Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“So,” Mixy said. “I know that you’re not relaly confident in Celeria’s magic skills, and that’s totally understandable given her past history with you, but I really think you ought to give her a chance, since her disguise spell is getting better all the time and if she can disguise you as Githyanki you should be able to walk right into their fortress without having to fight your way in, and-”

Bryn put her hand over the elf girl’s mouth. “Shh,” she said.

Celeria, for her part, was practicing the necessary incantation when the blow landed, at the exact time that “Womp Rat” was approaching with a tureen of fresh, if foul, soup. When he tripped, the shock of that noise combined with the shock of the bump on the head turned the practice incantation into a real one.

“Womp Rat” was suddenly, and surprisingly convincingly, disguised as a githyanki. “Not again,” he moaned.

Bryn burst into the jail cell and, without missing a beat, she stuck her head in between the bars–it fit easily through the human-sized gap. “Give me your clothes,” she growled in her most intimidating voice. The Githyanki prisoner, flustered, meekly surrendered his prison clothes.

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But…what is the Bulwark?

The Chickasaw knew that, when the rock began to crumble, the hunting in the area would turn bad and any crops planted or food gathered would be of poor quality. The settlers who ejected them from their own lands found that cattle would die when the Bulwark was weak, babies would fail to thrive, and people had a way of disappearing. Reinforcing the Bulwark, even until little of the original igneous rock remained, seemed to put an end to this.

Its current caretakers believe the Bulwark is a place where another set of rules, physical rules, intersects with our own. Without raw matter to hold it back, they think, totally different and alien laws of physics begin to take hold–laws which have a negative effect on anything around them. But they are terrified that, despite their best efforts, the Bulwark is decaying with increasing speed.

Perhaps one could regard whatever is beneath those many layers as exerting pressure, either through natural processes or directed be a malign will. What once held for centuries, even millennia, with minimal human involvement now requires it. But what would happen if the Bulwark were to fail, wholly and catastrophically? What if the “pressure” behind it were to release?

It might allow the physics of an alien space to overwrite those of our own.

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Oral histories from the native Chickasaw say that the Bulwark appeared as a sort of volcanic stone, rent through with glassy intrusions, when their forefathers first came to know of it. Even then, the stones were beginning to crumble from within, and drawings from the 1810s and 1830s show that the feature bulged considerably during that time.

After the Chickasaw were forcibly removed, a local group including some notables of partial Chickasaw descent acted on what they regarded as a misguided but accurate local legend and began to reinforce the crumbling natural stone. Mortar was added in the 1840s, followed by brick buttresses shortly after the Civil War. Concrete followed in 1898, with reinforced concrete following in 1927.

To disguise the work from prying eyes, the small hillock from which the Bulwark protruded was completely bricked in as a warehouse, albeit one that never held any products. Indeed, most of the room inside was taken up by earth and stone and previous attempts to reinforce the Bulwark.

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She lay there, O Dreamer, within the shadows of Atogoza-Zož’s battlements, until one of the monks happened upon her and took her inside. There, they ministered to the traveler as best they were able as her wounds healed.

You may ask what becomes of one when they are so grievously wounded in the dream-realm. Do they awake? Are they comatose, in a sleep beyond sleep? In the case of our traveler, O Dreamer, she remained asleep to the waking world, for the vageries of the passage of time across the slumbering world and into the waking one meant that what were months in one were mere hours in the other.

The monks of Atogoza-Zož were amazed that one with such injuries from the night terrors had not been destroyed. They had buried many such in the communal dreamrest nearby, for those unfortunates had fallen into eternal sleep close enough to safety that itmight have been theirs.

Our traveler, once she was well enough to speak, asked for that high travelers to distant Atogoza-Zož always ask. She asked to fall into the deeper slumber. And the monks replied as they always did: she was free to stay in the monastary as long as she wished, but until she had undertaken to remain there a year and a day, they would not allow her to slip into slumber within slumber.

In addition to allowing time to study the great library of Atogoza-Zož, O Dreamer, this period allowed for careful consideration of the risks. For while the monks cared unceasingly for those dreamers within dreams, they could not help but notice how few returned, and how many slipped away into death.

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Dusty scribblings
Long forgotten
Borne from the past
On library wings
To bear witness
To a new digital age

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“They don’t let us have internet. We can’t have CDs because they’re too easy to make a shank out of. There’s books in the library, sure, but they’re mostly donations from like churches. Reading that stuff gets real boring.”

“I heard that some use the time to write,” said Greg. “La Morte d’Arthur was written while Thomas More was in prison for armed robbery.”

“They take pencils and pens whenever they feel like it,” Marcus said. “Pages too. I had a hundred pages of a fantasy book wind up in the toilet because the guard thought I was sassing him.”

“As someone who once left the outline of a seven-book cycle of high fantasy novellas on a city bus, I feel you there,” said Greg. “But they’re saying you killed Darius because of something he said about your work?”

Marcus recoiled. “Hmph. Like usual, they didn’t even listen to what I was telling them. Darius might have hated my story but that wasn’t a reason to kill him. No, Darius was…”

The prisoner trailed off.

“Was what?” Greg said. “Listen, from where I’m sitting, prison seems like a leveled-up middle school, my worst nightmare, where the cliques can kill and being a nerd makes you a literal target to be stabbed by literal knives. But they didn’t even want to let me in here at all, and I don’t have much time. So if you know something, tell me. I can’t promise I won’t have to tell them, but I’ll do my best.”

Marcus looked up. “What was it about?” he said. “The outline you lost on that bus.”

“I called it Epic of the Spheres,” said Greg. “Each novella was about someone in the elf-world of Sylvantine who was responsible for singing the song that bound the role together. One of them was even a prisoner who sang his song in secret to the prison sparrows.”

