Babies made me happy. When I held my daughter I could somehow forget the desperate nightmares I had seen. Looking into her innocent eyes I found a sanctuary from the residue of evil that lingered in my consciousness.

I held in my hand the dust of the aeons. I poured it between my fingers. As morning brought my daughter's smile to my sight, I in turn was brought to another place. I knelt amid the pouring sands as the wind took them across the scoured ruins of that nameless city of fable. I didn't believe in fables, or rather I didn't believe that fables were fiction. It is impossible to believe something does not exist when it pours between the fingers. To know that the myth was real was a dull horror, aching in my mind.

"We are not here. This is the collective memory of those we are here to steal from. My Lord?" Cory was hopping about and leaving crow tracks in the sand that vanished in the dusty winds. I realized he had tried for my attention already. I was lost in my thoughts about the place and then recognized my thoughts were not even really my own. Like he was saying: we were in the collective memory of those we were trying to rob.

I stood up and as my head brushed the vague, uncolored sky, the world froze into a mural and became as ribbons lifting away from us and vanishing. There was no dust on my fingers. I stepped off the dais and it took a moment to shake off the disorientation I felt.

I recalled that after work I had encountered a cat and followed it into an invisible cave in an embankment in the empty lot. The stairs had led to this place. Four dim gray stones sat, each carved and polished into a dais. When the cat told us we were to take the emerald disc we were instructed to find its hidden place on our own. The only clues were in the memories of the creatures that had built this place. Each dais took more and more of my mind as I stepped upon them and saw the histories they held. I stood feeling dizzy and had to put my hand on the smooth walls of the carved cavern.

"It was upon such a stone that I learned the language and ways of Cat." Cory told me. "Before I met you, I wanted to know how to speak the names of all creatures. Cats know many such names, their sorcerers know many things."

"Teleportation is their greatest secret." I decided. Cory clicked once in agreement.

"It is a magic that is beyond all their other spells. Watching you and seeing the future are simple tricks. Some can resurrect themselves a number of times." Cory spoke of the magic of cats.

"Nine times." I speculated.

"Silver?" Cory heard the number and associated it with the numeric values that crows assign to a variety of people, objects and ideas.

"Not every use of a number holds a magical property." I tried to explain to my crow. He thought I was joking and began to laugh at me and then told me:

"My Lord tells the best jokes." He chuckled, a sound like a car engine grinding during an attempted ignition.

I realized we could see in that darkness despite a lack of light. It was as though the very air held something that outlined everything. It was a place designed for the eyes and bodies of reptiles that had died or devolved before the rise of humans. The places and histories I had absorbed into my head helped me to understand that these were four of many such powerful artifacts. To climb onto one and stop breathing was to be imbued with the knowledge it contained. But the memory was like walking among them in their markets and cities.

"All of it as dust. All gone." I sighed. I felt the desolation of their downfall, having seen it all. Their empires had stood for a hundred thousand years before their decline. It was complicated, many corruptions had infected their culture. I found all of their ways abhorrent, especially when they developed a taste for their own eggs. They had made their own offspring into a delicacy. Their empty nests and their long lives and mutating bodies spoke of the ultimate horror of a once wise and scientific race. I wanted to vomit the knowledge from my mind; to pour it between the fingers of thought as dust.

"Knowledge is not dust." Cory shared the memories of the nameless race and had learned their languages and magic alongside me.

"I am struggling to remember my own life, how we came to be here." I complained. "My head is filled with a million facts about extinct reptiles."

"And yet we have learned nothing of the emerald disc we must steal from them." Cory clicked in agreement. Then he restated: "Knowledge is not dust."

"I know. We could speak to each other in their tongue, cast their spells even. If we called the nameless ones by the name they gave themselves, would we still know them to be nameless?" I wondered. Cory considered this, as though it meant something.

