I dreamed I was in my last year of high school when I discovered I had magical powers. There was a particular elevator I'd walked past in my school for years without realizing not everyone could see it. One day I realized this, and found myself in a group of people who could seeing it, looking around carefully, pushing the call button, and hopping in.
We wanted to go all the way to the top, floor 34, but the elevator stopped at 17 and wouldn't go any further, so we got out. We found ourselves in a sort of foyer that was a veranda looking over a dazzling ocean view. A bunch of girls were gathered around because there was a school legend going around that if the scent of a newcomer immediately caught your attention, that meant you were destined to be together.
One really lovely girl, with dark hair, olive skin, large dark eyes, and a sultry pout, perked up as we got off the elevator. But when she tracked down the person she'd smelled, it was the thirteen-year-old boy that I'd taken under my wing and was now best friends with. He was pleased that he'd interested her, but pretty devastated when she was openly scornful and disappointed. I told him she was obviously a bitch, and would have some growing up to do before she was ready to be with someone awesome like him. None of the few guys standing around seemed to scent me, though another girl in our new group perked up at the same time as one young man, and they wandered off, happy to meet each other.
My thirteen-year-old friend and I went down from the entry way out onto the shore to explore the island. There were four or five large lagoons, each with a different sort of beach and different land and water activities going on. We were in a school for water and tree magic, and we got into swim suits and paddled out to find out what we should do. An older boy with dark red hair and slightly slanted brown eyes came to guide us through a lazy river sort of course, except the water was anything but lazy. It roiled and surged along its banks, and swimming it was just exhilarating!
Suddenly, my young friend was gone, and I realized he'd transformed into a small, twiggy creature with leaf-like hands. He was using these to paddle along, and our new acquaintance was worried he'd get swamped, but somehow I knew he'd be okay. That he was just now discovering his powers, and some day maybe he'd be a giant log to ride the rapids.
As night fell, I walked along the shore with my two friends, the younger one back in human form. The sky was soft as velvet, studded with gleaming diamond stars. The waves were like gauzy silk frosting the water below, and their sound was a lullaby. As the castle at the peak of the island went dark and they called us in, I stumbled down a sand bank and was delayed trying to climb back up. No one seemed to notice, and as everyone left me behind, the castle went dark. All but a baleful red light glaring out from one window high up on the roof.
I knew then that this was what had called me here. I sprang up the outside of the building and began climbing the leads, still warm from the newly set sun. I reached the window, and found myself looking into prison. There was a man, strong but bound and blindfolded, dejected, but still majestic, sitting in a faded, dusty throne. He looked like he had sat tied there for years, but still wept for his freedom and his wife.
She was nearby, though he didn't know it. He couldn't see her, and she couldn't call out to him, because she'd been frozen into marble stillness, a living statue, helpless, immobile, and asleep. As I looked at them, I knew. I knew that they were the rulers of this realm, a king and queen, captive here. And they were my parents. Someone here would be sure to find that out, if they didn't know already, so I could count on being in danger. But I couldn't leave. I had to free them.
Over the next few days I confided in the two people I trusted, and we kept our eyes open and our ears to the ground, trying to learn as much as we could about what was going on. We learned that the upper parts of the castle were reserved for the most talented students, those who had proven both their skill and their loyalty to the school. As they grew in their powers, they became almost like angels. As we watched each others' backs, we worked hard to rise up to that level, but somehow I never could manage to get ahead.
But my friends rose, and they kept quiet about our mutual devotion, but they never abandoned me. When they'd been at the penultimate level for a week, and the younger boy was ready to ascend, they came to me to tell me what we had to do.
The girl that had turned her nose up at him when he arrived had begun to show an interest as the brilliance of his talent became clear. She had snuck him up to her room a couple of times, and he had seen through doors that were quickly shut on him that to get into the top levels, you had to shrink to pixie size. This was something I could do, so we laid our plans.
On a night as warm and still as the night we'd arrived, with the same eerie and ominous red light shining from the prison window, I shrank down to a quarter of my usual size and joined the pixies in the uppermost halls of the castle. There was a stretch of roof I needed to get over to unlock the prison cell, but I knew that if I stepped on any of the ornaments that adorned the slates, I'd sound the alarm. A being had to be even smaller than pixie size, with just a particular ratio of weight and length and breadth and limbs. I figured out the math, then called my younger friend. He turned into his twig creature and was scampering through the maze of ornaments to the lock.
And then I woke up.
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