Freebie Mondays: The Moment of Power (Prompt Novel Chapter 22)

For 2024, I decided to devote my prompt writing time to a novel. The twist is that the novel plot will be generated entirely by the writing prompts I chose to use for the project – which were rolled randomly using my trusty dice and a few online prompt lists. You can find the Table of Contents here.

For Chapter 22, the prompt was: “you can buy a pill that lets you decide exactly what you will dream.”

This represents the start of a sequence of 3 prompts/chapters that will serve as the climax for this novel. This is the point where I have to take all the wild, crazy things I’ve established in this novel and make them make sense. And then, of course, I have to give the story an ending.

I’ve been looking forward to this particular prompt for some time because I absolutely love playing with dream sequences. Some people are adamant that you should never include them. But when you throw magic into the mix, I think they get a lot more powerful. Because instead of robbing the reader of everything they experienced when the character wakes up, what happens in the dream affects the waking world. So the experience sticks.

If you’d like to see this chapter come together, you can watch the VoD on Youtube!
. . .

Ira’s hands shook as she pulled the ratty hem of her favorite sleeping shirt into place. It was an oversized tee she’d stolen from Delmar’s closet, too ragged to continue to be worn out of the house but just comfortable enough to soothe the ache of his absence whenever the two of them were separated. She fiddled with the frayed hem for several moments longer than was necessary – so long that she teased a thin sliver of thread free of its former mooring before the loosening of another hole caused her to jerk her hand away.

She approached the bed that occupied her old room in her parent’s house as though it had become a living thing, adorned with spikes and teeth.

The witch’s gift was sitting on the nightstand, nestled in a small bed of tissue paper in the center of the box that transported it. It looked like a simple gel capsule – the kind she might take if she had a cold. It wasn’t particularly large, though the liquid inside gleamed an odd amber-gold. She almost expected glitter to shift from one end to the other when she lifted it.

Forcing her numb legs to move, Ira settled on the edge of the bed and stared at the pill beneath the soft glow of her bedside lamp. It seemed like such an innocuous thing, shockingly normal to anyone who didn’t know what it was supposed to do. But she couldn’t help recalling how she recoiled in horror the first time she saw it.

“This is not what I asked for!” she remembered snarling to the witch, though she had to drive to the next town over to even find a serviceable payphone so she could screech in the woman’s ears.

“It is not what you think,” the old crone had cackled, her voice a hoarse rasp as something between a cough and maniacal laughter flowed from her throat. “I could not do exactly what you asked. You must, sadly, accept the best approximation.”

Ira set a hand over her abdomen and closed her eyes. She wasn’t far enough into this pregnancy for the life inside her to be more than a small bundle of cells. She had weeks yet before she even had to worry about showing – weeks during which to determine what she would ultimately tell her husband.

She shivered when she thought of the original purpose she assigned the witch’s gift – and wondered if the result might yet be the same.

“Think carefully and clearly,” the old woman’s voice filled the vaults of her mind, as it had since they held the brief, terse conversation. “You only get one chance to use this kind of magic. The results cannot be undone.”

Ira lifted the pill from its soft bed of tissue paper and shifted it beneath the light. There was no glitter. The liquid didn’t even shimmer to indicate the magic it supposedly held. But as she was learning, that seemed to be the way of things.

“It never takes the form you expect it to,” the witch lectured from the depths of her memory. “It’s important to remember that.”

She wished she knew that before she lobbed a stray thought at the random stranger that nearly ran her off the road that day she returned to the office after Wendell disappeared. If she had, perhaps things would have been different.

But she cut that thought out of her mind quickly and dropped the pill as if it was a poison thing.

It would be simple and easy to undo that moment. Then she would probably never meet Alyial. Certainly he would never have gotten stuck in a computer simulation and needed her to rescue him.

And the life growing inside her would cease to exist.

But she wondered – fate had an odd way of rearranging itself. Cutting out one event often didn’t prevent another.

The witch had warned her about that too.

“Just don’t try to undo the moment your power awakened,” she had warned with an ominous undertone running through her voice. “The gift doesn’t work like that. The chosen are chosen for a reason. You can’t change what you are.”

And if she was stuck with this gift, she had better learn how to properly use it.

She could wait. It need not be tonight. The magic wouldn’t grow any less potent – though there was always a small chance someone could discover the pill and make use of it by mistake.

That alone was enough to convince her she probably shouldn’t put things off.

Indeed, she was due to fly home tomorrow. Back to the city, back to her husband, and back to her regular life.

It might be best if she had certain things sorted out by then.

She lifted the glass of water she set on the table when she began the process of preparing for bed and tried to ignore the way the liquid quaked and sloshed as she raised it to her lips. She took a long, deep sip to settle her nerves. They she gulped another and held it in her mouth.

