Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The voices of Vloles spoke together, in unison. A city of billions, united beneath living battlements. Unknown, unknowable, and yet here, now, and present.

“Were it easy,” Vloles said. “It would be meaningless. Were it impossible, it would be equally so. Welcome, then, and take your places with the others.”

“Is this the Next Dream, the Dream-to-Come, the Deepest Dream?” Farciya said. Tiris could feel himself drifting away from her even as the great turrets of Vloles came into sharper focus.

“Perhaps,” came the answer. “Perhaps.”

Tiris could now feel himself drifting away, drifting apart. The arms of immortal Vloles were wide, its gates thrown open, and he was welcomed even as he was extinguished thereby.

Light and sun faded from frozen Harbiyyah, and he opened his eyes, painfully and tearfully, upon the rocky shores with the smell of his friend’s blood mixed with that of the salt, the sea.

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“F-Farciya…” Tiris croaked. He crawled toward her motionless form, gasping as the seashore gravel scraped across his wounds, leaving a furrowed scar in his wake. “It’s here. I see it.”

Farciya did not move or respond. She was still, her lifeblood dashed out upon the stones by the claws of the frost-paguros. Tiris gasped at the sight, and sobbed a moment even as the light that he had been seeking played over him and the Dreaming Moon arose, unseen and ignored.

“May you find your peace in the Next Dream, the Dream-to-Come, the Deepest Dream,” he said softly.

“And may you find it as well.”

Farciya reached down and gently lifted Tiris up. He watched, stunned, as he continued to mourn over his fallen friend’s body even as he ascended. It was as Ad Dakhla had written, as Le Aauin had witnessed; the ascent to the Dreaming Moon was a sort of cleaving, of two ways taken at once.

“Why…? How…?” Tiris muttered.

“I do not know,” laughed Farciya. “Perhaps we will soon learn.”

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The light.

The light.

Tiris couldn’t shut it out, as much as he wanted to slam his eyes shut and sink away from the pain and into darkness. But it was no use; before such radiance his eyelids were useless. He opened them, wincing as his pupils slammed shut.

Days and cold sunlight had been lengthening throughout the trek, but now the noon sun hung, suspended. It was at the center of a great halo, a rainbow ring, with a blazing sun of its own at each of the four corners.

And looming, behind it all…? Perhaps, just perhaps, the suggestion of a luminous moon, a crater-pocked landscape upon which perched immortal Vloles and the end of his journey.

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The land continued, narrow and rocky, as the frost-paguros continued their relentless pursuit. Tiris and Farciya had abandoned their sleds, their provisions, their fuel. All they carried were the clothes on their backs and a knife apiece as they made their final dash northwards.

Staggering over brown and lichen-covered rocks, they soon saw the deep white-flecked blue of the sea in front of them, as well. Trapped, herded onto a peninsula at what might have been the furthest north it was possible to walk in the dreamlands, they were set upon by their pursuers.

A frost-paguro batted Tiris aside like a toy as he tried to stab at it, casting him, limp, upon the gravel shore. Farciya, in rushing to his aid, sunk her own knife into the back of another, which responded with a savage strike of its long claw, opening up lines of crimson on her chest as she skidded to a dead stop mere yards from the water.

Though their intruders were unmoving and vulnerable, the frost-paguros did not press the attack. Instead they retired whence they had come, huffing noisily in the thin, cold air.

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As the spheres spiraled inward, they grew in size, from pebbles to boulders, and at the center of the spirals, there was a great bare patch, untouched by snow yet stained by gore. A great mound filled the hollow, guarded by stone sentinels, and even from the hilltop at distance Tiris recognized what they were, preserved by the cold even as they had been mangled by their creation.

“Arms,” he said. “Left arms, as you said. And icy waters as far as the eye can see on either side of the isthmus. What shall we do?”

“We cannot turn back,” said Farciya. “Not after all we have been through, all we have seen. We press on, and if death comes at the bellowing jaws of a frost-paguro, then so be it, and roll on the Next Dream, the Dream-to-Come, the Deepest Dream.”

