Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

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?”

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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

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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.

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“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?”

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

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In the palm of Nä Ti, the Dead Hand
Lies Rait Tirat, the Tomb of the Rebel
He who rebelled against It
Nyir Rvi, murderer of the Creator
Xon Vty, father of the Goblins
The father awaits his children
To give to them purpose anew
And to anoint them with right
And free them of their sins

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Once the transmission ended, Yekaterina made no further log entries. Based on biometric data, it appears that she systematically depressurized all the units of the station except for three: her quarters, the central corridor, and the arboretum.

The cherry trees in the arboretum were in full bloom, and Yekaterina apparently clipped all of their blossoms one by one over the course of the next 36 hours, stopping only to eat food stored in her quarters and to use the bathroom there. Once she was done, she laid out her EVA suit on the bed and filled it with flowers before closing and locking the faceplate.

What telemetry is available suggests that Yekaterina’s next action was to move through the station, pressurizing rooms ahead of her and depressurizing them behind. When she reached the main airlock, she overrode the safety mechanisms with a screwdriver and opened it.

To this day, no trace of her body ahs ever been found, and the reasons for her final actions remain a mystery.

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The Orcs practiced a syncretic religion that was related to the worship of the Creator, as in the Sepulcher of the Creator, but also Muolih the Spreading Darkness, as in the Goblin and Dwarven faiths. Furthermore, many minor spirits were recognized, from ancestors to those posessing trees and streams, though the primary surviving codices note that they all emphasized the paramountcy of the gods of good and evil.

In Orcish, Muolih was called Tirat, the Rebel, while the Creator was called Nyir, which literally means “that which has created.” Their faith was, as a result, sometimes called Nyirtirat, literally “creator-rebel” but more accurately “the rebel and the rebelled against.” It’s important to note, though, that despite commonalities each Orc community and band had its own extremely local interpretation of faith and disagreements up to and including violence were all too common.

Naturally, this changed with the introduction of the Hamurabash by Hamur, which replaced the former religion with a set of ethical and atheistic strictures and emphasizing the memory of departed kin. The bashamalurs who succeeded Hamur were generally successful in eradicating all traces of the former Orcish religion with only a few isolated (and well-fortified) communities harboring so-called taiwa or apostates.

Even as Hamur’s successors agressively spread his message of atheism, equality, ancestral memory, and the militarization of society, there remain significant Orcish ruins in the high desert of the Lrira, predating the Hamurabash, and in many cases even the Sepulcher, deeply carved and embossed with the memory of the old faith.

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Think of the most lauded person you can who isn’t actively a deity. Someone who is pretty unanimously thought of as a moral person and who left a major mark on our world and on Western civilization–but as a ruler, not a philosopher or a religious leader.

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone like that with a better reputation after 1900 years than Trajan, the lucky 13th emperor of Rome.

He was renowned as a builder and a leader, who made more civic improvements to Rome and the empire as a whole than anyone before or since. Trajan was also a military leader who expanded the empire to its greatest extent in history, from the Persian Gulf to Britain. The list goes on; the Senate usually gave emperors titles to comemorate their rule, and for Trajan they simply awarded him Optimus, best. Every subsequent emperor was wished to be felicior Augusto, melior Traiano–as lucky as Augustus and as good as Trajan.

It’s a strange thing, then, that there are almost no surviving sources from his reign: all the relevent books are lost, and all that remains is people writing years or centuries later. Stranger still is the fact that Trajan was also an arch conservative when push came to shove; asked about Christians, he mercifully said that they should be given every opportunity and benefit of the doubt to reclaim paganism. If they still demurred, well, to the lions with them. That little detail bothered medieval and Renaissance theologians so much that they came up with outlandish ways for the centuries-dead emperor to be resurrected, forgiven, and baptized.

But the most interesting detail to me is this: Trajan was never related to any of the emperors that came before him. He was of comparatively humble stock, working his way up from the bottom. His predecessor basically had his arm twisted to adopt Trajan as his heir to retain the support of the army, after all.

It kind of makes one wonder–what sort of man was the “best emperor,” really? The sort of man you’d have a beer with? A standard politician with an unusually astute mind for appearing humble? Or a Pope Francis-like figure who really was humble and able, but whose talents happened to lie in war and the apex of political power rather than religion?

We’ll never know. But Trajan is a fascinating guy all the same.

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I’ve never read or seen The Quiet Earth or On the Beach, both of which have been books and movies.

But their message is nevertheless compelling: the last people on Earth, the last survivors of a physics experiment and a nuclear war respectively, living out their final days in ANZAC. Australia and New Zealand are in many ways an admirable locale for such: isolated yet temperate, distant yet with all the comforts of the First World.

They would be excellent places to live out an apocalypse, if apocalypse come.

So even though I’ve never been there, even though their cost of living is astronomical, even though, even though, even though…I am attracted to the romantic notion all the same. Places distant and safe, civilized and alien.

They seem like places I could live.

New Zealand especially. An isolated microcontinent, diverse in flora and fauna, as far away from Europe as one can get without booster rockets. If ever I fear an apocalypse, I feel like it’s as good a destination as any.

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