"Health is only a moment in a life and a life is only a moment in history." Dr. Arefu of the State Hospital told me.

"You are very strange, for a doctor." Isidore told her.

I recalled those were the words I heard before I awoke completely from my coma. History is nothing more than part of a moment, as dreams always fill in the blanks. History is a lie compared to the dreams of Dawn.

White flanks in forests of Dawn did run with joy and freedom and innocence. Their golden horns left a trail of light as they ran together in a silence that echoed as soft music. Each hoof fall left blooms in their wake that blossomed instantly. An entourage of flittering beings flew behind them in laughter and song. Those that could not take to the flight of love and life were along the parade's path, clapping and sipping of the beauty. I longed for Dawn and yet only the world of Man remained.

Dawn had days and nights of equal length. Darkness and light existed in balance. Those of the darkness had no resentment or treachery, yet. All existed in perfect order. Two worlds could exist together without conflict. Nothing had wisdom and nothing used magic. No creature desired for anything and each moment was fruitful and brought accomplishment. Thus Dawn was all about creation, creativity and symmetry. All were seen in context that was most fitting and all appeared beautiful and well formed in their own frame. There was one language and one purpose that all shared. Nothing was good and nothing was evil; for all knew their role and had cause to do as they did. Each obeyed the symphony of life and life was without end.

"I yearn for Dawn and yet I am born as a man." I complained.

"You are awake." Isidore said quietly. She had always recognized me and I had not always recognized her. This imbalance was only one of an infinite many imbalances I was aware of as I blinked and lost my visions of Dawn. I held one of my remaining fingers up to conceal the alacorn of the painting of a unicorn that adorned a wall in my room. For an instant I could feel the warmth and healing entering my body from the gesture; only to be smothered by the coldness of the intravenous rehydrating me through my vein. I saw that my missing finger was not entirely missing.

"I have returned to Modern from Dawn. To sleep, to wake, it is to go from one world to another." I spoke weakly and slowly.

"Your eyes have no reflection of me." Isidore stared unblinking. "I see something else; I don't see. I feel something else." She took my hand and held its ruins in both of hers and warmed it.

"I do not wish to be here." I told her honestly. "I am so tired."

"Where or what is Dawn?" Isidore instinctively knew and her eyes watered and her lip quivered. She looked pale as her mind opened to the thought of it. I just pointed at the unicorn's image and a tear ran across her cheek.

Dr. Arefu entered my room to respond to my alert state. She had come to work to find her patient had come out of a coma. She stood there staring at me for awhile and then said:

"I have seen many strange things. Things that a person of faith would call miracles. I was there when your friend raised the dead." Dr. Arefu sounded very serious. "Only your blood is more strange. There is something inside of you, healing you, changing you. Your body is slowly regenerating due to this. I don't know what it is." She held up a tiny medical flask with an isolated sample of the substance in my blood. I recognized the white elixir of the monster that had devastated my body. "Can you tell me what this is?"

"It was fed to me as a white liquid. It burned and tingled and it closed my wounds and reversed the infection already eating my fleshless bones on my legs. Without it I would have died." I told her.

"It is like no chemical known to anyone I have consulted. When I took samples it became separated from your blood and returned to its original state. That is not possible, and yet here it is." Dr. Arefu held it up and admired it.

I looked at my hands and noticed that the stubs of my severed fingers were indeed like uncurled fern fronds and were in a slow yet steady state of growth. "My fingers are growing back?"

"This stuff is in your muscles, your organs and your bones. In your brain as well. How fares your memories? My patients often experience a variety of amnesia after their coma." Dr. Arefu was in a state of high curiosity and awe. Isidore was right to say she sounded strange for a doctor. She had forgotten she was a doctor. She stood as a child before the altar, staring with eyes of renewal and belief. She had never looked so innocent before since childhood. I instinctively knew this just by watching her face. My own eyes could see better than they ever had. My mind was working in perfect order.

"There is no memory I cannot access." I spoke normally as I felt my strength of morning come to me. "As I slept I remembered impossible things."

Dr. Arefu nodded as though she had expected this. "Excuse me." She said and walked out of the room, taking her prized sample with her in a gentle grip.

"What is happening?" Isidore asked.

