Gather up your caravan and sail east to the rumors of your home, your kingdom. You are not the hero, but you are something other than what you thought you were, not merely an anonymous boy, but a prince whose father was a king. This is how these stories go. Nothing is what it seems. Land on a continent where lazy Cyclopses and large-mouthed dragons roam. Arrive at an inn built into a giant tree, founded by hippies. The hippies tell you to rest here if you’re traveling north, the kingdom lies through a treacherous mountain path. Rest, but not too long. Go north. Wind between the spiraling molars of mountains, chipped like they’ve chewed up the sky. Tightrope walk across rickety rope bridges. Rappel down cliff walls. Look at your partner beside, her heels dug into a rocky enclave, and wonder if this is what everyone’s newlywed life is like. Come to a mountain village. Maybe it’s the hard journey, maybe it’s the altitude, the thin air, but your childhood friend, your forever partner collapses in the snow. The innkeeper takes her in. You dry the melted snow on her arms and wait for her to wake. In this mountain village, the men at the pub talk about the king from the north searching for his missing queen. They talk about the queen’s power, and the bartender says he sees the same luminescence in your eyes. Elsewhere, a woman tells her son he’ll be kidnapped by monsters just like the queen if he doesn’t eat his carrots. As you cross the rope bridge to descend back into the caves, catch a view of the kingdom from a distance, framed by the cliff faces, the way it might look on a postcard, something from home, I miss you, I wish you were here. As you make your way down through the stale-smelling caverns, dodging the flashing lights of attacking monsters, all you see is that castle in your mind like a house nestled on a small hill, a lawn ornament deer glimpsed through the tree trunks as though waiting to make its leaping escape through prison bars, bowling balls buried like seeds in the dirt, a writhing tentacled garden, a low brick wall lining the driveway upon which a child might perch, waiting for his parents to come home after his key breaks in the lock. Your path dead-ends at a hole in the ground and you know you must jump, just like that boy sitting on the driveway’s brick wall, who might, when he is sure no one will spot him, stand up on that wall and imagine himself a bird or a superhero or a magician with teleportation spells as he steps off into the air, believing his own magic in those trembling milliseconds before the ground comes rushing up to meet his feet.