The Magic Hour

Prologue

Here is a story.

Once upon a time, magic came to the Earth. It came in the form of a meteorite, and landed discreetly in the backyard of a small, normal family. And nothing would've changed, except that the son of that family found it, and he touched it.

He started to glow. 

His parents looked out the window, and they gasped as they saw their son, looking as though he had swallowed an entire package of glow-in-the-dark bands whole. They touched the rock too. The boy's mother became momentarily transparent. His father's eyes turned black. 

Scared and confused, the parents called a number of officials -- we are going crazy, something's happened to us, hallucinations, something. 

They were not going crazy.

Eventually, the government found out, and a number of officials touched the rock too. They glowed, they flew, they vanished. And they agreed -- the public was not to know about this. Not until they knew more about this peculiar brand of magic and whether there was more of it out there. The boy and his parents were placed into quarantine, as the affects of the rock had not worn off.

A new department -- COMS, the Containment of Magical Substances -- was created. Some said that it was crazy to even think about using the word magic, but the name stuck. A team of scientists was assigned to examine all the properties of the meteorite, and, if possible, to see if its powers could be weaponized. The boy and his family were under constant surveillance for any increase in their powers.

And then things started to go wrong.

The boy, the glowing boy, got a fever. His body temperature rose and rose, long past what any normal human would have been able to survive, and then his body literally burned up.

His mother, who had been able to turn invisible at will, disappeared entirely. She was not only invisible, she was simply gone. The matter that made up her body had disappeared.

His father, whose eyes had turned black, went blind. One by one he lost his senses -- seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and finally, the sense of touch.

Everyone who had touched the meteorite suffered the consequences. They lost their senses, their bodies, their minds. But the scariest of all were the ones who lost their humanity. They stopped being able to feel -- sadness and happiness and everything in between -- and lost their compassion and empathy. They were the ones who began to hurt the others. 

Not everyone died. But there were many.

COMS was in chaos. It took years to subdue all the violent ones, and longer to count everyone who had died either from violence or from their direct contact with the rock. COMS hid everything they could from the public, and increased the quarantine to include anyone who had either come in contact with the rock indirectly or whose parents had touched it. And they began to study.

The first generation born to anyone who had survived contact with the rock was known as Gen2. They seemed healthy enough at first, but by their tween years, magic started showing up within them, and nearly all of them died by the time they were thirty. Their bodies, instead of absorbing the magic and using it, as Gen1 had, were took weak to hold it in, and most of them burned, just like the glowing boy.

The next generation, Gen3, lived longer. They also started showing signs of magic in their tweens, but the symptoms didn't start becoming more severe until their thirties. Seeing this, they knew they would all die soon. They turned to their children -- Gen4 -- for a cure, believing that maybe these children, most of whom seemed to be born without any traces of magic within them, could save lives. 

As Gen4 grew up, they were tested -- mentally and physically -- for anything about them that might provide a cure. One by one, they were eliminated from the testing program, all except one. Ary. 

Here is a story. It has good, evil, a heroine, and her best friend.

But mostly, it has magic.