Excerpt: On We Go

Once upon a time, there lived a princess named Abigail. Or, at least, that’s the way she would put it because it sounded nice in all the stories.
Naturally, she lived with her family, since no sensible princess would dare venture away from the castle and therefore be forced to survive in the cruel, rather more frightening, world of peasants. However, the simplest of differences between princesses and peasants is that princesses are never sensible.
That being said, she ended up straying away from the castle.
It was the sprawling-type castle that got built out rather than up over time. So, while she certainly did sleep in the topmost tower just like a proper, insensible princess, she was still only two and a half stories up. But since this is Scotland where the wind blows, etc., it was quite drafty at two and a half stories. Yet again, the princess chose the most cliché, and therefore least prudent of choices.
A building has to be quite large for there to exist unknown passageways, or else there’s no way for them to be hidden. The walls are so thick as well, that no one notices when it is a good four feet thicker than it should be. There were, of course, the secret chambers built for secret reasons that certain secret people were allowed to enter for secret meetings, but everyone knows those secrets. The truly secret chambers and passageways are the ones that are accidentally put there by inept architects. Where two rooms should meet, there’s a gap; where they ran out of stone, they covered it with a tapestry; where there wasn’t room and they had to dig underground, behind the stone walls there is still that second tunnel out. Occasionally they get found by a couple of kids who actually succeed in keeping it secret, using it only as a place of interest to play games of imagination. Then they grow up, lose their imaginations altogether because they’ve probably become lawyers, doctors, priests, or politicians, and pretend it all never happened.
That’s where the mistakes were. Those people grew up. But they left behind the games they played, doing that very human thing: they stop seeing what’s there – what they put there – what still exists.
The universe is very strange about defining existence. It never told us anything. In fact, why should the universe itself even exist? But for something to exist it just has to be. And ideas and imaginings be. They exist. Children know this, and can see the things that exist. But then they get taught the rules. Rules don’t have to work on minds, they work on bodies. Not all things that exist have to have bodies, but the human teachers on the Castle thought so. But then there’s space, and space takes up volume, so space should exist, but teachers on the Castle didn’t think so. And ideas exist because they’re there, and you can sense them with all five senses if you want to, but at this the teachers on the Castle would probably hang you.
So the children knew about The Man In the Wall Who Grants Your Wishes, and the adults convinced themselves that he didn’t exist because the rules said he couldn’t. This they believed so strongly that they couldn’t sense him anymore, and if you shoved the Man in an adult’s face, the Man would go through. But for the children, things like The Man In the Wall Who Grants Your Wishes changed the whole world, and wishes truly were granted simply because the children believed they were.
Abigail was both a child and a princess. This created difficulties.