Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Hetasa, the merchant city, had a long tradition of independence despite owing ostensible fealty to many entities over the years. It had been everything from a kingdom in its own right to a de facto empire, a province of the Empire to a subject of the Emirate, an free city to a unit of a much larger territory. But to the Hetasans, all that was strictly secondary. The city, and the House of Iora that ruled it, were eternal and unchanging.

Tales are still told in dark alleys and nurseries of the time the great Emir decided to remove the House of Iora from power and replace them with a satrap of her own choosing. The guilds and associations and merchants had worried the satrap to premature age and death from a heart attack inside of a year; the Emir, frustrated, had restored the House of Iora to power after it swore fealty to her. The city had quickly calmed, and when the Emirate collapsed Hetasa had endured almost unchanged.

The House of Iora took power in the earliest days of the city, overthrowing the noble house of Xyri and bringing the other nobility into line. The Iora had revived the ancient traditions of the Assembly of Nobles and the Assembly of the Humble, and used the illusion of participation and consensus to forge a rule more ironclad yet more unobtrusive than any a would-be despot could hope to establish.

Two things about the House of Iora excited mild interest and off-color jokes among outsiders: the fact that the ruler was styled “Last Among Equals” even though the reverse was clearly true, and the curious coincidence that the ruler of Hetasa and the head of the House of Iora was inevitably a woman. Unlike the Empire and the Emirate, where large families fought amongst one another over claims to the throne, there was inevitably–no matter the ruler’s consort–only a single heir born into the house every generation, a daughter. Sequestered in a temple during their minority and only presented to the public on coming of age, the Iora women were invariably highly able–a fact some attributed to the strictness and isolation of their upbringing. Some argued that no line could sustain such ability over the long term, and that some of the Ioras must have been adopted, but the strong family resemblance they demonstrated generally buried such concerns.

But, in truth, there was far more to it than that. If, during the reign of Iora XXVI, one had managed to penetrate into the temple sanctum in search of the young Iora XXVII, they would have found only empty rooms and a staff with their tongues cut out. Similarly, the grand marble effigied tombs in the City Palace hold nothing but a few motes of dust.

Hetasa has, in fact, been ruled by the same being since the Xyri were overthrown nearly one thousand years ago.

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“I need someone to mold something for me,” said Davis. His fingers trembled at the thought, and the crystals clutched within clinked together with low and resonant musical tones.

“Well, I am a molder, so in that sense you’re on the right track,” Caroline said. She’d led Davis into a nearby Grant’s Crossing greasy spoon; they sat opposite a molder cook who was busily shaping the dry infertile dust of the Permeable Lands into unwholesome dishes. “Put those down before you break them.”

Davis laid the crystals on the table, and Caroline delicately tapped one, smiling as it gave off the proper note. They were among the few things it was impossible to mold into existence, even in the Permeable Lands. “I need you to mold a person for me,” he said at length.

“Oh, is that all?” Caroline said, sounding bored. “You can put half of those away. Give me a brief description of appearance and personality and what name you’d like them to have. Complex clothes are extra, and don’t you dare try to remove them from the Permeable Lands unless you want a pillar of dust and a pissed-off molder.”

“No,” Davis said, trying hard not to adopt a condescending tone despite the youth of the girl he was addressing. “Not just any person. Not a new person. Someone that I used to know.”

Caroline recoiled. “Someone alive?”

Davis breathed a deep and racking sigh. “Dead. My daughter.”

“Now that is a whole other thing,” said Caroline. “Take those crystals back out. Do you know what you’re asking for? We’d need to go to the very heart of the Permeable Lands for that, the most permeable of the permeable. I’d be unable to work on anything else for at least a month, and you’d be responsible for all incidental travel expenses.”

“Can’t…can’t you just create her like you did with that fake bar, all those fake people?”

The girl glared at him. “The bar was an illusion, sand and dust suspended in the air and given a little color. Nothing solid, nothing alive.”

“From a description? I’ve read your ‘Molders’ Creed’ and it’s all about how creation lies in the whole, not the details. Complexity of result isn’t necessarily complexity of input?”

“Yeah, but think about it. If you gave me a description, I could mold someone. It might even look superficially like your daughter and act like her a little. But it would still be my interpretation of her. You’d be paying me to create a third-hand copy. No, for a job like this I have to have your thoughts–everything you ever saw your daughter do or say. I need access to your most intimate perceptions of her.”

“Is that what you mean by the most permeable of the permeable?” asked Davis.

“Precisely,” said Caroline. “It’s damn hard to alter anything once it exists–you might remember that from the Molders’ Creed too–and to get the information I need for your daughter, that’s exactly what has to happen. It’s still not going to be perfect: the molding will be based on your memories, after all, not any kind of objective reality. It’s a fool’s errand, but at least you’ve found a molder who will at least try to give you something close to what you want rather than just a cheap and unsatisfying simulacrum.”

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Nobody’s sure what happened; the texts are filled with wild speculation and the sages are silent. It’s true that for almost a thousand years the city of Aura had been gripped by a change in the local climate. It had been a chilly if fertile land when the settlers had first arrived, refugees from the collapsing Empire, but the climate had steadily worsened. By the time of the incident, no one could remember a time when the city wasn’t artificially heated and trading its expertise in weaving the subtle threads of magic for foodstuffs from the south.

Chroniclers describe Aura as a city of great learning and even greater hubris, where the normal and customary laws regarding moderation in the use of non-scientific powers was ignored or mocked. It had streetlamps before any other city in the former Empire, albeit ones lit by will o’ the wisps rather than electricity or gas. Citizens never bought any of the furs traded by other settlements in what had become a cold and unforgiving northland; their magics kept the city at such a tropical temperature that scholars from the distant, steamy Hegemony often lived there comfortably.

It may have been that overuse, that flaunting, of power that was Aura’s undoing. Or perhaps it was merely the vengeful spirit of a northland that had been too long defied. Either way, all communication with the city stopped abruptly one day. After a worrying end to the regular trade caravans that plied the route between Aura and Kynemeguta, scouts were dispatched.

They returned with tales of desolation. The town was dark and cold, with ice and snow choking every avenue. The people were frozen where they had stood, some with their hands thrown up as if to resist some terrible threat. They and their city remain there to this day, a prime destination for adventure seekers…and a warning.

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