"Efks, skif, shif, eksa, shf if shiffe eks!" Cory cast one of their spells with nothing but words. I knew the same spell and knew it would open the door that was not to be opened. I trembled in fear, knowing it broke their laws. An ornate door angled with the vaulted ceiling and made of a metal of orange brown appeared. I stared at it in the false light and saw the symbols that meant it was illegal and wrong to open that door. The room held its own strange dimension like the inside of a dome that felt both spacious and too low at once. The door was an impossibly angled wedge that conformed to this shape. How it could exist defied geometry. On impulse I spoke the final word of the spell and it opened. My mind hurt trying to comprehend how it moved inward despite its dimensions.

"Do we dare?" Cory asked me in our own hybrid tongue. I had asked it many times in our early adventures. I longed for the daylight and the magic springs and ancient rocks we had found while walking unknown trails. How we had come to these serial nightmares I could not account for. I nodded. Cory landed on my shoulder as we stepped through the portal to the forbidden place of a fallen race.

There was a sensation of dread, not knowing what safeguards or traps might wait. We met no danger as we entered that final chamber. The idea of its absolute bane was enough to keep it sealed by the species that had made it. Never had they come here after they had built it. One dais remained there. I worried at what knowledge it would share. Such horror at their debauchery was already in my mind. What final secret could be so terrible that they had hidden it, even from themselves?

"Cory?" I asked for reassurance.

"My Lord fears knowledge." Cory sounded disappointed with me. I clicked that he was right. I was afraid.

"Our minds could break." I noted.

"So? We will know what nothing knows." Cory was not afraid. "But my Lord has a valid point. The nameless ones themselves feared this knowledge. It was forbidden to creatures without any morals left. They had shed all decency like a snake sheds its skin."

"Doesn't that frighten you? What could possibly be so awful that they kept it a secret when nothing was shameful to them?" I stared in dim terror as my mind raced through the memories of those foul amphibious reptiles with a science that could write magic. Their mouths sucking their young from the yoke of their own eggs and belching in satisfaction, their slime covered orgies and their prayers to obscene entities: just for amusement. All of those ways and some sins I couldn't even describe, so alien were their customs and bodies.

"You presume it is some dark deed that they could not allow to be known. It could simply be the location of their accumulated wealth and the spells required to obtain it." Cory advised me of an alternative. It was unlike him to speculate in such a way, but he knew as well as I did that their own kind would have believed this to be the knowledge of the final dais.

"It shall be both. Iksh Ne Shittim wrote in its final words that one dais was unknown and to know it was to know the ultimate inheritance, the last phase of life for the nameless ones." I observed the memory of one individual among them that had held certainty of this chamber we stood in.

"You mean the heretic's book? None of them took the words of Iksh Ne Shittim seriously. Others thought it held the wisdom of wealth, nothing more." Cory argued.

"The last generation was the stupidist." I ignored their collective thoughts as they gibbered in their hideous language inside my own mind. A million spoken and written words of the nameless ones could be freshly recalled by me and my bird. I wondered at the capacity of our brains to have so much contained; all within the hour since we had walked into that place following a pregnant gray cat. She had not lingered.

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"So stupid that they were smart enough to obey their only remaining law." Cory agreed and disagreed in the same statement. Crows loved saying things like that. It was their highest form of humor. So funny we both forgot to laugh.

"Let us see." I used the feeling of powerful humor to shield my personality from the onslaught of 'wisdom' I would receive. I crawled up onto the dais and Cory landed beside me from a hop and we exhaled.

Some from each generation were considered special and deserved a sacred burial. They mummified these ones and encased them in boxes of transparent metal that was more precious than gold and unable to exist on earth without the enchantments of their science. Over time they had lost many of their greatest achievements, unable to replicate their own inventions. How this was possible was a mystery, since even Cory and I knew how to manufacture such material, at least in principle. We knew all of their spells and technology, which were basically the same thing. How they could forget what two aliens had learned in the span of an hour was not something we had learned yet.

