Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

After murdering the abusive, drunken fiancee that had been forced upon her, Cera refused to acquiesce to either the burgermeister or the bishop that offered her protection in exchange for her hand. Instead, she was last seen entering the mires with all her worldly possessions.

They spoke in whispers of how Cera had chosen to forsake her beauty and all of her suitors to enter into the swamp and to live in sorcery therein as the legendary swamp witch. For surely, they thought, no woman of sane mind would flee into such dreadful environs, and only black magic could explain the powerful hold she’d seemed to wield over local men with her intense beauty.

Naturally, in those stories–as is often the case–Cera the swamp witch had to trade her beauty for power, for none can be suffered to have both. They say that her hair grew thick with moss, that mushrooms and other fungi erupted from her fair skin, and that none could see her if she failed to move in her new and native home, so complete was the disguise.

Folks for miles around claimed to have seen her riding at night, seen her lights dancing over the swamps and bogs, and seen a dark and twisted shape casting spells in their dreams. Cera is cited as both a cautionary tale to young brides who would go astray, and as a sign of the strength that a woman can grasp if she has but the hands to hold it.

Cera herself, long dead and mummified in the peat bog where she had lay since the day she had sunk into the muck whilst making her escape, would have been proud of such a legacy.

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Anita cleans homes for a living. She doesn’t take much joy in her job, but she does have pride in her hard work, and how even her increasingly desperate situation has not been able to get her down. In a moment, she will begin cleaning out an old wardrobe, one that has not been touched since the stately home changed hands.

Near the back of the many old and dusty furs, she will find a hidden latch, mistaking it for a splinter to be pulled and reglued. Woodworking and joinery isn’t in her job description, but since the new owners are both asking and paying, there’s a bottle of wood glue in her back pocket.

The back will slide open on hinges still well-oiled, revealing a passage down into darkness. It’s filthy, so does it need to be cleaned too? That will be foremost on Anita’s mind as she enters, cell phone flashlight ablaze.

She has never heard of the Findlay Vault, the legendary trove that Sir Thomas Findlay III supposedly hid on the grounds. Anita has no idea that the room she is cleaning and airing out was the young Master Thomas IV’s room, untouched by his grieving mother who was one Sir Thomas’s young bride, until she died. No one had been in that room, in that wardrobe, in the nearly 70 years since Master Thomas IV had perished and his father had disappeared.

Anita will follow the long, cool stone tunnel, perhaps once used to smuggle Roman Catholic priests. She will follow it to the Findlay Trove, long undisturbed. And the light of her flashlight will play over the mummified remains of Sir Thomas, surrounded by the riches he hoped to take with him into the next world.

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Ellis was eventually caught, of course–even the scion of a rich clan cannot forever kidnap horses from the stables of fellow Social Register families. What was less clear was what he had done with the animals, thoroughbreds all, which could not be found in either the Grissom family stables or anywhere on the black market.

Eventually, the police found a false wall in Ellis Grissom’s private stables, and behind it a hidden room with all the makings of a tannery, with the equipment to skin, tan, and condition leather. In one corner was Ellis’s old wooden rocking horse, his most prized childhood toy and, it was later found, the subject of nearly all of Ellis’s 13,000 journal entries.

The rocking horse was nearly completely covered by leather made from the tanned hides of thoroughbred racers, with only a small patch near the muzzle incomplete.

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Twenty-four wrecks in twenty-four hours
And those are just the ones reported
Strange how close the students’ joy
Always seems to mirror the oblate ball
They pretend to watch, corner of one eye
While drifting off on gin-scented wings

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Hey there sports fans! We here at the University love tailgating and football as much as you do, so we have put together this list of handy safety tips for your first big game weekend. Go team!

1. Arrive to the game early. It can take up to 3 hours to move through heavy traffic on a major game day!

2. Only alcohol purchased onsite is allowed in the stadium. The booze will know if it is in the wrong place, and may cry out in pain.

3. Tailgating starts no earlier than 6pm the Friday before the game. Violators must give the University a Friday of its choosing in the future.

