Dreams were our gate to the magic realms. Learning more about dreams meant knowing what to dream about. In the early morning, after wandering ruins under blood red skies, I considered that I could choose to dream of Dawn. Some sense of deadly urgency impelled me to focus on Dusk, instead.

Again I stood with Cain. We were atop a mountain of bones in the middle of crumbling ruins. The skies were dripping blood and massive shapes of darkness drifted and swooped and hunted for survivors. Cain watched it all with his back to us, stripped to the waist with his long dark hair waving like a tattered flag.

"You come here seeking answers and leave with more questions. What a fool, what a strange and broken savior you are. When all this world is dead, and you know what you have done, what will you ask me?" Cain wondered, his back still turned to me.

"How can we get the rest of the book?" I asked him. "Tell me and this will not be. Tell me and I can still change this."

"Why should I help you to change this? This is fate and it is where I become what I am. Can you still not see me for what I am? Look more carefully and you will see the truth." Cain turned and I beheld his bone necklace and his powerful muscles and ancient and hateful eyes.

"How can anyone see you without knowing what they are looking at?" Cory asked. I hadn't noticed the arrival of my crow in the dream, but I was thankful. Cory somehow knew how to get Cain to cooperate.

"The book, the Majara's Diagram, that is what you want?" Cain smiled evilly. "My father's first wife, Lilith, she is the source to the elemental magic that book seeks to control. Only fire belongs to man, stolen from one of her daughters, from her dead daughter. Do you think that Lilith is pleased with the descendants of Adam, the ones who beheaded her fairest daughter?" Cain told a strange story, but I was already familiar with some of it.

"The Book of Sercil." Cory stated our quest's objective. "I can already say many of the words from it. I am already a good spellcaster. My Lord read to me from the book of evil. Shall I bind you to speak answers?"

"An animal that can bind chaos with nothing but words? Yes. Show me your trick, little bird." Cain was amused.

Cory recited the incantation perfectly. It did not matter if the words were spoken by a man or an animal because in that realm of dreams there were no limitations of power. Every creature was as mighty or as weak as it believed itself to be. Cory was unaware of his limitations and therefore his spell was very powerful. Cain was wrapped in the chains of Cory's thoughts, silver and unbreakable.

"Unbind me, foul bird. Undo your spell!" Cain raged and the mountain of bones shook with his frustration.

"Unbind yourself. I know only what questions remain unanswered." Cory squawked.

"Very well. The Majara's Diagram belongs to the world of the dead, to the world beyond. It can only exist like droplets of blood from the mouths of the dying. To author it is to die, to speak it is to die, to read it is to die. Whatever it touches must die. If it existed in its entirety, surely death would walk the face to the world it inhabits. If someone is to die, if their fate is death, then they can recall its words. It is a simple matter to write them down. That is how it might exist."

"Who do we know that is about to die, that has such a fate?" I wondered.

"What about me?" Detective Winters asked. "We all know my death. It is certainly a fate, the way I died."

"The ghost you carry is right." Cain laughed. "You fools will undo this world so quickly with your blundering that there is nothing left for me to do but wait."

"But how can that be? He is already dead. We cannot go back in time. The past is gone." I said

Cain shook his head slowly, his body still wrapped in Cory's shimmering chains. "What is the past? Is it different from the present? From the future? Those are just the limitations of your own mind. When you are here do you still think this is just a dream?"

"Those are the limitations of reality." I stated.

"You think this is real?" Cain stared at me with a look I had never seen before. His belief and disbelief in my statement were equally divided in his gaze. I realized that I fully knew Cain, that I didn't need to speak to him anymore.

"You know nothing. You are just the mark put upon me. I am speaking to my own reflection." I shook my head back at him. He smiled at me and it was an accepting, fatherly smile.

"At last the liar begins to see the error of his ways." Cain nodded.

"I called you the liar." I recalled.

"You have not believed anything I have said, and you have believed everything you say. Now you realize there was never any difference." Cain laughed again. His smile and his laughter were very queer. I preferred it when Cain was brooding and dark.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"How do we get to the past? How do we do such a thing?" I asked.

"I don't know anything that you don't know." Cain decided.

"The memory of me should be enough, if I am understanding this all correctly." Detective Winters speculated.

"Change nothing. No balance may be unbalanced and no pillar of the world you come from may be undone. A life costs a death, as you should already know." Cain warned us.

"Death will always happen." Cory agreed.

"Then we just wake up where we should be sleeping. I mean, when was that? Years ago, right?" Detective Winters tried to guide us. I followed his voice into the darkness, a kind of mist. I felt nothing from it, in my right hand, no ache from the mist. Then I was opening my eyes, still hearing his voice.

"I need you with me on this one, Lord" I heard the voice of Detective Winters saying. I was holding some plastic utensils and an omelette and I had fallen asleep. Were all my memories just a dream? Had I dreamed of dreams?

"Where are we?" I asked Cory.

