Standing at the window, with a warm mug of chai tea, brought the light of Dawn. I could see it for an instant, I could see in the mists that made my right hand ache, could see unicorns running across the field. My eyes watered and I blinked and they were gone.

Cory hopped up onto the windowsill and asked:

"My Lord, is it a vision of Dawn?" He asked in English. Then he clicked and made a throat clearing sound and one soft cawing noise, speaking one word in Corvin that translated to: "Worlds from within are the same as those outside."

"Dusk is closer. As I now stand again, there is a prophecy. She saw me standing against some unknown enemy." I recalled the words of Agent Saint from so long ago.

"Oh? Standing alone?" Cory wondered.

"No. Two of my relatives will join me. I think she meant my nephews. I haven't seen them in years."

"My Lord will see how they have grown into men. My Lord will know them and they shall recognize their place. Will the lacuna be a revelation or a corruption?" Cory speculated randomly between English and our hybrid of Corvin and English. I had to think about what he had said to understand it. He believed we needed the lacuna, even if the information in the book of nightmares was deceptive. And we were not the only ones who were trying to create a physical copy of the book, as I had considered, there was someone else. It was a weapon, not just a book.

"Things from dreams can become crystallized into reality." I considered. "Visions, prophecies and dreams. In what way are they removed from the real world?" I wondered. The manifestation of the Book of Sercil required death and madness to write. An evil book that described the darkest sorcery and the destruction of the world by magical forces. All I had read was the Key of Sercil; a book describing the book we needed. We had to read it to know its contents; to know what we were up against.

My phone was chiming a call from the FBI. I collected it and answered the call.

"I need your help with what we have found. I think you will know what it is and how we can use it. A serial killer wrote it." Agent Saint spoke to me over the phone.

"A manuscript?" I asked. I guessed correctly that she wanted me to read what the serial killer had written. It seemed too often that I knew what Agent Saint needed from me. Her quest and mine were the same, and she knew it too.

"Yes. It contains spells and it mentions the return of a powerful goddess. It doesn't say more. I was hoping you could help with the rest." Agent Saint explained. She came and got me.

"Lord, you can walk!" She saw me standing and waiting for her.

"It's a miracle." I agreed. Agent Saint was grinning.

"I like miracles. They assure me of my gifts, teach me patience and give me joy." Agent Saint beamed.

"Your gifts?" I pondered. She was an oracle, she sometimes had visions of prophecy, guidance from beyond. Her gifts were only her's so long as she remained a virgin. If she had a daughter someday then that child might inherit her gifts. That was my understanding of what she was referring to. "Did you not see me standing with two men of my bloodline?"

"I did, Lord. I do not have faith in what I see. Not anymore." Agent Saint sounded like she regretted what she was saying.

"You should." I promised her. "I do."

"Thank you, Lord." Agent Saint drove us in her tiny car to the FBI. There I met up with her team as they were working on the Manuscript Killer. This murderer was captured already, a therapist that had somehow used hypnotism or magic to turn his victims into living conduits of the book of nightmares. Then he had written down what they had said about it as they died.

My hands were trembling as I began to read the translation. I was reading the actual Book of Sercil. It seemed incomplete, but I had a substantial portion of it right in front of me.

"You look like you know this book." Agent Gilbery watched my reaction and told me what he saw.

"This book only existed in dreams. It should not exist in the real world." I said, half to myself.

"Would you be willing to ask about it? From the one who wrote it? We don't know the right questions." Agent Heller offered me some coffee.

"Of course. When?" I gulped nervously and sipped the coffee. Cory looked up at him and said:

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Sercil wrote this book, Sercil as in, the Sons of Araek." Cory stated. He meant that the agent's request was not applicable. Sercil was a legendary character and the Sons of Araek were from prehistory. Agent Heller realized my bird didn't know the difference.

"Jeremy Peterson wrote this copy." Agent Heller corrected himself for my bird.

"He shouldn't have." Cory decided.

"The prosecutor has agreed to let our civilian consultant interview Peterson." Agent Pyresh had hung up his phone, presumably after acquiring such permission.

"That's you." Agent Gilbery smiled.

The next thing for me to do was to sit in the interrogation room and wait while Jeremy Peterson was brought in. Agent Saint was there beside me to supervise and Cory stood on my shoulder, staring at the murderer.

"Twelve victims and twelve pages to your book." Agent Saint sounded like she was complimenting the killer's efforts. He nodded appreciatively.

"It isn't so bad, getting caught. The FBI understands me, they listen to me. When I was done: it wouldn't be so bad to just turn myself in." Jeremy Peterson was smiling at Agent Saint.

