The sky is open and the city is nearly drowned. The rain looks like fire as it approaches lamp posts lining the city streets. In a loft overlooking small, family-owned shops and a fair sum of New York City's rat population, a family of five sits around a long table celebrating the Wizarding holiday of Liberum Faber. They're watched by a young wizard, no older than 17, who's just lost everything that ever meant anything to her.
Taylin McGee pulls a book from the little black messenger bag she's been wearing for the past 2 days. A Wizard's History: 19th Century, it's her favorite - the informative passages on the First and Second Wars of 1847 and the Stemic Plague of the Atlantic are written in beautiful prose. Her parents had always possessed a magical skill for interpreting history and recanting it almost poetically.
In all the chaos of having lost her parents and her home, she'd almost forgotten that today is Liberum Faber. It had always been one of her favorite Wizarding holidays. In some communities it's extremely festive; of course not in New York, where the un-endowed shouldn't even know that people like her exist, but back in the Wizard world and Aerofaer, the day is fabulous. Yet, instead of eating the fyrpuffs and flying a broomstick alongside the Parade for Ol' Nyk, she's sitting in a dark alley across the street from the modest loft on Waverly Place. Inside that loft, a happy, complete family celebrates her favorite holiday with a feast.
Taylin searches for the"L" section of her book's index, a reading of the history of the holiday is standard for a formal celebration. Perhaps having her own reading will be enough to connect her to her world for just this day. It's a day to celebrate the freedom of the working class wizards from the tyrannical ways of their employers and financial superiors. In those days, wizards like the famous Erin of Aerofaer, Alexandre Cristo, and Greggor Benni could torture smaller powers with the protection of their other wealthy comrades holding political office. Nyk Lucas led a rebellion against their power and on the 14th of August in 1878 rounded up the greatest offenders. The wizards forced their former employers to forfeit their own endowments to wizarding families.. They called this day Liberum Faber, and so to the Old Wizarding families, like the McGee's, it is a day to celebrate equality, and to the six New Wizarding families, like the one that Taylin watches now, it is a day to celebrate power.
Taylin herself only hopes to one day be as great a historian as her parents. Soon she could start her career, she's already completed her education at WizTech for the Social Magics. And absorbed every morsel of information she could find in each of her parents' books, but she was planning to tour with them this fall. They were to communicate certain correlations between current events and reports from the Dark Ages of Magic that suggest a resurrection of Warlock and Witch magic. It doesn't matter now, as far as Taylin's concerned, her parents' kidnapping was confirmation.
The three children in the window ahead would likely be the only ones who could help Taylin save her parents and they don't even know it. She cries herself to sleep.