Trust is foolish, because for all anyone knows, The Screaming Zahir may be a finite resource. It might be that each person who comes across it somehow takes ownership of it from you. How can you possess that which is possessed by all? If the Screaming Zahir belongs to everyone, then it belongs to no one.

And yet, you were drawn here like anyone else, by the stories of The Screaming Zahir, by the tales of the obsessed. Those glass-eyed, humbled wretches who spoke of nothing else, thought of nothing else, dreamed of nothing else when they grasped moments of sleep in their great exhaustion.

The skull ahead if larger than a man. The horns that curve down on either side of its face send shadows into the voids of the gigantic beast’s eye sockets. Faces are formed, twin women staring at one another, their eyes wide and their mouths agape to scream. They are perched in their tombs - perhaps tombs are worthy of pursuit as a concept? What would they scream of, other than The Screaming Zahir?