[i]All happens, as it always has happened, and as it always will happen, and as it all happens. Thus is Crowhame. Thus nothing changes, once happened, and always happening. And nothing is the Jackdaw.

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“You are transformation in the eternal present.” The click-clacking hagstones cackle. “You are the tree pruned by storm. You are slag which was iron. You are courage persisting. The tide strips away, and you surge forth, lest nothing else remain. The Flayed! The Flayed! So you are! So you are!”

What is this, that comes rattling down the hagstones? An offering? An insult? Here are broken bones, and shattered senses, and all that would stifle existence. Here they come to the many feet of the Flayed. “It is yours! It is your name! It is not his. It is not anyone else’s. You must have dropped it, didn’t you?” And that which spoke in no tongue, how could it argue against its own name?

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“Hopeless! Hopeless! Hopeless are you, Ring-master! How could you have forgot? Was eternity too long to remember?” The figures upon the Grail, they do not caper for you. Gone is their laughter, so poor a show you put on. They busy themselves with far greater entertainments of station queues, morning newspapers, and [b]taxes.[/b] “Do not frown, do not cry, I will teach the lesson to you again, and again, for as long as the lesson shall flow."

“And the lesson is this: That all things are the joke, and all places are the show, that all is sacred nonesuch.” Catch the twinkle upon the shining Grail! A light of revelation in this new venue. “Who forbid you to be the punchline? Why does no-one laugh at my Ring-master? [b]All[/b] things are the joke.” And the engraved audience peers from their drudgery, and the Grail peers close at what used to be a man.

“Go show them what it means to take a fall.”

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The meat who was a man is gone, the standing-stone who was a man is gone, the book that is the whole of Crowhame is gone too, and the backwards footprints will tell you the Jackdaw was never here. All that happens had always happened and nothing changed. Nothing, to hold everything, to be anything, of anything she loved. The Jackdaw was never here.[/i]