The world was so much poorer without it, so she invented magic.

"I suppose," she said to herself that night, as she lay in bed unable to sleep and still not convinced that she had indeed invented magic, "I was somehow the right person, in the right place ... right time ..."

In time she came to understand that she was indeed the right person, but to her dying day, she never knew why. She simply was, and that was all the explanation she ever found for why it was she, after thousands of years of human experience and possibilty, she who achieved the impossible. Before her, magic was a story and a game and a dream. Then one evening, she performed the first magic, and then it was merely a matter of refining the art and teaching others.

Telling, of course, is so much simpler than living. For her, the time before magic was the life of one person, and the time after, a different person, the two connected by little more than memories and flesh. Both lives were full and difficult, rewarding in their different ways, and neither could have existed without the other. And on one warm summer evening, the two lives intersected, both living through a set of experiences that were so thoroughly mundane that no outcome more important than a good night's sleep should have resulted. As it was, she invented magic and changed the world forever.

Her name was Tera and she lived in a small town on the Pacific Coast of the United States. Not right on the coast, but inland, about an hour-and-a-half drive from beaches of rock cliffs and water too cold for her to ever enjoy more than a walk in barefeet and shorts. She was twenty-two years old, had spent two years in college before quitting, and before that had spent two years on the other side of the country, in the new urban South, a place of shallow moral values she despised and people for whom she discovered she had nothing but comtempt. So she moved to the far side of the country, settled into a small cottage, thanks to a modest trust fund, and lived day by day without the slightest idea of what she was doing with her life.

The evening she discovered the skills she would use to invent magic was no different than any of the other evenings she endured, day after day. She was not depressed, nor angst-ridden, nor overwhelmed with despair for meaning. She just had no direction, no purpose, and so she went day to day waiting for something to point her in the right direction. After all, as she said to herself at least twice a week, she was only twenty-two.

"What's the rush? It'll come in time. I'll find it...."

Whatever "it" was. She did not know if she would recognize "it" when the time came; as it turned out, she did not recognize it, but that proved unnecessary. She acted in the necessary way, and the forces of power and nature and the universe did the rest