Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The pizzas were bubbling and browning in the brick oven Shokunin had spent the previous day building. Fired by his own special mix of wood and kuso, they would soon be ready to feed the starving villagers. But as Shokunin took up his ancestral pizza peel to paddle the pies onto plates, he was stopped by the flat of a hostile ken slapped onto its handle.

“Halt!” said the ken‘s bearer, an unkempt bandit wearing the mon of Clan Sutoronbori. “These pies belong to us, in place of the tribute these miserable peasants have failed to provide!”

Shokunin bowed. “You have shown me the error of my ways,” he said. “I shall take up my pizza peel and use it to deliver your rightful reward.”

Leering, the bandit allowed Shokunin to take up his peel. A moment later, he gasped in pain from a blow that had come too swiftly to see; he then slid apart at the waist, his innards like toppings upon the grass.

“I am Pizza Chef Shokunin!” cried the pie chef, hefting his sharpened paddle. “My peel was forged by Anchobi the swordsmith from the same pig iron furnace that birthed the Fudo Masamune with a handle carved from the same trunk that furnished the mount for The Forceful Cutter. Who will stand before me and receive the just reward for their insults and lack of honor toward pizzas?”

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Here at the Sanctuary for Unusual Birds, we do our best to offer a safe and secure environment for avians that for whatever reason are not able to function in their natural enviornment.

Take Phil the Polychromatic Chicken. Like all of his kind, his feathers change to whatever hue someone mentions, from pink to purple to burnt sienna. However, he has been shunned by his kind ever since some terrible person mentioned plaid to him and caused poor Phil to have a nervous breakdown, half-plaid and half sea-green.

Then there’s Kiki the Gyrostrich. Like all Gyrostriches she is a natural dancer and can often be found in the wild busting a move. However, she dances tap, with shoes scavanged from the wreck of a Carnival cruise ship. The other Gyrostriches dance ballet, and therefore shun her.

And who could forget Claude, the vegan hawk? The Sanctuary found him half-dead in the dumpster of an organic health food store, living on discarded tofu and enriched kale.

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The red dragon that had passed itself off as Ros Dos-Denarg, priestess of Jovan, glowered at the party from amid the ancient draconic ruins.

“Stand back!” cried Iffy the mage. “I’ve got a spell I’ve been saving for a situation like this!” Flipping through her spellbook in a whirl, she cried out an incantation and cast a pinch of ashes from a cursed fire onto the ground in front of her.

A pentagram spread upon the ground, serving as a gateway to the nether realms of the Abyss, from whence a terrifying demon with stunted wings and full red eyes pulled itself. It was gross, bloated, and reeking, far from the terrible demon one would expect from such a portal.

“Ugh, what IS that thing?” cried Tinuviel the halfling rogue.

“It smells awful!” added Adenan the halfling battlemistress.

“It’s a dretch,” said Iffy. “It can cast a spell of stinking cloud that should give us an edge against the dragon.”

“So wait,” said Chanel the elf cleric. “Did you just summon a fart demon to help us against the red dragon?”

“She did!” Tinuviel shouted. “She summoned a fart demon!”

“I did not! It’s nothing of the sort!” Iffy snapped back.

At that moment, the dretch loosed its attack. A pea-green soup of fog issued forth from the demon with a sphincter-rattling raspberry, flooding a good part of the chamber and sending Adenan gagging for clear air.

“Yeah. It’s a fart demon,” she said after the retching stopped. “It’s a fart demon.

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As long as Janis could remeber, Teddie Bear had been her wise protector and guardian. Whenever she had a problem she had but to whisper it to him, and sage advice or swift action would follow.

“Teddie, Aron Schmidt is bullying me in school.”

“Fear not, young one. This will only take a moment.”

Janis had never found out what Teddie had done in that time, but Aron Schmidt had never bothered her again, and he seemed positively contrite afterwards.

“Teddie, I’m worried about my math test on Friday.”

“Fear not, young one. This will only take a moment.”

The study guide that had appeared, fully annotated, the next morning on Janis’s desk had helped immensely.

“Teddie, I’m scared. Those zombies outside just ate the neighbors.”

“Fear not, young one,” said Teddie, hefting a chainsaw and standing up. “This will only take a moment.”

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Evelyn had waited as long and as quietly as any librarian could. “Roland. Something’s wrong.”

Roland jumped, all four-foot-three of him (in heels). “T-the fortress of our great Aklatan Library is a bulwark from the Nevez,” he said. “But we do tend to rattle around a bit in here. Is that it? Or is it…”

Evelyn laid a hand on Roland’s shoulder seeking to stem the tide of nervous twitterings that were his stock and trade. “Calm yourself, my friend,” she said. “I’ve told you a hundred times, just because the Aklatan Archives are under the Stricture of Silence…”

“…it doesn’t mean I have to make twice as much noise outside them, I know.” said Roland. “But enough of that. What’s mildewing at you, Evelyn? The Nevez? They sacked another caravan bringing us books, I heard. Three carts of tomes to the torch in the name of holy ignorance, and three librarians besides.”

