Autumn had me wheeling a new path with my crow on my shoulder. My old job was no longer possible. I was getting checks that were enough to live off of. So I spent my time exploring. Cory loved it; he said the ride on the chair was: "...way more awesome." than on my shoulder, walking.

"Back to where you were in the beginning, before you got into trouble with the law." Detective Winters decided, in my thoughts. Sometimes I wondered if he was a spirit residing within me with an incomplete task in life or if he was just my memories. In those dull days with snow falling it became easy to forget the truth.

"I wonder then how Khurl fares." I said out loud. Cory tilted his head, his beady crow eyes seeing something in my words. He clicked his approval of my comment.

"I should fly there and ask her for my Lord. It would not displease her if an animal entered her territory. Shall I?" Cory stretched his wings. I recalled there was a time he could not fly as a crow flies. There was even a time he could not fly with his broken wing. I shook my head 'no', worried to let him leave while I was remembering his injuries when I met him.

"What if other crows see you and decided to hurt you? Are you not an exile?" I asked him.

"I had not thought of that." Cory clicked twice. It meant he was relieved he had avoided an unknown danger. He was thanking me.

"You are welcome." I said in plain English. I knew so many languages that it felt good to just speak my own. I'd learned Spanish in school and I had learned Corvin from Cory and then I had learned Felidaen. I also knew, somewhere in my thoughts, the language of the Nameless. Some part of me had never forgotten it as their words had traveled on the neurons in my gray matter. I could not consciously recall their words, but I somehow knew that I still knew them. Should I ever again hear their thoughts or speech I would know what they meant. I knew this, from feelings and from insight, but I could not prove it to myself.

Then I saw, at the yard sale, the scope of an emerald. It sat basking in a glass sphere upon a golden pedestal of twisted wires. It was extremely heavy for its small size and the thin wires could not be gold, yet they were. The miracle in the glass held the light in a darkness of green and smoke. Somehow it cast no shadow as the light could not penetrate the abyss.

I stared at it, transfixed. I realized it was the same kind of recording device as the emerald disk. Somehow, something had crystallized it from dreams. It should not exist in our dimension, it was nothing but thought. How it could physically manifest from nonexistence I could not understand. I just stared at it.

"Got it from an estate sale. This kid was selling all his uncle's stuff. This was in there. Neat huh? It isn't real. The glass it is in is worth more than the jade in there. Isn't even real gold. I can let it go for two hundred." The ogre running the garage sale told me. I looked up at the bloated man with his infected lip piercing. The crust around his eyes told of his wisdom. I asked:

"Does it whisper?" I asked him. He blinked at me and said:

"Hundred? Got a hundred?" He stammered.

"Ask him if it has shown him anything." Detective Winters suggested.

"That's a good one." I said out loud and then asked him: "Has it shown you anything?"

"You can have it for free." The guy belched at me and plod away.

"I don't want it." I said after him. He turned and had a handful of bills in his hand. He thumbed through them and offered me four twenties. I accepted the cash and took the emerald and set it on my lap.

"Pleasure doing business with you." He had a strange tone and stared distantly as his mind fought harder to reject what he thought he had seen and heard. Now, because of me, he was sure of the cosmic horrors. I was glad to take his money but I had no idea what to do with the relic.

"My Lord does not intend to discard that cursed object? My Lord has accepted it as his own possession. It will become restless and harm thee." Cory advised me.

"I know that." I told him, worried about what I would do with it instead.

"What is it, exactly?" Cory attuned to it, atop it, pecking at it.

"A cursed relic of the Nameless. A nice bookend that will give me nightmares." I contemplated it. Surely it was harmless as long as I left it idle on a shelf. I took it home, hoping I was correct in my certainty.

"I do not like that thing. It has the aura of something jealous and devious." Silverbell whispered in my ear in the dark as I stared at it without sleep.

The touch of a fairy tickles. When the girls were playing on the floor and their moms weren't looking, the fairy would emerge from her hiding places. She would go to the babies and tickle them until they were two laughing babies. Then, just as quickly as she had appeared, the fairy was gone.

On my cheek it felt like the most sensual caress.

"I will get rid of it when I learn why I found it." I decided.

"Because that is what you do." Silverbell was agitated. She flew off into the span of darkness that lingers over the sleepers. She could feel their dreams, like a warmth, like a vibration. She told me it nourished her in some way, some kind of fairy vitamin. So she basked and watched the sleepers, making do with the home she had. That part I understood.

I had forgotten all about the house I had once had. It was long gone, but Persephone and Penelope were with me and that was all that mattered. I lived with Dr. Leidenfrost now and I loved my home.