She lifted the pill and popped it through her lips quickly before the water could escape. Then she titled her head back as she swallowed to ease the pill along its final path.

She held her breath for a moment after she swallowed it, half-expecting a foul taste to drift back up her throat like when she had taken cough medicine as a child. She anticipated that her next inhale would draw a coughing fit from her throat – but that didn’t happen either.

Ira almost slammed the glass back down on her nightstand and turned out the light. She practically vaulted into her bed, drawing the covers rapidly around her shoulders as she flopped her head onto her pillow.

Her heart hammered in her chest even as she willed her body to calm and assume a state of ultimate relaxation. She felt as though she needed to fall asleep the instant the pill hit her stomach, and she was already far behind.

Yet as her initial haze of panic cleared and faded, she realized she didn’t feel any different. Her eyelids weren’t drooping, nor did her limbs tingle. Perhaps it would take awhile for the pill’s coating to digest and release the magic into her system – much like regular medication.

Or perhaps she had once again simply misunderstood how magic was supposed to work.

She exhaled, expelling all of the air from her lungs in a single, long-lasting motion. Then she inhaled again at an equally measured pace.

Life had been chaotic since she made the 911 call that resulted in the arrest of “The Mawor” and catapulted her toward something like nation-wide fame. First, she had to answer to the FBI about her experience and relate the bizarre story of Owen-Marius.

The twin who had raised her best friend and accompanied her on numerous sleepovers and family trips had fled by the time the FBI reached his cabin. They had scoured the woods for any sign of him, but no one had any idea where he’d gone.

The other twin, the cursed twin, they found in the basement locked in the makeshift cage, held by rusted chains in a room that had clearly been boarded up and re-boarded several times in an attempt to contain the beast within.

She wouldn’t have called the thing they had spent their lives referring to as the Mawor a man. His long nails and twisted teeth obliterated anything approaching pity she might have felt for the human he started out as.

And she knew the second she saw the photo that it was the thing that stalked her. Even Wendell had shuddered uncontrollably until she took the image away. Even then, the pallor that claimed his skin lasted the rest of the day and barley any food passed his lips.

Ira was sure now that most of the children that passed through that grove were stalked by nothing but their fears. Imagination made beasts of shadows and, with nothing to prove otherwise, those specters became reality.

But real claws had tangled in her hair and reached for her arms. They had bound Wendell and dragged him back to a makeshift nest made for a bird but the size of a man. And if she lived a hundred more years after this one, she would never be able to forget the terror that realization instilled in her.

It should have been over. Her family should have been able to move on. But after the chaos of the FBI had come the chaos of news reporters and national correspondents requesting interviews. Some she hadn’t been able to say no to. The story had simply been too important.

But now she felt gutted, drained to her core of the small parcel of energy that had sustained her through the bulk of it. She needed to retreat to the isolation of the house she shared with Delmar and the quiet normality of the life they lived there.

She needed to exhale without feeling panic well in her chest, and she needed his soft warmth to settle against her when she tried to sleep.

Before all that, though, she needed to decide where she wanted the magic to take her, what moment in her life bore the greatest potential for freeing of her of this tangle of her own creation. Because she knew as soon as she told her husband she was pregnant, it would crush his soul into a thousand tiny pieces.

There was no way the baby could be his. In all the chaos over Wendell’s disappearance, there had simply been no time. Maybe that was why the sweet glory of the compressed time within the computer simulation called to her with such deadly allure.

Maybe that is what I should change… Find some way to make the baby his. Delmar had always loved the idea of children, though he had never gone out of his way to make it happen. And he would make a wonderful father, the kind that was patient and nurturing.

But she could change only one thing. She couldn’t put Delmar into the computer simulation and she couldn’t yank herself out. So giving the child a chance of being Delmar’s might also mean never knowing whose it really was. And the idea of watching Delmar raise a child that might not really be his twisted her heart with such pain, she couldn’t breathe.

There must be a way. Surely the witch wouldn’t have given her a gift meant to save her from this imminent disaster of her own creation if it wouldn’t do her an ounce of good.

Or maybe she would just to teach me a lesson.

Ira squeezed her eyes closed. She had never been less tired. She tossed and turned, trying to find a more comfortable position than the thoughtless sprawl she adopted when she leapt into bed. But every placement of her legs, arms and neck quickly grew uncomfortable, forcing her to seek a new angle and a new curl of the blankets that surrounded her.

At least her family was safely restored to its original state. Wendell would carry the same fear she had for the rest of his life. Probably his would be worse since the Mawor did actually manage to get its claws on him for a little while. But he would grow. He would live.

That was the most important thing.

She thought again of Alyial’s car cutting her off on her way to the office that faithful day and wondered what might have happened if the curse befell someone else. She knew better than to attempt to eradicate the curse. If it was, as the witch claimed, the awakening of her powers, then it was a fixed moment. It would happen sooner or later, one way or another. She might only be able to choose its target.