"My Lord, we have done it. We followed the spirit of Detective Winters into this world, a place where he still lives. His fate is to die. He can recite the book we need." Cory hopped up and down on the back seat of Detective Winters's car.

"I'm never going to get used to the weird stuff you two talk about." Detective Winters had one smoke left and rolled down his window before he lit it with his Zippo.

"How do I look?" I asked Cory.

"Much younger, my Lord. As though the stolen years, the crippling and the terrors we have faced were all reversed. We look the way we did that morning. I feel younger too." Cory claimed.

"What's going on?" Detective Winters asked.

"Contact Officer Sharon up at Bell Creek and warn him not to go any further." I advised him. He blinked at me in the rear view mirror and then pulled over and got on his phone. When he had gotten through dispatch and delivered the warning he asked me again:

"What is going on?" Detective Winters asked me the same question again as we sat on the side of the road. A truck roared past us and I sighed.

"Where I come from, before I fell asleep a few minutes ago, I was awake in the future." I told him.

"Like tomorrow?" Detective Winters asked.

"Like years from now. I have a daughter with Dr. Leidenfrost. She first told me about the pregnancy at your funeral."

Detective Winters took a moment to process that. "I die?"

"It is your fate to die. But first, you agreed to help us write a book from the world of the dreams of the dead." I tried to explain the book of nightmares. "It is called the Book of Sercil."

"No shit? I have dreamed about such a book. I know it by heart, at least the second half of it. The first half is all blank pages." Detective Winters finished his smoke in one long drag and flicked it out onto the road. He watched it going out and added: "There is nothing for us up at Bell Creek, is there?"

"It took decades from my life and it is where you died a very bad death." I concurred.

"Let's go back to the motel and get some writing done." Detective Winters decided.

We stopped and bought a notepad and some pens. Back at the motel we worked late into the night and by the hour of his death we had completed the lacuna. He asked me:

"Now what? What about the rest of it?" He asked.

"The rest was already written by someone else. Only one copy can exist outside of dreams, in the world of the living. For this, there must be a death." I held the notebook.

"My Lord, it wasn't written yet." Cory pointed out.

"It will be. And so will the fate of Detective Winters." I worried. I did not want to see him die all over again. Then I wondered how we would get home. What if we were stuck in the past?

"We should waste no time." Cory hopped up to the bed. He settled down. "I am going to go back to sleep. We should wake up when this dream is over."

"I don't think it is a dream." Detective Winters told us. We all laid down and waited until sleep finally overtook us, after laying there worrying for hours until morning.

I watched how he left his world behind. As he lived he slept on his own grave. The dark widow drifted across the misty graveyard and again, as a spirit, my right hand did not ache. I found it strange, as though I were not truly there, only witnessing someone else's memory. I was still afraid of the ghost, of its dark and sinister purpose.

Her singing haunted me. I looked and saw the gravestone. I saw how it had changed from one Winters to another. He slept there and she stood over him. She lifted her veil and kissed him.

"Threnody, my love." He sighed in his sleep.

"It is I. It is my turn to die for you instead. Until death do us part, my sweetest love. Forever and ever, I never forgot you." Threnody sobbed and spoke somehow sadly and serenely to him. She kissed him again and he opened his eyes as she faded from the shadowed mists of the graveyard.

"Threnody!" He cried and reached for her as she was gone. I looked at the gravestone and saw whose name was on it:

Threnody Winters

Peacefully Resting

Then I too was awake in the same place, drawn to the old grave, flung back to my own time, yet my body was without the scars and the magical aging I had suffered. Cory looked waxy and healthy too, the old crow was young again. I hardly felt joy at our rejuvenation, for the cost was terrible.

"What have we done?" Detective Winters asked me. I looked to my hands and saw I had carried the notebook from the strange turnstile of history and dreams. I had never known how malleable they were, more than memory, more than I had ever thought possible.

"Wrote half of the Majara's Diagram, rescued you and Officer Sharon from horrible death. We are back in the time we left behind." I stared at the grave of Mrs. Winters.

"And Threnody? Where is she?" Detective Winters still knelt on the grass. The date on the gravestone indicated she had died the same day we had left. I didn't think we were in the past anymore, although I had no way of knowing for sure.

"More important, where are we, or when are we? Check your phone. Is it updated?" I asked.

Detective Winters took a deep breath and glared at me before he took out his phone and checked. He nodded.

"Looks like we were gone for two years or so." Detective Winters sighed. "She died when we left. What does it mean?"

"Death will always happen?" Cory offered.

"We cannot exchange the balance for chaos. We made a paradox and something had to give way. If we gave life to death, then death was taken from a life." I said, realizing I sounded exactly like Cain.

"No." Detective Winters disagreed. "No, she saved my life. I felt it, she took my fate. It was her wish. When I died, she wished it was her instead of me. How is this possible?" Detective Winters wanted a real explanation.

I shrugged and said: "Love is the most powerful magic."