First, imagine a book in your mind.
This book encompassed everything happening now, everything that had happened, and everything that would eventually happen.
It seemed to be the myriad phenomena of the world, containing all things.
The book had a thick, smooth cover, but its leather came from some beast that had never existed, just as the paper bearing its words came from some plant that had never appeared.
The only pair of eyes that had ever seen this book belonged to a blind man, and those eyes contained nothing but endless night.
He was Destiny. Destiny was always blind.
The book was linked to him by an invisible chain, perhaps to keep it from being lost, perhaps to stop him from escaping its pages, or perhaps to show that Destiny and stories were one and the same.
Yet even he could not explain it, nor could he tell anyone else.
Still, the Book of Destiny had its limits. It contained only stories that already existed, and could not record poems that had never been. Thus, now that Dream had vanished, finding him was difficult.
But today, when Destiny turned to the next page, he inexplicably saw himself appear within the book.
Such things had happened before, but he also knew that whenever he appeared in a story, matters tended to become complicated.
He was doing what he did now—holding the heavy Book of Destiny as he stood in his home, the Labyrinth of Destiny, calling out to another member of his family through an oil painting on the wall.
"I am Destiny of the Endless. Here, I call upon you, my sister, though I do not know why I am doing so."
The oil painting on the wall came alive. The beautiful woman within had already worn a smile,