We stood where the last of their kind had become naked savages, dwelling as idiot immortals in the crumbling ruins of their own cities. They warred among themselves, killing each other with great effort, as they had forgotten how to use their weapons and death spells. Their killing spells required the name of a creature to be known by the killer, and these last ones had no names. They had truly and ironically become a nameless race. Creatures that could know the names of particles and assemble them in the air with spoken words had no more names for themselves. I corrected that thought: these degenerate final abominations were not the same creatures anymore. They could barely even speak or think.

They raided each other for the food they had: expired garbage stored against unforeseen disasters by prudent ancestors. They killed each other over the mummified remains of those same ancestors. They killed themselves when they had nothing else to kill.

There was no more mystery about the construction of this library, the four shelves in the chamber before and the last shelf in the forbidden chamber. It was made by the living ancestors in an effort to preserve all their knowledge, and yet it was all merely a fraction, barely a third of all the accumulated education of a thousand dynasties. The rest was lost or destroyed by their vandalizing youths in their rampant ignorance. The living ancestors were the first secret of the final dais. One by one their preservation had failed and their spirits were obliterated. Not one should remain except it had made itself a prisoner of the emerald disc. It had infused its will into an object of timeless strength and hidden itself in a microcosmos of its own creation. Before it had done this it had committed one final and most diabolical sin. My mind tried to reject what I was learning and could not escape the facts.

It had possessed the clumsy bodies of the dying and nameless race and forced them to work their minds, mouths and hands to craft a laboratory. It was a crude alchemy compared to all they had done before, and yet it was still far removed from anything mankind could make yet. These puppet lab assistants assembled what was needed to preserve a mockery of their species: a new generation inert from advancement or failure. These last ones were unlike any before and could not reproduce or die. They had taken the early humans to this underground hall and into the dimly lit laboratory. They had dissected them alive without regard to the suffering they caused. When they were satisfied they sewed them back up with the things they had changed. Then they bred them above, changing the stock of the tribe of humans until they had something they could work with. These humans were their cattle and concubines at once. As they changed them and bred them they achieved a final stock. The bones that piled up showed the gradual change from one species to another.

By the time they had completed this last project there was not one human of the tribe or labcoat wearing nameless one left. There was only the cocoons of unborn monsters that hung in the laboratory. After a very long time those creatures were born. They had no minds, only reptile instinct. Always they did the same things and obeyed the will of their creator. Like a god the last of the nameless ruled them from their empty heads. They were the emergent body of a dead and disembodied being.

They burrowed through the earth and walked their new catacombs until they had horrible tunnels beneath the new cities that humans were building. They were undying creatures and yet they were living things that needed food. Only one food could nourish their bodies. To get it they taught the humans corruption. They taught the humans to love diamonds and these they exchanged for food. Centuries went by and humans kept trading the newly born in secret pacts for the clear rocks of the earth.

The corrupt bargain lasted all through human history. The creatures simply existed below every important city of man and traded with the rich and powerful, giving them the diamonds, on occasion, for the continued delivery of the freshly born. Conspiracies and cults among the humans kept their secret for them: the creatures that were to last forever. The eternal pact had many forms, many ways to get the meat of Man, all invented by the most greedy and wealthy and powerful among men. Every city, every society had a way to trade with the creatures throughout all of human history.

The more babies that were given to the creatures the less dormant they were and the more wealth they transferred to the surface. I could not stand to see that the greatest nation had developed a system that always produced unborn babies to feed them, treated as medical waste or garbage. It was the easiest and darkest method yet. I compared the Romans leaving 'unwanted' babies outside the gate of their villa at night to the medical waste bins with bags containing a soup of torn up fetuses.

How poor Rome seemed when compared to its modern counterpart. I exited the darkest chapter of their history and the first chapter of human history. It was a shared history with the nameless ones, a shared bloodline. I heard a madman laughing maniacally in the limelight and someone was clawing at my face and pulling out my hair. I looked at the blood and hair on my hands and the crazed laughter stopped.

