EGYPT KID Chapter 7

 

Chapter 7

The palace was a monument to madness, built grain by golden grain from the echoing hollow where Hari’s faith had been. He sat on a throne of petrified tamarind wood, a gift from a grove that had never existed, and watched Memphis live again without him.

Outside the alabaster windows, the city thrived. The weavers of Per-Medjed worked their miraculously restored looms, their laughter carrying on a breeze Hari had wished into being. The markets bustled, fed by conjured grain and conjured peace. They had forgiven the queen, who now toured the revived districts with serene grace, accepting their relieved devotion as her due. They had forgiven the gods, whose caprice was familiar. But they could not forgive the architect of their terror, the man who had both erased and restored their world. To them, Hari was not a savior. He was a volatile, unnatural fact—a wound in reality they politely ignored.

In the cavernous hall, Naqad and Zahir bickered like the ancient, married calamities they were.

“It’s gauche,” Naqad sniffed, swirling around a pillar he’d just materialized out of spite. “All this empty space. It yearns for tapestries. For a theme.”

“Themes are a provincial concern,” Zahir countered, reclining on a couch of solidified shadow. “The emptiness is the statement. It’s a critique of mortal ‘coziness.’ It screams of existential desolation. I adore it.”

“It screams of a poor draftsman who forgot to fill in the details.”

“You would cover the sublime with knick-knacks. You always had the soul of a tax collector.”

“And you have the attention span of a hypernova! You redecorate continents but can’t finish a thought!”

Hari stared through them, their words buzzing like flies against the window of his mind. Their constant, petty war was the soundtrack to his unraveling. He had everything he had ever wished for: safety, power, a seat above the world. And it was ashes.

The goodness he had once believed in—the people’s inherent justice, the redemptive arc of struggle—was a lie. The people were fickle, their love transactional, their memories short. They would accept bread from the hand that had earlier broken them, so long as the breaking was forgotten. His suffering, his exile, his story… none of it mattered. They had moved on. They loved life again, but they did not love him. Respect had curdled into a quiet, profound contempt.

He was not their hero. He was their ghost.

Madness, he found, was not a raging fire. It was a slow, cold seep, like water into a foundation. It was the quiet realization that no narrative was true, no motive pure, and no victory clean. The queen had won by doing nothing but enduring. He had lost by caring too much, in the wrong way, at the wrong time.

And so, the idea grew. It was not a plan born of heat, but of the perfect, crystalline cold now settled in his bones. Revenge. Not the grand, revolutionary revenge of toppling thrones, but a personal, intimate corrosion. If he could not be loved as a savior, he would be remembered as a poison in the very heart of their world.

He would seduce the queen.

Not for power. Not for alliance. For the sheer, destructive poetry of it. To prove that the system she embodied, the order that had erased him, was as hollow and corruptible as he was. To take from her the control she prized above all. To make the symbol of his ruin into his final, damning story.

He stood from the throne. Naqad and Zahir paused their argument.

“Where are you going?” Naqad asked, suspicion in his ember-glow.

“For a walk in the gardens,” Hari said, his voice flat. “I need to wish up some night-blooming jasmine. The air smells too much of… restoration.”

He walked past them, through halls that echoed with his solitude. In the gardens that bloomed by his command, under a moon he had once wished larger, he began to craft his new persona. Not Hari the storyteller. Not the Chairman. Not the desperate rebel.

Something smoother. Colder. A patient shadow.

He would become the perfect, irresistible confidant. A regretful, wise, subdued power who understood her burdens. He would reflect her own greatness back at her, until she saw not a threat, but the only one who truly comprehended her isolation at the top. He would listen. He would agree. He would, with infinite patience, make himself the answer to a question she didn’t yet know she was asking.

Let the people of Memphis learn to love again. Let them weave and feast and forget. Their happy noise was just the background hum to his silent, meticulous work.

He looked towards the distant glow of the royal quarters, a smile touching his lips for the first time in weeks. It didn’t reach his eyes.

The game was no longer about winning their hearts. It was about breaking hers. And in doing so, he would etch his name into history not as a footnote of failed rebellion, but as the flaw that shattered the perfect vase.

The hare was done running. It was time to become the serpent in the lotus bed.

