**10 years later**

The forest was crusted in Starsand. The trees, as green as they once were, had branches pitch-black in color; they crumbled away at the lightest touch. The grass was shriveled and gnarled like the hair of an old hag. The only creatures that resided within the brambles were bats and odd beings of the mist that dwelled in the darkest corners of the earth.

A young man, perhaps twenty, roamed the outskirts of the Twilight Forest with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His wispy brown hair was tossed by the gentle breeze out of his eyes; he squinted at the forest, recalling the memories it held deep within its twisted roots. That was a time before the Shadowsayers had taken root.

It was on a humid night, at a sleepover - absently planned during a full moon - when Sabre had first seen Nyc in his Awakened form. White feathers coated his arms, and his eyes were wide, the same shade of yellow that was familiar to Sabre. The small snowy owl chick had cocked his head to the side and hopped up to Sabre in a friendly greeting, but the wolf pup did not recognize his best friend until the Transformations finally wore off.

Neither of them had brought it up until they were outside in Sabre's backyard. His home skirted the borders of Naticook Forest, making it an ideal play spot. Nyc idly tugged at fistfuls of fresh grass. "So...I had a dream that there was..." he began, before breaking into a grin. "No. It's stupid." "No, keep goin'," Sabre urged, looking up from his coloring book. His feet swung behind him from where he was positioned laying on his stomach. "I dreamt that there was a wolf in your room...just a little baby one..." He didn't notice Sabre's dumbfounded expression for a good minute or two. "What?" "I dreamt about an owl," Sabre responded as if in a trance. "A little owl chick just hopping around. It was-"

     "Shh!" Nyc suddenly whisper-screeched at a light rustling in the leaves. "Did you hear that?"

     Sabre strained his ears. Nope. Just the river and the leaves in the wind. "No. I don't think so. What did you hear?"

     "It sounded like a-a rat or something, scurrying through the leaves.."

     "You're crazy. There's nothing to worry about when we're this far out of the forest."

     Nyc's cheeks burnt pink and he looked back down at the earthen floor.

     "Sabre...I was the owl."

      Sabre didn't appear fazed. "I was the wolf."

That was the day that Nyc showed Sabre the purple scar that creased his temple, just underneath the fluffy curls that decorated his head. "I got it ever since that lightning storm last year," he said. "I don't know what's happening, but...I'm glad to not be alone." Then his expression turned fearful. "You can't tell anyone else."

"No, not a soul," promised...not Sabre. Instead a voice came from up in the trees. It wasn't Evan Hansen, though. An eastern garter snake, dark green and glimmering in the setting sunlight, slithered down the bark of a nearby tree and into the grass. Nyc looked like he was going to faint when a kid appeared next to him - maybe seven years old, with platinum blonde hair that stood out among the green of the earth. "What'd I miss?"

     Leviathan Agawa. His piercing green eyes were unmistakable, especially when they were the same green eyes that had glared at Sabre like a lion to its prey the minute he'd accidentally stepped into Levi's second-grade homeroom.

"Levi?!" Nyc yelped, bolting as far away from him as possible.

"So, you're a Therian, too?" Levi asked Sabre, not really appearing to care.

Sabre kept his right fist closed tight. "A wolf," he mumbled.

"Oh, so a Fire."

"A what?"

"My mother told me all about this when I Awakened," he said proudly, puffing his chest out. "There are the Fire Therians, the River ones, the Skies and the Earths. I'm a River Therian. Cause I'm a snake. Fire Therians are the predators; wolves, lions, gazelles, Cinderella's Prince from Into the Woods-"

"What?"

Levi tugged down the collar of his shirt, barely by an inch, to reveal a jagged blue scar tracing his collarbone. "You have one too, don't you?"

With much hesitation, Sabre let his hand uncurl and he showed Levi his own scar. The River Therian nodded knowingly, but the Fire Therian still didn't understand. "How can you control when you-" "Because I'm smarter than you, and better than you, and the one with the astrologers for parents," Levi cut him off with a smirk that boiled Sabre's blood. "Or, it just takes time. When you know the right practices, you're gonna learn how to control your Transformations, too."

"Why can't you teach me?"

Levi scoffed.

Nyc was approaching him, still very slowly. "You can do the animal thing, too?" he asked with innocent wonder. "Wh-what is it?"

"It's a famous legend that my mother told me about - she likes that kind of stuff," Levi explained. "You can do it too, right? What are you?"

"An owl," Nyc said warily.

"So you're a Sky Therian. There are four Therians our age - me, you, you," - he addressed both of them - "and another one." He pointed to Sabre - "There's the Fire one - born in April, under Aries -" He pointed to Nyc - "Then the Sky, born in May, under Gemini. Then there's me, I'm the Scorpio, the River...and then there's gotta be someone to fill in the blank. The Virgo, the Earth Therian born in September. Maybe he goes to our school."

"And your parents knew about all of this?"

"Yep. They're cool like that."

Sabre rolled his eyes. "What's the point of all this anyway?"

"Something's supposed to happen. Something...dark. And when the time comes, we're all gonna band together and help the world in a big way. That's all Mother could tell me."

"Like superheroes!" Nyc exclaimed, his eyes lighting up.

