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"Aha! The spell is working!"
Girl slowly opens her eyes as he could no longer feel the cold sheets of his bed anymore and the last track on his CD finally played out finishing with Wolf's threat to Samuel, "Nah but if I seen that ****** I would have killed him" cutting all out to silence, jolting him awake.
"Look Gamma! Finally we have found one!" The Old Wizard exclaimed, as if finding a rare bug under a rock
There were books stacked to the ceiling threatening to fall, the light from the giant blue crystal up above too bright for him to see and yet not bright enough to see the back of the office, the red carpet was littered with stars as if he were in a void daring to drop him. . . this wasn't his room anymore, yet it felt just as cold.
"Who?" A grey little owl with a hat and a purple scarf hooted, as ridiculous as it looked next to Old Wizard adorned with stars, she couldn't help but feel as if it too was eyeing him like prey.
Without his veil, girl felt like prey.
"A young Wizard! One with AMAZING potential" The Old Wizard spoke up optimistically, "Perhaps, enough to save Wizard City!"
He really isn't home anymore . . . where was home anyway? How did he get here?
"Oh really? Where?"
"A very, very distant realm," The Old Wizard offered the answer like a professor, "My goodness! On a world that doesn't even believe in magic!"
Small, smaller, smaller still, they continued their conversation without the Young Wizard as it continued to drone in his head, swimming around, digging up a familiar frustration he was always had with people deciding who he was. His name was ##### but people called him by other names like rag-head, punk, terrorist, girl. Has his memory always been this foggy? And yet even still the word float to the surface like seaweed.
Slimy
That's the word he's looking for, now that he would wear a new name "Young Wizard" and eventually save Wizard City.
All for a fleeting moment, he couldn't help it, but he could think about was a fight.
Now in front of the Book of Secrets, the Old Wizard regards the Young Wizard intently to answer the questions "To find out what type of Wizard you are."
These answers seemed redundant, but as he answered, the Young Wizard's foggy memory stirs like sand at the bottom of a bottle. Some old memory of sneaking out in the middle of the night to a friend's house getting his first piercing on his 18th birthday, the old snake in his classroom he took care of, the sweet coming of winter where no one questioned his modest fashion. Memories of places he couldn't quite place.
Did they ever exist?
Were these . . . leftovers?
Theurgy. Creation. Healing. Community: it made sense to the Young Wizard, everything he always wanted.
The Old Wizard pointed to a mirror beside them, still excited with a warm smile.
"Now that we know what you are, what do you look like?"
He looked so small next to the Old Wizard, small, smaller, smaller still, the Young Wizard looked into the mirror and saw the first recognizable thing in this room and it didn't look like him at all. There was still something so unnerving about his own body and face, like it was pinched in the wrong places, bones to wide or thin. Maybe someone saw him as normal but to the Young Wizard, everything felt so wrong like this body didn't belong to him and just couldn't figure out why.
He's the young wizard now though, he could change himself.
So he steps in front of the mirror and stares at himself, as it seemed to move with his blinking, so he closes his eyes. He cups his hands in front of him; familiarly; like d'ua; he imagines himself in the way he wanted to look; bright, bold, fierce, hardly modest, but it felt like him. So he placed his hands on his face, rubbing it up through his thick hair, and opened his eye to see . . . himself as he imagined.
It was his golden eyes that were most beautiful, giving him the lens to see the beauty he created. His long hair cut to the shoulders and now a rainbow of colors draped around a sharper, more masculine face. Though, he could never bring himself to remove the freckles on his warm brown skin: it was too much of a compliment.
The Old Wizard spoke up again, "All right then, what is your name?"
At once, the Young Wizard finally found his voice. "My name is-"
That didn't sound right, there were some things that the spell didn't fix, so he pitched it deeper
"My name is-"
It was on the tip of his tongue and yet the words didn't come like a old song buried under white noise, he couldn't place it. So he looked down at the CD player on his hip and opened the lid to read the CD with songs now ended.
"Wolf."