“Heh,” said Marcus. “That’s some geeky stuff, man. Mine was gonna be about a king who rules in secret from a prison, and someone who goes inside to overthrow ’em. All the wardens and guards were going to be elves, all high and mighty.”

“You should keep kicking the idea around,” said Greg. “I’d read it. And you know, I am the general coordinator of Nerdicon, we even get publishers there sometimes. More than one of our attendees has one home with a book deal.”

“Yeah…” Marcus said wistfully. “Yeah.” Then, his face was hard, and all business. “Darius wasn’t a book critic,” he said. “Darius was the dungeon master of a secret group of us that would get together to play Dungeons and Dragons. We made like we were a gan or a crew, but we’d just geek out together. Until last week, anyhow.”

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After all, Dad was an Edward, and Granddad, and so on. I come from a long line of Edwards, each more Edwardian than the last.

So when Dad turned out to be a violent drunk, just like his dad, and so on back down the Edward line…well, it made my silly name a very sensible course of action. And when I finally snuffed the old man out for his crimes, made it look like an accident, there was even more to be afraid of.

I’d seen what Edwards could do.

I’d seen what Edwards were capable of.

I couldn’t let myself be on the receiving end of that. So an Edwardphobe I was, and an Edwardphobe I remain.

They all must die.

And I will be the last.

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“Unfortunately, my lovely Valia Springs are currently…occupied,” said Namidine. “Drow in one pool, githyanki in another, and modrons in a third…and none of them are paying!”

Bearing down on the githyanki that had called her kind ‘accursed winged filth,’ the young strix stove his head in with a well-aimed smack from her warpwood rod, blasting foul ichor into the spring’s clear healing waters.

The springs’ healing magic washed away the crude drow disguise that Celeria had cast; “Womp Rat” no longer looked like the lead from an elfsploitation scroll. Playing it up, he moaned and cried most pitiably, trying to convince the other drow that a terrible curse affected the pool, one that could turn them into scruffy and smelly humans. Alarmed, they quickly vacated the sparkling waters.

“Womp Rat” picked up Brynhildr and tossed her over the traps. She successfully made it as far as the Valia Guildhall’s table, but landed there with a belly flop that rolled the wounded guard, Tinuviel, off the table and onto the Baleful Polymorph trap. She hit the floor as an–admittedly fully healed–French bulldog.

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And then, O Dreamer, you will come to the great and impossible plateau where the slumbering nation of Igasiz meets its neighbors. A steep-cliffed mile high, these Outer Mountains are a refuge for those who find even the dream-worlds too great an imposition. The tiny hamlet of Atogoza-Zož waits there, a refuge for those seeking an enlightened dream even within their very dreams.

It is not a journey for the weak, O Dreamer, nor for a mere dilettante in the ways of the slumbering world. The nearest city in friendly Isašžozi, land of the quiescent indulgents, is quiet and peaceful Žakož. But the cliffs above it are of such a frightening and sheet height, and frequented in those wild dreamlands by such unbound horrors, that none are known to have made the crossing safely. Ozipizo, to the southwest as the great orb rises, is the land of violent nightmares and even those who reach the relative safety of its great fortress of Mes-O find themselves able to push no further against the nameless and hungry teeth of the id that lurk northward. Of those brave, foolhardy souls who have attempted it, O Dreamer, only one is known to have reached the hamlet of Mus-Na, where the hardy inhabitants are nightly besieged by the final nightmares of the dying. Though the cliffs are far more gentle slopes from Ozipizo, none but the mad would attempt that route.

That leaves only Igasiz. A peaceful land, protected from the horrors of Ozipizo by the Outer Mountains, its dangers are mostly the dreamt rocks and ego-winds, harder and more scouring than any the waking would could ever produce. Many seekers begin their trek at the great river-city of Sames, where the mountain streams join to form a navigable river. Atogoza-Zož awaits a mile above and many leagues south, and by following the gullies carved by the waters from above, the bravest and hardiest can make the trek. It is not an easy one, O Dreamer. Many have died from the rocks, the winds, the waters that suck the warmth from a body in an instant. The shock of awakening from such a death is often enough to kill the dreamer, or to permanently eject them from the dreamlands forever after. Even if one survives such a tussle, the possibilities of rescue are slim. While the yowling dreamstalkers of the Outer Mountains will not attack the hale, these twisted shadows that were once sapient beings have no qualms about feasting upon the wounded.

But beyond all these, Atogoza-Zož! It is built like a fortress-monastery of old, as safe from the elements as it is from the cares of the slumbering world. The monks there tend to those few who have successfully made the journey, seeing to what few physical needs dreamers have while allowing their wards the freedom to fall still deeper into slumber. Many never awaken, and others simply fade away–whether into wakefulness or a still-deeper dream none can say. But from those who do return, the monks take the stories and recollections, fleeting though they may be. Their writings, steady and impartial, fill the vast library of Atogoza-Zož with such knowledge as few have the aptitude to even read, much less decipher.

You may ask, O Dreamer, what possesses these monks of Atogoza-Zož to so do, and to tend the dreamers rather than joining them. Their response is recorded thus: “For every gate, a gatekeeper. For every traveler, an ear for the tale. For every bold explorer, one who recognizes they can never go so far.”

Inspired by this.

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My middle name should have been Phoebe, after my grandmother, who died the day before I was born. But thanks to the fifth my dad snuck into the delivery room, it was duly recorded as Phobe.

Edward Phobe.

He who is afraid of Edwards.

And, as an Edward myself, it sort of stood to reason that I’d be terrified of…well, myself.

So wouldn’t you know it, I was. But not for the reason you might expect. I’m terrified of myself because I might kill again.

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