•••

Hari walked with Naqad, his wish-provider, through the perfumed dusk toward the palace of Memphis. The sky was a riot of stars, cheap and glittering as scattered salt. It was a nice night, if you liked that sort of thing. Hari didn’t. He felt the weight of the restored city around him, a painted set propped up by his silent, simmering will.

They took a side street, a shortcut Naqad insisted upon (“Efficiency is a moral stance,” the djinn had droned). It was narrower, dirtier, closer to the life Hari once knew. And there, lounging against a mud-brick wall, were a few of his old “fans.” They’d grown up. Their eyes held no awe now, only a dull, familiar spite.

One of them, a lanky youth with a scar through his eyebrow, straightened up as Hari passed. “Well,” he sneered. “Look what the dung beetle rolled in. The ghost.”

Hari kept walking.

“Hey. I’m talking to you, Rooster Head.” The youth kicked something into the street. It was a small, crudely painted wooden figurine—the warrior woman from Reborn in Fire, machete raised. Another followed. Then a crocodile. Then the lion-whisperer. A little pile of his heroes, dumped in the dust.

Another kid, a girl with a shaved scalp, reached into a sack and pulled out a rotten pomegranate. It hit Hari square in the chest with a wet thwap, spraying bitter pulp and rind across his clean, wished-for tunic.

“Your story’s trash,” the girl said, her voice flat. “Just like you.”

The first youth stepped on the figurine of the warrior. It cracked under his sandal. “Nobody cares anymore. We’ve got real food now. We don’t need your little carvings.”

Something hot and small uncoiled in Hari’s belly. It wasn’t the old, theatrical rage. This was colder. Sharper. A little tickle. A whisper.

See? it whispered. You tried to give them heroes. They just wanted fruit.

Naqad floated nearby, observing with clinical disinterest. “Shall I turn them into something? Garden slugs are traditional. Philosophically resonant, too.”

Hari ignored him. He looked at the broken toys, the spoiled fruit on his chest. He looked at their smug, hateful faces. The tickle in his belly spread, warming him. It felt… good. Simple. Clean.

“No,” Hari said, his voice quiet. “I don’t want slugs.” He met the lanky youth’s eyes. “I want dogs.”

He didn’t even have to wish it formally. Naqad understood the vibe. The djinn gave a minute, almost imperceptible shrug.

From the shadows of the alley, three lean, muscular dogs materialized. They were the color of dried blood, with eyes that glowed like embers. They didn’t growl. They just looked at the teenagers, tails stiff.

The youths froze, their bravado evaporating.

“Get them,” Hari said.

The dogs moved. They were silent, terrifyingly fast. They didn’t go for throats. They went for the ass.

A chorus of high-pitched, undignified shrieks split the night as fangs sank into buttocks through thin linen. The youths stumbled, howling, clutching their bitten backsides. The dogs harried them, snapping at heels and thighs, driving them down the street in a frantic, yelping stampede. One boy tripped and sprawled in the dirt, only to scramble up and run faster, a patch of his kilt torn clean away.

Hari watched them go. The little tickle in his belly blossomed into a warm, glowing coal. It wasn’t happiness. It was better. It was satisfaction. A pure, undiluted hit of seeing the world bite back, exactly on command. No metaphors. No lessons. Just cause and very specific, painful effect.

That, he thought, is how you write a story.

Naqad drifted closer. “A bit on-the-nose, don’t you think? ‘Let slip the dogs of war,’ et cetera. Very first-draft.”

“Shut up,” Hari said, but he was smiling. He flicked a bit of pomegranate off his tunic. “It’s time. Time to get back at the world that cursed me. Not with a manifesto. With a masterpiece.”

The palace gates loomed ahead, ivory inlaid with lapis lazuli. Hari didn’t approach the main entrance. He wished for a small, discrete side door to be unguarded and unlocked. It was.

He slipped inside, Naqad a wisp of smoke at his heel. The halls were cool, quiet, smelling of cedar and power. He knew where the royal apartments were. He’d made the palace, after all. He’d just never visited the heart of it.

His plan was crystalline. Seduce the queen. Not for love, not for an alliance. To own the architect of his misery. To prove that the pinnacle of this world, this system, was as hollow and temptable as he was. It would be his final, perfect plot twist.

He found the antechamber to her private rooms. A lone figure stood there, back to him, studying a scroll by lamplight. A slender frame, elegant neck, the simple but exquisite linen of a high courtier. The Queen’s Speaker. The voice of the throne.