Her eyelids grew heavy at last and, in a panic, Ira attempted to banish the thought from her mind. The timeline with Alyial was at least familiar. She had no idea what can of worms she might unleash if she brought someone random into this scenario.

And besides, foisting a curse onto someone else seemed just as bad as erasing the life growing inside of her.

There had to be something else, something that would give her the answer.

But she was tired now, so tired she could barely think. Her eyelids responded sluggishly to her attempts to open them, and the last of the discomfort fled her limbs.

The moment of truth had arrived. She was locked into this course whether she liked it or not.

And before she drifted to sleep she couldn’t help thinking, What might have happened if I met Alyial first?

*   *   *

It started much the same as it had in the computer simulation. He was sitting in the corner of a busy cafe tucked between two taller, busier buildings on a crowded city street. The light of mid-morning caught in his hair and highlighted the gleeful glimmer in his eyes as his fingers moved across the keys of his keyboard.

Ira had always been drawn to passions. That was what got her into this trouble in the first place. She could see the zeal written within the man’s expression of deep focus, and it drew her to the tiny booth before she realized she had moved.

She set her coffee cup down on the table and grinned when she saw the surprise in his face. He probably wasn’t the sort who liked random circumstance or spontaneity. He was a coder, after all, and a scientist. Everything in its place, ordered and neat, was probably his preference.

Yet he smiled when she said, “Hi. My name is Ira, and I want to know what you’re working on.” He was so stunned and flattered, it all just flowed from his lips without pause or interruption – and the sun had moved beyond its zenith by the time the two of them quit the cafe to go elsewhere.

The events that followed were hardly revelatory. They followed the same sequence she was familiar with. He asked her back to his apartment and she, in a moment of inspiration, agreed. They stayed up all night talking, laughing and snacking. And after the sun rose, they retired to Alyil’s bedroom to spend several hours collectively curled beneath his covers.

It was the timing that was different, perhaps triggered by the thought that crossed her mind in the seconds before she fell asleep.

What if I met Alyil first.

She met Delmar in college – two years before graduation, as a matter of fact. They were both about to get their degrees and both on fire with ideas for the business world they were about to stumble into. His passion caught her attention and lit her spark. They married and graduated at almost the exact same time, thrusting themselves into a life of communal entrepreneurship that, by all accounts, never should have worked out as well as it did.

She wondered if the magic had something to do with that too.

Instead of traveling that path, the dream showed her a young Alyil, still working his way through university and always typing away at some book he wanted to write on the side. Publication was no more of a certain world than the one Ira was hoping to occupy, and a book deal didn’t mean a big house and a secure nest egg at the start of their journey – but it did get Alyil’s foot in the door.

The two of them were capable of building beautiful things together. The universe wanted her to know that.

But she couldn’t help thinking the two of them could build those beautiful things without having to get married. Youth might have granted them a head start, but starting midway through the path of life was better than never starting at all.

Ira liked Alyil. She was certain under the right circumstances, she could easily fall in love with him.

But it wasn’t love that had driven her to do what she did inside the computer simulation. She was self-aware enough to know that. She had liked the temporary nature of that circumstance. In fact, she had embraced it a little too much.

And what of Delmar in this new scenario? What would have happened to him if he had never met her?

The universe had filled in her time when it showed her this new world, erasing her fear that she would have to live a long and lonely period waiting for Alyil to arrive. But she couldn’t stand the thought of abandoning Delmar to such an existence – her longing for him before she drifted to sleep had certainly not been feigned. And really, was no less urgent now that she had drifted into this strange non-place.

If meeting Alyil first and making a life with him so that they could raise this child side by side would resign Delmar to a life of misery, there was no way Ira could choose it, even if it meant wasting the gift that had been given to her.

But as the dream that surrounded her began to warp and shift, it wasn’t that she feared most. It wasn’t watching her husband stumble through life without her at his side that filled her with such dread, she almost vomited.

No, something far worse filled her head.

What if the life Delmar lived without her was better? What if he found a truer happiness than they had ever been able to find together?

What if there was someone out there that could do better for him than Ira ever had?

Her mind could not conceive of a scenario where anyone could pair with Delmar and create a better bliss than he and she had shared these long years. But then she also hadn’t been able to conceive of sharing intimacy with anyone other than her husband – even in a simulation – until she stumbled into Alyil inside the false world.

If Delmar was capable of finding a match that was better for him and a love that fulfilled him more than hers, who would she be to deny him?

She didn’t know the limitations of this magic, nor how long she had before she had to make her decision. But as new images appeared in front of her, she was keenly aware that if there was a better future out there for Delmar that didn’t involve her, she might just be forced to give it to him.