Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The goose would always show up at the strangest of times, and always with a pin–either held in its beak or fixed to one of its wings, or both. The bird then made a beeline for whatever food stalls or open-air concessions it could find before sprinting away with nuggets and morsels impaled upon the needle.

Today, it had hit up a pretzel stand. Honking quietly and still dripping with nacho cheese, it walked into the small, hidden cabin on the outskirts of town, where the hidden old man–its mentor–waited.

“Very good, yes very good,” the man cackled. He took the pretzely prize and split it between himself and his bird. “Here’s to another day of high life at the man’s expense.”

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And then, O then, the great Selene did mourn for her lost love. She set his soul free from his broken body, did the moon goddess of old, and placed it in the body of a humble moth, there to forever be with her in the night sky and ever-seeking her light. When the moth did die of old age, Selene would gently place her love’s soul into another newborn night-flitterer.

However, and you must be wary of this, O my children, there is an important lesson and catch. For among the infinite and uncountable moths of our world, there is one that is a very important bug. For it contains the soul of great Selene’s great love. Woe betide any mortal, any being that might know better, that casually smashes that most important of bugs, for they will find themselves at the mercy of a vengeful moon.

The night sky will brighten, the tides will have a moment of madness, and then all will be still, save for a rush of air. And another body, O children do not look upon it, will be left on the flank of great Selene, desiccated and aloft forever as a punishment for its great crime.

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The old men gathered around the table began to speak, with Witherspoon at the head speaking and then the rest uttering a refrain in unison.

“First, we give thanks to the Old Moth, who ever seeks the flame that will end the world. It has seen each age pass as its lesser children see each phase of their life; we are await its glorious reemergence from the Coccoon.”

“Emerge, Old Moth, and let our flame guide you in the extinction of all things.”

“And we do not forget the Old Moth’s consort, She-Who-Swims-Nameless. We know her by many appellations: the fish of holes, the swimmer of voids, and container of oceans and emptiness. But in all things we see her in the waters primordial that precede and follow all that is alive and alight, and in her many gaping holes we see ourselves.”

“In each wound, never closing but swarming with parasites, we see what we truly are.”

Clearly, this was no ordinary meeting of a Rotary Club. They were talking about something far darker and more secret.

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“Ah! Secret.” Hui nodded eagerly, watching his image in the webcam preview bobble about a fraction of a second later. “I understand. It’s important to have secrets, not to blab everything too early.”

“Exactly!” said Xi. “I’m so happy you understand. It seems a like we have a lot in common, but we need to keep some things secret for now.”

“So…we can talk again?” Hui said. “You wouldn’t mind?”

“Of course!” said Xi. “I have to go now, though, but we’ll talk again soon, okay?”

“Okay!”

On her end, Xi, killed the webcam. Rather than playing around with the computer and her satellite internet for a bit longer, she turned off the generator and got ready to do to sleep. Slithering into the nest she had made of torn-up clothing and her own shed skin, she wrapped her long and brightly scaled tail around herself, her cold-blooded anatomy encircling, and gaining warmth from, her hot-blooded.

“I’ll tell him eventually,” the naga said to herself. “Maybe start by asking if he likes centaurs and snakes, and going from there…”

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“The Devibha. Its name roughly meaning “planetqueen” in Sanskrit, this flawless gem was found in the mines of Kollur around 1500, and the uncut stone was regarded as having no peer in heaven or on earth–as a result it was given as a wedding present from the king of a Rajput kingdom to his bride, who he believed it had no equal. His wife died, tragically, only three days later. But during those three days, legend has it, the planet itself obeyed her every whim when she wore her diadem.”

“This led to a tradition that the Devibha granted phenomenal power–the power of a queen–over the earth itself, but did so at the price of a drastically shortened life of only a few days. The stone passed from owner to owner in the Indian subcontinent, never staying in the same hands for long; few were eager to wear it, for the idea of bending the planet to one’s will loses some luster if it means death in a few days. It made its way from India to Britain as spoils after the sack of Mysore, and at some point during the Regency it was also cut into its current shape and placed in a new setting.”

“The last known owner was Lady Paget, who never wore the Devibha. Upon her death in 1962, it was donated to the Museum.”

