Gavin is doing his best to survive at his local comprehensive school, which means keep your head down and try to fit in. He's in the closet trans and write's stories to express his inner girl. Then the school encourages everyone to take part in a national creative writing competition and, encouraged by his teacher to take a chance, he writes a TG fantasy piece is picked as a one of the competition winners.

Then the head decides to read an excerpt from it to the whole school in the last assembly of the year.

Gavin's life is officially over. He has the summer holidays to look forward to, but after that there will be a few idiots at school waiting to show hem just what happens to people like him when they land in the spotlight.

One positive to come from it, his prize is a week long master class in creative writing at a prestigious public (private) school in Wiltshire. There's an ancient mound there that's rumoured to be the final resting place of Merlin the Magician. Just the sort of place for a fantasy writer to pick up a little detail for future stories.

Then he gets to Marlborough College and one of the first people he meets is old, with long grey hair and beard, and no-one else can see him...

Chapter endings are a little arbitrary here. Sometimes they fell just right, but mostly it was about keeping the chapter length relatively consistent. The plan is to post daily with the last chapter (chapter 8) going up next Sunday.

All my stories are available on my personal story site at metamorph.org.uk. The novels and novellas are available here.