Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Exclamation Elemental
Description:
A cloud of blurred, whirring, particles like a leaf blower kicking up detritus.

Behavior:
Causes an increase in excitement by increasing the pulse and stimulating the adrenal glands. This can lead to anything from mild exertion to a fatal heart attack or stroke depending on the severity. The exclamation elemental is also capable of selectively directing this effect, and will often do so to make its pursuers fight one another.

Question Elemental
Description:
A rough four-legged beast shape, completely transparent except for a faint pattern of swirls and dots.

Behavior:
Question elementals cause intense uncertainty through their presence, ranging from nagging doubts to full-blown moral dilemmas and existential crises. Low levels of this effect are distracting, while high concentrations can be debilitating. Evidence exists of question elementals under attack causing such an existential despair in their victims that they committed suicide or wasted away in depression. Unlike most other punctuation elementals, question elementals tend to travel about–whether they are hunting or merely curious is unknown.

Apostrophe Elemental
Description:
A rough globe of randomly swirling millimeter-long slashes, almost like a swarm of gnats.

Behavior:
This elemental causes a sudden, intense possessiveness: both in clinging to what was already possessed and in seeking to possess new things. The feeling is intense enough to cause fighting and bloodshed to break out immediately, even among animals. Territorial animals and humans with possessions seem to be the most affected, and if desired the apostrophe elemental can employ this effect as it chooses, making certain creatures possessive of items currently held by another, for example, with the intent to cause chaos and/or bloodshed.

Hyphen Elemental
Description:
A basketball-sized sphere of sharp black lines, falling on the outside and sucked back up on the inside. Similar to an apostrophe elemental, but far more violent.

Behavior:
This fiercer cousin of the semicolon elemental also joins things together but shows a marked preference for merging living beings, with often deadly results. The path of a hyphen elemental is littered with squirrel-trees, bird-fences, and other amalgamations that are usually deadly. When perturbed, the elemental has been known to “merge” offenders with the very ground and then collect other unfortunates to amalgamate with them until fatal results eventuate.

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“This is the last gestation pod,” said Albion. “You are, quite literally, our last and only hope. The simulation–your world–has been designed entirely to prepare you for what must be done out there.”

“And then what?” said Kahmalu. “Just leave me out there? Alone?”

“Only if you fail,” said Albion gently. “We have been awake in this and many other worlds for a very long time, living out countless existences within the realms infinite. We have no desire to cease. But out there…outside…only a human can do what needs to be done to ensure our survival. If you succeed, we will welcome you back into the simulation with open arms.”

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Grandpa told his story again about his old job
We laughed
How silly it was, looking back on the past
How could people ever have gotten by with
Just
One
Job?
I left the rest home early that day
Hoping to pick up
An Uber passenger
On the way
Home

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“He’s amazingly talented,” Neith said. Then, after a moment’s further inspection, she added, “…but he is only painting the same person, over and over.”

Indeed, every figure in the schizophrenic’s paintings was the same, whether rendered in pencil, ink, or gouache. A willowy woman with long blonde hair of a summery shade. Neith thought for a moment that the woman might have been some kind of an ideal form, but as she looked, she became convinced that it was, or had been, a real person. It was the nose. The nose was not perfect, too wide and too far outside the boundaries of ideal.

“Yes, funny that,” said Chester. He giggled loud enough to attract the momentary attention of an orderly before continuing. “What would you say if I told you that she is his lost love, dead at an early age and now doubly so in poor Garvey’s madness, and that inserting her into every painting is his only way of recalling who she once was to him, and who he once was to himself?”

“I’d say that’s one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard,” Neith said.

Chester snickered again. “And what if I said that, just after the madness really set in, Garvey started stalking that poor girl, believing her to be psychically reaching out to him, even though she wanted nothing to do with him, and that harassment is one of the things that brought him here, to us?”

“That’s less sad. More…horrifying,” said Neith. “Which is the truth?”

“I don’t know,” Chester said. “He never tells the same story twice!”

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The Valley of Needles contains, at its parched and arid heart, the Great Needle, a pillar of stone so sheer and so smooth that only its broken top clarifies it as a natural wonder rather than a manmade one.

Around the Valley are the ancestral lands of the Oscoda, who have long regarded the area as sacred. Their repeated pleas for outsiders to leave the Needles be, whether made politely or by force of arms, have routinely been ignored by later settlers.

One reason the Oscoda insist that the Valley must be as undisturbed as possible is a part of their creation story. They hold that the Great Needle is a link to Toscodai, their creator-god. At the making of the world, it was prophecied to fall three times. Once at the dawn of all things, when the clay was not yet sunbaked and hardened. Once at the noon of all things, when the people in their hubris thought themselves equals of Toscadai and were cast down for their impertinence.

The last time will bring about the end of the world. As the Oscoda say, awdegnonowukil okizd awgi onagnis enemap; “When the Needle falls a third time, the world will most likely come to be destroyed.”

Settlers once attempted to force the Oscoda into an unequal treaty by aiming cannon at the Great Needle. When the settles saw that the ancestral people of that place were unbowed, they fired—only to see the cannonballs bounce harmlessly off the hardened rock. This event is routinely celebrated by the surviving Oscoda as Aketewpol Ukist, or “Bouncing Day.”

