Prologue
Do you remember the classic stories you would read as a child, or the fantasy movies you would obsess over as a teenager? The ones where the girl/boy meets the vampire or the werewolf, or finds out they are a wizard or a royal? The one where they tell you that the mystical world was just a hair's breadth away, but they kept themselves so well hidden that the rest of the human race never knew they existed in the first place. Except that wasn't exactly true.
Millenia ago, the world was host to many wonderful and awful things that would now be called fiction. The world was full of the great unknown world of magic and what the humans now perceive as fantasy. One of the last to survive were the Avilions, those with such incredible abilities the rest of the world could only imagine. Everyone knew there used to be Avilions that lived and worked alongside the humans. However, as the rest of the magical world slowly disappeared, they slowly did too. They vanished bit by bit until the final Avilion vanished too, never to be seen or heard from again, leaving the rest of the world asking if they were only a fairytale to begin with. No one knew why and many professional organisations were dedicated to finding the answer, but none had been successful.
A lack of success inevitably brought out the worst in people. Desperation and selfishness led those with money and power to create more drastic means to find the answer. The answer, to those powerful people who sought only more power, was to use those less fortunate. The threat was real enough that those born with a Sek - a sector of the iris that is a different colour than the rest, a distinctive identifier of an Avilion- were often hidden away from birth for a while, less they be mutilated or even murdered by those powerful shadows that would snatch them away. As the world began to move on, so did the shadows. Until Avillions were officially a thing of the past. Luckily those with a Sek were a little freer now as the world made peace with what it had lost, but some still choose to wear coloured contacts to hide the truth. If only Buck and his siblings had followed their lead.
It’s funny isn’t it? So many of us spend our whole lives wishing for superheroes to come swooping in to save the day. For us to wake up and be able to perform great feats and cool tricks with just a thought. For the world of mystery and magic to be just around the corner ready to turn our boring lives into something much more exciting. But do you know what is really funny? When that dream turns into a reality and you want nothing more than to make it go away. Be careful what you wish for. Buck and his siblings used to think the stories they would read at night when they went to bed were just that, stories. They were so wrong. Instead they found out it was all true, it just wasn’t like the fairy tales in their books, it was so much worse.