"I was abducted and tortured. A monster did this to me, a monster called Hatharia. She is dead now: Hatharia was assassinated by a cat-sorcerer. I was merely the trap to give the cats access to her secret lair. To keep me alive for her purpose, Hatharia fed me that stuff. It has not stopped healing me and instead I am slowly becoming whole." I told Isidore. She said nothing, not comprehending my story. I wondered if I was experiencing my crow's perspective whenever he told me his stories in all pertinent details and I didn't really understand him. Isidore shrugged, confirming the blank look on her face.

"Dr. Arefu spoke of someone being dead." Isidore wondered.

"Detective Winters used a serum we obtained to bring a victim to life for a moment so she could accuse her killers. Then she went back to being dead." I explained. "Dr. Arefu was there for that."

"Will you go back to being unhealed?" Isidore continued to wonder.

"I wasn't dead, only dying. What was given to me was digested. What was given to her was shot into her veins. There are many other differences. Whatever is healing me is slow and not instant. It is also slowing down, because at first it was healing me quickly and now it is healing me very slowly." I had enough brain power to race to this conclusion. It had restored all of my organs, Dr. Arefu had mentioned, including my brain. I could think with speed and clarity like a young student that loves to learn. "It is wearing off as it finishes its work. Perhaps a body can already regenerate and only requires perfect stimulation. Like Dr. Arefu said: it is not a chemical."

"It looked like milk." Isidore pointed out.

"It was extremely unpleasant to drink it and I had already suffered heights of physical agony, by comparison." I described.

We were alone for awhile and spoke instead of Dr. Leidenfrost's pregnancy and of our own child, Persephone. I had spent some weeks in a coma and had missed a lot. I hoped that this restoration and completion of the series of tasks from the cats would be the end of my time in the wilderness. I longed for home, it was the closest thing I would ever have of Dawn. I recalled I had left home to find the wilderness, thinking by mistake that it would be like Dawn out there. At first the magic springs and eternal stones and unwalked paths did feel like Dawn. All of it had become as nightmares and horror, starting with my own foul deed, jealous of the discovery of my hidden worlds.

I was alone in my hospital room and thought about the kiss Isidore had given to me as a goodnight gesture. It reminded me of the kiss of a creator, a god, a being above oneself that can guide and heal and give purpose. There could not be order without something keeping things that way. Dawn must give way to the rest of time, a timeless world must know change. Without hardship the gifts and blessings meant nothing. Jealousy could arise amid perfect contentment.

Before there was a concept of good there was a concept of wrong. Then there could be evil, the full embrace of wrong, in rebellion against good. Wrong had come from an action of chaos, a breaking from perfect order. Wrong was motivated by jealousy. A feeling of discontentment amid plentiful wholesomeness. A stagnation of endless happiness and wonder. I thought of how it might have happened:

When I had sat in the church and read the book of Genesis from the Bible there was one story that exemplified it. In Genesis there was a story of two brothers born to Eve. Eve was a strange character already, since she had attempted to lie before there were lies. She had stolen before there were laws. She had sinned before there was sin. Her sons carried this legacy to an entirely new level. One of them chose to be only good, Abel, and by this there must by an opposition, a contrast. The other, Cain, embraced wrong and rebellion from a state of goodness. I could see how there was still a balance and order was not entirely lost. Good and evil were still existing in harmony and yet in balance there was now a conflict. Then evil had graduated into a force of destruction, preying on good, treating it as weak and inferior. Cain had, from jealousy, murdered his brother Abel. According to the story this was the first time.

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I compared this to my own wanderings. I had found the mindless and obedient John Monica in my sacred places and felt threatened. I was jealous of his trespassing. His presence represented a threat to the sanctity of what I loved. He was disturbing the mists of Dawn that were already so thin and hard to find. I had remorselessly resorted to killing him. Afterward I was marked as a murderer. Nothing I could say in my defense justified what I had done. I had begged to escape from Man's justice and I was granted exile, by the clemency of the same goodness I had defied. I could see with clarity how all of chaos was still a pattern, how order could force randomness into sequence through endless repetition. There was still a vague balance left.

"Mr. Briar?" Agent Saint interrupted my thoughts.

"I see you there." I blinked. I had gone so far into my own head I had forgotten what was right in front of me. "Agent Saint."

"Please just call me Maia." She begged me and sat down. "Please."

"It is not my way." I apologized to her. She nodded with disappointment.

"I found out you are here and I came to visit last week. Dr. Arefu called me, because I convinced her she had to. You are supposed to be in witness protection right now, with the U.S. Marshals." Agent Saint explained herself without actually explaining anything.

"Must be busy." I sighed.

