wand of memory β§ . aya akazawa ( @chthonaya ) | fantasy action prompts , accepting
the boy does not fit in -- a quintessential high school cliche, if not for the fact that he was no high schooler, and his reasons for seeming out of place ran far beyond strange dress or social ineptitude. though a youth by appearance, he was an endless, the lord of dreams who could recall when the first living creature dared to imagine its first idea and would be here still when the last living creature closes its eyes to that final and dreamless sleep. which may come much sooner, he thinks, if he does not manage to find his dreamstones.
clad in white robes, he floats through the empty halls, trailed by starlings and pearlescent cloud smoke, pulled by an ancestral call toward the heart of this school, to where he knows a dormant stone has been kept and stirred awake. to what end he cannot say, but already he notes the subtle shifts of illusion and fragility between planes threatening to rupture. at once, there is the monotonous rows of lockers on either side of him, yellowed and aged with time and vandalism, and then there is the sense of being swallowed, stuck between the comb of a whale's baleen teeth.
the deeper he ventures through them, the more it seems to filter out his intangibility without his notice, until the smoke clears, the stars in his eyes dim to a deep green, the robes begin to shift into a white polo uniform. passing a trophy case, he's distracted by an unrecognizable reflection, staring at the stranger like an animal, tentatively learning its own image for the first time. ( you are still daniel hall, the boy who is and never was. )
he takes note of the photographs of past and current students, all full of promise, smiling brightly beside their tokens of achievement as if they knew, even at this age, exactly where they were headed, who they would be. ( and who might you have been, if the dream king never claimed you? ) the question knots in his brow and somewhere in his chest, but he does not dwell on this unpleasantness for long. a bell rings, loud enough to make him wince and his thoughts scatter. suddenly, he's caught in a swell of students flooding the hall in a hurry and a raucous to get to their next destination, and he stands in the middle, dumbstruck and wide eyed. forgetting where he supposed to go. unsure if he should follow the crowd.