The Desert Queendom of Helmunaptra

Follow the rumors culled from the pubs and the taverns: follow them south, sailing to the dust-blown desert on a new continent, where a powerful queen rules. In your dreams, you wait for the opportunity to abandon the concrete desert you call home, you wave goodbye to friends as they move to fire-frilled forests and towering humidities. You thought some of them might know you forever. Awake, your partner treks through the shifting sands beside you, her yellow ribbon scarfing her hair in place. Behind you, a caravan of loyal monsters, but in your dreams you are lonely. People forget you still live there, in the house with white cinderblock walls, with glow-in-the-dark spider webs spun up on windows every Halloween. Arrive at the desert queendom. It looks familiar, it reminds you of all the other kingdoms you’ve seen before, but all castles look the same, especially from the outside. The guards tell you the queen is not upstairs, where rulers usually preside, but down. Question why a queen would throne over her kingdom from below, then descend the staircase and see: it is no basement, but a beautiful, tranquil garden. An oasis. The guards say you look astounded, but your face, it does not change. The guards tell you the flowers here need constant care. The guards tell you about the queen’s greatest powers: her eyes that penetrate the mysteries of the future. She is more precious than beetle’s blood. Hope she will say more than the fortuneteller, more than your father did before he died. Hope for direction. The queen asks if you are here to visit the sacred grave of the legendary hero. Of course, she says, it is a shrine, not a grave. The hero’s body is not buried here. No one knows what happened to him after saving the world from unearthly darkness. Maybe he is still alive, immortal. You can always hope. See the helm peering over the shrine. She hands it to you, and you try it on just in case, but it rests heavy and hollow on your head, its crest falls over your eyes. Still, the queen lets you take it with you on your quest. You put it in your bag, which never feels any heavier no matter the objects it accumulates. Then, she tells you she has knowledge of your true home: you are from a kingdom to the east, the son of a king. In your dreams, you were born in a castle, maybe not a dream after all. In the dreams you’re sure are dreams, moving from the concrete desert is a daunting task, it would require trucks and strong arms to move couches and bedframes. Do not leave the desert queendom yet. Spend days in the library, reading about how to survive the sand, flipping through joke books, studying books on the world’s eccentrics: a king who trades treasures for tiny medals, a man who built a museum with nothing to display. Find a desert rose after the dust storm—not a flower, but a rock in the shape of one, gray ridges like petals, like the silvered crest of a helm. It turns out, even awake, leaving the desert is no easier because it means returning to a home you never knew. Maybe your mother is there, but more likely there is an empty castle that looks like all other castles, a sign or a shopkeeper or a monster in a well telling you where to go next from all this nothing.