"I am supposed to sign you over to their protective custody. Things are moving at a snail's pace." Agent Saint grimaced at a thought. She looked thoughtful, like she was about to say more and then hesitated.

"Something about snails?" I asked. I was slightly curious. I knew Cory got a thrill from hunting snails. They were one of the few things he would kill for food. Crows prefer to find their food already dead.

"I sometimes fancy myself to be a kind of warrior or a knight." She blushed at the revelation. I nodded in agreement and the redness faded from her cheeks. I told her:

"I recognize the great warrior that you are." I assured her. She sat blinking for a moment and strength returned to her eyes.

"Thank you." Agent Saint had absorbed my words and they had made her a little bit more powerful somehow. "In Medieval there were illuminated manuscripts with these cartoons of knights or warriors fighting snails."

"You know the meaning of such?" I asked as more of a statement.

Agent Saint nodded. "I also know I am not going to solve the case without your help."

"What about Agent Meroë and his team?" I asked.

"He has lost two agents and a third is now crippled. He doesn't have a team and hasn't made any progress." Agent Saint said with a mixture of emotions evident in her voice.

"What about you? Are you still with the FBI?" I asked her. "Or have things changed so much in so little time?"

She shook her head before saying almost without emphasis: "I am alone."

"You will always be with the FBI in my book." I told her. This actually meant something to her: reinforcement of me calling her a great warrior. She knew herself, had confidence, and knew she could fight the battles of the war she had started. She needed someone else to know it too, however.

"I am staying here and this is my number, Mr. Briar. I need your help." She handed me a hotel card with her phone number on it and looked imploringly at me before she said it again, with her farewell: "I need you. Goodbye for now."

I could not imagine calling her and offering my help. I wanted that chapter of my life to be over. I understood she and Agent Meroë were upsetting the balance further and could only make things worse. There was part of me that respected her so much that I could not flat out refuse to help her. Alone she would fail, she would fall and she would die horribly. I also could not imagine allowing her to battle on alone so that her fate would be failure and death. Conflicted I sat alone in my room and held the card, staring at it. Just a hotel card with her number handwritten on the back. She had not given me her FBI card, I doubted she was willing to give those to anyone at that point in her journey. There was something awful about that piece of paper. It was a relic of her struggle, symbolic of her life. On one side was the hotel's print in perfect order. On the other her poor handwriting looked chaotic. It was symbolic of what she lost and what she still was trying to accomplish. It was given to me in trust and necessity and yet I could easily choose to disregard it. Indeed it would be easy for good reasons to forget about it and I had very little reason to help her. I owed her nothing.

I didn't want to question the actions of a courageous me if I called her on a day that had not dawned. As I sat there I was questioning that man who I might become. I wanted to know why he would choose such a perilous path and leave the safety and warmth of home. I asked him how he could betray me and leave his family only to die at her side. I demanded that he tell me how he came to learn such courage, as I was still a coward.

Dr. Leidenfrost was the one who brought me home from the hospital during a quiet car ride where I sat in the backseat against her protest. When we were at the home of the Winters' she asked me to accept her kiss. I did and the feeling was the essence of warmth and love. "I love you." She swore to me. I knew she did. She endured loneliness to prove it, something she could not stand for long. At least without her work with the dead nearby or her work on her book. She needed to escape herself, always, to project her happiness onto others. She could not abide joy within herself and had to have the lives of others surrounding her to feel alive. I realized as she drove away that I loved her too. It was possible I loved her best of all. I decided to keep that as my secret. I needed a secret.

Cory was swooping around the side of the house where part of the driveway continued as gravel. He clicked once in greeting and perched upon my shoulder without any further renewal. Josh was the opposite. He treated my return as an appearance of one who is back from the tomb. He prepared a feast of all the foods he was sure I liked best and he was quite accurate. I sipped a beer that evening and talked with him on the back steps as we sat, he a few steps below me. I actually enjoyed the small talk and banter for a change and realized how much I had come to appreciate and adore that man.

After bedtime I laid on the couch downstairs. I had grown back my fingers and they looked atrophied and new, smaller than they were before. I could walk on the legs I had lost. My flesh bore scars that were fading as though many decades had faded them. Even my broken teeth had come back, although they now looked like canines and were pointed. The white streaks in my beard and hair, and the bullet scar, were completely gone. The aging I had grown used to had reversed and I felt and looked even younger than I was. It had all seemed to cease, however, as the restoration had slowed again and again and then worn off completely. I wondered what would have happened if I had drank more than a little of Hatharia's white elixir.