The figure turned.

Hari’s breath hitched.

It was Taia.

Of course it was Taia. The Queen’s Speaker. The woman who had intervened at the guildhall with cool, gaslighting grace. The woman who had cornered him in her salon, her kiss a violation, her offer a demand. The one who’d had the scandal with the Greek socialite, Kyros. The one who’d made him feel like a tool in her hand.

Her eyes, sharp and intelligent, widened in recognition. Then they narrowed, calculating.

“Hari Potet,” she said, her voice like honey on a razor. “The ghost in the machine. I heard you’d built yourself a mausoleum. I didn’t expect a house call.”

All his practiced lines, his smooth seducer’s persona, evaporated. The warm coal of evil in his belly flared, but it twisted, confused. This wasn’t the target. This was… complication.

Naqad, invisible to her, whispered in his ear. “Plot twist! I love it. The intended object of corruption is elsewhere, and you’re left with the morally ambiguous bureaucrat who already sexually assaulted you. The dramatic irony is chef’s kiss.”

Hari stared at Taia. He saw not the queen’s faceless instrument, but the woman who had seen his raw power and wanted to wield it. Who had touched him not with desire, but with conquest. The hate was there, immediate and personal. But it was tangled with a perverse, electric recognition.

He didn’t wish for charm. He didn’t need to. The words came out raw, stripped of pretense. “You tried to buy me. With wine and threats.”

She didn’t flinch. She set the scroll down. “I offered you a purpose. You chose irrelevance instead. And yet…” She gestured around them, at the palace his power had subtly reshaped. “…here you are. Not so irrelevant after all. Just terribly lost.”

“I’m not lost,” he snarled. “I’m here to burn it all down.”

“Starting with the queen’s virtue?” A smirk touched her lips. “How pedestrian. She’s a statue, Hari. Cold, polished, and entirely self-possessed. You’d have better luck seducing the Sphinx. It has more warmth, and better conversation.”

The insult was for the queen, but it felt like a challenge to him. He stepped closer. The lamplight played on the angles of her face. She was beautiful, in a way that was all edges and secrets. “You think you know what I’m capable of?”

“I know you’re a boy with a god’s lighter, trying to set fire to a rainstorm.” Her gaze dropped to the pomegranate stain on his tunic. “And it seems the rain has already hit back.”

The coal in his belly surged. It wasn’t just evil. It was a need to prove. To prove her wrong, to prove his power, to shatter her cool, knowing composure. The target shifted. The queen was an idea. Taia was here. Real. A wound that hadn’t healed.

He looked at her, really looked. Past the title, past the violation, past the schemes. He saw the isolation in her eyes, the intelligence burning in a gilded cage. She was as trapped by the palace as he was, just in a nicer cell.

“Forget her,” Hari heard himself say, the plan crumbling into something more urgent, more dangerous. “She’s the past.”

Taia’s eyebrow arched. “And what am I?”

“The present.” He reached out, not to grab, but to trace the line of her jaw with his thumb. A touch she had once forced, now offered. A reversal. “You wanted a weapon. I’m offering you the hand that holds it.”

She didn’t pull away. Her breath caught, just slightly. The calculator in her eyes was still there, but it was flickering, overloading with new, uncharted data. This wasn’t part of her plan.

And it wasn’t part of his. That was the thrill.

Naqad groaned in his ear. “Oh, for the sake of all that is predictably apocalyptic! This isn’t revenge, this is a rom-com meet-cute with extra psychological damage! You’re supposed to be seducing the queen to destroy the state, not having a charged moment with your workplace harasser!”

Hari ignored him. The world outside, the hateful crowds, the restored city, the distant queen—all of it faded to a dull hum. Here, in this quiet room, was a different kind of fire. More complicated. More personal. Infinitely more interesting.

He leaned in. His lips brushed hers, not a conquest, but a question.

She answered.

Later, much later, tangled in the sheets of her surprisingly austere chamber, the first rays of dawn painting stripes across the floor, Hari made his final wish of the night. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the ceiling, at the palace he had built from his pain.

“I wish,” he whispered, to Naqad, to the universe, to himself, “that I will rule Egypt.”

