George walked hesitantly to the bedside. The girl lay in bed, asleep, her face creased with pain. He reached out to brush the hair out of her face, but stopped just short. Touching her would break the spell, bring an end to something he couldn’t quite describe.

He turned his attention to the bedside table. It was covered in simple crayon drawings of a man in red and a green dragon.

“How is she?” a voice from the door asked. George turned slowly to see his mother standing in the doorway, a look of sad concern on her face.

“She’s sleepin’,” George replied quietly. “I think she’s hurting, mom.”

“She is,” his mother said, “but the doctor says there isn’t much we can do about it.”

“I know,” George said.

George crept through the castle on quiet feet, his eyes darting around for signs of another living soul. He saw none. The castle, which appeared massive from outside, seemed smaller on the inside, and less imposing than George would have imagined. He took off his helmet and set it on the floor, walking slowly down the single hallway he found himself in.

The hallway ended in a single door of plain wood, a brass knob placed conventionally in the face of the portal. As George reached for it, he noticed his limbs seemed shorter than before, his muscles less-defined. He looked at his hands, saw they were small and soft. A sense of dread and foreboding stole across his spine, causing him to shiver involuntarily. He reached out once more for the doorknob, took it in his hand, and turned it.

Inside was a small room, the walls bathed in the shadow of twilight. Across from the door stood a small bed, its lone occupant a small girl with the covers tucked up under her chin. She looked remarkably familiar…

George and the girl pushed the boat into the surf and climbed aboard. The girl took the tiller, guiding the boat out as the tide pulled them further from shore. The boat hardly seemed to need anyone to steer it, though the girl kept her hand on the rudder just in case.

The boat sailed for days, until nothing was visible except sky and sea. There was nothing else in sight, no signs of another living soul or even that anything else existed in the world except for the water and the air. The boat became their entire world, a floating pebble in a galaxy of blue.

After what felt like two weeks, a sliver of something not blue appeared on the horizon. Eventually, the sliver grew to become a shoreline, with trees and sand dunes visible. The boat scraped against sand, and George and the girl clambered out, splashing through the last few feet of surf to reach dry land. They dragged the boat up onto the sand behind them, leaving it beached as they lay out on the dry expanse next to the sparkling ocean.

“So, where are we going?” George asked,staring up into the empty sky.

“Wherever the journey takes us,” the girl replied quietly.