Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Dragons were driven underground long ago, secreting themselves in the furthest parts of the world once the mortal races, both the slow folk and the quick, had grown powerful enough to oppose them. They sought refuge at the roots of mountains, at the pressure points of fault lines, at the basements of great caverns that they collapsed behind them. One such powerful beast buried itself once, long ago, in a place that became rich with minerals due to its passage and its influence, as the mysterious process that draws precious things to the great wyrms worked its way over centuries.

The greatest city the current age knows was once a simple dwarven mining settlement, set up to mine these riches. So vast and rewarding were the canyons and fissures below that they soon grew in power and population, with the noble houses growing fat and indolent and enjoying the sway they held over the surface city and its quick folk. Dwarven nobles provide the Lord Regent of the city, the most powerful single king in the world by meany measures, and the wealth of the mines flows through him. The King Underground, the legendary first miner that claimed the lode as their own, will never return and their line is broken–so they say, anyhow.

When the miners awoke the slumbering beast, it slew them without a second thought. But then a curious predicament presented itself: how to subvert and destroy the city above, the vast cancer that had grown in the wyrm’s slumber, without bringing the full force of the mortal world down upon it? The dragon had ideas of reviving its race to primacy once more, after all. The solution it hit upon was as simple as it was brilliant.

Have the mortals kill one another. Act through agents to sow chaos, discord, and violence above. Then, as the city fell apart in open warfare and its nobles were preoccupied with slaughtering one another, the time to rise would come. Those few that survived would soon know the primacy of the wyrms that, once hunted, had faded into legend and myth.

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

Ora Nightstealer, also known as “the Puppetmistress” for her delight in manipulating people to do her bidding, is one of the more powerful night hags from the Grey Waste of Hades. She was a renowned wheeler and dealer in souls, amassing immense power by trading for favors with some of the most vile evil creatures on both sides of the Blood War. When she is not hard at this gruesome work, Ora is known to be a lover of illusions, often using particularly devilish ones as a form of gatekeeper – ensuring that only visitors she finds sufficiently interesting are allowed to meet her.

Legend has it, however, that she is also deeply unhappy.

The tale goes that, while pursuing her own goals on the prime material plane, Ora encountered a princeling from a noble house. Whether she was on that plane on a mission to steal souls or simply for her own amusement, the troubadours do not record. But as night hags can easily assume any shape they please, Ora appeared there as a comely maiden. And, for reasons that remain obscure, she fell in love with the princeling, and he loved her in return, so far as anyone could see.

And then, Oda chose to reveal herself to her lover in her true form as a night hag. Horrified, he turned her away. While most night hags would have strangled a mortal to death for such a transgression, by all accounts Oda left the princeling alive. But the experience broke her heart, and tens of thousands of mortals owe centuries of torment to her shattered feelings.

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

Wealth brings wyrms, the elders always say. This is why the old cities of the Above were always so strongly fortified. Dragons would seek to steal their wealth from above, and the insidious Below, the cursed refuge of evil souls that writhes deep within the planet, would seek to bubble up from below like an overstirred pot. The great fortresses of old, be they made by the slow folk or the quick folk, were always reinforced at both ends.

But that was before the Age of Reason, when the dragons were all hounded to the far corners of the earth and killed, and the Below was brought to a low simmer by declining belief. A soul that believes in nothing, after all, never reaches the hell Below or the bliss Above but merely ceases to be. And dragons, the great agents for the Above and the Below in their various shifting allegiances and guises, were all but extinct.

All save one, anyhow. And she had a plan.

The greatest dwarven city of the Age was sunk deep into the richest mines ever discovered, with a vast metropolis wade by the quick folk set atop it and owing fealty to the nobles below and the mythical King Underground. What if a dragon were to make their way to the basement of this great city and claim its horde? It could be done in secret and with subtlety, and as the last of the drakes still possessed her dead consort’s seed within her, it could be the birth dry of a whole new generation of her kind.

So she snuck into the great city in the guise of a petty quick folk and began to work downward. Quick folk, slave, elf, and even dwarf – she made lives as them all as she worked ever downward. It was decades, centuries, before the miners and the dwarven houses that employed them began to notice the deep tentacles in their society, the wealth flowing downward, the crime bosses and gangs acting in concert with the mysterious evil rising from below.

By that time it was perhaps too late. Distracted by the shiny bauble of the Lord Regency and its power, the nobles had allowed a true Queen Underground to arise, and the time when she will make herself known and feast on that which has grown fat an complacent is soon at hand.

