My body had become this light, this throbbing, pulsing, shivering light, this simmering light. And I felt as if it were pouring out of me through my fingers and my toes, through my cock, through my skull. I could feel it generated and regenerated inside me, inside my pounding heart and pouring out so that I seemed immense, immense beyond all imagining, expanding in a void of light, light that was blinding, light that was beautiful, light that was perfect.

I cried out again. I heard it but never meant to do it. I heard it.

Then the light flashed as if to blind me forever, and I saw the ceiling above me, and I saw the circle of the chandelier—the flashing prismatic colors of that chandelier. The room came down around me as if descending from Heaven and I was not on the floor at all. I was standing on my feet.

Never in all my existence had I felt so powerful. Not even ascending with the Cloud Gift had I ever known such fearlessness, such buoyancy, such limitless and utterly sublime strength. I was climbing to the stars yet I had not left the room.

I stared down at Mekare. She was dead. She had sunk to her knees and then fallen on her right side, her blighted eye socket hidden, her left profile perfect as she lay there staring forward with one half-lidded blue eye as if she were asleep. How beautiful she looked, how complete, how like a flower fallen there on the gravel path of a garden, how destined for this fragile moment.

The sound of wind filled my ears, wind and singing as if I’d passed into realms of angels, and then voices assailed me, voices from everywhere, rising and falling in waves, relentless voices, voices in splashes, as if someone were splashing the very walls of my entire universe with great splashes of molten gold paint.

“Are you with me?” I whispered.

“I am with you,” he said clearly, distinctly in my brain.

“Do you see what I see?”

“It’s magnificent.”

“Do you hear what I hear?”

“It’s magnificent.”

“I see as never before,” I said.

“As do I.”

We were wrapped in a cloud of sound together, immense, unending, and symphonic sound.

I looked down at my hands. They were throbbing as was all my body, as was the whole brilliant world. Never had they seemed such a miracle of texture and perfection.

“Are these your hands?” I asked.

“They are mine,” he said calmly.

I turned to the mirror.

“Are these your eyes?” I asked, staring into my own.

“They are mine.”

I gave a long low sigh.

“We are beautiful, you and I,” he said.

Behind me in the glass, behind my still awestruck face, I saw them all. They had all come into the room.