His words echoed in the cavernous common area, sending a few librarian-initiates scampering away to their cells with wide fearful eyes. “Roland,” Evelyn said. “Stop. Listen.”

“I’m stopping. I’m listening.”

“I am afraid…that the Nevez may have made inroads into the Aklatan. Through nefarious means, sorcerous means that we librarians with all our weapons and training have nothing to counter with.”

Roland began to pace like a caged animal, his stumpy legs acting out his nervousness. “One of the initiates saw you pounding on the wall in a dead-end in the Old Annex,” he said. “I also heard over in the meadery that you’ve been heard crying and whispering things in a strange language.”

“Stranger than Nevezean?” said Evelyn with a glimmer of a smile.

“I said crying and whispering, not grunting and hooting.”

“It’s true, though,” Evelyn said, growing serious and drawing Roland near. “I keep seeing…well…it’s as if the veil of this world is torn from my eyes and another is set down in its place. Horrifying visions that I can’t quite describe. Almost like…insanity. Things that, if the High Cataloguer knew…”

“Insanity? What kind of insanity?” cried Roland in a voice that echoed off the rafters.

“Shh!” hissed Evelyn, with her best librarian-face and raised finger, honed in areas the Stricture of Silence covered. “Visions of people…of places…” she continued. “I try to draw my sword, but there is no sword, I try to kick and my muscles have lost their memory, I try to scream but the only words that come are gutteral nonsense.”

Roland was a loudmouth and a nervous wreck, but it was clear Evelyn’s words wracked him with worry. “How often?” he said, much quieter this time.

“Irregular but…increasing.” Evelyn instinctively gripped the handle of her saber, fingering the groove where a Nevez axe had left its mark during last year’s incursion. “I worry that it’s some sort of…spellcraft…that the Nevez are trying to use. Destroy the Aklatan from within, not from without.”

Roland violently shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no. The Nevez stand for ignorance. Stasis. Brutishness where applicable. They’re not sorcerors, and their dead gods have no power to grant them anything.”

“Then what is it?” Evelyn cried, much louder than she intended. “Aklatan librarians are trained to meet threats with arms and tomes. I’ve nothing.”

It was Roland’s turn to shush her. “Let me talk…er, sign…to the Head Archivist about this,” he said. “You know she won’t talk. Vow of silence and all. We can see if anything like this has ever happened before.”

“But…” Evelyn’s doubts were cast upon Roland’s back; as was he way, he was off pumping his short legs in pursuit of his latest, likely impractical, idea.

Alone in the common area, Evelyn began to find her way back to her cell, hand still light on the hilt of her blade. The Aklatan library suddenly seemed every still, very quiet, even though it was not time for meals or combat training, the twin pursuits that took librarians, archivists, and initiates out of circulation.

A sharp T-junction at the end of the common area, designed to prevent noise from bleeding over, should have put Evelyn on the path to her modest quarters. Instead, the ninety-degree jog that she navigated opened upon a scene from a nightmare.

A bright light blazed, Evelyn’s pupils stinging as they contracted in response. It was rushing toward her with the sound of a spring storm, growing in intensity and clarity even as the individual bricks of the Aklatan seemed to be torn loose and devoured by a hungry and glowing maw.

Evelyn tried to run, but her legs ached as the hours of endless combar training deserted her. She tried to draw steel, but the muscle memory wasn’t there either. All she could do was stumble forward, blindly, into the vortex that seemed to be ending her world.

And beyond it?

Shelves, dull beige with rust spots. A ceiling of rickety metal and fiberglass panels, fluorescents dying a slow blinking death within them surrounded by the bodies of their many insect victims. And, of course, books…but not the richly bound tomes and ornate scrolls of Aklatan. Pulp and hardback instead, bowed by moisture and time.

“Evelyn!” A sharp voice from around the corner.

“Yes, Ms. Foster?” said Evelyn, the gutteral words gritting against her lips like beach sand.

The Alcona Public Library deputy director stuck her head around the corner. “Finish shelving that cart instead of talking to yourself.”

“But…I was talking to Roland…” Evelyn murmured.

“A junior library volunteer is here as labor, not as a chatty Cathy,” Foster snapped. “See to your work and only give that hyperactive little monster what he he needs so he can see to his.”

“Yes, Ms. Foster.” Nodding smugly, Foster withdrew, leaving Evelyn by herself in the basement with the stains, the rust, the mold, the pulp fantasy novels slowly going to seed. Aklatan, wherever it was, was as far away as it had ever been.

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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