, cars with large tables for playing games (like the one Arenya and Talvun had chosen while her Alavian took a nap), cars with people reading books aloud, empty cars and cars packed with people...

If the option existed, Arenya would stick her head out the side of the train like a dog and feel the rush of air against her face. Sadly, the windows couldn't be rolled down. Still, the fun of traveling in such an fantastic device couldn't be understated.

For the most part, anyway. It was a little cramped, Arenya was forced to admit, with all but the largest traincars not quite wide enough to fully unfurl her wings. It was tolerable for the first few hours, but she found herself all but needing to stretch them out.

At last! she thought to herself. A large room - by the train's standards, at the least - with nothing but chairs on the sides and no passersby to disturb. She strode right to the center of the room, turned to the side, and extended her wings fully. A series of pops resounded out as the joints cracked.

"By The Six!"

Arenya turned, looking around the plain brown seats, then blushed. In the corner of the traincar sat a young woman with dark blond hair; a black shirt and trousers; and a large, dark blue book with an unadorned cover. The woman stared openly at Arenya, gaze focused on her wings.

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Arenya. "I thought the train car was empty."

"It is no matter." The woman spoke with a thick accent that Arenya couldn't quite place, one that heavily emphasized hard T sounds. "I confess, I am caught a bit off guard... I have never seen wings like yours before now. Quite impressive, I must say. You would be a... half-drake, then?"

Arenya managed to hide an annoyed expression. "Quarter-dragon. Drakes' wings are more like webbings attached to the arms, and half-drakes don't have tails."

"And a tail, too! Remarkable!"

Arenya suppressed a slight sigh as the strange young woman walked around her in a circle. Dragons and drakes aren't that uncommon, are they? Can she really not have met one before? "I'm Arenya. Are you a student at Cedric's?"

"Indeed. I'm hoping to become a theoretical magitechnician." She returned to her seat and held up the book she'd been reading. "I wished a bit of study done before returning, so I looked for the quietest car I could find. You are the first person to stop by here for more than a brief moment."

"Right..." Arenya vaguely recalled looking over the requirements to become a magitechnician. It sounded interesting to her at first, creating incredible weapons and armor or massive war machines, but it also involved heaps of mathematics, a lot of precision and attention to detail, and horrific amounts of memorization. Arenya decided not to pursue it. "What's your name? And you follow The Six, then?"

"Cartalis," said the woman offhandedly, already looking back at her tome. "And not especially, though my family does observe the major days."

Ah. One of those, then.

"Umm... what book is that?"

"It is the Principia Mathemagica. Would you care to take a brief look?"

Arenya crept around to glance over Cartalis' shoulder. She looked at the page in the strange book, then nearly stumbled back. "What is that!" she yelled. "There's no words! It looks like nothing but masses of symbols, letters, and arrows." Even the Ancient Writings of the Dragon Sages looked easier to read than that... mess.

Cartalis hid a grin. "More or less. It's a seminal work in theoretical magitechnology, which influenced much of what we understand today, but few have even heard of it, let alone attempted to read it. The theoretical underpinnings of our modern magical society are forgotten, because it's such an incredibly dense and difficult text. It takes hundreds of pages to establish even basic theory. That is, in no small part, why it is so important to me to read it entirely. This book must not be forgotten, lest a deeper understanding of theory be lost, and then where will we be? Nevertheless, it took me months to make it even a hundred pages in, and this is only the first volume..."

Arenya couldn't tell if she liked this strange woman or not. "Shall I leave you to your reading, then?" she asked.

"If you wish. Should we meet again at Cedric's, I hope you wouldn't mind if I question you a bit about part-dragon culture?"

Arenya managed not to roll her eyes. "It's not dragon culture, it's Follower culture. We're more than just our wings, and plenty of people who have no dragon blood at all are still Followers. And anyway, we're really not that interesting, or that different from full humans, but if you insist, sure." She gave Cartalis a friendly wave, furled her wings back up, and headed back to the traincar her father waited in, to lose yet another game of Chess.