The Chieftain's Son

Date: 2/17/2019

This is a backlogged dream from November 20, 2018. It started with a boy who was reincarnated in the same world shortly after dying. Only a few years had passed, I think, between his death and his rebirth. He lived with a terrible family, but a few people in it were kind to him. He went on an elementary school friend trip by accident. He didn’t know the school was planning it. But it was with his favorite teacher, who seemed to know he was special and let him do things other teachers would’ve questioned — like writing too well for his age, or conducting his investigations into... something magical. A classmate ended up clinging to him, but he eventually let her be because he admired her spirit and couldn’t see her being a threat. She was also doing strange things for a kid her age, although we didn’t think she was reincarnated. We got a notebook to write in. We wanted to write new spells. We wanted to write down what we were experiencing. The girl wanted to learn a new language, I think. The teacher talked with the gifts shop clerk about how sad it was when her husband died. The clerk reminded me of a character from Yakitate Ja-Pan. It was his attitude. His mood. He was like Mushroom Head. The kid snuck out. Or was taken by allies/friends. There was some flashing back and forth between times. I took over as the main character. I was some kind of rogue guy, with other rogues by my side. One was a Dragonborn type, with red scales and a sleek, thin body and bright green eyes. Another was a kid from the elementary school class, who didn’t grow up the way I did. He was still elementary school aged. He got embarrassed from losing his wig, so I gave him mine and revealed that my hair was... weird. Like a really bad, really curly mullet. With weird divisions between colors. Everyone judged it, but nobody said anything since it was noble that I’d helped the kid. There was also, like, a fortune-teller lady. She was the one who’d had the others pick me up and take me to a little village of people who were like werewolves but also werelizards. They turned into and/or spent most of their time as these, like, scaly wolves with sharp teeth and rough scales and whip-like tails. I was introduced to the chief of the village as his long lost son. He was cold, but accepted me well enough. He had a guy from town give me a tour and have me participate in some everyday village practices and norms. I met a lot of people who were halfway between accepting me and rejecting me, and a couple of people who tried to tell me not to take everyone’s caution to heart and to just try to relax. Then came communal bathing time. I tried to get out of it, but I couldn’t. So instead, I just tried to cover and hide my chest with my arms. I’d been acting as masc as possible and identifying that way to everyone in the village all day, and now they could see that I wasn’t actually a cis guy. They could see not just my body, which wasn’t all that embarrassing in itself, but my dysphoria about it. I tried to hide as best I could among the other guys. They went from being rowdy and playful and splashing and loud as they enjoyed their time in the lake to being quiet and awkward and thoughtful. I tried to keep physical distance to avoid anyone touching my chest, but I also tried to get in and mingle and act how they were acting before. Stay masc. They tried to go back to the way they were before, but they seemed cautious. Aware of me, and possibly pitying me. I felt terrible, until one guy slapped me on the back and my arms fell from my chest. I shouted at him a bit and splashed him with water and everyone seemed to relax. They seemed to see me as a guy again. I still tried to cover my chest as often as possible, but it was almost like they didn’t mind when I didn’t cover it at all. Like they understood, and accepted me as a trans guy. The girls came into the lake from a little bathhouse on the opposite shore. I was accidentally in that area when they arrived, without knowing it. A flood of girls rushed past me, a few smiling at me and telling me to get back to the boys’ side. They’d accepted me from the beginning. When I got back, a few girls trailed with me. Nobody minded. Nobody considered it indecent. Some of the boys made jokes that I’d been on the wrong side, but nothing transphobic or hurtful or lewd. They just... treated me like they would have anyone else. I was still tense and hated being naked in a body that wasn’t masc like my previous one(s), but I felt safe and almost comfortable around these people. These were my people, and I’d been missing out on being part of their community for too long. I was glad the fortune-teller lady brought me to this place. Later, after I was dressed again and helping the other villagers with some kind of construction thing, the chief came and asked me to speak with him in private. We stood near his cabin and he told me that I was long overdue to become one of them. He would teach me to shift, and make me a full-time true citizen of this place. At first, he hadn’t thought of me as a true member of their species — let alone their community. He thought that the way I was raised meant I’d have no connection to him and I’d just be another human. He also thought, despite being introduced as his son, that I was actually a girl who had been trying to impress him because males are more commonly heirs than females and gender roles are somewhat strict in some areas of daily life. He thought I was an imposter, and an imposter’s daughter as well. A well-off human girl who would never fit in. But he watched me interacting with his people, and he knew better now. I was one of his kind, and a guy as well. I was his son, not an imposter’s daughter. He would teach me to be that. I was happy. I was really, really happy. Later, on a walk, I saw what I think was the visitor’s center or town hall of the village. It had a huge cloth banner/flag with three lines of writing, each counting down to when I would arrive. The first line said “she’s coming” the next said “she’s almost here” and the last said “she’s welcome to our village.” As I walked by, however, I stopped because I noticed that the letter “s” had been crossed out with a big red “x” so they all said “he’s” instead of “she’s.” I could see the chief ordering some boys around and telling them to do it right, since the pride of his son was at stake. I smiled. I walked to a ledge and saw a guy who was a different kind of lizard/dragon person from either my kind or the red-scaled boy. He didn’t have a tail, and his scales almost looked like desert rock. He was sitting on the porch of the post-office, presumably waiting for me. I sat on the cliff instead, leaning against the wood fence like it was a safety bar on an amusement park ride. I shouted to him about what the chief had said to me. He mostly just nodded and asked “he accepted you, didn’t he?” near the end. As I was speaking, the chief showed up and sat next to me, where he told me he really meant it when he said he accepted me as his son. I was even happier with that. I felt like I was glowing from the inside. I belonged here. As myself. The dream then cut to a really weird sequence with the guy who’d been reincarnated before I took over. He was back home and much older, and had some kind of... almost seizure event? The others in the house immediately panicked, and went to shine a green light on the bare (beer) belly of the guy who was holding him by the armpits after. The guy held him with his shoulder blades against the guy’s belly, so he had to lower the reincarnated kid a bit to let the light shine on the right place. It shone on a tattoo in the shape of a crown, with Latin words inside. There were a couple of flashbacks as concerned, nosy aunts shouted questions and orders. One of them referenced the reincarnated kid having been Harry Potter in his last life and that being a horcrux had messed with his reincarnation or something. They had to stabilize him. The one holding the light shouted that they knew. Of course they knew. They’d looked after the kid this long. The beer belly guy read off his tattoo to cast the spell, and the color returned to ex-Harry’s face. His breathing returned to normal. They put him on the couch to rest and recover. When he woke up, he was bitter both that this had happened and that he’d had to go through some of Harry Potter’s memories. He wasn’t Harry anymore. He was a totally new person. It wasn’t fair that he had to carry this other guy’s baggage. He sulked. There was also something, I think during the elementary school trip but maybe also in the werewolfdragon village, about magic that used tablets. Light, thin, chalkboard-type tablets with wood frames. You wrote a letter on each one, and then used some kind of in-born telekinesis ability to arrange them in the air (sometimes in 3-dimensional arrangements, usually just in 2d shapes around you or your target). The arrangement would spell out a word, usually. Even if it didn’t spell out a word, it would cast magic beyond simple telekinesis. Magic didn’t really work any other way. I think the elementary school kid was trying to use this magic, but had to be secretive about it cause a kid his age shouldn’t have known the letters or their arrangements at all. That’s all I can remember for now. Until next I wander.