There had to be a way to use the crown for good. I consulted the charred remains of the books for any remaining answers, forgetting the only one I needed. Cory told me:

"There is a way." As he heard me muttering. We both knew the prayer that would do it. A very evil prayer.

"What are we supposed to do with this thing?" Agent Nomak asked me, pleadingly. He hated the crown, for the deaths of his friends and a fear of it.

"I am working on it." Was all I could tell him.

"Let's go see the place, at least." Cory suggested.

"I agree." I wanted to stretch my legs. We went on the trail into the ruins and followed the deserts where shadows were gone from cooled places. The day swept by as we walked. Then we were at the crumbling hills of rubble poured from the air after the mind of a Son of Araek bid the bricks and mortar, an aggregate of all the building materials of the town, still burning, into a parody of an ancient city.

We eventually found our way to the Temple of Araek. It was where the sorcerers and the Sons of Araek were buried before. Now it stood as it had in ancient times, cobbled together in a mockery. The horror of it was dizzying. I thought of how it was when we had first seen it. In some places the dead bodies of victims were half in the wall and bleeding into mortar and in other places they were not dead yet and dripped and moaned in agony, part of the creature's wall. Now it had grown cold and the horrors were a lingering echo, a smell, a sensation.

"I really hate this place." I told Cory.

"I don't. I wish I could eat their eyes. The dead ones, I mean." Cory told me. "Or, since they are all dead and their ghosts are as stone: a cold meal."

"You can't. I don't ever want you to do that." I told him.

"Yes, my Lord." Cory cawed, apologizing.

We went into the Temple of Araek and saw a weird stature idol of Araek. It was impossible to tell what sort of being it was meant to be. Some kind of geometric insect with unstill mouths and strange tendrils. It was clear that Araek was some kind of alien horror beyond the comprehension of the mortal world. A being of immense magical power.

"Maybe we should go." I worried.

"It is only an effigy, a symbol of Thu. It is a creature of pure life-giving power, a giant pool of viral liquid that can change anything alive at will." Cory laughed at me.

"What does this have to do with Araek?" I asked Cory.

"This idol means Araek is like Thu." Cory warned me. "Something no longer even alive, in the sense of things. More of a hand of fate, a spirit of things." Cory tried to explain his crow logic, probably so he could use a pun. I didn't need his jokes at that moment. I was considering what the Book of Sercil had said.

"Cory, what do you think would truly happen if we do not use the prayer to Araek?" I asked.

"The Sons of Araek will raise monsters and the dead to destroy the world." Cory thought.

"And if we do use the prayer, will Araek destroy the world?" I asked.

"Yes, but first: Araek would destroy the Sons of Araek and all those that follow, treating them as thieves of his magical powers." Cory recited the facts from the Book of Sercil.

"And we can, if we survive, undo his magic by denouncing him?" I sweated.

"That is correct." Cory cawed.

"We will need help. In surviving. I think we should use the crown of flames." I said.

"Oh. Of course." Cory agreed.

We went back to La Cucharacha, intent on using the crown, thereby finding a way to return it to Lilith's Tomb, where Pheriel was buried. Somehow doing that with the spell we had learned would return the magic and undo the curse of Lilith's oldest daughter. Hopefully.

"I need to use the crown." I told Agent Saint. She looked up at me and then at the gathered agents.

"After what Lothstone did?" She said quietly.

"Lothstone was possessed by the most ancient of all demons: Azoza." I protested. "It was being used to give the magic of flames to an evil spirit. I want to use it to give the magic back to whom it belongs."

"I understand. What will this involve?" Agent Saint sounded tired, despondent.

"It won't be ours anymore. It will be gone." I sold them on my idea. The agents of the FBI were nodding and glancing at it. The crown had cost them so much that they were happy to be rid of its awful burden.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"There is more to your plans?" Agent Gilbery asked suddenly.

"Of course!" Cory hopped excitedly. "My Lord has made the best plan."

"Let's hear such a plan." Agent Meroë requested.

"The books, including the Book of Lilith, have outlined that the curse of destruction is conditional to the crown of flames. Between reading The Winds Of The North and The Majara's Diagram I have begun to imagine the Tomb Of Lilith. It is where the crown must be taken, in dreams." I attempted to explain the first part of my plans.

"Oh, God." Agent Meroë sank into a thinker's pose and lost his face into his hands, sighing silently.

"The Sons of Araek are too powerful for the remaining Lilim to defeat. I am sure that they are hiding, afraid of these times. We need their help. They are enemies of our enemies. We need their help to protect us from a being of immense power. A kind of magical nuke, Araek." I said. Then I added: "We can call Araek into our world to destroy the Sons and then we can denounce the god and send it away. We need only to survive and to pray."

"Dreams and prayers?" Agent Meroë looked up and stared at me with bloodshot eyes.

"That is correct." Cory told him defensively.