As I forgot the object it invaded my thoughts and then I knew of it. I realized it had intelligence, was one of the Nameless. It claimed to have followed me backwards through time and saved me from a gunman only to arrive in my path as it did. I believed that the relic was lying to me. It had read my thoughts somehow and then lied to me. That was my instinct about it.

Then I met it while standing alone on a windswept stone. The stone we were on stretched to the horizon, the bedrock and all the land was blown away. Some other world, no, some other time. A time so long ago that there was yet to be water for the oceans and land upon the continent. We stood upon one single desolate continent. I watched as bubbling mounds began to form where the oldest mountains had just broken the surface.

"It is like the cutting of the teeth from the gums." The hideous Nameless stood beside me and spoke from its crocodile's mouth. Then it said: "Your species suffers this burst and so did mine. See where we get it? The Earth is our mother. She has not given birth to us yet. She has not even conceived us yet. We are only here in spirit, witnessing this moment in geologically scaled time."

"It relieves me that I was right. I do still know your language." I spoke back to it. My mouth could not form their words easily, but our communication was telepathic and it knew what I was saying. I realized that it had read my thoughts the same way, as my thoughts were still in their words in some unconscious part of my mind.

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"From the one whose essence you crystallized." It replied. "A distant descendant."

"Barely the same species." I noted for it. I could see it was a much more primordial version of the Nameless. A creature that had existed many millions of years before the others had come along. Vast time belonged to their dynasties. Their history was incomprehensibly long. I had forgotten almost all of it.

"It used a more advanced method of preserving itself than my people had." The creature told me.

"What do you want?" I asked it.

"To stop travelling backwards in time. I do not wish to meet the final things of the Great Bloodline. It is bad enough that I know of their last form as it wallows below." The creature explained: "You must end my existence. You must do it at the correct moment, when both of the angles of time converge. This will happen in your lifetime in about eleven months. I will be more sure of the exact coordinate as it grows closer."

"I will do this for you. You said you saved my life." I tried to hide my sarcastic tone.

"You do not believe that I did, and in any case it was entirely selfish. I offer you a reward instead. When my consciousness is terminated you shall have the reward. I shall tell you a spell that will restore you in physical vitality. Fair enough?" It bargained.

"I chose to do it before you offered me a reward. I just didn't believe that you saved me." I argued miserably with the monster.

"I altered the timeline until the result was your survival, warning you and preventing your death on subsequent time alterations. I cannot alter time from within this dimension. I am trapped here. It was a leap of faith, I had to believe you would help me."

"You allowed me to suffer so I would agree, so that I would want the reward." I reiterated its words. It was a lying and devious thing.

"Yes." It admitted.

I willed myself to be out of its presence, to open my eyes and be wakeful. The vision was gone like a daydream. I stared at the emerald in the glass orb. In a year it would restore my body. It wasn't lying about that. As it knew my mind I had known the mind of the creature. I could sense it really would, it was a perfectionist, that was the honor that bound it. It had to prove me wrong, so therefore it would do right by me.

My phone woke me from the light sleep I had slipped into. Dr. Leidenfrost had bought it for me. I still hadn't gotten used to answering a phone. I'd given Agent Saint my new number and hoped she wouldn't call me for anything.

"There's something I would like you to take a look at. Just to give me your opinion." She said without any kind of greeting.

"I'll be home." I told her.

It was before the sunrise, sometime around five when she arrived. She helped me into her car. I vaguely recalled she had made a point of renting the same one, just to feel more at home where the FBI sent her. I was glad she was back with the bureau. I hated to think of her alone just for doing her job. Her bosses didn't understand what she was up against. Or maybe they did, they had given her her own department, after-all.

The morning light was a halo behind the ancient manor. It had stood since colonial days and stood yet. In grayness the front faced away from the morning light. Presumably the light would enter the bedrooms from windows in the back.

"Fairview Midst is a restoration." Agent Saint noticed I was admiring the structure. Knowing its name reminded me of what I had done at Festival Moon. I felt ashamed that I had somehow forgotten the name of the man who took my place at the gallows for that.

"Something the matter, Mr. Briar?" She asked.

"Could you just call me Lord? We've gone through it together, haven't we?" I requested with some annoyance.

"I've missed you, Lord." She added suddenly. "My agents don't see the way you do. They don't know what I see."

I nodded. Her tone had changed when she had said this and I accepted that she was being sincere.

"My Lord has revealed he has a secret to one who finds secrets." Cory warned me in our hybrid language, clicking and muttering.

I followed Agent Saint and she asked again:

"What is bothering you?" She asked.

"The guy who killed Anson Carni. What was his name?" I asked her.