"Um...yeah," Levi smiled sympathetically. "Like superheroes."

~

When Sabre walked into Library Street School alongside Nyc the next day, Levi was waiting for them. He approached them quickly. "We'd better keep an eye out for that Earth Therian today," he whispered to them conspiratorially. "He could be here." Even after his abrupt warning, he continued walking with them long enough to see two second-graders - Carey McCormack and Asher Kisiel - sharing a kiss in only the way foolish seven-year-olds could. This was the age of picking daisies, passing notes, and friend-requesting one another on Roblox to express love.

"Gross," Levi vocalized so only Sabre and Nyc could hear. "I'm never gonna date anyone. It's weird."

Sabre and Nyc were nodding their agreement when a rise of commotion caught their attention from down the hall. A group of bigger third-grade kids were surrounding a younger one - the youngest boy in first grade, in fact. Rowan Kodiak had always been the weak link, and the other kids loved to use his weakness to their advantage. One of these bigger kids held a crumpled piece of paper in their hand. "What's this?" she was asking him jeeringly. "Writing a poem to your little boyfriend? Need validation that badly, don't you, sprout?"

"Give it back, Lily, p-please," Rowan was asking meekly. He was barely heard over his opponents.

When Sabre caught this interaction, he wanted nothing more than to help him. Be the hero, his parents had always encouraged him. Heroes are ordinary people who make themselves extraordinary.

I'm gonna be extraordinary, Sabre thought. But before he could reach the fight and say something -

There was a green flash of light and something sharp, like an arrow, flew right past Sabre's head. It barely missed him.

These flew out in every direction like spears, except they didn't pierce anything in their path. Instead they just clung to whatever they hit first, stuck there like a pin in a corkboard. Sabre got a closer look at one that was lodged into the wall.

Quills?

Sabre whipped around to look back at Rowan. The small boy pressed himself against the lockers, his back still straightening like he had just moved from a fetal position. His baby-blue eyes were blown wide with fear, as were the eyes of everyone surrounding him. It looked like a freeze frame of shock.

A stunned silence took hold of everyone.

Lily's expression turned to stone. She tugged a quill from one of her long, harvest-blond braids and whipped it in Rowan's direction. "Freak," she hissed, backing away. The clatter of the quill hitting the tiled floor echoed like an explosion into the suffocating silence.

The other third-graders followed suit.

"Weirdo."

"Loser."

"Nerd."

"Quit being a baby, Kodiak."

Sabre had been watching from afar. "Why do they have to be like that?" he huffed.

Levi appeared beside him. "They're jealous. That's what Mother always tells me. Or maybe this place is just meant to be this way."

"Why is school so awful?" Nyc sighed dramatically.

"Oh, it won't last for long," Sabre shrugged. "I bet it'll be a lot better when we get to high school. Everything's better in high school."

Once the crowd dispersed, Rowan was still frozen like a deer in headlights. His face was red and splotchy. Sabre walked over to him tentatively, with Levi and Nyc trailing behind him.

"Hey, are you o-"

"Leave me alone," Rowan whimpered, sliding down to a sitting position and hugging his knees to his chest. He glared at the quill on the floor with equal parts fear and bitterness.

"No, no, I'm not one of them. I know what happened just now."

"Y-You do?"

~

"A-an Earth Therian? I-I'm actually good for something?"

Rowan was blinking in shock at the swirling green scar that was now on his shoulder.

Levi was grinning like a mad scientist who had just discovered how to make something blow up. "I knew it, I knew it, I knew it," he was murmuring excitedly. They had all sat down together in the corner of the playground, away from the noise. Well, Levi hadn't stayed sitting. He had sprung to his feet and started parading around like a prince. "This is great, this is so great, I found them, I found the Earth Therian, I'm so smart, smarter than you, and you, and you, and-" he had testified for a good minute before Rowan finally worked up the courage to ask more about what was happening to him. And Levi had happily - happily - explained more.

After school, all four of the boys gathered at Levi's home, in the same spot at the same time as the night prior. Except they were plus one this evening.

"So, you have to be nice to us now, right?" Nyc asked Levi, rocking back and forth idly as he spoke. "Cause we're gonna have to work together to save the world?"

Levi picked up a dried-up leaf from the forest floor, crushing it in his fist just to hear the satisfying crunch. "Sure," he said. "I can be nice. But it's not like we're gonna spend the rest of our lives together. Who knows when it's gonna strike? I don't have to like you now and I won't have anything to do with you after it's done."

"I mean," Nyc's gaze dropped to the leaf corpse that Levi had released from his grip. "It's still nice to be nice, right?"

"Is that what your mama always tells you?" Levi jeered.

"Levi," Sabre finally spoke up with a warning in his tone. He heard Rowan mumble "that wasn't a very nice thing to say" into the pages of the astrology book he was reading.

Levi huffed and a corner of his lip turned up in an attempted smile. "Fine. We can be friends. I'll try that if it's gonna depend on the fate of the world."

The four Therian Children might not have known just what they were in for right then. They might have grown apart in years to come, as Levi had considered. But they would definitely see each other again. Their fate was in writing.

And when they did, they would be in for an adventure beyond superheroes, beyond bullies, beyond even the wildest fabrication of a second-grader's dreams.