Dahozhoni Meadow the red crown

Today for Moisés everything is too bright and too loud, and his temper chafes like the thighs of a working animal, and the sensation of his breaths against the back of his throat is unbearable, and even counting to threes—which is the safest number, la trinidad, la tríada, o la trinitaria, which to him may well be the atom—fails to soothe him, so his mind desperately chases its own tail, and what it catches are Lanza's words from before—

Porque hago lo que me dicen

—and he almost grasps what the spear had meant, that is, the real words beneath the surface, but voices, real voices, distract him and his eyes somehow find the foundations of a nascent Babel and its queen regent, a terribly beautiful woman who sits like an effigy carved from baetyl, un zopilote overhead casting a sickle-shaped shadow so that for a moment she has a comet's tail, only in black instead of the usual spate of white.