"I just want to know how you plan on falling asleep with that crown. I can't even sleep with my gun." Agent Gilbery wondered.

"As a matter of magic, only an enchanted sleep will prevail." Cory spoke to Agent Gilbery.

"Cory will use a spell to cause me to sleep. I can only wake up when the spell is lifted. In the meanwhile I must remain with the crown." I hesitated for a moment, holding the crown timidly and then I went and laid on the couch in the lobby of La Cucharacha and set the crown against the back so that it rested upon me, cradled. Cory breezed across the room and set down over me and began to recite the incantation that would cause me to fall into a magical sleep.

I wandered in a windswept wasteland with the crown. Ahead I could see some old rectangular shaped boulders that formed a kind of leaning pyramid. Within was a darkness, smaller stones formed an archway and a hall. In any direction there was nothing except desolation. The place was real and I was really there, in a sense that my own world was not real except in the time and place where I was conscious. In terms of a deeper reality, categorically, there was nothing beyond what a mind could comprehend. As the world beyond the horizon cannot exist, neither could the otherworldly plane I stood on. I had learned already that while I stood in such a dream the place where my body lay on a couch was nothing but imagination.

I was frightened to be where I was. The world of the dead, the dying, the unborn. I was aware that I was not alone in Limbo, that ghosts surrounded me and that I myself was a part of their world. I was neither dead nor alive. If I did not do what I had come for I could never leave. Hopelessness and the lost were the ways of the shadow beneath time. I had become as a dweller of the deepest shadow. I saw only what I knew and looked no further.

In Lilith's Tomb I stood trembling in mortal fear. There were four pedestals and beneath one of them were the bones of Pheriel. I looked up and stared at her mother. The sleeping creature was Lilith. At a glance she was like a tall and naked woman with vaguely crimson flesh and small ebony antlers. She had a more monstrous form and I gaped at her terrible beauty. I could see at once all the shapes of living things that belonged to her, a thousand nightmares, shifting into the parts and organs and grue of any monster and all of them at once. Then again I could see her human body and a frowning and lovely queen's face. Her slumber perpetually held the tomb in stillness and silence. I shook in terror of the thought of her waking to find my trespass.

There were words written in the ancient language granted by her Creator and perversely cast into symbols to make an epitaph for her. Somehow I knew their meaning as I stared at them, as no language of mankind is without their syllables. I felt my mind change as I learned the oldest truth of Her. To crudely translate them I recall:

"Mother Of All. Born From Her Are Four Magic Directions. Divorced Of God And Man. Tamer Of Death. Birth To Monsters. Banished To Limbo. Sleep Until The End. Here Is Lilith."

I knelt as the older language, far more profound than anything I can say those words meant, overtook me. I knew all of her days and I knew her ways. I knew her agony and her fury. I quaked and my mind rejected all that I had known before. I heard a whisper, an echo, a kind of new thought:

"Give to Womæn what is given to Man." The voice said.

"Womæn this crown is yours. Come what may, may it be not the Dusk." I spoke, my voice an echo of doom and hollow brokenness. I had crawled to her bones and stared at her skull. Her tiny horns matched her mother's and the features were the same. I knew that Lilith had made her four daughters without a father. To her they were the first women, the first with belly buttons and wombs. They had begun as the keepers of life and death, masters over magic and Man. Only in time had all of that changed. I placed Pheriel's Crown where it belonged. I knew my task was done, but that I was not meant for just one such task. I knew, in the eyes of Lilith, I was born of a perfect number and it coincided with her will. I would not be undone any easier than the curse and I would be no less harmful. I had a choice and I had always chosen to do things my own way. I had learned that the paths I followed had formed long before by the footsteps of those that came before. I was merely a pedestrian of fate.

I staggered out into the bleak wilderness and doubted I would leave. Then I saw my shadow there. I saw it and knew that a light was shining and that Lilith's Tomb was in my dreams. I heard a familiar cawing noise and smiled weakly. Cory was with me. And others:

"What have you done?" I heard the voice of Serephiel.

"I have returned your sister's crown. Among you who were made by Lilith. Where have you gone? You knew of no such place?" I wondered.

"How dare you?" Liminiel demanded. Only she and Serephiel were there in my dreams to confront me. We stood in night outside the home I grew up in, out on the street. Cory landed on my shoulder.

"As Cain stood, so do I. I have no shame for serving a cause greater than myself." I refused to take their shame.

"Cain was a murderer." Serephiel smirked. "And a fool."

"Those are not the words you chose for him when you wrote about your sister's death." I reminded her. She blinked, unable to think of what she had said so long ago.

"You are both here and know one less enemy. Isn't that enough to start with? The curse must be renounced. A time of destruction is upon you and upon Man and upon all living things. Will you stand against it, together with my Lord?" Cory asked them.

For some reason my talking crow softened their hard scowls and they listened.

"I will help." Liminiel promised. Reluctantly her sister nodded and said:

"For now: friend."