Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

I…I don’t think it knows what it’s creating. Not consciously, at any rate. It’s like an unconscious echo of things once known and cherished.

You’ve seen the impossibilities, just like I have. Shells of buildings without interiors. Subway tunnels where no train will ever run because they have no exits. People, or pieces of people, seemingly carved out of white marble, out of pearls. Sometimes a whole figure, sometimes just part of one trailing off into nothingness.

Nobody goes there anymore, and I don’t blame them. Anyone who’s seen the new constructions, how unsettling they are, or even the messy pangs that birth them…no, I don’t blame them at all.

We’re not sure of what’s in the center, what’s causing it. But I think it’s obvious that they are…or were…like us. And, like I said, I don’t think it knows what it’s doing. What we’re seeing are mere dreams, echoes, of a life it once knew.

If archaeologists could excavate the depths of your dreams, if little men ran over your naked subconscious looking for meaning, what would you do? What would I do?

That’s why we must be cautious.

That’s also why we must know.

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Throughout the history of the Crimson Empire, one rule was regarded as absolute by the Imperial Guard: no surrender. Legions of the Guard could be defeated; they could retreat; they could be annihilated. But they could not surrender, and only in instances where legions changed allegiance from one claimant to the throne to another was anything of the sort not punished in the harshest terms.

The 83rd Legion was particularly well-respected in the Empire; of the original 100 legions, it was one of only seven that had never been defeated or disbanded. As such, it was assigned to one of the most volatile areas of the Imperial frontier, a sector where quiescent tribes and petty kingdoms forever seethed and were one spark away from rebellion.

During the Imperial Crisis, when Emperor Sejan IV was besieged in the capital by rebellious troops seeking to remove him for his alleged insanity, the 83rd Legion found itself abandoned on its flanks as the soldiers moved north en masse to support one side or the other. Sensing their opportunity, an alliance of the tribes and small kingdoms surrounded the 83rd legion and demanded their surrender.

Cut off from resupply or reinforcement, the legion’s standing orders were to break out or fight to the last man. The former was impossible, as the Legion was outnumbered five to one, and the latter was complicated by circumstance. As a border unit, the 83rd had many camp followers including the wives and children or many officers and men. To fight to the last would have been to sacrifice their loved ones.

What followed would rock the Empire for a hundred years.

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The contest between flesh and steel lasted for many months and many years of months. Each side took upon itself to improve its arsenal with greater and more potent means not only of delivering death but of planning the delivery of death. Thus the side of steel built the massive computer banks that have since become known as Mothers, and the side of flesh bred titans of bone and brain and steel that they called the Fathers.

In time, steel won the contest, and all the great Fathers of the flesh were torn down. Without their thoughts, conveyed through a powerful psychic wind, many of the armies of the flesh were useless. Those of the flesh who could do so moulted their arms and armor and surrendered, while those who could not were slaughtered. It was not without a touch of irony, incidentally, that the mechanized troopers of the steel were themselves deactivated and slaughtered soon after, so great was the threat they were seen to pose to steel without an external enemy.

The final Father of the flesh, though, was not destroyed. He was instead pulled from his citadel by the forces of steel and the glands that made his psychic commands audible across vast distances were smashed and destroyed. Dead Fathers rapidly crumbled to dust, so the forces of steel were careful to keep their trophy alive. He was installed in a great tank, filled with recycled nutrients, as part of the innermost ward of the city of steel.

But there was something that the Mothers of steel had failed to account for.

Steel did not heal, but flesh most certainly did.

Inspired by this.

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Are you sick of people barging into your home or place of business and ransacking the place without a word of explanation?

Are you tired of being asked the same questions over and over by armed interlopers?

Is your business buckling under the financial strain of customers who demand payment in cash for stacks of 99 crisp basilisk urethras, even though you don’t run a pawnshop?

Then we have good news for you!

We are now accepting applications to join the NPC Local 983, a very special kind of trade union dedicated to curbing the abuses of self-proclaimed heroes and adventurers. Membership is open to all small business owners and employees, local homeowners, police and private security guards, as well as loiterers and hangers-on. Anyone who wants to get on with the business of living their life without interference by outside interlopers is welcome!

Our recent successes include:

– NPCs working at a Pizza Hut on Starbase 37b successfully opposed the efforts of a group of three malefactors in powered combat armor who tried to talk themselves into being given the contents of the cash register.

– An NPC family in Hearthburg was able to lock and bar their home to prevent entry by a man in plate mail after he had entered their property on several other occasions to smash jars and steal anything of value.

– The staff of the Rosina Arsenal was successfully able to refuse to purchase a stack of 99 Cockatrice Scales from a customer who demanded that they be accepted in trade for a brand new Falchion worth 2500 GP. This success was especially noteworthy given that the customer was in fact the King of Rosina and demanded a discount.

Don’t delay! Unionize, fight back, and together we can forge a more equitable shake for the working NPC everywhere.

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The larva of an enigma moth is more commonly known as a riddling worm or riddleworm. They thrive on riddles, puzzles, and conundrums posed by others, but aren’t able to pose any of their own. They tend to congregate in bookstores, libraries, college campuses, and debating societies. Anyone who’s ever handled an old book of riddles has probably seen their empty egg casings and the spidery filaments of doubt they leave behind.

