Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Ros, Reverand Mother of the True Temple of Jovan (not to be confused with the False Temple of Jovan that sent gibbering minions and skeletons to attack defenseless towns), appeared at the door of the Demon Arms Inn, resplendent in her crimson robes.

“Were there not more of you before?” she said in melodious tones. “I have come to offer thanks and apologize for my earlier brusqueness.”

“Tinuviel and Chanel decided to spend the night outside, camping in the streets,” said Iffy the elven conjurer. “Gora the Seventh did kind of pick our pocket before she offered us free room and board for the winter.”

“I see,” said Ros. “Well, I wanted to offer you a nugget of information in recompense. When the followers of false Jovan invaded, as you know, you allowed them to escape with a wagon filled with prisoners.”

Adenan the halfling bruiser bristled at this suggestion that they had failed. “What about it?”

“One of the Jovan cultists was captured by the city guard. He…perished…under interrogaion, but not before revealing the heading that the prisoners may have followed.”

“Excellent!” Iffy cried. “We can go rescue them, really live up to our status as associate junior guards!”

“I must admit,” added Reverend Mother Ros, “normally I have to pay quite handsomely in bribes for this sort of information from the guards. But this time, one of the guards offered it to me quite willingly.”

Iffy and Adenan looked at each other with loaded expressions. They knew all about their halfling ne’er-do-well friend Tinuviel’s continuing flirtations with Vakt the city guard.

Ros held up a scroll. “The guard only insisted that the information be given directly and personally to a short woman,” she continued. She thrust the scroll into Adenan’s hands, oblivious to the halfling’s eyes suddenly swelling to saucers. “He also asked that I give you…something else…but I regret that my oath as a Reverand Mother of Jovan makes that impossible.”

The Reverand Mother departed, leaving Adenan holding the scroll, stunned, and her companions overtaken by hopeless laughter.

The last gibberling–a tiny whirlwind of teeth and fur that seemed a cross between a gibbon and a Pomeranian pup–took Chanel’s blow to the head and passed out cold. The others tied him up, and turned to Adenan to converse with the creature, since she had taken a minor in Gibber Languages at university.

“Who are you?” she said in Gibbertongue. “Who else is in this cave? Talk or I’ll throw you into the river!”

“You-killed-my-friends!” the gibberling motormouthed. “You-killed-Gus! You-squashed-him-into-jelly! Gus-had-gibberlettes-and-a-gibberwife!”

Adenan bonked the gibberling over the head. “Who are you?” she repeated. “Who else is in this cave?”

“I’m-Gus. Gus-Two. Lots-of-Gusses,” the gibberling…well…gibbered. “Lots-of-us-in-here. Some-big-green-ones-too. And-the-boss.”

“What’s the boss?”

“Big!”

Adenan rolled her eyes. “What about the prisoners?”

“Oh-yeah-boss-has-some-prisoners. Gonna-eat-em-soon! Taste-good. Like-the-horses-outside. Ate-them-and-then-burned-the-bits-for-fun!”

Attempting to sneak around a corner of Ransack Cavern, Tinuviel the halfling rogue instead came face to face with a young troll–one of the “green-ones” that Gus Two had gibbered on about before he had run off screaming and broken his neck in a deadfall trap.

Normally, she was decently sneaky. But this time, Tinuviel tripped over her own foot-hairs and tumbled straight to the ground. Her cooking set tumbled out of her rucksack, making such a ruckus that it could have woken the dead (had any of the skeletons they’d fought earlier been present).

“What that?” the troll cried. “Who there?”

Thinking quickly, Tinuviel got up, dusted herself off, and bowed deeply. “Why, I’m one of you! My most humble apologies, sir. I seem to have gotten lost looking for the boss.”

The troll regarded the tiny halfling with deep suspicion. “You smell like Gus,” he snarled. “Smell like Gus Two. Like Gus Two’s gooey bits. You kill him?”

“Of course not,” saif Tinuviel, bowing again. “He killed himself by running into a deadfall. But I’m still one of you, one of the Ransack Cavern gang through and through.”

“What the password?” the troll said, readying its fists.

“The password is…” Tinuviel racked her thoughts, and coughed up the first word that came to mind: “…flugelhorn.”

The troll gaped. The password was indeed “flugelhorn,” after the boss’s ill-fated stint as a brass player. “How you know that?”

“Like I said,” Tinuviel grinned. “I’m one of you.”

