The words slipped out. “Making her comfortable.”
He wasn’t sure what he meant. Just something to say. But he knew he couldn’t leave her on the floor a moment longer.
He rose and carried her to one of the Lady’s unused bedrooms- all unused, because she never slept. He positioned her on her back on a queen-size bed in the nearest room and pulled the spread over her, up to her breasts, covering her wound. He closed her eyelids. In the dark, with only the backwash of light from the living room around the corner, she could have been asleep.
He sat next to her as an emptiness yawned within him. She’d become such a part of his life since she’d reappeared last year, what was he going to do without her? A light had gone out. The world without Weezy… it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t… whole.
His voice broke as he took her bloody hand in his and whispered, “Weezy.”
A man who is something more than a man goes to the mountain and shouts his name.
Not “Rasalom.” And not his birth name, the one his mother bestowed on him. He discarded that back in the First Age when the Otherness held more sway in this sphere. When he tapped into that mother lode of power and strangeness he took on a new name, an Other Name he had protected like a wolverine guarding her young. But the time for secrecy is past. He can now shout his Other Name anywhere and it will not matter.
From here atop Minya Konka, through a break in the clouds, much of what is now called China spreads out in the darkness nearly five miles below. His birthplace is not far from here. It is bitterly cold on the mountaintop. Gale-force winds shriek and howl as they swirl the frozen air about his naked body. He scarcely notices. The power within protects him, fed by the delicious woes of the world below.
The horizon brightens. Dawn does not break at this altitude-it shatters. He stares at the glint of fire sliding into view and focuses the power he has been storing during the months since the death of the Lady. Eons of frustration fall away as he finalizes the process to which he has devoted the ages of his existence. No gestures, no incantations, just elseness, Otherness, vomiting out of him, spreading out and up and around, seeping into the planet’s crust, billowing into its atmosphere, saturating this locus in the multiverse.
Soon all shall be his. The Enemy has moved on. No one and nothing opposes him, no power on Earth or elsewhere can stop him. He drops to his knees, not in prayer but in relief, elation.
At last, after so many ages, it has begun.
Dawn will never be the same.
On May 17, the sun rises late.
And so it begins…