The Queen Of All Strange Things

5

Sightless.

Wasn’t there any other name for the place? To call it sightless, it was huge. I mean huge huge! 

When Salzar flew over, I held my breath. There were rising towers, more pyramids, old temples, domes buildings, streets lined with markets, a replica of the white house I guess, a few Greek buildings, something like a coliseum and a lot of mansions and tons of small houses. The lanes were crowded with people whom I shall not say specifically which species they belong to. But most were not human. There were Pegasus flying around, some unknown flying creatures and of course, a few more Chinese dragons. They flew alongside Salzar as we arrived. Each one of them had a different colour. One was gold, another was red, green, white and the last was black.

‘How is the Palace?’ asked Andrew.

‘Worse, my prince,’ said the gold dragon.

I looked down at my watch. It was two in the evening. We took two hours to fly all the way from England to Egypt.

I still could not understand what the big “problem” was. Well, not until we reached what seemed like the river Nile that I noticed there was a sand tornado encircling in the center of the city besides the Nile.

There was such a roar of the wind that Andrew had to yell to speak.

‘What about the others?’

Lightning cracked from somewhere and there wasn’t even storm. But then I realized that the lightning was coming from within the miniature sand hurricane. Andrew turned to me.

‘Call then off,’ he shouted.

‘WHAT?’ I had to yell so hard that I tasted sand in my mouth. Salzar did the craziest thing. He plummeted into the storm.

I closed my face and felt bits of sand piecing through my skin. Andrew held on tight to Salzar. From below, I saw a building much more with a Roman look to it with some Greek buildings like the Parthenon surrounded by a medieval looking fortress.  But this thing was huge and it had so many structures from different designs that it looked like the architect could not decide to which era and culture the building was supposed to belong.

It took me a while to notice the creatures inside the storm. Tiny people were flirting and zapping through the air. There was a loud musical buzz, more like the storm was chanting to itself. Somehow, I could understand what they were chanting.

‘Destroy… destroy…’

Okay, not what I expected.

‘Stop!’ I yelled.

The tiny creatures around me stopped. Then I saw them. They were fairies.

‘Destroy, destroy, destroy...’

Goodness, that was creepy.

‘No one is destroying anything,’ I yelled. Much to my surprise, my voice echoed like that of a bell and everything stopped, as if time froze.

Then they started to move again.

Oh my, this is going to be a nightmare, I thought.

Salzar slowly headed in front of the palace. Lucky for him, he had scales. But the tiny sand fairies were still monotonously chanting the same word over and over again.

Then I saw someone push a large marble coffin out of the palace.

‘Destroy…. Have to destroy….’

They seemed very angry about something.

‘Send them in,’ said Andrew.

‘Huh? Like they’ll listen?’