Once upon a time — when the earth was just a little bit younger than it is today, in a town pressed against the western foothills of the high Sierras, there lived a boy, and there lived a girl.

The boy’s name was Elijah Matthews, and he was nine, on the cusp of turning ten. His hair fell over his round face, and came to rest on his thin, normally drawn in shoulders in golden ringlets, that would snag and snap any comb or brush unlucky enough to be used on them. Beneath these golden curls were a pair of gray eyes that were much too large for his face. His pointed nose was always buried in one book or another, and his mind was filled with images of shining rockets breaching through the firmament. Of chrome cities spanning entire planets, and of bubbled colonies on distant worlds much like our own; only a little more dusty and a little more red.

The girl’s name was Hanna Greenwood, and she was ten and a quarter. Her eyes were as wide as saucers; with a slight upward curve in their corners, and took up a good quarter of her oddly angular face. They were mostly brown, with specs of green floating around, “like a forest’s floor after a storm,” as her grandmother had often said. They would dart every which way in search of something interesting to focus intently on until the interest faded and the search would start anew.

Her hair was auburn, bordering on copper, and fell to rest in between her shoulder blades. Different strands of hair would stick out from the masses every day, requiring them to be held down by the variety of multi-colored hair clips she owned. She kept her long bangs from falling over her face with an old, fading felt headband that had ripped a little to show the white plastic rib underneath the lilac cloth. Her mind was filled with clouds and cotton. With white stone castles sitting atop distant peaks, and armies in glittering armor clashing. Of lost civilizations and treasure filled temples within winding caverns or overgrown jungles.

Both the boy and the girl had known each other for their entire lives. Their parents had been close friends since their school days, so it only seemed natural to the two pairs that their children would become friends as well. And so it was.

Hanna had always sworn that her first memory was holding the newly born Elijah in the hospital, despite her being much too young to form memories, and was a fact that she would often throw in his face when the two of them were in the midst of those nonsense arguments that children often have.

It is in the middle of one of these arguments where our story begins.