The Abandoned Palace

They came out of the forest onto a wide plain of silver grass, and at the far end, on a high hill, stood the palace.

It was a magnificent palace of white marble, with domes and towers and tall columns. But it was strange. Some of the columns were snapped in the middle, and some of the staircases climbed up and then simply stopped in mid-air without reaching anywhere. Faded red banners fluttered slowly from its walls, as if they were tired.

"This is King Nasser's palace," said Luna. "He's the hero of a very old story that a writer began hundreds of years ago... and then stopped halfway through. They never finished it."

"So why hasn't the Forgetting eaten it?" asked Sara.

"Because the king is still waiting. Waiting keeps a story alive for a little while. But he's waited a very, very long time... and he's starting to get tired."

They went in through the great open gate. The corridors were long and silent, dust covered everything, and the mirrors on the walls reflected unfinished pictures: half a knight, half a garden, half a feast. Everything in the palace was a half.

In the great kitchen they saw a plump baker in a white hat standing perfectly still, reaching towards the oven with a half-baked loaf in his hands. In the garden, a little girl skipping with a rope hung frozen in mid-air in the middle of a jump, the rope above her head and her smile stuck in place. In the stables, a white horse reared on its back legs — and hadn't put its front hooves down for five hundred years.