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There were no more trees, with only the occasional windswept tops of shrubs and branches peeking from amidst the snow to suggest that anything other than endless ice and howling winds had ever existed. The only shelter lay in hollows within the land, the wind-shadows of hills, the great boulders that dotted the landscape.

Before long, Tiris noticed something strange about the boulders he and Farciya encountered in their trek through the snowscape. As they sat in the lee of one such monolith, shivering in the wind, he saw that the stone was a perfect sphere, as if it had been roughly hewn and sanded by a great invisible hand.

“I have never heard of such a thing,” Farciya said, even as she agreed that the spherical shape was unmistakable. “I fear my experience, and even the rumors we sometimes heard from travelers, ended some days south of here.”

“Perhaps it is a representation of the sun, standing still, or the glittering orbs attending to it, that Ad Dakhla wrote of,” said Tiris.

“Or perhaps it is something made naturally by the same forces that sap the living heat from our bodies,” Farciya countered.

“It could be either, or both…or a warning,” Tiris mused.

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“A frost-paguro, I think, I have heard them called.” Farciya huddled closer to the warmth that the creature’s burning body offered. “I thought they were legend, but in a dreaming that can contain the sound-gaunts, I suppose it is not too farfatched that they exist.”

“What else have you heard of them?” Tiris said, himself bundled strongly against the cold and as near to the dead thing’s greasy flames as he dared get.

“Wild stories. That they are dreamers lost to the great snowy wilderness, that there is a mound of severed left arms in the deep wilderness where they make their sacrifice for survival.” Farciya shuddered. “But also that they are simple beasts in a shape we find terrifying, searching for food and warmth, the same as we.”

“That word, ‘paguro.’ What does it mean?”

“A joke, I think. It’s an old word for crab, I suppose because one arm is so much larger than the other.”

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Based on intercepted plans for the Soviet RDS-119, the MX-202 was developed as part of Project Plowshares. Even given the limited information available on radiation exposure in 1955, it may seem ludicrous that an atomic oven was ever under consideration. But the pervasive feeling among Army brass was that every Soviet invention needed to have a possible counterpart, and as such plans were drawn up for an atomic over capable of baking thousands of goods simultaneously, though thought was also given to using it as a crematorium or a heating apparatus.

Little did the brass know that the RDS-119 was actually a private joke among the Soviet nuclear technicians involved with the Ядерные взрывы для народного хозяйства program, and never actually given any serious consideration. In fact, the leakage of the joke caused a real-life double agent to be exposed. The revelation of this to top Soviet official Sergei Kolypin reportedly caused his death due to a heart attack–induced by laughter.

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The creature moved eerily, silently, and where its eyes might have been were a pair of translucent eyelids, with blank white orbs lolling beneath. It charged ahead, bellowing through sharp and yellowed teeth, with its one massive arm pumping furiously with its shorter legs to maintain a furious pace. Of its other arm, only a vestigial stump remained, and the asymmetrical tracks it left suddenly seemed all too familiar.

Farciya drew her knife, but it was barely the size of the snow-thing’s largest canines, and seemed unlikely to do her any good unless she were able to plunge it into some vital spot. Tiris produced the larger axe that they had used to fell firewood during the journey, and when the creature passed him he used the weapon to open its flank, scattering bright crimson across the Harbiyyah snow.

Whatever it was, it could be wounded. It could be killed.

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Farciya and Tiris, each carrying both a load on their back and a load on a sled slung behind them, were days out from the Last Refuge, northward. Always northward.

Temperatures had been dropping steadily, and flurries of snow were now falling with increasing regularity. But, Tiris noted, the days were also becoming longer. Often, when they made their exhausted camp for the evening, the sun still lingered near the horizon. In order to sleep, they both found they had to blindfold themselves against the midnight sun.

There were strange tracks, too. Some were simple deer and rabbits, but others were asymmetrical and vile, a mockery of life and of gait. Farciya had never seen anything like them, and Tiris had no desire to make their acquaintance. Harbiyyah Stretched before them both, increasingly barren, but the sun’s odd behavior made Tiris hope, as he never had before, that the Dreaming Moon was somehow near.

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