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

When the founders of the city arrived, dwarves drawn by the mineral wealth that exceeded anything they ever could have imagined in the Old Mines, their first delvings uncovered a massive beast. An elder wyrm of the kind no longer found in our world, it had set itself atop the vast veins of gold, silver, and still other unknown ores as one of his lesser kin might set themselves upon a stolen hoard of coin. But the dwarves, ever canny, sought to negotiate with this dragon, whose power they could not hope to defeat. Through flattery and guile, they reached an accord which would stand for millennia.

They acknowledged the great wyrm as their lord, and pledged to tie the city to his life force. If he ever perished, the subtle magicks and intricate engineering of that place would fail. There was thus no reason for them to kill him and every reason to protect him, though he never deigned to appear above the surface and simply appointed a Lord Regent to act in his stead. In return, the dwarves were allowed to mint their coins and sell their wares.

Over time, irritated by the continued growth of the city, the dragon retreated underground in tunnels of his own excavation. But by the time the new city, built by humans and the other quicker species, began to rise on the surface above the now-subterranean abode of the dwarves, the dragon was all but forgotten. The heads of the great dwarven houses regarded him as mere myth, the King Underground, and the Lord Regent had become a king in everything but name, a bauble that the nobles squabbled for amongst themselves.

However, as it always does, the corruption of the earth arose once more, bearing with it evil and chaos on wings of sulfur. As the Below ever sought to subvert and overthrow the Above, one of its reaching tendrils found the sleeping dragon deep beneath the city and invaded his dreams. Perhaps the Below does this with full knowledge of what the dragon’s corruption and death will bring on the surface. Perhaps it merely enjoys the sport.

But the time will soon come when the minor rumblings beneath the city, whispers of evil that are denied by the noble houses, will bear dangerous fruit for all that remain in what has become the greatest city the Above has ever known.

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

“It’s the perfect environment for curating the art,” said the Russian in perfect English. He was well-dressed, tuxedo-clad, and docenting an exhibit of precious jewels in a friendly manner. “The salt mine means basically no humidity.”

“Of course,” I said. “It all makes sense.”

“So,” he said. “I know you have come to buy one of these priceless items. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. So what can I sell you today?”

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

The light streamed upward from the salt mine, filtered brilliantly through the amber halite and taking on a hexagon pattern from the reinforcing girders for the elevator and the mine itself, below.

“So here you are, on your way down into a Russian salt mine, looking for who knows what,” she said. “It may be time to reevaluate your decision-making process. If you died here, they’d just list you as missing and bury a coffin full of bricks.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’ve come this far.”

The air rushing upward smells like the ocean, and the light is intense. We are moments away from the bottom.

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

“You know I’m not really here, right?” she said. “Your subconscious inserts me into places I shouldn’t be, places you wish I was, like a person airbushed into a photo. But even then, I’m only saying the sort of thing you think I’d say. Always an extrapolation, but never the real thing.”

“I know,” I said. “I wish I could forget.”

“And I wish I could be forgotten,” she said. “What a maddening existence, being a half-thing not fully imagined or realized.”

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

The college administration building was a tower, ten stories tall but rather narrow. The base was concave, giving the whole first floor a strange recessed affect not unlike the inside lip of a frisbee. The design made sense in the 60s, I’m sure, but now it’s known more for its odd appearance and echoing effects than anything.

That must be why the school orchestra started playing there. By spacing the members out and playing, the echo effect made for a rich, resonant, and loud experience. But they were quickly taken in by the echoes and fell out of sync with one another. There’d be a moment of harmony as you walked by, a violinist playing in tune with the echoes you could hear, but it quickly fell to dissonance as the sonics fell off.

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

Flourish

Black science and technology
Nano elastic material
Amazing nano rubber pad

US Amazing Nano rubber pad
Strong adsorption ability
Everything can stick
Without any vestige when remove it.

Easy to use
Toss lightly, It goes to wall easily
Pull whatever you like

The thing you can not hang
on the wall in your life
It can be absorbed easily
Even the small stereo also can be
go to the wall easily

Just remove it, when do not want to use
Also can reuse
How to solve when meet dust,
Rinse with water for a second
will be a new one.

Origin: US Michigan

Taken from the packaging for this.

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

“Who are you?”

“I am a dreamstalker. Once your dream here has ended, I will slay your mortal form from where I sit crouched over it.”

“What?”

“You may wonder why I do not simply kill you now. The truth is, I gain sustenance from the mortal dreams I invade. Sustenance and amusement.”

“This has got to be part of the dream.”

“But when it ends, you will die! Perhaps not be too hasty about waking then, eh?”

“It’s a nightmare!”

“For you, perhaps, it will be upon waking. But for now, the dream is long and deep. Let us explore it, eh?”

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