4. Masks are forbidden at all games. Though you hide your face, we know your soul better than you yourself.

5. No weapons may be carried on campus. The human body is a weapon, the most dangerous one of all.

6. All University buildings will be closed on game day. The secret whispers to unlock them are known solely to the cleaning staff and may not be overheard by sane ears.

7. Be aware that there may be cellular and data outages due to high demand. Human emotions, rising skyward like death rattles, envy the shining silver threads of cellular signals and seek only to end them.

8. Do not run. It will not help you, should the beast awaken.

9. Somewhere on campus, there is a patch of dead grass with a radius of 11.11 inches. No one must ever enter it.

10. If you suddenly feel the air temperature drop by 39.1 degrees centigrade, run. Do not look back, for what is coming cannot be seen with sane eyes.

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“And that’s what planned giving means for you,” finished Mr. White. “Planning for a bequest in advance makes it easy and painless.”

He could have been named for his perfectly bleached smile, his shimmering skin, or even the waves of whitecaps cresting atop his perfectly coiffed head. But Miriam saw right through all of it, and through his seersucker suit besides, to the mosquito within. The university called him a development officer, but in Miriam’s eyes he was a looter, there to take her for everything she was worth under the banner of a university she detested.

“Thank you for coming all this way,” she said, sweetly. “You know, I met my husband at the university, God rest his weary soul.”

“I saw that, I’m sorry for your loss,” Mr. White said, smile still gleaming.

“It was in ‘92, so you’re a bit late for that,” Miriam said with a hint of battery acid. “You know, all the time we were dating, people had the most terrible things to say to us. They called him a race traitor, said he had the jungle fever, called me a gold-digger n-…well, you can fill in the rest of that for yourself.”

“It was rough in the pre-integration days, wasn’t it?”

Miriam glared at Mr. White. “I graduated in 1976, son. Integration was 15 years before that, and a good 10 years after most other places, I might add.”

“All the more reason to make the campus better with your generous gift.” Like a tried and true salesman whose commission depended on it, nothing she snarked had any effect on him.

“Let me think it over,” she said. “In the meantime, though, I do have a bit of planned giving you can take back with you, so you won’t have driven all the way out here empty-handed.”

“Oh?” said the development officer. He had a donor form out and a pen clicked before Miriam could even continue.

“Up there on the shelf,” said Miriam, gesturing to a rack of dusty curios. “You see the stone head? The Olmecs called it Tiquetzalitza, the Bringer of Rewards. It was given to my husband as a gift after we did an excavation in Tuxtla and donated the artifacts to a local museum instead of looting them.”

Mr. White eagerly filled out the form, asking a few additional questions and snapping a few photos. “This will have a place of honor in our university museum,” he said. “Thank you. And you’ll consider a monetary bequest as well?”

“Call on me in a year and we’ll have a cup of tea over it,” said Miriam, smiling.

In a year she would be dead; the cancer would see to that. And without whispering the name of a new owner into its stony ears, the Olmec Idol of Tiquetzalitza would regard its new owners as thieves. It was made to curse conquistadors with ill luck and poverty, something that had worked so well that they had given it back to its rightful owners three hundred years ago.

With the entire university as the guilty party, that was planned giving indeed.

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Stones I sell, I sell stones
Each with magical powers
A crystal, a geode you may expect
But none of those are ours
Granite here and sandstone too
Unpolished quartz, we have a few
All closely held, all closely worn
Sometimes we see a little scorn
It cannot be a magic stone
When it is found and isn’t grown
They look for jewels, trinkets all
And that is where their logic falls
This quartz was lucky to a man
Who now owns a company in Japan
This granite chunk was precious to
A president, I’ll say not who
Each of them holds within
A power to make witches grin
A power they had and they retain
A power to make all new again
What do we call this magic, then?
It’s called BELIEF, and there all ends.

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Prince Iainen had united the apoc and the symph, as he felt was his birthright. The apoc were to be the warriors, the tip of the spear, with which to bring order and prosperity to the Vale and all the woods beyond. The symph were to bolster their numbers and to work as the logistical tail of this army: as porters, farmers, teamsters. But the next generation of apoc needed living hosts, and Iainen was loathe to sacrifice any of his people for the purpose. He was also dismissive of the use of non-sapient hosts like the onii, feeling it would breed weaker warriors.

