Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The Architects, as they say, thought of everything.

They constructed the sphere out of pure but porous crystal, allowing heat to enter in the day and leave during the night. Inside, the plants and animals were carefully chosen to create a complete and functioning ecosystem. Strict rules were set out to keep the one tiny settlement small and self-sufficient.

Their task completed, the Architects flung the sphere into the World Ocean, where its perfect design allowed it to bob and float endlessly. The world outside the sphere was lost, as the Architects knew it would be. All went down to ruin except the single bottle that they had thrown upon the sea.

The Architects, as they say, thought of everything.

Everything, that is, except the people nested in their great sphere.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

And then, in his wisdom, the Eternal set a wheel in the ground, against the motion of continents. Each passing millennia moved it but little, but over time…over time…

The Eternal had arranged it so that the energy of Earth’s evolution would also sustain its downfall.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

“What’ll you give me for this?” the guy said, hefting the Blu-Ray player onto the countertop.

“Market’s not what it was,” said the owner. “Everyone’s going digital. A pound is the best I can do.”

“You sure you can’t do two?” said the guy. “I really need this.”

“If you throw in that Bluetooth headset, I could give you one and a half,” replied the owner. “Final offer.”

“Fine, fine,” said the man. “Give it here.”

The owner hefted a bucket onto the countertop, dripping with salt water and smelling like the beach at high tide. “Here. One and a half pounds of fresh prawns.”

Eagerly, the man put on a bib with a decapod emblazoned on it and licked his lips. “Just what I needed!”

“Remember, you can get your Blu-Ray back within 30 days if yo repay me in full plus ten percent,” the owner added.

“I don’t think so,” said the man, his mouth already full of chitin and butter. “I don’t think so.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

We call ’em fruit flies, you see, because they like the taste of sweet things. Lollies, sugar water, rotten fruit. They’ll just sit there and suck on it ’til it’s gone rather than come after you. Why, I can’t say. I guess the taste must be one of the few pleasant sensations left to them, or maybe it reminds them of what they’ve lost. But it can’t last forever; sooner or later, the tongue rots right out and then sweets are no good at placating them anymore. When that happens, they’re just more dead on a recruitment drive.

I knew a guy once, out by the Rift, who used to boil hard candy in his free time. He’d feed it to the fruit flies that swarmed his place until they were practically like pets, eating out of his hand. They must have all caught the rot around the same time, though, because those dead had their tongues rot out all within a day of each other. They ate that guy alive, nothing left but his metal buttons and false teeth.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Let me tell you, O wonderer, of the Immortal Arc.

The Arc was once a center of learning and culture, where many of the achievements that power our society were first discovered. They credit it with steam power, parts that interchange, the fire that burns underwater, and so many others. But the most dauntinc challenge that the Arc took on, and the final one, was that of alchemy.

Alchemy, the transmutation of one element to another, was long held to be a folly as were the associated tales of the Philosopher’s Stone. It could, they said, transmute lead to gold and lifelessness to an elixir of life. The most prestigious laboratory in the Arc took on the challenge of forginc such a stone, assembling the neccessary materials and pieceing together the neccessary knowledge over the course of nearly a century.

Once the proper crucible pit had been constructed and lined with impermeable materials, the toxins and reagents neccessary for the precipitation of the Stone were added. A senior alchemist, whose name history records as Claflin Seaholme, supervised the process and added the final reagents himself.

But something went very wrong. Or perhaps, O wonderers, something went very right.

In either case, the crucible was destroyed, along with the alchemy lab, and everything within a league was blown away unto dust, living or unliving. Seaholme alone survived, but bore with him a living scar of the moment. He learned this when, after stumbling out of the ruins, he attempted to eat a meal abandoned by its owners in the chaos of the disaster. The meat would not be torn, nor sundered, nor swallowed. It was, in almost every sense of the word save for the motility and will that cooking had shorn away, immortal.

Claflin Seaholm had become the Philosopher’s Stone, in point of fact. And, O wonderers, rather than suffer the fate of King Midas and turning all he touched to gold, a far crueler fate was in store for him.

For everything he touched turned to immortality.

Seaholm was a man of learning, and he realized much to his sorrow that this was untenable. So he sealed himself within the abandoned Arc along with everything he had subsequently touched, building, rock, stone, or being.

It remains there still.

It will remain, O wonderers, unto the ends of our world and beyond.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

The men were talking frantically but quietly.

The first man spoke uietly but excitedly. He clutched an antique shotgun, the single good slug left to him loaded in the left barrel. “I’ve looked around. Everywhere she’s been–everywhere!–has fallen off the map afterwards.”

“You mean…?” His friend was armed only with the machete he habitually carried, slug across his back in a harness.

“Just a precipice, rotted away into nothningess like the rest of the places taken by the late blight.”

The second man, the older of the two, rolled this over in his brain. “You’re saying…she caused it?”

“Not the blight, no, not all of it. But if you trace the way she says she came on a map, every one of those places has been rotted hollow since.”

“But she’s been good to us here, a real asset,” his friend said stubbornly. “I see where you’re headed and that’s murder. Cold blooded.”

“It’s self-defense.”

“Just listen to yourself. What if each of those places did the same thing we’re thinking of doing? What if the blight wasn’t her…but us?”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

The Twelvers, or the Twelve Sisters are the cosmopolitan cities of the Dodecopolis, a group of trading cities that dot the coasts and rivers of Naix. The cities are ancient, strategic, and fiercely independent. While they were once under the nominal suzerainty of the Crimson Empire, they exist in a loose confederation after its destruction.

Each of the cities has a name, the origins of which lie with the ancient language of the long-extinct Voyagers who founded them, and a poetic descriptor give to them by the Crimson Emperors who brought them into the Empire, albeit temporarily. They are:

Auida, the First Sister
Huhan, the Impregnable
Bauarn, the Jewel of the River
A’Jinaue, the Learned Sister
N’Raunj, the Martial Sister
H’Naunn, the Spiritual Sister
Gaiza, the Hermit Sister
Ruijaau, the Divine Mystery
Inrauinj, the Sorrow of the Sands
Aud, the Treasure of Naix
Poeb, the Quicksilver
Eaju, the Last Sister

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Name: Clara Noir
Occupation: Professional Mime
Height: 5’6″
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Black
Skin: Death metal pale
Outfit: Black and white striped trench coat, black fedora, black leggings, white boots
Description:
Mimetown is a rough-and-tumble neighborhood of the city, with a vibrant culture and cuisine that hides a seedy underbelly. Clara Noir plies her trade in the roughest part of town as she mimes glass boxes and ropes for tips.

Some say that she is involved in other, darker business with Mr. Quiet, the unspoken crime boss of Mimetown. Trouble never seems to be far behind her, and if she knows anything, she ain’t talking.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

“Surely you must, at some level, know that you were wrong,” said Paul. “Seeing what you’ve seen ever since your death.”

“You don’t understand.” The apparition seemed to roil in on itself like a cloud of steam, the faded grey of its corporeal form running and mixing before reforming into the visage of a Confederate officer in ramshackle uniform. “Learning stops with death. All that I am, all that I ever can be, was set before the moment of my demise. No matter what I see–and see I have–I cannot change my beliefs.”

“So you’d just sit here, a rot, like a fungus growing in the damp,” said Paul. “As foul in death as you were in life.”

“What choice do I have?”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

A jawbreaker lies
Uncjewed on the ground, shattered
By the jaws of life

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!