"But you weren't done." I pointed out. "The Book of Sercil should have a chapter about the gods. Instead there is just a mentioning of the goddess Bastet."

"Book of Sercil? You mean the Majara's Diagram? Bastet has her star in the sky, her Majara is complete. I was just the messenger. It will be the death of all things." Jeremy Peterson knew what I meant, but corrected me anyway. Then he realized I had said something interesting to him and he asked: "Who are you?"

"My Lord has met this goddess and gathered the jewels of the Majara; every piece of that star you mentioned." Cory spoke.

"It isn't really a star. It's more like the light of her jeweled crown, her boat on the Nile. I mean 'star' as a metaphor for her position in the heavens." Jeremy Peterson said after a moment of consideration.

"Do you even like cats?" Cory wondered. "It isn't the 'death of all things'. Just the things that annoy cats."

"Cats, snakemen, fairies. What does it matter who gets the weapon? It should be in the hands of men." Jeremy Peterson looked at me and added: "But you already knew all that. It was in the hands of a man, piece by piece, wasn't it?"

I nodded. I felt my face going red. I was embarrassed that I had blindly served the cats in their insidious plot.

"Why did you help them?" Jeremy Peterson asked me.

"To save my daughter's life I agreed to help them. I wasn't aware of the consequences." I said defensively.

"So people died while you did this. There is always a death, isn't there?" Jeremy Peterson sensed he had me on the ropes.

I nodded again. I was sweating, I was about to confess what I had done. "I stole every piece they needed and gave it to them. I ignored the cost in human lives."

"Okay. I also ignored such a price. But my work has begun to reverse what you did." Jeremy Peterson observed. "I see two warriors who are willing and able to fight back against the coming apocalypse. You might be all that stands between our species and extinction."

"You are a murderer. I didn't kill anyone." I protested. I hadn't heard his assessment of Agent Saint and me.

"Death will always happen." Cory reminded me. He hadn't said so in a long time.

"Your crow is right. The speakers were a necessary component of my process. Only the dying may know the truth about death and the closer they are to death, the more they can say. The Majara's Diagram is entirely about death." Jeremy Peterson responded in a quiet and reverent way. He appreciated Cory's motto. Cory sensed this accurately and repeated himself:

"Death will always happen." And for the first time I had heard him say so I realized that I had never accepted it. I had never really accepted the reality of it before. Knowing how I would die had made me callous towards the purpose of death. I did not accept death as the conclusion, not the way Cory did.

"What's the matter?" Jeremy Peterson asked. It sounded like he would finish with the idiom: "Cat got your tongue?" but he restrained himself, the rest of his voice becoming a silent echo where we could still hear him saying it.

"I've realized he is right." I sighed. "So you did what nobody else could do. You wrote the Book of Sercil, or most of it anyway."

"How will I write the rest? It must be done. You will need every page to read. You will need to know the movements of the enemy in advance and how to resist their magic. There is a time coming when such things must be, or all will perish. You both know that, yet you inhibit my work." Jeremy Peterson looked from me to Agent Saint. He sounded completely reasonable, with his voice, anyway.

"How many more pages are missing?" Agent Saint frowned. He shrugged.

"Maybe another twelve pages. Twelve more speakers. You couldn't live with that?" Jeremy Peterson wondered.

"I can't just let you go." Agent Saint shrugged. "Maybe in Dellfriar you will get the help you need."

"You think I am crazy?" Jeremy Peterson stopped smiling. "I don't believe that. You both know I am not crazy."

"Sorry, Mr. Peterson. It isn't up to me." Agent Saint got up and left us there. We just stared at each other for a moment and then I left too.

I found Agent Saint and asked her: "Now what?"

"He has confessed to everything. The trial will be quick and he will be sent to Dellfriar. There he will be able to continue his work momentarily. It will kill him, he must write the last page from his own death. He is a martyr." Agent Saint spoke with a coldness I had never heard from her before. I was startled.

"You know he will kill again?" I whispered in a weird kind of terror. I hated that she had called him a martyr. It reminded me that I had killed John Monica and eventually betrayed Khurl. I was no better than Jeremy Peterson.

"Yes. It is his fate to complete this. It will manifest in bedlam if he does not channel it into our world. You completed part of this Majara's Diagram thing and now he is completing the other half. It is causality. It is a manifestation of things to come. It is taking form." Agent Saint struggled to articulate her thoughts and feelings.

After I was back at home I stood in the evening at the window. I stared out at the field and all I saw were rusted hulks of cars and piles of debris and a homeless camp. There were no more unicorns in the mist and I wondered if I would ever see them again.