Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Laslo Sunseri hated the letter “M.” No one was quite sure why; perhaps it had something to do with the old Wonky M Ranch going under. Perhaps the day they had covered the letter “M” on Sesame Street had been a really bad one.

Laslo liked to hang out in the square, feeding the pigeons and telling anyone who would listen how much of a menace the letter was, always taking as much care as he could to never use the letter itself save to denigrate it.

One day Jamie Parkerson came to the square looking for Henry, his uncle. Henry was about the same height and the same age as Laslo and a bit of a pigeon-feeder himself, so Jamie approached the latter from behind, thinking it was his uncle.

“Umm…Mom wants to know if you want meatballs or mash for dinner,” Jamie said.

Whipping around, Lazlo startled the boy with the ferocity of his reply. “Don’t be so careless in using that accursed letter, boy!” he cried. “The letter ‘M’ is the tool of the devil! The letter ‘M’ is a pox upon our language! Call those beef spheres if you have to, call it potato pudding if you have to, but never, ever use the letter ‘M’ except to curse its foul sound to the heavens!”

Startled, the boy mumbled a reply and beat a hasty retreat.

“Who’s that?” said a concerned passerby who knew Jamie from elsewhere, wondering what all the shouting was about.

“Well,” said Jamie, “He’s not Uncle Henry, but he sure is anti-M.”

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Zack was troubled moreso than usual, and his were not the garden-variety troublings that normally bedeviled this sensitive and introverted soul. Everybody that he knew had been acting strangely around him, and by measures he was able to deduce that this behavior was nothing new but rather longstanding.

Revelations of that sort are normally the purview of the mentally ill, but careful observation had convinced Zack that those who surrounded him did not have lives apart from and independent of his own. Only moving when he was present, only reacting when he needed them to react, window dressing for a strange stage which Zack did not and could not understand.

The implication hit him like a thunderbolt, but even more potent was the aftermath, in which he wandered through a world he could no longer accept as reality wondering: why and why me. He toyed with the notion that he had created the world himself, with the notion that he was in heaven or in hell, with the notion that he was on television, with the notion that he was hooked up to some sort of virtual reality.

Reality and rational thought disabused him of all those, notion by painstaking notion. Everything he could see pointed to the same outcome: he was, and always had been, an artificial mind placed in a simulation of human life to build empathy and humanlike cognition.

Everything led to that conclusion, but what happened next was the crux: realization of their predicament appeared to be the final test, and in passing it the mind who had known himself as Zack was set free to face his next test.

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The Lady in Black has been described by those who have had rare personal audiences with her as personable, even friendly. She has always given fair hearings to those who have managed to attract her attention, and doled out terrifying punishments to those found wanting. But the specter of enduring a lifetime of agony over seven days of the breaking wheel is not the reason few seek her out.

Rather, it is the Lady’s retinue, the Faceless Six.

She is never without the Faceless, at least not that any have ever seen. Even when a supplicant is able to meet with her, she is always surrounded by the Six, and the Six are always closer than she. Their features are concealed behind featureless black masks, broken only by a pair of black lenses like two pools of inky liquid. They wear robes and hoods, gloves and boots, so that not an inch of their true skin can be seen, and they kill any who approach too close to their Lady.

The robes conceal, for each of the Six, a set of short blades that are used to ward off interlopers with a slash and end them with a stab. Lest you think, as many have, that this makes them weak to a canny sniper, this is not the case. They will form a testudo about the Lady if confronted by arrow or shot, faster than the eye can see, and they will respond with repeating rifles hidden beneath their vestments. No one has ever witnessed a shot that has harmed one of the Faceless Six, but their aim is unerring in returning fire, and later examination of the bodies they leave in their wake never reveals a projectile.

Myriad are the theories and speculations behind the Faceless Six, how they came to serve the Lady, and what truly lurks beneath their masks:

The Hostage – The Lady in Black is at the mercy by the Faceless Six, who control access to her and therefore control the city. But why, then, do they never speak?

The Figurehead – The Faceless Six are the true rulers, and the Lady in Black is but a figurehead for their depredations. But why, then, do they not dispense with her altogether? She has no more claim to rule than they.

The Divided – The Faceless Six and the Lady in Black are all aspects of a single being, one that divided itself to better lead and to survive should one of its parts be harmed or destroyed. But why, then, are six of the parts outwardly identical? No other divided being is such.

The Foil – The Lady’s kindness is an act, and she uses the Faceless Six as enforcers to allow her reputation to remain untainted by the steel that must be drawn to remain in power. But why, then, are the Six never seen alone or apart from her?