Once enough small riddles–or perhaps just one great corker of a riddle–have been devoured, the riddleworm will spin a cocoon from the threads of stories and pupate, emerging as an enigma moth. They are so named because they must pose an enigma before the end of their ephemeral life, requiring the ensuing raw confusion to lay their eggs much in the same way that the riddleworms feed on it.

Enigma moths whisper their conundrums quietly but so insistently that most cannot help but hear.

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Civilizations tend to destroy themselves. You’ve noticed this, haven’t you? For every empire of a thousand years a hundred fall, and length is no guarantee. Easter Island supported 10,000 people at its peak, the Roman Empire was 1500 years old when the gates of the Hagia Sophia were battered down, and the Empire of China was heir to 2000 years of intrigue when it was toppled by a few flags in the street.

It doesn’t take much, does it, to project those onto a global scale?

This is as unavoidable as it is inevitable, as the civilization of your choice is always prey to the capricious whims of a few, the lowest and base, who would see everything ground to dust for their own reasons. On a planetary scale, it means that civilizations are inevitably doomed regardless of their level of technology or expansion.

It seems like a closed system, a foolproof system. But what if it’s not? What if there’s a chance—however slight—that sapients might avoid the cycle that has seen galactic empires crumble and the mighty R’de laid low?

Someone, something, has seen to that, too.

There are three possible states of a universe: stasis, growth, and contraction. We know that the former to are untenable given our observations, and a cursory examination of the Vyaeh archives reveals the same. The universe is expanding, and that expansion is, against all that we know, accelerating.

The Vyaeh know this at the highest levels of their Orphaned Court, as do those of them with half a brain. But they, like us, are too busy fighting over the ashes to recognize the conflagration that surrounds and envelops them. Their manifest stupidity prevents any serious inquiry, though I’ve reason to suspect that perhaps there are forces acting upon them, and upon us, that cannot be fully understood.

But the R’de…the R’de are different. Why were they destroyed and enslaved by the Vyaeh? Why, when our scientists, and theirs, insist that there is nothing to learn from them? Their worlds are not strategic, they contain no natural resources of value.

Don’t you see? They were destroyed because they were too close to unlocking the secret. The ultimate failsafe that will prevent intelligent life from thriving and spreading: the heat-death of the universe.

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Each summer, the city would send forth nineteen of its finest to form a convoy to its sister settlement across the great wastes. The nineteen were carefully chosen, as they were entrusted with the city’s finest trade goods, swiftest steeds, and best arms. Setting off across the wastes at the beginning of the wet season, theirs was a journey of months.

Some years, the nineteen would return, bearing trade goods from the sister settlement–all of the things that the city itself could not make. Some years, they would return in disgrace, having been unable to complete the journey. Some years they would not return at all.

All of the nineteen were volunteers, for eternal glory awaited those who returned with goods, and all of the city’s most important positions were filled by veterans of a successful caravan. Applying was simple: one needed the recommendation of a caravan veteran, the recommendation of one of the city’s guildmasters, and successful completion of a test.

The test was simple, a single question:

You are crossing the desert with your brother, your son, and your greatest enemy. Bandits are ahead, and wild dogs at your heels. Your brother is wounded, your son is ill, but your greatest enemy is in perfect health. There is only food, water, and weapons for three. Who shall be cast out to die, and who shall be armed in the caravan’s defense?

The question is administered in secret, though candidates are permitted to explain themselves, and the answers remain sealed forever. Prospective answers to the question are hotly debated in the city’s public houses among would-be members of the nineteen. For who has never wondered, when faced with the darkness, what they would do to survive?

What would your answer be?

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Our corrected interior accepts the wisdom of the pulp.
How does my editorial sense slip words into structure?
Why is a logical statement logical within the syntax?
Why can’t the referendum smell?

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In what became an internet sensation, an ornithologist once wrote about a colony of sparrows who, due to a genetic mutation exacerbated by the founder effect on their small offshore island home, could not sing within the range of other sparrows’ hearing. Forced to inbreed, their population grew smaller and smaller due to infertile eggs and the slow arch of time.

These birds–the “loneliest sparrows on the planet” were the subject of a documentary, a Kickstarter, and even some internet innovations aimed at making their high-pitched songs understandable to mainland sparrows (who could presumably then flit over and add fresh new blood to the isolate population dynamics). But the sparrows proved elusive; the island often varied from description to description, and those islands matching the descriptions often contained no sparrows. Those that did typically featured thoroughly natural birdsong audible to human and bird alike.

There was a reason. The ornithologist’s piece had been a fabrication–they claimed it was a piece of fiction, though they’d had no qualms about basking in the adulation of internet denizens.

The elusive sparrows were in fact illusive sparrows, more a metaphor of the longing of human nature to fit creatures into anthropomorphic narratives than anything else.

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Should deeply planted and long-cultivated toil fall to its opposite in the great race? Many of history’s most illustrious successes, and even more of its noblest attempts, came from those with the disadvantage of moving quickly, impulsively, without forethought. The masses have oft seen this as undesirable, preferring that success be the reward of toil rather than that of rashness. The swampy morass of history is difficult to read on the matter, its arenas bubbling throughout with echoes of the disunifying clash.

The answer has always been there. You have but to grasp it.

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