Iainen was also afraid of the coming of the 37-year laulu, which was not far off. When they emerged, moulted, and saw what he had wrought in the Vale, he was sure that the junior brood would oppose him by force of arms. And when, just a few years later, the 41-year senior brood arose, they would finish the job–the two cycles were not always synchronized, but at this time, they very nearly were.

The solution that presented itself was as brutal as it was simple. Iainen gathered eggs from the apoc that followed him and inserted them into the young laulu as they slept underground. The empathic powers of the apoc were enough to locate the shallowly buried junior brood, and long bamboo tubes were sufficient to deposit the young. By wiping out the junior brood, and using the troops thus raised to defeat their brothers, who were buried so deep as to be undetectable, Iainen had felled two onii with one stone.

But the plan had to be perfect. If even a single laulu from the junior brood survived, they could attempt to awaken the senior brood early, and that would provide a force sufficient to challenge the new order of the apoc. Iainen himself accompanied his people, seeing to the dirty deed personally.

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Prince Iainen was unusual from the first.

His mother Metsaa was the most celebrated tracker in generations and personal huntress to Queen Siipi, the great leader of perhaps the largest symph hive in the Vale. Time and again, Metsaa performed her duties well and was rewarded with the permission to deposit her young in elderly symph males, long past their breeding prime and of no use to the Sisterhood. However, during the long years of her service to the Queen, Metsaa fell in love with Siipi, and found that the queen loved her in return.

Now, despite the close kinship between the symph and the apoc, it was not possible for them to interbreed. Even if it had been, there was no way for the queen and the huntress to concieve, though they yearned for a child as a proof of their love. In the end, Siipi decided to allow Metsaa to lay an egg within her, to be its flesh-mother, with the hope that the child would inherit some of her memories and personalities. This is uncommon but not unheard-of, after all, and Siipi had already taken care with her own succession.

Metsaa protested but eventually broke down. With the strongest and most empathic apoc she could find as the father, Metsaa’s child grew within the queen, killing her softly before emerging as a child. As the lovers had hoped, the boy was an immensely talented empath and had many of his flesh-mother’s traits.

As he grew, Prince Iainen became convinced that the apoc were held back by their individuality, much as the symph were held back by their Sisterhood and long cumbersome life-cycle. He sought to reconcile the two peoples and unite them as one, with the apoc adopting the collective lifestyle of the symph and the symph abandoning their sisterhood in favor of breeding more males and therefore more children.

Alarmed, Metsaa banished her son, and his “flesh-sister” the new queen of the symph hive quietly ordered his death. But within a few years, he had returned with many followers and worked his will upon those that had wronged him, building a militant empire that stood to dominate the Vale for generations to come.

There was only one problem.

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The apoc are a curious people, widely regarded as the best hunters and trackers in the Vale but also completely dependent on the other creatures therein for their young. Like their close cousins the symph, the apoc are capable of flight and have a lingering empathic connection to one another–not enough for any but the most skilled to communicate wordlessly, but enough to sense feelings and to guide behavior. They have always been solitary, though, unlike the social symph, and their numbers include many males in contrast to the Sisterhood.

However, unlike the symph Sisters, whose young grow safely within the confines of their great hives, apoc young must gestate within a living host, and they are inevitably fatal upon their emergence.

In ages past, the apoc traded their skills as hunters, gatherers, trackers, and woodsmen for hosts. It was seen as a great honor for the older denizens of the wood to birth an apoc child, for the natural secretions of the egg and larva deadened the senses over time and led to a death that was painless and gave rise to new life. It was often common for young apoc to be named for their hosts, and to regard and be regarded by the decedent’s family as their own. The natural empathy that apoc had seemed to impart to their young certain characteristics of the individuals in which they grew, and the more gifted apoc sometimes could claim memories from their “flesh-mother” or “flesh-father.”

While poorer apoc could and did raise young in unintelligent creatures like wild onis, it was regarded as a black mark and those children were generally disdained. Some apoc did trade in unwilling flesh-parents, but those cases were regarded with horror and any practitioners regarded as enemies of the apoc people and stamped out.

That is, until the appearance of Prince Iainen.

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