As I slept my dreams were no longer of Dawn. Now I saw the ravages and desolation that were to come. I knew I was seeing Dusk. A world we would soon know. All was in ruins, the forests, the oceans, the ice of the poles, the skies, the moon and every city of Man. I saw there, standing atop the mountain of bones of all living things, one tattered and shadowy figure. I climbed to the side of this figure and recognized him as Cain, by the same mark I knew was upon me.

"My brother." He spoke with a kind of pained pride. "Abel. His name was Abel. He is dead now."

"You killed him." I told him.

"Was I to know what I was doing? Killing things was my way. I was a hunter and I ate the animals. Except when I killed him it was not out of hunger." Cain offered me his truth.

"What was it?" I asked.

"See for yourself. You have sight. You see the same visions that drove me to it. You know the feeling of power and feel threatened by the blundering of another. Should John Monica have lived, he too would have killed. That is not why you killed him. You wanted to return to Dawn. You thought things would go back to the way you want them to be." Cain spoke at length and compared me to himself.

"See what you are speaking to!" Cory swooped from the torn red skies to land in front of us where we stood atop a mountain of bones of all living things.

"You cannot see me." Cain said sadly to me. "You can only see what you think I am. I have no form, nothing designed me. I am the emergence of accident, of the inevitable and chance. I am coincidence personified, a temporary alignment that seems to form a pattern, a conjunction of thoughts and ideas that were spared by mistake. I am the entropy that has not yet occurred. I will be and yet I never shall be. When I am, nothing shall be."

"You are not Cain?" I asked.

"I am he, although I am also all that was before and after Cain. I am the mark put upon him. The same mark that is upon you, the same mark that is upon this entire world." Cain spoke in circles and I tried to follow, only finding my thoughts on a circular path.

"That is Death. That is chaos." Cory advised me. "The disorder that is trying to exist."

"Art thou Death?" I questioned in my own words.

"As you are, I am." Cain seemed to confirm. I still had doubts.

"I am not Death. I am merely a man." I doubted.

"Look where you stand. You did this. This Dusk is from your action, your inaction. The same thing." Cain pointed to the pile of bones we stood on. It was truly a mountain. "You are merely a man and all men are merely men. I was merely a man. You act or do not act in unison and this is what you create." Cain disregarded my doubts. His voice held contempt for my doubts, as though my refusal to take responsibility was cowardly.

"Do you think I am a coward?" I asked.

"Death is not a coward. You said yourself that you are not Death. You must be a coward." Cain had a knowing and angry smile for me.

"What should I do to prevent this?" I asked. "I am not a coward if I take action."

"Whatever action you take or do not take will still lead to this." Cain scolded. "Are you afraid to be a coward?"

"I am afraid of letting cowardice to cause me to fail." I considered.

"The same thing. You fear yourself. You fear a death." Cain's tattered robes fluttered in the breeze and he stared at me while I thought.

"Am I Death?" I asked. He nodded.

"As your action or inaction will always lead to this, you and Death are the same. Mere men are all the same. This is what must be. This will always happen." Cain again sounded sad to speak his thoughts.

"Death will always happen." Cory clicked in agreement and said his favorite words with renewed awe.

"Your companion is right." Cain agreed with Cory.

"What can change this?" Cory looked at all the destruction.

"Men must become more than mere men. Death must be put in order. Chaos must have its day and then the Dusk might come before a new Dawn." Cain theorized.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"I am as sure as you are. This place belongs to you. It is of your creation." Cain offered no certainty.

"This is only a dream." I spat in objection.

"Only a fool would distinguish a dream from reality." Cory cawed at me in objection, in our hybrid language.

"This is no dream." Cain reached out and touched me and I awoke.

I was again on the couch, lying in a cold sweat. I had cried out in terror as I dreamed and woke, the nightmare shocking me as my mind held onto it as a memory. Cory asked me from the darkness:

"Does my Lord really think a dream cannot also be fate? Is a foolishness going to be the action? Will cowardice?" Cory was concerned.

"I know not." I sat up. I thought with my newfound clarity. I picked up the wireless housephone and turned on the lamp. I found the card of the hotel and dialed the number. I got through to her room. I said to Agent Saint before she finally spoke:

"I will help you. It is the only way to sow peace. We must strive for a peaceful resolution."

"I know, Lord. I know."