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In time, the waters rose. In time, much of the land was borne away on watery hands, silting off into the deep which never gives up that which it has taken. In time, only a handful of trees remained above the ripples to show that the water had ever been held at bay, that hills low and forested had ever existed.

Nourished by lenses of fresh water that ebbed with each passing year, the great gnarled trees kept their silent vigil over glassy waters. An epitaph for an island, a mausoleum for a mound.

One day, it is to be hoped, someone will look across the expanse and see them. One day, it is to be hoped, they will wonder how a tree ever came to grow under such conditions. They, whoever they are, will see and wonder. And in that way, in only that way, the island-that-was will be remembered.

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Found mostly in
Pretentious literary
Fictions

The metaphor spider
Spins silken words
Together

No like no as
Only ideas compared
Concretely

The spider webs
Cross the pages
Unbroken

Awaiting willing
Readers to be
Entangled

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Fine porcelain curves, sculpted in flesh by I know not whom, with an unneccessary pair of completely round, oversized spectacles. Brown eyes glittering beneath brown hair that for all its length is held aloft in long strands by static alone.

She is the most powerful woman in the world, and I do not even know her name.

She is the most powerful woman in the world, and she would be dismissed on sight by anyone who met her.

Perhaps that is why.

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“Don’t worry yourself, Majesty,” said Wyllbow. “We are quite safe.” He tightened his mailed fist on the jeweled hilt of his sword, the elaborate blade exclusive to members of the Arcane Guard.

“Yes, Nadeen, safe,” purred Loat indolently. “You are quite safe. Safe from the creatures of this place, for the Arcanes plan to kill you. Safe from the Arcanes, for the creatures plan to eat you.”

The other Arcanes traveled in a wary circle around Nadeen, their weapons drawn or ready in sheaths, their breath misting into the cool forest air.

“Hush, Loat,” whispered Nadeen, glaring at the wispcat. “I’ve no patience for your tricks.”

“Who are you speaking to, Majesty?” Wyllbow said. “Are we not quiet enough?”

“No, I mean…never mind,” said Nadeen. “How soon will we be there?”

“Soon enough, Majesty,” said the Arcane Guard, gently sliding his weapon free of its frosted sheath. “Soon enough.”

Inspired by this.

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Snow begins with shadow.

Sharp, frenzied cries pierce the dark. He is running now, his friends forgotten, through calf-deep drifts. Even when the cries have stopped, he can hear and he can feel.

Snow finalizes shadow.

There was no warning. Darkness given shape and form had risen up and battered the campsite to ash. Only the screaming blanket of wind, which siphoned warmth in lieu of gifting it, remained.

Snow is shadow.

The shape was behind and in front, a marriage of dark and light. Everywhere and nowhere, looming. He falls. Blood from the gaping injury completes the snow, speckled across a surface that it returns to ancestral water. Darkness devoured the ice. It shone in the rising moon, as the shadow upon its surface receded.

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This week, Excerpts from Nonexistent Books published its 2000th excerpt. Over 5 years, we’ve been able to post a story every day (with occasional light cheating to fill in holes), and now we’re proud to say that there is now an EFNB excerpt for every year of human history since the birth of Christ.

The nonexistent editors, nonexistent staff, and nonexistent contributors here at EFNB would like to thank all of our readers and commenters for helping make this great literary experiment an ongoing success. Here’s to 2000 more stories that never existed!

“I do not believe you for a minute,” said Ockham the Red. “You are surely one of them.”

He had an impressive countenance as a full-blooded orc, made all the more so by his immaculate sky-blue uniform with crossed white belts and brass polished to a mirror-shine. It was undermined somewhat by the fact that he and the other two Vallia guardsmen, Vakt the Rosy and Pyse the Peach, had been locked in the jail of their own stockade, blindsided by the insane cultists of Jovan and their attendent skeletons.

“Didn’t you see the light show downstairs?” said Tinuviel the halfling. “Our cleric Chanel just channeled enough positive energy to be seen from the Caldera rim and it double-killed four skeletons all at once.”

Ockham harrumphed. “You lie. I wouldn’t believe you if you laid the severed heads of those Jovan-addled brigands downstairs at my feet.”

“Funny you should mention that,” said Tinuviel. “Adenan, let ‘erm rip.”

