Prologue

Liona Knight was an ordinary girl, with an ordinary family, ordinary friends, and an excruciatingly ordinary life. Every day she woke up to an ordinary sun, and lived her ordinary day until the ordinary night where she fell into an ordinary sleep. Liona’s dreams, however, were anything but ordinary.

Imaginative Liona dreamed of escaping the ordinary, and becoming the extraordinary. She dreamed she was a sort of Cinderella, who was temporarily trapped in a world with no wonder, but who would soon discover true love in a mystical and exciting new universe. In her sixteen years she had been told over and over again to be satisfied with the ordinary. Her parents had told her to live in reality, and not fantasy; her teachers told her she was not focused enough on actuality. Yet Liona found that fantasy was much more exciting than reality, and as a result she spent much of her time in the dream world. One does not need to sleep to experience dreams, after all.

Though despite Liona’s adventures in her dream world, she was still quite unhappy. Liona knew that even if she could dream the most extraordinary things in existence that these fantasies never would become reality. Certainly everyone, including you, knows that dreams no matter how exciting are only a little fulfilling. It is what actually happens to us that is the most exciting of all, and Liona woke from her dreams perhaps more distressed than when she entered them to begin with.

If Liona could have had her very own Genie she would have wished for her fantasies to become reality. She wanted nothing more than to meet a goblin or a queen, or to fight a dragon and rescue herself from a dangerous serpent. Regretfully, Liona knew these things would never happen, and that all she had was her wish.

Though as the wisest of us say, be careful what you wish for…