After reading the tag, I cast it aside and picked out the remaining broken glass. The diadem fit neatly, and when I gave it the slightest thought, the ground rumbled with an earthquake.

Three days to live seemed like a fair price to pay for such power.

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I started off by laying out, as plainly as I could, what had happened. “We thought it odd that the forest was so unique. The trees there, the plants…like nothing else on the face of the earth. And that’s to say nothing of all the animals, all unique forms of what you might find elsewhere. It made no sense for there to be this much diversity in a place that wasn’t an island or a tepui or otherwise isolated.”

There was no response.

Taking this as an encouraging sign, I continued: “There were legends about the woods, of course, as there always are. Mostly in the form of people and things going in and never coming out. The few records I’ve been able to find have been quite strange. People found wrapped up in thorny vines, choked on thousands of flies that occur nowhere else, or with tooth marks from a dozen different species on them. And that’s when I began, you know. To suspect.”

This time, I felt a faint breeze kicking up. “To suspect what?” The words were a whisper on the wind, syllables howling across the open and rotted stumps.

“People say the forest is full of beasts,” I said. “But now I know that the forest is the beast.”

“Oh?”

“Every tree and branch, every unique animal inside…is part of a single organism. Great, powerful, and wise.”

“And?”

“And I’ve come to join it.”

A pause, and then a single, drawn out word, echoing from every quarter of the living forest. “Welcome.”

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“The Astral Egg must crack. We are each of us an eggshell, and it must be shattered to release the truth within.”

Those words, tumbling out in a rising-and-falling singsong mantra, kept on issuing from each of the cultists in the room, their dark robes against the shadows making each look like a pair of floating hands and ominous lips. Shane swung the knife back and forth, wildly, but they were dozens and he was just one.

“The Astral Egg must crack. We are each of us an eggshell, and it must be shattered to release the truth within.”

“Get back! Back, or I’ll cut you, so help me!” Shane let loose with a knife-wrestling scream as his blade found purchase in a cultist who’d gotten too close.

The man tumbled to the ground. “His Astral Egg has cracked! We are each of us an eggshell, and it must be shattered to release the truth within,” the others continued. “The truth within has been released!”

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“There’s a ribbon of solid ground here. Follow the mushrooms. They need something solid to grow on, since they’re eating burrow-things that died.” The words were transmitted directly to Peixoto’s mind; the bone familiar that the magician had constructed remained perched silently on his shoulder.

It was useful advice, very astute, and at the homunculus’s urging Peixoto picked his way through the swamp, with only one wet boot from a missed step where he’d mistaken a plucked and floating mushroom for solid ground.

“How did you know that?” said Peixoto.

The bone golem hopped from one foot to the other. “It is how my flesh was taken, and I remember it well.”

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“What we didn’t realize was that the waste products, which are normally toxic but rather inert, had actually been mixing together in the sluice pile, accidentally accumulating in a pool.”

“Wait. You’re telling me that the runoff from the world’s most advanced and experimental bioreactor was being stored in a pool?”

“It seems that the elbow of one of the runoff pipes was improperly fabricated, an engineering problem really. The liquid didn’t escape the facility, it just wound up in a pool of water where a lot of detritus winds up.”

“What kinds of detritus?”

“Mostly stuff from the mess that gets accidentally shunted through pipes. Silverware and the like.”

“That sounds dangerous and negligent, but hardly the ‘watery discovery’ your email mentioned.”

“Ah. Well, as it turns out, the introduction of the commingled waste products into a space with water and kitchen detritus resulted in some rather…exotic…results.”

“How exotic are we talking?”

“We discovered the first spoon creature eighteen hours ago.”

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“What have you got to be so prickly about?” I said.

The skeleton had no eyes, but it rolled its head in such a way that I felt like it was looking at me with arched brows (which it also did not have). “Oy. Maybe ya ‘aven’t noticed, guv, but bein’ dead ‘as a way of givin’ ya a grim outlook, ya ken? If the dyin’ doesn’t do it, then the rotting away will. Cor, maybe the bindin’ of yer old bones wif ancient runes o’ power just as you was gettin’ comfy will be the kicker, eh?”

“Sorry!” I cried. “Geez. Sorry I asked.”

“Oy, I bet you is, guv. Point bein’, way I see it is, I gots every right to be prickly as a bleedin’ cactus, ya ken?”

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