
It’s a first impression that nearly precluded a second, if it weren’t for the fact that Kane was unintentionally uncooperative with Hawk’s deadly intentions. Hawk’keen Maragold Tertania, Hawk for short, is a new boy at Peter Quince High School, and he’s unlike any boy Kane has ever seen, for reasons not the least of which include the fact that Hawk plunged a sword through Kane’s chest upon their initial encounter. It takes much more than that to make an impression upon the hippie population in Athens, but I can guarantee that even this town, with all its normal eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, hasn’t encountered anything, or anyone, nearly as remarkable as Kane is about to. Kane Vess has lived there for the entirety of his sixteen years, with his flautist father, and though this small town in the middle of nowhere boasts its fair share of curiosities, Kane being the only openly gay teenager in town isn’t quite special enough to be one of them. If, that is, you’d classify Athens, Iowa and its residents as mundane. Welcome to a contemporary fantasy, where fiction becomes fact, and the pages of borrowed imagination become the amorphous fabric that veils the arcane realms from the sight of mundane mortals.
