“I work for one of the most powerful international agencies you’ve never heard of – the MASO. We stand at the intersection of a world that knows nothing about magic, and all of its myriad practitioners. While my colleagues deal largely with the mundane, I’m given the most unusual, and often the most dangerous, cases. They often begin simply enough. This one certainly did.” ~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O Dawn holds a particular kind of majesty. In it, there is the beauty of any beginning, but also the subtle promise of an inevitable end. A cold breeze coursing through the branches of a towering pine, setting the birds that roost in it to a frenzy of caws and sharp screeches, becomes the last ghostly breath of the fading night. The first sparkling glimpse of sunlight on the blue-green waters of a wide lake becomes the glittering eye of a world waking slowly to a new day. These thoughts drifted incomprehensibly through the mind of Silver Alurian, who sat at the edge of such a lake, watching as her reflection was distorted by the ripples from a cold, easterly wind. The slightest hint of spring rode that wind, beckoning with the warm lure of the sun as it rose above the distant horizon. Evergreens crowded at her back, shadowing a few smaller trees whose buds had only recently burst into velvety green leaves. The birds that bustled busily in their boughs ruffled their sage and cream feathers, watching the eighteen-year old girl and chatting amongst themselves. There was nothing particularly special about Silver, and she knew it. She was neither tall nor short, fat nor thin. There was an innocent light in her hazel green eyes, but she cast them suspiciously behind her periodically, checking her surroundings. Pale with a dusting of freckles and dark hair the color of tree bark, there was a childlike softness to her expressions. Her clothes were merely functional. She paid attention to them, but lacked the skill or desire to be fashionable – which one, it was hard to say. Nonetheless, the birds seemed to find her interesting. Ignoring their attention, Silver swept the hair out of her eyes, smiling slightly at a pair of wide fish eyes that stared unblinkingly up at her before vanishing suddenly into the dark river waters. She stood then and stretched, watching the last golden tinges of sunrise fade from the sky. “It *is* pretty here, at least. Good for writing, good for drawing,” she muttered to herself, “Good for just about anything that isn’t school.” After a moment, she bent to retrieve her backpack with a breathy sigh, and turned to catch one last glimpse of the sunrise before she made her way back into civilization. Beyond the waters were a row of snowcapped mountains, magnificent in their height alone. Past that was only the endless sky, though somewhere she knew there were other cities and people and creatures, a world of mystery and magic that she had yet to see. Every day since her family had moved here, she had come down to the water’s edge to breathe in the silence. It was a short hike back to her neighborhood - asphalt roads lined by dreary houses on a steeply sloping hill. Cookie-cutter homes were the new money-maker in construction, so she spent her days surrounded by similarly styled houses dressed in varying shades of sullen grays and creams, sometimes with the occasional shock of blue trim that looked more crazy than creative. Here there were trees too, sprightly little things with wind-beaten trunks tipped in crowns of green-flecked twigs, but they were nothing like the grandfatherly evergreens overlooking the lake. Those trees had history. Mystery. Magnificence. Sometimes, Silver hated to admit that she craved those things quite so much. Then again, mysterious things piled up in her life a little too often whether she sought them out or not. Occasional glimpses of someone in a restaurant or grocery store that sent a shiver down her spine but seemed invisible to everyone else. Moments when she was sure that a miracle had just occurred before her eyes only to find that nothing had changed seconds later…Or perhaps the time in fifth grade she had spent an hour explaining an impossible set of instructions to her neighbor’s cat only to have it carry them out to a tee – with unfortunate consequences for their Barbie collection. Frowning to herself, she finished the walk to her house with occasional mutterings of strange things she had seen and the irony that she was pinned with the tedium of school regardless. Her house, or her new house, as Silver still thought of it, sat well back from the main road behind a grassy yard that was virtually treeless. It was the sort of house that people’s eyes naturally slid over when they looked at it; there was no fancy garden – in fact hardly a bush seemed to flourish in the poor gravel – and the house was a simple white with brown trim. A long driveway twisted back to the porch, protected by an old picket fence that routinely filled her fingers with splinters. She supposed the house was something like her; it was nothing special, and no one cared to dress it up. Inside, she was greeted by the metallic clack of a kitchen knife, evidence that her dad was busy in the kitchen. That the house smelled like buttered toast and warm peanut butter added credence to her assumption, and at the same time caused her stomach to growl in noisy protest. She closed the door with a quiet click behind her, and dropped her backpack on the floor as her eyes wandered to the low ceiling and creamy walls of the living room. One month after moving in, the house still felt strange to her. Almost as strange as the fact that they had moved two months before the end of her senior year of high school, which meant that soon she would officially, forever, be done with public school. It seemed like a weird time to move, but her dad had needed to switch job positions in a hurry. That was a better reason to move than the one that had driven them out of her first house when she was a kid – she had no memory whatsoever of that house save that a fire had reduced it to nothing but smoldering ruins. “Is that you, Silver?” her dad called from the kitchen. She walked in, stepping lightly on the hardwood floor and skirting around the island in the middle of the kitchen; she still ran into the thing sometimes when she