"My Lord." Cory spoke with delicate words. "That is not a knowledge that should be known."

"Is that what you think?" I asked him.

"It is the sentient thought of the one who made this place and hid their secrets here. When they looked into their own future and knew it would be: they would not know what it would teach. Not because they couldn't guess but because they refused to accept it." Cory told me the last fact, which was not one they had said. It was the one we both knew then, as we had learned what they themselves did not wish to know. They did not want to see their fate as a bloodline mindlessly enslaved to the pathetic humans for a food they found disgusting. Their revulsion was nothing compared to mine.

"They eat our babies and pay the rich." I gagged on the information.

"They always have done this. Money is the foundation of human civilization. Its value comes from a nameless debt." Cory completed the cycle for me. "Have you not always felt that money is somehow evil?"

"It is common knowledge." I spat.

"Then those with the most money must be the most evil." Cory added it up for me. I shook my head.

"We ignore that and wish to be rich." I disagreed. "Money is a god."

"God is a diamond traded for the flesh of the children of men?" Cory feigned confusion, forcing me to accept what I now knew.

"This knowledge is unacceptable." I wanted to puke it out of my mind and could not make it be forgotten.

"What is ignorance?" Cory made fun of me. He was not as disturbed, it all meant very little to him, although he recognized it as evil. "My Lord knew all of this to be true, by instinct, by dreams, by touching a diamond."

"I've never touched a diamond." I swore. "The blood on my hand is my own."

"We still don't have the emerald disc." Cory pointed out, changing the subject.

"Yes we do." I felt something like rational sanity for a moment. My mind was spinning wildly, trying to know whether I actually knew anything at all.

"What do you mean?" Cory tilted his head.

"We know where to find it." I realized as I said so.

"Where? It is suspended in a timeless state. How can we touch something outside the walls of time?" Cory was puzzled.

I pointed to my own head. "The emerald disc is nothing but a thought or an idea in our state of existence."

"Duh." Cory said after I stopped talking.

"What does it contain?" I rolled my hands, waiting for him to catch up. He pondered this and then he got it:

"The last mind of their kind."

"Does it know more than we do? Are its emotions or needs somehow removed from ours?" I asked, smiling as Cory nodded and comprehended my meaning.

"We can make it a reality. We know all of its secrets, we can crystallize it into reality, trapping it within sequence." I said what we both knew.

"Let's do it, let's do it before we can forget any of it. If it fades it will not be complete." Cory hopped up and down with excitement.

Together we chanted the words that made the emerald disc appear from thin air, commanding the molecules to form by speaking their name and configuration into existence. It was the final use of their science-magic, as we both forgot most of their sentiments and days and books and histories as we infused them into the emerald disc. Only a vague recollection like a fading nightmare remained.

I only knew them as the nameless as I held the disc, forgetting what they called themselves. Cory looked at the air above the disc and said quietly: "Its spirit is here and cannot remain long."

"Tell it to go away." I whispered with residual reverence.

"Ifn kikn shiss hiss hikish nftik." Cory spoke to it in its own language, the nameless language. He had told the ghost that it was now dead. Once dismissed it left the disc as an empty shell.

"Let's get out of here. I hate this place." I said as I stood up. Outside our escorting cat was waiting for the prize we had obtained. I left it there at her feet and she meowed something to us.

"She said 'your welcome' as a way of saying 'thank you'." Cory told me. "The way a cat expresses gratitude is to accept your gratitude at serving it."

"I know." I recalled.

"My Lord, may I confess something peculiar about myself I have just realized?" Cory was inferring that this was a change for him, by his exact cadence.

"Is it that you kinda like cats all-of-a-sudden? Like they are somehow clean?" I asked. I felt that way suddenly.

"Yes my Lord. I do believe I have a love for cats." Cory chuckled softly and it sounded like an electric car powering down.

"Me too." I smiled as we headed for home.