a girl named Battle.

Introduction.
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Battle and a boy named Rust, two children destined to meet each other but were gifted with very different yet unusual circumstances. Battle grew up in a tall building full of people of considerable wealth and oppurtunity. Despite an early inclination towards playful tantrums and kicking good times in mudpits, her parents silenced her to a vast schedule of lessons, forcing her to spend her days with a book balanced on her head while she gurgled french, ate with a salad fork, rode white horses, and played wronged virgins in lackluster balletic performances. She often cried in the evening for reasons largely unknown to herself, but she derived some pleasure in watching old war footage in her grandfather's secret study where he sipped brandy, smoked his forbidden pipe and eyed his vast collection of photographs featuring fat Victorian beauties.

Rust literally grew up in the underground, in an abandoned loop of subway track where a large tribe of
urban gypsies and mystical vagabonds set up camp. His mother was a noted clairvoyant who made peculiar candles that could make or break the fortune of those who dared to light them. His father, despite an uncanny resemblance to Rasputin, had a successful career in vaudeville as an acrobat and comic, but he harbored a secret talent for transformation with the help of a magical tambourine. Very few ever witnessed the miracle. Rust himself never saw this particular trick, though he once caught an indirect glimpse of it, seeing his father's silhouette against a bonfire morph into beasts, bird, and curious pieces of furniture.

Needless to say, Rust grew up in an unusual neighborhood, full of communal festivities and spontaneous chanting. But sometimes, Rush would find himself in a nook near the surface, contemplating this familiar darkness in his life and wonder about the mountains and pasture, the soil from which the wicked herbs and mythical flowers grew, the very foliage and blooms that disingrated when they were submerged into his world, becoming merely a familar smell by a boiling cauldron, a wafting scent from a dried bouquet. It was while he was pondering these very thoughts, one day, that the subway track rumbled, and the dust from obliterated cement rained from a sunlit crack above. And Rust gazed at this vision--this cloud of silt suspended in a slit of sunlight--as if it pulsated with magical possibility. For right above lived that other world he only knew briefly while at school or at the carnival, that strange land above where people regarded the sun not so much as a source of romance as much as regularity and routine.

It seems odd to most but it was perfectly normal to Rust, that he developed an ecstatic curiosity for the mundane. Soon after. he toiled over elaborate plans for expeditions. He scaled buildings, crawled through vents, swung on ropes, slid into dark corners just to glimpse a man sip brandy while engaging in stoic conversation over finances with his wife, witness a poor student smell a steaming pie before wielding an eager knife, admire a clerk finger through the crisp edges of paper files, and wonder at a maid using a broom just for sweeping--not flying.

Rust could not feign invisibility flawlessly, however. Whether it be because of over-inquisitive neighbors or the serendiptous arrival or unsuspecting cops, reports of a peeping tom circulated throughout various neighborhoods.
And even though they were uncommonly supportive of their son's hungry mind and strange inclinations, Rust's parents got particularly worried after an ugly incident involving brush with the feds and some angry dwellers with pitchforks, the entire intriguing chase culminating with a showdown on a skyscraper and Rust dangling happily from the hour-hand of a large clock, sixty feet up in the air. Sternly, his father insisted," Due to the boy's inelegant method of mischief, he must be inititated into OUR special way of dealing with matters." So for his thirteenth birthday, both his mother and father recruited his Uncle Boris to give Rust a special present: his first spell.