Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The 99th Assassin of the Rising Dawn is always the youngest and most inexperienced, which is why they alone bear another duty: that of Harbinger. In the spirit of whatever passes for fair play among the Infernal Powers that Be, the 99th Assassin notifies the target of their fate before attempting to serve it.

The current 99th Assassin is Rerus, an eager recruit who sees himself rapidly climbing the ranks despite the fact that it is almost literally impossible for him to do so. As he has limited experience and even more limited funds, his preferred mode of assassination is to incapacitate the target and then place them in an almost assuredly deadly situation to make it appear like a suicide. There’s no reason for this–the Infernum truly does not care if they are implicated or not–but like many of his brethren in the 99th-90th Assassins, it’s felt that this is a classier way to go, and one that generally makes it more likely that the assassin will not face any significant opposition.

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For those who have offended the Infernal Powers That Be keenly enough, there is only one punishment that they will accept: death. For this reason, the Infernum has seen fit to retain a legion of killers known as the The 99 Assassins of the Rising Dawn. Whenever someone is marked for death by the inscrutable whims of the Infernum, the 99 Assassins answer the call.

The current 99th Assassin is the first to take the job. If they fail, their own life is forfeit, so the assassin will make as many attempts as are needed to finish the job. In the event that they are killed or incapacitated, the contract will devolve upon the 98th Assassin, who will then carry it out under the same stipulations. The 100th Assassin, a trainee, will then step forward to take the place of the fallen.

An assassination target is usually laid low by the 99th Assassin, but given the trainee-laced nature of the hierarchy, it is not unheard of for a target to survive the first wave of assassination attempts only to be finished off by the 75th Assassin or so. Some particularly troublesome targets have been known to climb the hierarchy still further. Should the target survive all 99 Assassins, an event so rare as to be almost unprecedented, the Infernal Powers That Be will cancel the contract, for they are as impressed by diabolically good work as any.

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The innermost seal protecting Project Eclipse was a door originally designed for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and while it was well-balanced enough to be opened by one person, it was guarded by two: Pyotr [REDACTED] and Olga [REDACTED], both of whom carried one of the two keys necessary to gain access during their shift. They had been briefed in emergency shutdown and containment protocols, nothing more, and passed the considerable time by field-stripping and maintaining their weapons one at a time, and making small talk.

“So he says he doesn’t think you’re the kind of girl who can be serious?” Pyotr said. He was seated on an overturned paint container, cleaning the bore of his AN-94 of the debris from his last trip to the range. He still had his sights set on the father-son trophy at the annual marksmanship contest.

“I mean, define serious relationship,” Olga replied, her own weapon at the ready. “What does that mean, exactly?”

Pyotr looked up to nod in agreement, only to pause. “Говно!” he muttered. Then, aloud to both Olga and Grigory, on the comms: “We have lights out on Inner Seal perimeter.”

Grigory responded: “No reported breaks in circuitry. We’re sending Beta Team down to reinforce you. Do not investigate; do not engage. Smells like a trap.”

“Говно!” Pyotr said again, hurrying to reassemble his AN-94. “Of all the days to have an alert, of all the times, right when I need to do rocket surgery to put this thing back together!”

“Uh, Pyotr?” Olga said. “What’s going on?”

Looking up, Pyotr saw that lights were going out, bank by bank, all around them–to either side of the patrol bath around the Project Eclipse core and the catwalk back to the elevator.

“Additional lights out,” Pyotr said, abandoning his AN-94 and drawing his first backup weapon, a PP-19 Bizon submachine gun. “Grigory! What the hell is going on up there?”

“I…I don’t understand,” Grigory said. “I am getting reports of lights failing all over the complex, but the power is still flowing. By rights the lights should be on.”

The darkness was closing in, bank by bank. “I hear footsteps,” Olga muttered. “There’s a human agency behind this, mark my words.”

The footsteps were still approaching; Pyotr and Olga each pulled down the night-vision attachments on their helmets just before the last nights went out. “Do not approach any further, or we will open fire,” Olga cried.

In a sudden, suffocating moment of darkness, both the night vision rigs went out, the screens going completely black even though they still emitted the high electronic buzz that accompanied their typical operation. Pyotr, cursing, cast his aside and opened up with his Bizon at the unseen assailant. Olga joined him, firing a series of short burst from her AN-94 before dropping a flare. The muzzle flashes of the weapons combined with the flare allowed both of them to see that a figure was approaching.

