Dellfriar became the only operational asylum in the world. Everything had collapsed, outside the Medieval castle, filled with laughing madmen. The skies outside had darkened and the world out there was entirely depleted of sanity. Only in our house was there any joy or reason. Only we possessed any agency that wasn't purely survival instinct. Our straight jackets and drugs and cells kept us isolated from the infectious and rabid degeneration of humanity. We stayed meek and contained as the rest of the world boldly spilled the noise of an era dominated purely by a singular human species. We fasted on grapes and dew as the last remnant of civilization devoured itself in seventy nights of terror, until things became utterly silent. Our song of bedlam remained as one continuous strain until that last shadowed silence fell.

Then it was our turn. We passed through the window and flew as ravens, twenty or so patients of Dellfriar. We were the Choir, the ones sent by our shiny new god.

We saw two suns hung in the sky, for Liminiel had made a second star. All had changed. Man was gone, and we, as ravens, were not intruding in the landscape where animals walked upright and spoke amid the wreckage of the cities. No more were the beasts not as men. They sat outside coffee shops holding broken cell phones and sipping empty tea cups and staring vacantly, trying to remember what their life as an animal was like, before. It was futile, for only the passing flock of patients as ravens knew the truth. Among us there was one crow, and as an animal that had not changed at all, the crow spoke as a human with proficiency and told them they were to know the truth, only in time.

Cory's promise to the ones below, made them wait for his return, anticipating that the secret would come freely. I doubted they would play no part in our survival. In the ruined world of dreamy skies, Man's Bane fell below our shadowed wingbeats.

We landed where we were told to go, by Aureus. The spell of Circe wore off and we became as we were, armed humans in straight jackets and giggling on the castle's drugs. We had flown backward in time and arrived at the height of the decades before our world had come to be. I sensed that I was within myself, watching from a farflung aeon. Some part of me existed at the very end of time and was looking at me, seeing what I was seeing. I was not interfered with or communicated with, just observed. I had always felt watched, but suddenly, as I stood there gazing at the Mirror of Time, I realized who I truly was. I knew I was also some being from many ages into the future. I knew I would remain as one of the very last. Part of me considered that I should, at some point, relay a record of my adventures. I had existed long before and long after, but it was those moments, knowing who I eternally was, that changed me. I felt like I was no longer innocent, and in a much different way than any thought, action or experience had ever made me feel before. Even going insane had not felt so different.

The Choir stood and admired themselves. As we looked we perceived an infinite number of possibilities in the Mirror of Time. It was Cory who broke our trance.

"The trap is that the more possibilities of your fate that you witness, the less there actually are. No dream you have in the mirror will come true, after you have seen it. Look away or lose first your best life, and then your second best and so on, with each gaze into the magical reflection. It will take all from you if you stare too long. You will eventually cease to exist, I am sure." Cory told us.

Not one of the Choir was willing to look at the mirror after hearing such a description. We went around it and beheld the object of our errand.

"Isn't this exactly like when we took such gems for the cats to make their Majara?" Cory asked me, in Felidaen. His meows distracted the rest of the Choir around us, but didn't reveal what he was asking me. I meowed back:

"It is, except now we are stealing for-" I agreed. and added in English: "-Aureus."

"Seems like this is not a good plan. We know that evil is-" Cory meowed and added in English: "-Aureus."

"For now we bide our time and help. When this is complete we will have our chance to stop-" I meowed and added: "-Aureus."

"Are you two meowing about Aureus?" Jacoby the Disorderly asked me. He used to work as an orderly at Dellfriar, but became a patient. From there his spiral into madness had led him to being transformed into a raven and sent flying through time and space to the distant city where a mirror tested all who wished to exist.

There was a gem to steal, and as my crow had pointed out, there always would be. We worked for Aureus and there was no sense in wasting anything. Aureus was a god and we could be faithful or we could be heretics. Only as heretics could we kill another god. We had to tell ourselves we knew what we were doing.

It was all too insane, the murders and mayhem. Crossing from world to world as ravens, stealing the essence, crystalized to us as glowing gems. I was terrified, knowing we were assembling something horrible for Aureus. Whatever it was, we needed something like the book of evil to tell us how to reverse our efforts and stop Aureus. Except we had no such book and no idea what Aureus was making.

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There were yellow robed people who stood frail and short, armed with carved clubs too light to move a croquet ball, let alone cause us any harm. They guarded the gem fiercely, not realizing how much stronger and more violent we were. The Choir cut through them in seconds, glass bottles and chains and a razor sharp clawed hook making short work of the natives of the mirrored city.

After we had killed them all we took the gem, or at least, Jacoby did. He began sneezing and then the ground shook and we all fled, taking him along with us. Jacoby carried the gem as we stood on the raven's gesture, a glowing mist to us, visually. There was no actual mist or my right hand would have ached. We could see it and so could the people around us. Only we were enchanted to fly back home, and they could not follow us. At least that is what we presumed. We never saw them again, but other enemies, such as the Folk of the Shaded Places or the Fen and the Fell or even the cat-umbramancers, could follow us with their teleportation abilities.