Not through the queen. Not as her consort. For himself. Because the seduction had worked, but not on the intended target. It had worked on him. He was entangled now, in hate, in recognition, in something terrifyingly close to understanding. And from this tangled, messed-up, profoundly personal ground zero, he would build his throne. Not for the people. Not for the story.

For Hari.

Taia, lying beside him, heard the whisper. She didn’t speak. She just smiled, a small, secret thing in the growing light, and traced the outline of the pomegranate stain still on his discarded tunic.

The game had changed. The hare was in the lion’s den. And he’d decided he quite liked the decor.

•••

Lo and behold, Hari became the greatest ruler of Egypt ever seen and started a new dynasty.

It wasn't a dramatic coup. There was no war. No epic battle on the palace steps. It was, frankly, a bit of an administrative letdown.

One morning, Queen Anahita simply resigned.

The High Priest of Amun, a man whose beliefs had recently and inexplicably shifted to center around a prophetic "Rooster-Heated Phoenix of Renewal" (a story Hari had casually wished into the man's dreams), examined the stars. He announced, with tearful awe, that the celestial jackals were howling for a new, humble, from-the-dirt kind of king. The kind who understood camel dung and cosmic irony.

The generals, who had been enjoying a sudden, unexplained surge in their salaries and the quality of palace catering, voiced no objection.

The people of Memphis, still deeply weirded out by the guy who blew up and then rebuilt a town for fun, shrugged. "Okay," they said, over their conjured bread and conjured beer. "Weird, but the garbage collection has been fantastic lately."

And so, with less fanfare than the opening of a new sandwich cart, Hari Potet, former homeless kid, failed revolutionary, and accidental town-destroyer, was crowned Pharaoh. He chose the throne name: Nebkheperu-Potet, which basically meant "The Rooster Head is the Manifestation of the Soul." The scribes winced but carved it.

His first act as Pharaoh was to issue a decree so revolutionary it left the empire breathless: Two-Hour Lunch Breaks for All Monument Construction Workers. Followed by a mandatory, nationwide siesta from 1-3 PM. Productivity in the kingdom plummeted. Happiness, measured by a newly invented and completely subjective "Smile Index," skyrocketed.

His second act was to formally appoint Naqad as "Minister of Existential Dread and Interior Decorating," and Zahir as "Royal Critic of Everything." They were given a shared office in a far wing of the palace and spent their days arguing over the philosophical implications of wallpaper samples. It kept them busy.

His third act was to marry Taia. The ceremony was small. The only guest who mattered was a skinny girl from the delta named Meryt, now head of the new "Ministry of Really Cool Stories." As Hari placed the crown on Taia's head, she leaned in and whispered, "I still think seducing the queen would have been a more classical narrative arc." He whispered back, "Too predictable. This way, I get you and the job."

His reign was famously bizarre and famously effective. He used his wishes not for grand palaces, but for indoor plumbing (a concept that confused and delighted everyone). He replaced the tax system with a complex barter economy based on jokes—the funnier your offering, the greater your tax break. The royal court was constantly in stitches; the treasury was perpetually confused but full.

He solved foreign policy by wishing that all neighboring rulers developed a sudden, intense passion for competitive baking. Disputes that once ended in battle were now settled with tense, televised sourdough bake-offs. The Hittite Empire crumbled, but their baguettes were sublime.

He never wrote another grand tablet like Reborn in Fire. Instead, he commissioned thousands of small, cheap clay shards, inscribed with simple, useful truths: "A nap is a revolution." "If a bureaucrat annoys you, make him explain his job in song." "The best fertilizer for a kingdom is laughter." They were scattered everywhere. People used them as pot shards, doorstops, and to level wobbly tables. The wisdom seeped in unconsciously.

He and Taia ruled with a blend of cold efficiency (her) and inspired, chaotic benevolence (him). They had three children, who were raised by a rotating staff of wished-up nannies and the occasional, grumbling djinn. The kids turned out surprisingly well-adjusted, considering their bedtime stories were often about the metaphysical perils of poor spatial reasoning, told by a sentient smoke cloud.

One evening, decades later, an old Hari sat on his palace balcony overlooking a content, humming Memphis. The smell of baking bread from the national kitchens (another wish) wafted up. Naqad hovered beside him, a faint, rosy glow in the twilight—he’d developed a taste for sentimental sunsets.

"You never did free me, you know," Naqad said, not for the first time.