The two halflings each unfurled the dripping bundles in their hands, revealing the severed heads of the brigands that they had just killed. Adenan rolled the head of the white-kerchiefed brigand who had sicced the skeletons on them into Ockham’s cell. Tinuviel spun the red-kerchiefed head of the villian who had stabbed poor Iffy to within an ich of her squishy life into
Vakt’s prison.

Ockham picked up the dripping countenance and nodded curtly. “I am not afraid to admit when I am wrong,” said he. “This is definitely one of the foul brigands from the hills who turned of late to Jovan-worshipping insanity. Truly you are not one of they.”

“Damn straight,” groused Adenan, handing the cell keys to her halfling compatriot. She was still upset that her threat to hurl Ockham into the river had been laughed off.

Tinuviel unlocked Ockham’s cell, and then Vakt’s. That guard, given the gift of the dripping head of his enemy, looked down at the tiny halfling opening his cell with starry eyes. He fell to his knees as she opened the door.

“T-thank you, my lady,” he whispered through trembling besotted lips. “I have never seen a woman as…short…and as…formidible…as you.”

Tinuviel winked at him and tossed him the weapon the Jovan-crazed villains had deprived him of. Already on his knees, Vakt swooned a bit and awkwardly blew her a kiss.

The halfling mimed catching it, and placed it in her pocket before traipsing off and opening the last cell.

“I hope you realize that you’ve just made that poor guy fall in love with you,” groused Adenan.

“It’s cute,” said Tinuviel, dismissively. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Adenan looked back at Vakt the Rosy, who was busy composing a love poem on the blood-soaked kerchief of the severed head in his cell. “What indeed,” she sighed.

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“Nope!” cried Tinuviel, looking at the ten-foot-high battlements of the Vallia Stockade. “You are NOT throwing me up there! Nobody tosses this halfling!”

Adenan walked up to her halfling compatriot, on whom she had a good few inches (to say nothing of her much more fit physique). With her nose a mere inch from Tinuviel’s, her eyes narrowed, she riposted: “I’m going to toss you either way,” she growled. “It’s up to you whether you land on the battlements or in the river.”

The vivacious halfling wilted like a summer daisy in the face of her companion’s intimidating surety. “Fine, fine!” she cried, raising her hands. “Just be careful Watch the face!”

“I’m always careful,” Adenan said in her customary monotone. “Now stop whining or I’ll carefully chuck you in the shallowest part of the river.”

“How is she going to do it?” whispered their companion, Iffy the elf. “They’re practically the same size.”

“Don’t screw around with a halfling who knows what she wants,” replied Chanel, their other elf fellow-traveler. “Adenan can throw anything.”

As the fairfolk whisprered, Adenan seized her smaller compatriot by one arm and one leg. Spinning around several times like a shot-putter to gain momentum, she lifted Tinuviel up and released her at the apogee of the swing.

“Crap, crap, crap, craaaaaaaaaaap!” shrieked the smaller, shorter halfling as she sailed upward in a parabolic arc. It was enough to surmount the low battlements of the stockade, and the others hear her come to a safe landing above, at least judging by the volume of complaints that drifted down.

“Now throw down a rope so I can help you get in,” huffed Adenan. “We’ll open the door from the inside and get the drop on them.”

“No, I’m going in alone!” Tinuviel pouted from the battlements.

“I’m coming up there whether it’s with a rope or with my nails,” said Adenan flatly. “And whether I beat the window in with my fists or with your head depends entirely on that.”

“Don’t screw around with a halfling that knows what she wants,” Iffy echoed with a low whistle.

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The motley bells jangled on the Fool’s head above his painted visage. “There was a time, you know, when the cap and bells was the height of whimsy,” he said in a singsong voice.

“That’s changed,” I said.

Abruptly, the Fool’s capering stopped. With the speed of an uncoiling spring, he charged me. A moment later I was pinned against the far wall, a pale and bony hand about my throat.

“I know it’s changed!” he shouted. “I am what people pecieve me to be! Therefore, thanks to you and others like you, I am split down the middle!”

“W..wh..” I choked, seeing bright lights on the periphery of my vision.

The Fool dropped me and I sank, gasping, to my knees. “What do I mean?” he said, bright and smiling again. “Enough people see me as a simple jokester that I am that. But enough people see me as a murderous psychopath that I must be that too. I can’t be both at once.”

“So…s-so…” I gasped.

“So I’m a pendulum straight out of Poe, swinging back and forth with a razor-sharp edge,” the Fool spat, his tone, suddenly dark. He kicked me in the stomach, eliciting a howl of winded anguish as he did.

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