We flew back and saw the recursion of the beast-men and the times before the end of Man. There we arrived at Dellfriar, standing throughout the times until the moment we arrived from when we had come. Cory advised me:

"If we don't die trying, perhaps we could fly south, instead of to the castle?"

"We would die." I was certain.

"In almost every probability of seven-out-of-seven." Cory clicked in Corvin. It meant that no other outcome was possible. The exception was when something impossible happened, which is what Cory was saying we should gamble our lives on.

I sighed. I told Cory: "You mean that with a component, presumably the last or most important one, if we have no other option, we fly away from the castle with? I don't know if it is even possible. When we are as ravens we fly in one direction, from or to the castle. We might not even be able to deviate our flight. I am certain we would die."

"Death is always certain." Cory said. He thought it was funny. He added his own favorite joke: "Death will always happen."

"Right." I agreed. We sat and waited in the darkness. The morning brought us our breakfasts in our cells. We sat there and waited for Aureus.

Eventually Aureus came to us. The gem of the mirror people was taken from Jacoby.

I asked Aureus directly:

"How many more gems or jewels will we need?" I asked Aureus.

"You think to know what I am doing?" Aureus asked me.

I felt terrified. Aureus suspected my treachery. Aureus asked me, not sounding too angry, but rather, perplexed: "Piecing together what I am making? Is it another Majara? No. I have designed it myself."

Aureus just stood there blinking at me. I asked, nervously:

"What is it?" I asked. Aureus monologued for a very long time, saying:

"It will make me seventy times more powerful. It will be like I have wishes, no - boons, of the gods. And such would be unlimited. I think I am calling it the Amulet of Aureus. The power of the Majara would be less than this talisman. I know of all of these parts of this thing from Creation, from the pages I have collected. I have learned that each world is part of another world. Each universe is part of another universe. And you see, in nature we can find patterns from all these other worlds. With those patterns it is possible to see into those worlds. And when we look through time and space and see the remnant of those worlds, we have, in our own way, a path to them. So we go and take the shining molecule from each of these worlds, not long before they die anyway. It is just the last spark of a dying ember. It is harmless in the light of the brighter particle within me, enhanced by each of the pieces of the center, than is near mine. There are two suns in the sky, and I intend to become a kind of third. Mine however, is much hungrier. I will be more of what you might call, a black hole."

"You are going to become a black hole?" I asked.

"I already have a piece from one inside of me. It is a hellgate. It can eat anything and possess anyone. I am already hungry and unstoppable." Aureus continued.

"I guess all of us are made of particles that are inevitably stuff from the stars. You're saying one of your particles is from a black hole." I said. "That doesn't make you a black hole. It means that some immeasurable fraction of you is the remnant from something from a very long time ago."

"That's just it. The time doesn't seem to matter. I already know the outcome of this. You find it hopeless and cooperate. All of your friends, the Choir, they are expendable. They all die, or whatever. Fate isn't entirely sealed. We both know what happens to you. I can see it in your eyes that you know your fate. Except it is changing, uncertain. I have one fate and that is to live as a god and then die one day and become as a black hole, as I decompose from my living energy. In part of my consciousness I can feel myself as the black hole, destroying whole galaxies. It is my will, and you are as what you are and I am as what I am. That is who we be. For now you must serve me, because it is your path. Don't change your path." Aureus told me.

"I live until some distant time, then so must you. Or we both die." I said. Aureus considered my forecast and said:

"It doesn't matter if I live to complete this or if I die and become the inward cascading darkness that takes all things into it. The horizon of my mind tells me that the time is irrelevant. Even the age of the whole world is insignificant to the scale of the black hole. My existence, even as a god, is but a speck, and trivial beyond measure, to the awesomeness of the black hole. Remember that the first to be consumed will be you and your crow. Then the whole asylum and then the cities beyond and finally the continents. When those are taken it will be the broken remains of your world and those as crumbs as the worlds of your system are all eaten. Then the very suns of your system, the old and the new, both will be eaten. Those before the other systems and then the whole galaxy are eaten. All of it in the incrementally and exponentially growing moments of time. In the end I shall have eaten an entire galaxy, but it will take forever. For now I am in the very nature of my being. It matters not if I die in this moment or in a thousand years. Such a span of time is forgotten against the awesome and endless aeons of the time I will spend eating the whole galaxy as a black hole. And you see, I am not really afraid to become that because I am conscious of such, in the core of who I am."

"I am not going to betray you, not until I know how." I told Aureus.

"You must do as I tell you, that is the only way you can contribute to this world's longevity." Aureus said and then left me and Cory sitting in my cell.