Hari took a sip of his wished-for, perfectly chilled lemonade. "I told you. 'Eventually.'"

"Eventually is a temporal scam."

"Yep," Hari agreed cheerfully. "But look at the view. You helped build this. In a weird, roundabout, complaining-every-step-of-the-way kind of build."

Naqad made a sound like a dismissive sigh, but the rosy glow deepened. "It's tolerable. The sewage system is a work of grotesque genius."

Below, in the streets, a group of children played a game called "Hare and Jackal," which involved a lot of cunning running and theatrical, nonsense speeches. Their laughter echoed up.

Hari the Kid from the Cairo block, Hari the Banished, Hari the Failure, Hari the Calamity, Pharaoh Nebkheperu-Potet, leaned back in his chair. He hadn't just survived the story. He hadn't just won it.

He had, through a series of wildly poor decisions, catastrophic misunderstandings, and one truly excellent wish, rewritten the whole damn genre.

He grinned at the setting sun. Greatest ruler ever seen? Probably. The history scrolls, which he personally edited every Tuesday for comedy, would certainly say so.

•••

The sun beat down like a god’s unwavering eye on the city of Memphis. Today was not a day for work. Today was a day of blinding white linen, of flower petals piled ankle-deep in the streets, of music that seemed to rise from the very stones. It was the Heb-Sed festival, the jubilee of Pharaoh Nebkheperu-Potet, celebrating thirty years of his gloriously bizarre reign.

Hari, now a man in his fifties with a comfortable paunch and laugh lines etched deep around his eyes, sat in an open palanquin carried by Nubian guards whose muscles gleamed with perfumed oil. He waved, not with the stiff grace of a traditional monarch, but with the cheerful, slightly embarrassed air of a local celebrity at a neighborhood block party. The crowd roared back, not with the fearful deference of old, but with genuine, beer-fueled affection. They threw not just petals, but freshly baked rolls from the public ovens he’d established. One hit him square in the chest. He caught it, took a bite, and gave a thumbs-up. The crowd went wild.

This was his legacy. Full bellies, short workdays, and the sacred right to pelt your Pharaoh with baked goods.

Beside the procession, floating at head height, Naqad and Zahir provided the special effects. Or, they were supposed to.

“The cerulean streamers are clashing horribly with the ochre banners of the 12th nome,” Naqad hissed, his smokeless form shimmering with irritation. He was currently a tapestry of deep indigo and silver, meticulously coordinating with the official festival colors. “It’s visually dissonant. It screams of a committee with no taste.”

Zahir, who had chosen to manifest as a cascading, ever-shifting aurora of crimson and violent pink, scoffed. “Your ‘taste’ is a mortuary ledger. This is a celebration of chaotic life! Of untamed color! Your streamers are the chromatic equivalent of a tax audit.”

“Life has structure! Your pinks are bleeding into the spectrum of the royal guard’s plumes! They look like confused flamingos!”

“Flamingos are majestic! Your indigo is the color of a bored bureaucrat’s soul!”

“At least my soul has a complementary color scheme!”

The argument, a thirty-year running symphony of pettiness, was escalating. Zahir, in a fit of pique, swirled a tendril of magenta smoke and doused Naqad’s carefully arranged cerulean streamers, turning them a murky, bruised purple.

Naqad gasped, a sound like a bellows collapsing. “You vandal!”

“I am an artist! You are a decorator!”

“I’LL DECORATE YOUR NON-CORPOREAL ESSENCE!”

In a flash of ember-bright fury, Naqad shot a concentrated beam of pure, azure light at Zahir. Zahir retaliated not with a beam, but with a wave of distorted, rainbow-hued force that warped the air.

The two blasts of cosmic energy didn’t cancel each other out. They met in mid-air, above the cheering, oblivious crowd, and splintered.

The sound was wrong—a shattering of reality, like a million sheets of glass breaking in reverse. The clashing energies didn’t dissipate; they fused, twisted in on themselves, and vomited forth a new, terrible presence.

Where the two djinns had been, a single figure now loomed. It was vast, a towering silhouette of absolute blackness that drank the sunlight from the sky. It was not smoke, not fire, not light. It was a hole in the world, shaped like a djinn. Two points of cold, white starfire burned where its eyes should be. The cheerful festival music died, swallowed by a silence so deep it pressed on the eardrums.