But that was before the flare winked out too, impossibly. Pyotr let off a second burst, if only to make some light, but to his horror he found that the gun spat and recoiled but shed no light.

“What witchcraft is this?” he whispered.

The PM Makarov pistol was drawn from Pyotr’s holster and fired twice, once for him and once for Olga. As they slumped to the floor, Darklight tossed the weapon aside with a chuckle. “I can snuff out any light in existence,” she purred. “Even the one in your eyes.”

Project Eclipse awaited before her, unguarded, for the taking.

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The guards of the blacksite housing Project Eclipse weren’t military–too many questions. Instead, they were “military contractors,” hire through an elaborate paper trail from a secret account. Ex-Russian special forces, with a history of wetwork in nasty situations that the average American bureaucrat had never heard of, they were every bit the match, man-for-man, for any other professionals worldwide.

But Project Eclipse was no ordinary bauble, and its hardened perimeter and 10-megaton rated doors demanded a higher level of discretion and secrecy than even contractors could give. As such, in addition to a generous contract with a hefty stipend and benefits, each of the mercenaries had submitted to a small explosive charge being inserted into the longitudinal fissure of their brains. If they said anything from a short list of key words outside of work hours or off the blacksite, that was that.

Lights out.

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Rags had to admit that Codswallop had been right–the airship’s commissary had been laoded with fine foods, and he had gorged himself on toasted buttered bread, thick fat bacon, and thick pulpy orange juice. Rags had eventually stopped eating not because he was full but because he was bored, a circumstance which he had never felt before in his years on the street.

He had to admit it was nice, even as it galled him somewhat to have Codswallop nearby constantly wiping his mouth.

Laying in his cabin, on his bed–fully clothed, because after seeing the pajamas on offer, Rags refused to have anything to do with such a prissy garment–he had to admit as well that a full belly and a soft bed had their merits as well. Even if the bed was so soft and his belly so full that it felt unnatrual to sleep, accustomed as Rags was to having sleep for dinner.

As Rags lay there, he heard a distant sound, and the china on his bedside table rattled. The tea within it was long cold–Rags had not been able to finish it despite loading it with sugar and milk–but ripples were clearly visible in the liquid. The shadows of the full moon outside were also shifting through the cabin porthole, which led Rags to realize after a moment that the entire airship was shifting–perhaps changing course?

A second impact rattled the ship hard enough for the cup to bounce off the nightstand and shatter.

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Appointment to the High Elvish Academy is for life, which has historically limited new blood as elves are functionally immortal, and a current member must voluntarily resign or be killed in an accident or battle for anew one to be appointed. To say that the current group of Academicians is linguistically conservative would be an understatement–or, as one of them might correct you, a vaatlyawe.

The academy has been particularly defensive about loanwords from human tongues creeping in. Given the recent explosion of advanced digital technology, the High Elvish Academy has been struggling to create appropriate words to describe concepts that postdate the Sundering of the World Trees. For most young elves under 100, for instance, they call an electronic message an eamyl–an email. But in the official High Elvish dictionary, and in online translators, the word taikviest is used instead, a combination of the High Elvish root taik, for magic or sorcery, and the root vie for a message written in an impersonal hand.

Needless to say, despite taikviest being officially preferred, the number of elves under the age of 500 that use it conversationally is approximately zero. Indeed, there was even dissent from among the elvish linguistics community, which had suggested kipviest–“spark message”–instead in a formal proposal from the Elvish Studies department at Oxbridge, only to be ignored. The description of modern technology as “magic” or “sorcery” in many of the Academy’s neologisms has done little to push back against the idea that they are stodgy elitists.

More controversial still has been the assigning of names from the Elvish legendarium to concepts and inventions that they had no part in creating. For instance, the great hero Miekwë is famous for running 5,000 Elvish leagues to announce the death of the dread lord Vihol before dying from the strain. As a result, the Academy ordained that running shoes or sneakers be called Miekwëken, or “Miekwë’s shoes.” This despite Miekwë living in the First Age and never having seen smelted bronze, let alone modern plastics

This far, Elvish traditionalists in the Academy and more progressive voices have found themselves at an impasse. But as the Elvish language in dictionaries continues to drift further and further from what is spoken on the street, it is expected that things will eventually come to a head, with the Academy forced to adapt or see its speakers lose their proficiency.