stumbled into the kitchen late at night for a glass of water. “Hey Dad,” she answered with a touch of forced cheer. He turned around, revealing a middle-aged man with brown hair so dark as to be almost black and a thin beard and mustache that both lightened and softened his expression. His smile was warm, but his eyes masked a concern that seemed all too permanent. Silver attributed it to the stresses of having three kids and never a dollar to spare. She wondered sometimes what he had been like at her age…for a few minutes, at least. Like most kids, she had pieced together her parents’ younger lives over the years from snippets of stories and conversations. It had revealed her currently blue-collar father as a greasy-haired, motorcycle-riding teenager who spent more hours with his head under the hood of a car and a wrench in his hand than most college grads spent with their noses in the books. At some point, he had traded daylong desert rides in search of gopher snakes and spiked lizards for the air-conditioned safety of a classroom, though he still had an antique car in the garage. When he disappeared for hours on a Sunday morning, she could always find him rolled under its mostly-intact body. It baffled her how he could have met her mother, someone who she could only have described as an honors student with a girlish face and fantastic sense of style, right from day one of high school. It was no wonder her mom raised eyebrows at Silver’s penchant for dawning T-shirts and jeans every morning, and her habit of running a straightener through her hair so fast that the ceramic device had barely heated up before she had unplugged it. Her father was probably her mom’s fifth or sixth boyfriend – not a bad run for a couple that had been happily married for nearly twenty years. At the moment, he was in work slacks and a collared white shirt. “I thought you’d decided you didn’t need lunch today,” he quipped, handing her a piece of toast, “but at least you’re up. Do I need to go shake your sister again?” “Probably. I don’t know about Ren, though,” Silver laughed, wondering if her brother had gone to sleep before one in the morning the night before. “At this rate, he’s going to miss the bus. I’m heading out without him.” “Go ahead. He knows if I have to drive him again, he’s losing game privileges.” Her dad peered up the stairs before adding, “I hope you’re careful drawing out there alone. There’s no one around this early in the morning.” “You always say that,” Silver noted, not daring to mention that at least there were no rattlesnakes in her current river territory. She did not think there were any rattlesnakes in most of western Washington. There had been tons of them at the old house in Montana. “Your mom worries,” he reminded her. “And you?” “I want you to be safe. Take your cellphone.” “No problem, I’ve got it. Sheesh. It’s not like I could call you if I was getting mauled by a bear or something,” she reminded him. “Sure you could. You could fend of its jaws long enough to call and say you’d be late for dinner.” He grinned. “Dinner would be the least of my worries.” He handed her a brown paper bag with a large “S” written on it, eyebrow raised. “Your mom might disagree.” She took the bag with a smile and hurried out of the kitchen, snatching a second piece of cold peanut-buttered toast from his plate as she went. If there was one thing Silver Alurian would never forget, it was lunch. Or breakfast. Or dinner. She was out the door then, humming to herself, letting her feet carry her to the bus stop while her mind carried her somewhere else. Strangely, she had thought her life would change after the move. She had been very wrong. In this new city, this new town, she still had the same routine, the same life. That was probably because she was shy, but not in an obvious, hide-her-face-and-never-say-a-word kind of way. It simply took her time to warm up to people. Since she believed that eighty percent of every conversation took place on the other person’s face and hardly cared about what they actually said, she had a habit of watching people more than talking, making her an extraordinarily good listener – which mostly seemed awkward to other people. On the other hand, once she was comfortable, she had a tendency to say whatever came to mind. In short, she had managed to blend into the classroom jumble almost as soon as she started at her new school. Blending did not make her friends, even if it did keep her from making enemies. She also figured high school was just high school, no matter where it happened. There were still hours of useless homework to be done every night, dished out by teachers who really just hoped half the class would live to see graduation. As much as she was the self-appointed queen of BS when it came to English papers, there was only so much Silver could do about calculus. And, of course, the bus was still late even in another state. After about five minutes Silver looked at her watch, sighed, and kicked a rock so that it skittered noisily across the concrete. As if lured by the sound, a crow made its way lazily across the dark sky to light in a tree on the other side of the road and stare at her. Its chosen branch swung wildly under its weight, but the crow did not appear to care. Instead, it laughed at her waiting, wingless form in a low, cracking voice. Silver watched it preen, deep in thought. If only she could ask what it saw out there, flying above the trees, the lakes, the mountains. If only she could understand. It was not long after that the rumbling growl of a diesel engine drew her eyes back down the hill to catch a glimpse of glaring golden yellow metal and tinted glass. She tightened her backpack straps as the big yellow behemoth crawled up the hill at high speed to stop, all screech and blasting air, in front of her. The doors opened with a hiss and she got on, looking back once at the crow and the shadowed forest behind it. There was a slight reflection now, like that of cat eyes, through a gap in the trees. Bemused, Silver hurried forward as the folding door hissed shut behind her. A coyote? There were a lot of them around, but it was the first one she had seen. There was another creature, she thought, that would be interesting to talk to. What’s out there, she would ask? What have you seen that I never will?