Omnipotent #OnceUponNow #JustWriteIt

I See the Moon

For some reason, instead of hearing rhythms the man heard some sort of music that came from everywhere. This man, his name was Aladdin, that part he remembered. Like the Disney movie character, only real. And Thomas somehow knew what he'd seen was real, that there was no way that he'd just imagined it. This Aladdin, he used his magic with a finesse that Thomas could hardly believe, and then at the end, when somehow he'd seen into Mavok's mind...

Mavok. That smile hadn't been good. He'd done something, but Thomas didn't know what. All he knew was that the next moment everything went dark for Aladdin and the pulses started for Thomas.

Remembering the pulses, he began to look outside himself again. He sensed the enormous pulse that had crowded his head, softer now that he had it under control. He looked for its source but couldn't seem to find it. It felt like it just rose up out of the ground wherever he looked. As if it was...

"Thomas, come on, you ok? Do you need some help?"

Thomas glanced up at Timothy, who was still standing over him. "I can feel the earth." He replied, awe filling his voice.

"What do you mean? You can feel the dirt beneath us?"

Thomas got up excitedly. "I can feel the earth. The whole earth. One giant entity. I've never felt something so vast" he said enthusiastically as he hurried out their front door. Maybe...

He rushed down the hallway of the dorm, down two flights of stairs, and out the main door into the chilly night air, Timothy following him all the way. Looking up into the sky, he saw the moon, a pale white circle amidst the clouds. He closed his eyes, cast his mind upward, and, unbelievably, he felt the moon. It was hard to pick out among all the other rhythms clamoring for his attention, but there it was, over two-hundred thousand miles away. "Wow..." he breathed.

He turned from the sky and instead cast his mind downward. Past the grass, past the earth, casting his mind farther and farther. Hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of miles away. Just short of one hundred million miles, he found a thumping that managed to be both enormous and quiet. It was the sun. His mind struggled to comprehend the immensity of the star. It was thousands, hundreds of thousands, over a million times the size of the earth, filled with shifting currents of fire hotter than he could believe.

But why stop there? He broadened his focus, striving to feel everywhere, then cast his attention out in every direction. He quickly passed the sun, and the rest of the solar system quickly followed. A minute passed. Now his mind was a billion miles away from earth, ten times the distance of the earth to the sun. He doubled his pace. He doubled it again, and again, and again. Soon billions of miles were passing per second, yet it still took him over another minute to get to the next star, Alpha Centauri. However, he was expanding so fast that the star blurred by in a fraction of a second. He felt like a child again, a little boy whose biggest dream had been to soar among the stars. He continued onward, stars flying by as a trillion miles passed by him in a mere second. He felt like a child again, a little boy whose biggest dream had been to soar among the stars. Faster, faster, faster he flew, the speed of light a fantasy to his racing mind. So many stars. So many more planets. And then suddenly, nothing.

Thomas stumbled and lost his concentration. That nothing, the emptiness past the edge of the galaxy. It was immense, vast, overwhelming, even after feeling the entire galaxy in his mind. Thomas collapsed, exhausted.

Timothy hurried over. "You were staring at the ground for almost 5 minutes. I almost walked over and grabbed you to wake you up, but you didn't look like you were in pain, so..."

Thomas just shook his head. He couldn't believe what he'd just done. There were rules to the magic, limits. He and Timothy had spent months discovering them. And now they were gone, his world shaken yet again. He looked up at Timothy, and, almost crying, said, "I felt everything, Tim. Everything. I looked up and felt the moon. I looked down and felt the earth, and then through the earth, I felt the sun. I left the sun and found Alpha Centauri, then other stars, the galactic center, the edge, and then the nothing that lurked outside our galaxy and somehow managed to make even the milky way seem small. Everything, Timothy. Everything."

Stunned, Timothy sat down on the grass next to him. Thomas looked over and realized he could also feel the individual pieces making up his friend. Organs, cells, DNA, all the way down to the atoms, protons, and quarks, after which it got fuzzy. He quickly focused elsewhere, too disturbed by the thought of looking inside a person. Like he had a week ago.

Revulsion filled him as he again remembered the sight, and the moment of wonder was gone. A second later, even stronger than the revulsion was an immense feeling of terror. If he had been powerful enough to kill a hundred men on purpose and had even accidentally killed one, what could he do now that the things he could sense were no longer limited? What would he do, even on accident?

He couldn't take it. He burst into tears, just completely exhausted and overwhelmed. Timothy awkwardly brought him back into their room, where, despite everything, Thomas was able to calm down enough to fall asleep, clutching the golden bottle cap in his hand the entire time.