In general, though, the citizens under the Lady’s control espouse one theory above all others:

Don’t Ask – The Lady’s reasons are her own, and anyone who pries too deeply into her affairs, or those of the Faceless Six, is apt to find the seven of them waiting when they return home. Those who emerge from such a meeting with only a death sentence on the breaking wheel are the lucky ones.

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As has been known since time immemorial, the reikon—the soul—departs the body upon death. If disturbed, or if it was a violent and unsettled death, the reikon may become a yūrei—a ghost—doomed to wander and haunt until the cause of its woes is addressed.

There are myriad categories of yūrei, from the noble goryō to the motherly ubume, but none is more dangerous or more misunderstood than the tsuihō, the banished. They are living reikon stripped from their bodies without death, for the purpose of filling the soulless bodies with demons to form a supernaturally efficient fighting force and binding the souls to power dark constructs.

It is typically a fate worse than death. The soulless bodies are consumed in battle or eaten from within by corrupting demonic influence, while the expelled souls are consumed as fuel in the bellies of mechanical horrors. If they escape that fate, the enraged and confused reikon turn on whatever is nearest, ripping it apart in an orgy of destruction. Only the truly mad or the truly desperate sorcerer or daimyō has ever attempted to create tsuihō, and they have been feared and reviled throughout the home islands as a result.

One can easily recognize a tsuihō; unlike most yūrei, they are not white but black, a deep and impenetrable black that absorbs all light and all warmth. No features save the outline of a humanoid body may be discerned, and due to their untimely separation from their mortal shells, they have full use of their arms and legs.

Towering above all other tsuihō in legend is the Wandering Daimyō of Kyūshū. Once daimyō of a small clan, he and every man, woman, and child in his realm became tsuihō as the result of a rival’s machinations. With the soulless army thus created, this evil man sought to wipe out one of his enemies and create a force that could march on Kyoto and install himself as shōgun. Instead, he was torn to pieces by the forces that he hoped to marshall, his wailing reikon carried off to parts unknown by infernal powers.

The tsuihō thus released ravaged the countryside for a year and a day before gradually dissipating…save one. The Wandering Daimyō alone among his family, courtiers, and clansmen was able to retain his will. Fashioning a suit of armor in the likeness of his former face, with plates reflecting the visages of those he had known and loved, he took to the wilds of Kyūshū.

His mercurial rage became well-known among the farmers and peasants there. If the mood strikes him, the Wandering Daimyō will aid passersby. If it does not, he will slay them without mercy and consume their soul to extend his time in this world. It is said that if he approaches with his mask down, revealing the likeness of his former self, he will deliver aid; if he approaches with his mask up, revealing the indecipherable depths of darkness that truly make up his form, he will deliver destruction.

One man met the Wandering Daimyō when his mask was half-raised, revealing only the barest glimpse of the horror below. This is his story.

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“At one point does one give up? At what point does one concede that screaming into the void, no matter how eloquently, is still futile?”

That short note, on hotel stationary, was the only intelligible writing found in the hotel room of Abigail Stearmann when her body was discovered. Her body was found in bed, her death having occurred not more than four or five hours before its discovery, and the coroner ruled it a suicide inasmuch as there was no evidence of foul play. Indeed, Stearmann was found to have died of dehydration despite being not ten feet from a working faucet with potable water.

The more compelling mystery was what Stearmann had apparently been working on in her six months’ residence at the hotel. She had regularly gone out for paper and ink, and those that knew who she was assumed that the author had at long last begun her second novel or second short-story collection.

Instead, investigators found 10,983 pages of…markings. Some have described them as scribbles, some as glyphs, but all agree that there was absolutely no meaning to be had from them to the casual observer’s eye. “It was as if someone had rewritten the Voynich Manuscript in the very messy cursive of a medical doctor,” said one of Stearmann’s closest associates at Southern Michigan University.

The author’s notoriety—increased tenfold after her strange death—led to a number of increasingly sophisticated attempts to find meaning in her last writings. An early attempt, in 1985, was touted as a “lost” Stearmann novel. It was generally ridiculed at the same level as The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn that Elizabeth Wells Gallup claimed to have found in cipher among Shakespeare’s plays. The most sophisticated effort, a computer-aided statistical analysis published in 2012, found no meaning in the whole but allowed for the possibility of a representational cipher in some places.

An equal number of people saw Stearmann’s supposed suicide note as explanation enough. In the throes of a depression so deep, so all-consuming that she had considered not just her writing but all writing to be insignificant on a grander scale…what greater cosmic joke could there have been than to bequeath gibberish to posterity?

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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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