"Hold on, I forgot." She got her phone and looked up the article about the conviction. "Castini Ishbaal. He confessed to the first degree murder of Anson Carni. Investigators did not believe his confession until the weapon he had was proven to be the one used, despite that fact that several components necessary to fire the weapon were missing. He is on death row."

"They gave him the death sentence? He confessed! The district attorney didn't even think he was guilty!" I protested.

"You know who the real killer is?" Agent Saint had eyes that caught the light in such a pale way that I had to look away. It was like she could see all my deeds laid bare. Asking me to tell the truth was merely a formality.

"I killed him. That's how I know it wasn't Castini. He took it from me, he followed me and found the gun and put it back together and said that he had done it. He stole my sin." I confessed and complained.

"Why?" She asked, blinking serenely.

"Uh." I hesitated, unsure that I had even thought about why he had done it.

"Perhaps you should not judge this man until you know the truth about him." Agent Saint told me. "And only he can tell you what his truth is."

"How will I do this?" I asked humbly.

"I will help you. You must help me first." She pointed to Fairview Midst and gestured towards it also. "Shall we then?"

We went inside with a key from a realtor's box that she knew the code to.

"Thomas Grey owned this mansion. He wasn't really Thomas Grey, an orphan from London. He took that identity and we can only presume the real one is dead. He was Adrian Merriwell before that, and again, going back, we knew him as Daniel McCallister. That was about two hundred years ago." Agent Saint led me through the place. The furniture was draped in sheets.

"What did he do?" I asked.

"He is a serial killer. They found seven bodies buried on his property in the UK and we found four more here. He has killed people on two continents for two centuries." She told me.

"A killer grey in years." Cory said with some amusement.

"DNA and fingerprinting?" I asked, wondering if they knew for a fact it was him. She said nothing.

"We can prove he has killed three people here and one over there. The rest, you and I know is true, but it cannot be true." Agent Saint led me to the dumbwaiter for the winecellar. I was able to fit myself and my chair onto it and met her below.

I could see the handiwork of her team, they had cut open his panic room or vault or whatever it was. The heavy door was cut through and set aside. Only one item was inside.

"Ever read Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde?" She asked as she slowly walked up alongside the covered painting.

"No. What is it about?" I gulped.

"Apparently it is a true story, at least the part about making a deal with the devil." Agent Saint unveiled the portrait.

Some kind of horrifying rotten creature stood there like we were looking through a doorway at it. It was alive, the maggots dripping from it and its rheumy eyes watching us with a toothless, black-gummed scowl. The stench of it was visual, but hit the nostrils with efficacious synthesia. I was gagging on the cloud until I looked away, and then I could breathe.

"What is that?" I asked Agent Saint.

"It is a painting. A portrait that aged, rotted, died, when it should be our suspect." Agent Saint explained. "At least that is what I think."

The portrait stared down on me and my crow as we sat before it on my wheelchair. Cory told it:

"Look away devil. You are a picture of what is inside an ugly man, a man whose ugliness is all inside." Said my crow.

"You want to know what I think?" I offered. She nodded eagerly. I said: "I think that he is the devil. That this is his true form."

"Really?" Agent Saint doubted it.

"No." I apologized. I considered what I was looking at, thinking about it as I sat in my wheelchair. Then I explained my thoughts: "I think he is using magic to preserve himself. This is a manifestation of the evil he has done while under the spell on him. Without this, the spell would be broken and he would assume this image." I decided after some thought.

Agent Saint asked: "If I burned this he would look horrible like this painting?"

"Yes." I sounded sure. My instincts told me I was correct. Destroying his portrait would destroy him.

We left and Agent Saint told me: "That's good to know. He is going to beat the system."

She took me home and arranged that I could interview with Castini and herself. I thanked her for whatever effort she had made to get me there with him. Agent Saint told me:

"Guilt belongs to the guilty."

I sat across from the man who had stolen my sin. I asked him:

"Why did you kill Anson Carni?"

"His name was Carnius and I did not have the courage to do it. Not for decades. It was my burden and you took it from me. Now it is mine again, as it should be." Castini Ishbaal explained. There was a timorousness to him, a gentleness in his voice, a feeling of harmlessness from him.

"I killed him, not you!" I slapped my hands on the table and said my truth a little too loudly. One of the guards was staring at us.

"It was me. It was my task in life and I failed so you were sent to do it for me. This part I must do. You cannot have it, the guilt belongs to me. I am his killer." Castini vowed. Then he raised his voice and said: "Guards!"

They came for him, our interview over. Agent Saint put her hand on my shoulder:

"Let him go."