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“Is that a twinkle of genuine awe I detect in your eye, Coddy? Or are you just pleased to see me?” The woman that swept up to Codswallop was attired like an adventurer, her outfit bristling with pockets and pouches, her long and wild hair braided and bunned into place.

“Verity.” Codswallop, looking out over the airship’s railing as he sipped his tea, made no other motion, even as the Lightwind‘s altitude sapped away the drink’s heat before he could properly enjoy it.

“I haven’t seen you since the last all-hands meeting of the Association,” said Verity, leaning backwards on the guardrail with a stein of mead from the commissary in one hand. “Have they got you babysitting again?”

“I go where I’m needed and do as I’m told,” said Codswallop, sipping at his increasingly lukewarm tea. “Are you also escorting someone? I’d thought that the AoP had pulled you from the field.”

“Why, whatever gave you that idea?” said Verity.

“The circular entitled ‘AoP Member Verity Pulled From Field Duty‘ may have planted the seed in my mind,” said Codswallop. “But clearly they have reversed their position, if you’re here.”

“I am indeed escorting,” Verity said. “Who do you think has the more interesting ward this go-around? You start, I’ll see if I can match you.”

“A young boy,” said Codswallop. “He goes by Rags.”

“Ooh. Ouch. Not even a grown-up this time?” Verity said, clucking her tongue.

“Have you a grown-up as your ward, then?” Codswallop said. “I doubt that you’d take another child after what happened in the Mire.”

“That’ll just have to be my secret, then, won’t it?”

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“You can see here the inhumane conditions that these princesses were kept in,” says Strauß, pointing at the cages. “And of course, those were only the ones that met the breed standard. Those that didn’t were more often than not drowned.”

The castle in Bad Neustadt, raided by authorities last month as part of a wider crackdown on princess mills, had been producing pureblooded princesses of the Glückstadt and Coburg lines, mostly for use as mail-order brides. “You see it all the time,” Strauß continues. “A formerly great noble house, with not much land or money but some brand recognition, falling prey to breeders. Before you know it, the ancestral castle is a princess mill.”

Though royalists have long insisted that those looking for a prince or princess “adopt, don’t shop,” the situation in Bad Neustadt is far from unique. Authorities seized a princeling mill that was cranking out members of a minor cadet branch of the Lao royal family in Myanmar last year, and a number of Scottish clans have been accused of a similar practice.

“I hate to say it, but as long as people want to marry into noble blood, these princess mills will continue,” says Strauß, noting that the practice goes back at least as far as the infamous Saxe-Coburg-Gotha princeling mill.”

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“How did you get into this butler thing, anyway?” Rags asked. “Eyrie, the nice lady who loaded me on the airship, said that you were one of the best.”

“She is too kind,” Codswallop said, tapping his umbrella for emphasis. “But truly, it is my job and I care deeply for its honorable seeing-through, as any might.”

“Okay, but what does a manservant do?” Rags asked. “I’ve never had one before.”

“We look after you, guide you, and if necessary, protect you.”

“Pfft,” Rags said, striking the railing with his hand. “Protect me from what? Getting hit by a bird? Falling off the edge?”

“If necessary, yes, but even aboard the airship, the journey is not entirely safe, young master,” Codswallop said. “There are those who would hinder us.”

“Who gives a toss about me?” said Rags.

“I think you’d be surprised, young master. There are things of interest about all peoples, and there are those who would stop at nothing to see this airship a burning wreck with you aboard.”

Rags felt his grip tighten instinctively. “W-why?” he said.

“Best not dwell on it,” replied Codswallop. “Now, let us retire to the commissary to get you fed, and thence to your cabin to see you properly set abed.”

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“Why do they call them the Lands Betwixt?” asked Rags, squinting as he tried to make out details of the distant terrain.

“Why, because they are betwixt and between, young master,” said Codswallop. “Wild, lawless, and dangerous lands that lay between the civilized world and our destination. It is for the best that we are up here.”

Rags wrinkled his nose. “I think I’d like to be down there. It probably has lots of interesting stuff to see. And eat.”

“If you are hungry, we can certainly eat, young master,” said Codswallop.

“Is it the frou-frou buffet we saw on our way in?” said Rags. “If it is, I don’t want it.”

“I imagine you can have most anything you like,” Codswallop said.

“What would you eat, then?”

“Oh, I’m not hungry, young master,” Codswallop said, politely holding up a hand. “Thank you, though.”

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