30 Days of Fantasy: The Crown That Dreams You
Thirteen dreamers. One crown. And the memory of a world that refused to die quietly.
This story was written as part of the 30 Days of Fantasy Challenge—a month-long prompt series I’m hosting to explore magical worlds, strange myths, and haunted transformations. Each day brings a new theme. This one is about memory, sacrifice, and what it means to be dreamt back into being.
She hadn’t dreamed in seven years.
Not of oceans. Not of fire. Not of teeth falling like truths too long unspoken, or doors she couldn’t open—no matter how her dream-hands bled from trying. Sleep came like a blackout. She woke hollow-eyed, unsmudged. No trace. No echo. Not even breath where the dream should’ve been.
But on the night the moon cracked—spiderwebbed with a fracture no one else saw—she dreamed.
She knelt in a forest that stank of rust and violets. Her hands burrowed into damp earth, guided by something older than instinct—an ancient pull threaded through marrow, the kind of knowing that predates memory and smelled like old blood and first breath. Around her, the trees leaned too close, their bark grooved with expressions she didn’t want to name. The sky pulsed as if something behind it was trying to breathe through.
She did not know what she was digging for.
Only that her fingers had done this before. Only that they remembered.
When she touched it—the crown—a pressure built in her throat like a scream that knew its futility. It was no metal. No wood. It pulsed as if it were waiting for a pulse in her to answer back.
She lifted it. Bone. Root. Vine. Star. A thing built from buried screams and constellations no longer remembered. The scent of burnt sugar and something dead left too long in water.
The trees exhaled in unison.
At last, they whispered.
Or maybe her teeth whispered it.
She woke with dirt in her mouth. Not really. But the taste stayed.
In the mirror, her pupils looked carved. Her name, when spoken aloud, rang wrong in her throat, like humming the wrong harmony to a song only half-remembered.
That morning, she found a green coat button on her pillow. Small. Cold. Still damp. Her hands knew its shape before her mind caught up.
At the bus stop, the girl appeared again. Same green coat. Boots wrong-footed. Humming the tune that snagged in her ribs like a fishhook.
“You found it,” the girl said.
“Who are you?”
The child blinked slow. Her irises looked like clock faces with no hands.
“I’m what you made from your forgetting, Lyralei. The part that still wants a story with a kind ending.”
Then she vanished.
Before the second night, her hands trembled even when still. She found bruises she didn’t remember earning. The clocks in her apartment ticked out of sync. Then, she fought sleep like drowning. Coffee until her hands shook. Ice on her wrists. Showers until her skin blistered red.
It didn’t help.
Sleep took her like a thread pulled through her skull—silent, swift, unspooling all sense.
She dropped back into the clearing like a marionette cut from its strings—boneless, breathless, already claimed. This time, the crown glowed faintly.
This time, it called her name.
Not the name she wore in the waking world—the old one. The real one.
It sounded like a bell tolling underwater.
The third night, the forest breathed.
She wasn’t alone. But not all of them had arrived from the same direction—or the same century.
They ringed her: thirteen shadows, barely shaped. Faces that flickered between human and not—cheekbones that shimmered like fog when stared at too long, or mouths that blinked once, slowly, before vanishing altogether. Eyes that caught the starlight and returned it as judgment.
She knew them. Or parts of them.
Eleshar spoke first. His voice was full of teeth.
“The binding thins, Lyralei.”
Her knees buckled.
“That’s not—”
Cira laughed. It bubbled from her throat like water through lungs. “Names are a kindness we can’t afford anymore.”
Thorn’s hollow gaze pierced her. “You made us forget to teach yourself how.”
Mael scratched notes onto skin-thin parchment. Tessanel let moths pour from her sleeves.
This was her court. This was her undoing.
Fragments.
Refusing to stay buried.
The fourth night, she stopped pretending.
She stepped into the circle. The crown rose from the roots like something exhumed. The air shuddered.
She took it.
It knew her.
It had always known her.
The forest leaned close.
Put it on, said a voice in her blood.
Remember what you did.
So she did.
And the world cracked. Somewhere beneath the roots, something shifted. Not awake yet, but listening.
Pain was a mercy. This was not mercy. This was being split open by everything she had buried and renamed as silence.
This was remembering.
She had woven the crown from root and ruin to seal a thing too vast for language. The Hunger-That-Walks-Between. When it draws near, mirrors warp, shadows forget their source, and breath comes slow—as if the air itself is remembering how to scream. A silence that devoured dreaming.
She had been the First Dreamer, the bridge between sleep and sky. But the binding cost everything: her name, her body, her story—scattered like seeds into those who had loved her most.
She carved her forgetting into their bones.
To spare them. To delay the unmaking.
But delay was not enough.
She opened her eyes. The crown hummed on her brow.
The dreamers knelt.
Some wept silver tears, each drop etching itself into the soil like a forgotten name. Others bowed so deeply they sank into the ground, their limbs curling into roots. A few dissolved into light, unspooling upward like prayers let go too late.
The girl in green stepped forward. Her voice was older now.
“Now you remember.”
Lyralei blinked. Her shadow moved in three directions—one a memory, one a warning, and one a wound that had not yet happened.
“Not all of it,” she said. Her voice shook—not from fear, but from the weight of what still remained unnamed. “But enough.”
Mael’s feathers rustled. “The forest is waking.”
“No,” she whispered.
“The world is.”
The trees parted. Beyond them unfurled cities stitched from memory, seas that sang in tongues too old for mouths, and skies trembling with absence, with ache, with things that had no names left.
She looked back once at the place where she had buried herself. The crown pulsed with old warmth.
“What now?” Mael asked.
She smiled, strange and new, as if joy had borrowed grief's face—names she'd wept into silence, now crawling back through the cracks.
“Now we dream the world awake,” she said.
THE END
You have such a magical way with words!
Enjoyed