The Black Djinn looked down at its own hands, claws of condensed void, and then at the frozen city below. When it spoke, its voice was the grinding of dead continents, the echo of a scream from before time.

“WHO… DARES… TO TOY WITH THE SLEEP OF THE VEIL?”

Naqad and Zahir were gone. Not vanished. Absorbed. Their eternal bicker had accidentally unlocked a prison, awakened something older, angrier, and fundamentally wrong.

Hari stood up in his palanquin, the half-eaten roll forgotten. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

Before anyone could move, the Black Djinn, radiating pure, undiluted malice, turned its gaze toward the lifeblood of Egypt. It raised a hand. The Nile, the great, placid Hapy, obeyed. The river didn’t just rise. It convulsed. A wall of water a hundred feet high, thick with mud, fish, and shattered riverboats, tore itself from the riverbed and thundered towards Memphis like a liquid mountain. The tsunami’s roar drowned out all thought.

Pandemonium. The love turned to pure, animal terror. The crowd that had been cheering for Hari now screamed to him, their faces masks of primal fear. “PHARAOH! SAVE US! USE YOUR MAGIC!”

Hari’s mind raced. Naqad was gone. Zahir was gone. His wishes were tied to Naqad. He was just a man in a silly hat facing the end of the world.

But the habit of a lifetime died hard. The habit of looking to the irritable, all-powerful smoke cloud who was always, always there.

He closed his eyes, not in prayer, but in desperate, familiar demand. “NAQAD! I WISH YOU’D FIX THIS! GET RID OF THAT THING AND THE WAVE!”

Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened.

But the Black Djinn flinched. It wasn’t the wish. It was the name. The name of one of the components of its being. The name was a key in a broken lock.

The towering void-figure shuddered. The two points of starfire flickered, and for a split second, Hari saw not one, but two familiar patterns within the darkness—a flash of Naqad’s intricate ember-webs, a swirl of Zahir’s chaotic color. The djinns weren’t gone. They were trapped, screaming silently within the monstrous amalgamation.

The internal struggle was catastrophic. The Black Djinn clutched its head, a roar of conflicting identities tearing from its throat. The directed malice towards the Nile wavered.

The oncoming tsunami, a mile from the city walls, didn’t vanish. It… unmade itself. The mountain of water didn’t crash or recede; it simply dissolved, not into rain, but into a fine, glistening mist that hung in the air for a moment before dissipating. The Nile slumped back into its channel, confused and half-empty.

Memphis was saved from the wave.

But on the processional way, where the festival had been, stood a new, worse threat.

The Black Djinn had stabilized, but it was changed. The internal war was over, for now. It had settled into a simmering, focused hatred. The starfire eyes fixed on Hari. It had heard the wish. It had felt the tug of the bond. It understood, on some primordial level, that this mortal was the anchor, the focal point of the two irritating forces now caged within it.

“YOU,” it boomed, taking a step that shook the earth. Sandstone facades cracked. “YOUR PETTY NOISES AWOKE ME. YOUR FRAGILE WORLD CLINGS TO MY SLEEP. I WILL PEEL IT BACK. I WILL SHOW YOU THE SILENCE BETWEEN THE STARS.”

It wasn’t a conqueror. It wasn’t a tyrant. It was an exterminator. A cosmic eraser, unhappy at being disturbed.

Hari Potet, Pharaoh of the Two-Hour Lunch Break, stood before the embodiment of ancient, annihilating boredom. The people cowered behind him. Taia, from a nearby balcony, met his gaze, her face pale but set. No clever political move would work here. No wished-up plumbing could fix this.

He had spent decades building a kingdom on laughter and decent working conditions. Now, he faced something that found the very concept of existence to be a tedious affront.

Hari straightened his crown, which had gone crooked. He looked at the terrified, expectant faces of his people. He looked at the monstrous black shape blotting out the sun.

A slow, familiar grin spread across his face. It wasn’t a grin of confidence, but of sheer, audacious defiance. The kind he’d had when he was a homeless kid facing down street pavers.

“Alright,” he said, his voice carrying in the new, terrible quiet. “You want silence? Let’s talk volume.”

He had no djinn. No wish. Just a kingdom that knew how to laugh, and a lifetime of being a profoundly inconvenient pain in the ass.

It would have to be enough.

AtilA