Naturally, since both their world and ours is a world, we intersect different regions, so the creatures and demons of the East are different than ours, as are those of the African and the Amerind. But, commonly, our myths, our legends, our heroic sagas, are dream-linked accounts of that other place. The rest of you, the audience for these, whether reading or hearing them, respond because there is a suspension of disbelief induced by your own dream-links as well.

That is why we seem to be reading, and writing, the same book. We are not writing fiction at all; we are writing subjectively filtered accounts of the history of this other world.

There is a way through; a physical passageway across the Sea of Dreams. A few find it by accident, by unnatural convergence of being at just the wrong spot at the right time, vanishing there and becoming mysterious disappearances here, lumped with all the mundane, and more evil, fates of the bulk of the disappeared. A few go through, one way or the other, due to the rare dabbling in supernatural agencies that still goes on in back rooms and upper-class conservatories. Only one man, a sorcerer of great power in Husaquahr, can do it at will, and when and with whom and what he chooses.

He’s been around a long time—nobody knows how long, not even the others on the Council—and he’s had many names, both here and there. A decade ago he needed a hero not so bound by the Rules to combat an army of evil, and he chose, by means we will never know, an interstate trucker on the skids, a man in whose veins flowed the blood of the ancient Apaches, snatching him at the last moment from a fatal accident on a lonely west Texas highway. With him came an unexpected addition, a young woman hitchhiker who had education and once had promise, but whose life was so broken and mangled that she was just looking for a decent place to commit suicide. Together they battled the forces of Darkness, and vanquished them—for a time, for even the Rules mandate that no victory is without costs, nor may good or evil totally triumph.