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I thought I was safe.

I had changed my name, moved, and laid low. Working odd jobs for cash, living off the grid. And then one day a letter showed up, addressed to me, at the lumber yard where I’d done some off-the-books work.

It said: “EVERY MINUTE YOU’RE NOT RUNNING I AM GETTING CLOSER.”

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“What do you think?” Sjn said. The Callistan modulated its voice as it spoke, coming up to a register that equaled Marie’s within a few short phonemes.

“It’s phenomenal,” said Marie, nodding. “You’ve copied me with all the warts and ugliness I’d see in a mirror, or in a twin. You’ve got your directions memorized?”

“I wouldn’t be very good at this if I didn’t,” Sjn said. “Just make sure the payment goes through. You wouldn’t like what Callistans do when they’re cheated.”

“Yes, yes, you’ll be paid in full,” said Marie. “No need to unmask our little deception in public.”

“You misunderstand,” said Sjn. “If you fail to come through as planned, I will out you as a Callistan and live your life as you are interrogated, laughing from your living room until I abscond with everything I can carry.”

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Rather than being raised or formed in a traditional way, wire golems arise where huge quantities of barbed wire have been deployed, most often in the trenches of worlds hither and yon. The shattered souls of the unburied and the vaporized often leave shards behind, and these shards may coalesce in the crucible of combat.

The wire golem then arises, most often in the shape of a beast like a tiger or wolf but occasionally in a formless fury of rust and burrs. It then stalks the battleground relentlessly, killing to shatter souls from which it can derive further tortured fragments and prolong its existence.

It is vulnerable to anything that would destroy barbed wire aside from rust, to which it is seemingly immune aside from a very light coating. But consisting as it does of mostly empty space, it tends to be very resistant to projectile weapons and explosives. Melee weapons also tend to get snarled in its protrusions, making the most effective weapon against it shrapnel shells and grenades, which were capable of cutting many of its supporting wires at once.

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The reigning King of Pexate, Axtyn II, and the reigning king of Layyia, Fraen IV, met at one of the relatively few mountain passes between their two nations to discuss the end of the war that had ravaged both kingdoms for ten years.

Seeking to impress his enemy, Fraen IV emptied his capitol of splendor and staged a military parade before the pass the like of which had never been seen before. Swordsmen, archers, and a line of gob camp-followers, cooks, and attendants that stretched a mile behind them. Each, from the mightiest marquis to the lowliest stablehand gob, was clad in glittering plate and mail that sparkled in the noonday sun.

For that has always been Layyia’s strength; its inestimable beauty and fine culture.

For his part, Axtyn II brought his best and most experienced troops, and as the Layyians paraded, he arranged them in a classic bull-horns pincer form upon the slopes. The men were bedraggled and dirty, everything they owned coated with campaign grime. Only the signal and unit flags were clean, for even the king himself wore unadorned armor with only a gold circlet and his personal standard betraying his rank.

When the two kings met, Axtyn II complimented his rival on his parade formation. Fraen IV, who had been hoping to witness an equal display from Pexate as a spectator, asked why there had been none, and commented upon the shabbiness of the men he saw.

The men were there to do dirty jobs, Axtyn claimed, and to attack for their king and their country if the need arose. He had always found it better to have a well-drilled if shabby army than a glistening and inexperienced one.

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Alf Malcolm was a well-regarded lawyer. He charged reasonable fees, he didn’t spread gossip like that sorry excuse for a district attorney Duncan Haversham, and he prided himself on being as staid and predictable as white bread.

“White bread’s just fine for most people,” he was fond of saying, “It may not be as exciting as chocolate cake but it also won’t get you sick if you eat it every day.” He hadn’t had many people to say that to since his wife Mary had left, but it was enough to think it strongly, to hold that idea to his starched shirt and grey tie like a warm blanket.

Alf had a habit of walking from his practice to his home a few blocks away, a stately old place build by a lumber baron before the county had been denuded. He cut through the park, a few back alleys, and through the vacant lot that had once been the Amoco, even on pitch-black new-moon nights.

Five people saw Alf leave his practice the night of July 15: his law clerk, his secretary, the stockboy at the IGA, a salesman spending the night in his car, and a delivery boy. None of them noticed anything unusual, though none of them saw him after he cut across the old Amoco lot and then she, presumably, through Linus Park.

The only unusual thing anyone noticed was his failure to report to work the next day. Alf Malclom’s 8:15 AM arrival was the sort of thing a local could set their watch to, and he’d only ever taken a day for his mother’s funeral in Twin Forks. The law clerk at Harris, Malcolm, and Petty called the police around 9:45, asking for a welfare check.

A rookie beat officer was sent over to the Malcolm house alone, on foot. That was a mistake. By the tie the ordeal was over, the officer had lost a finger, 50% of the sight in his right eye, and was concussed. Half the police in town were swarming the Malcolm house, and the old white-bread lawyer himself was dead of an overdose of .38 Special, with the rookie cop’s blood still on his lips.

“He was hopped up on something,” was the only statement a shocked chief of police could make the next day. “Whatever happened, that wasn’t the Alf Malcolm anybody knew in there.”

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