Nightworld

Rasalom went to the mountain.

He is calling himself Rasalom these days because it seems he has always called himself Rasalom. It is not his birth name, the one his mother bestowed on him. He discarded that one back in the First Age when it was customary to keep one's True Name a secret. But he has used Rasalom so long it almost seems like his True Name.

From here atop Minya Konka, through a break in the clouds, much of what is now called China spreads out four and a half miles below him in the darkness. His birthplace is not far from here. It is bitterly cold on the mountaintop. Gale-force winds shriek and howl angrily as they swirl the frozen air about his naked body. Rasalom scarcely notices. The power within protects him, the ever-growing power, fed incessantly by the delicious woes of the world below.

The horizon brightens. Dawn does not break at this altitude—it shatters. Rasalom stares at the glint of brightness sliding into view and focuses the power he has been storing since his most recent rebirth. Millennia of frustration fall away as he begins the process to which he has devoted the ages of his existence. No gestures, no incantations, just the power, vomiting out of him, spreading out and up and around, seeping into the planet's crust, billowing into its atmosphere, saturating its locus in the universe.

Soon all of this shall be his. There is no opposition, no power on earth that 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.