Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Chronicles of the Lost Constellations: A Star Map Leading to Forgotten Cosmic Realms. Wait, so constellations can change?”

“The precession of the equinoxes. The proper motion of the stars. Earth’s axis wobbles on a 26,000-year cycle, and the stars are, all of them, in motion with regard to the earth. What we believe is fixed and immutable has changed within the span of recorded history, albeit only slightly, and it will change again.”

“So what’s the big deal, then?”

“This text chronicles lost constellations and asterisms, collections of stars in configurations that they could never have had in human history. In fact, my own computer modeling indicates that this book contains constellations that would have only been visible during the Ediacaran period, the first great explosion of multicellular life on this planet.”

“Are you saying…that this book was written in the Ediacaran?”

“Of course not. Look at it! It’s made of wood pulp and iron gall ink, and the Ediacaran was close to 100 million years earlier than the Ordovician period–to say nothing of the further 100 million needed to get to the Devonian period and trees. Anyone with the proper training could have backdated the existing constellations to this configuration, but why?”

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“I’m looking for the Tome of the Unknown Unknown,” said Cins.

“It might also be called the Book of Secret Secrets, or the Grimoire of the Unseen,” said Kerr, helpfully

The librariandroid cocked its head at the question, servos audibly clicking, hard drives spinning, electricity pumping. “Can you describe it?”

“It’s said to be the book containing all the most important information that no one knows that they need to know,” Cins said.

“I think it’s got a brown cover,” pipped Kerr. “Probably leather, since it sounds hella old.”

“One moment.” the librariandroid lurched to a nearby hatch, which promptly disgorged a book meeting the exact description that Cins and Kerr had given. It was leatherbound, with an air of the ancient about it, and all three titles were embossed on its cover.

“How…how did you get that so fast?” Cins gasped.

“Get? Patron, we do not ‘get’ items. No, we create them. From the description given to us, our immense Ingestion Machines create an object matching the description immaculately and then atom-print it to order.”

“Open it to page 99,” Kerr said. “See if what we need is there.”

Opening the volume, Cins was confronted with the overwhelming scent of a new book–far from what he might have expected. Page 99 was entirely given over to the dangers of a “1961-63 Corvair swing-axle rear suspension,” whatever that was.

“This…isn’t what we need,” he said.

“Ridiculous,” said the librariandroid. “The Ingestion Machines have ingested every available piece of data in the known universe, and several parallel dimensions. If this book does not match your expectations to within one standard deviation, clearly the problem is with your expectations, not the system.

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Not native to the realm, jackalopes are imports from the Lands Beyond, recently opened up for conquest and exploitation. Introduced by well-meaning explorers, they have subsequently escaped and bred wildly, overrunning the populations of local hares and stags by outcompeting them both. The high relative intelligence of the jackalope, combined with its powers as a seelie fae, has enabled it to outcompete native rabbits and hares. The Collegium has been involved in control efforts for the pest, posting bounties and attempting to locate and introduce natural predators, but to little effect so far.

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Long shunned as the most unseelie of the unseelie, a human being that had been cursed for unspeakable sins, it is now recognized that werewolves are in fact quite seelie, and their condition is caused by a disease the collegium has dubbed heteromorphia lycans. While much work remains to be done on the subject, it is believed that the condition may be acquired in life or congenitally passed down from parent to child, with particularly severe attacks occurring on a cycle of roughly 28.8 days—hence the myth of a lunar connection. Sufferers still have a major stigma about them, even with the availability of treatments to reduce the frequency and severity of outbreaks, and many fail to seek treatment out due to embarrassment or social pressure—with almost invariably fatal results for the individuals involved. The presence of Collegister Ie, a known werewolf, among the ranks of the institution is in and of itself proof at how far the fortunes of these misunderstood creatures has come in the modern age.

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Once classified as unseelie due to their seemingly mysterious appearance despite no young or breeding females ever being observed, the redcap is now in the process of being reclassified as seelie by the Collegium, as their nature and function are better understood. Rather than being animal, as had been supposed, redcaps are now known to be fungal, with their usual form being a nearly invisible network of mycelium. When they wish to spread their spores, however, redcaps will produce motile fruiting bodies that, to the observer, seem humanoid or even goblinoid. Since proper dispersion of spores requires a violent impact against the fruiting body, redcaps therefore mindlessly seek out combat. Once regarded as a perennial scourge, they can now best be understood as a menace that can be dealt with using a minimum of force and little danger in the loss of life and limb if a fungicidal agent is put in place.

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Reviled as unholy monsters, minotaurs are now rightly regarded by the Collegium as simply another type of sapient, but their status as seelie fae, and therefore not entitled to any inalienable rights, has been enshrined in law and statute for centuries. Though there have been numerous attempts to reform this, the moneyed concerns that benefit from minotaur labor with no constraints have consistently and successfully opposed it.

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Not native to this continent, the rakshasa is in many ways like a changeling, in that it has a mutable form, but rakshasas also posess a “true” form—that of a tiger-like beastman—and an organized nature. Using their ability to alter their shape, they infiltrate society and politics seeking both comfort and luxury for themselves as well as a steady supply of food—preferably sapients—on which to dine. While they are generally unable to assume the form of a specific individual, with some notable exceptions, rakshasas have nevertheless embedded themselves in the power structures of many foreign nations, and it is only through the greatest of efforts that they have been thus far unable to do so in the Emperor-King’s realm.

Thus far, a simple test developed by the Collegium has been able to root out all rakshasas attempting to pass themselves off as mundane individuals. A rakshasa, like some other sorts of seelie and unseelie fae, is unable to bear the touch of cold-forged iron, which will rapidly redden and blister them. Therefore, the simple act of holding an iron ingot is usually enough, although some rakshasas have been able to circumvent the test by using a similar weight of dark clay or by surreptitiously coating the iron in wax. Even so, anyone who ostentatiously uses copper or brass where iron might be expected is at risk of suspicion or accusation, rightly or wrongly.

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Numerous sightings of green children have been reported, up to a dozen per century at one point, but for all the common elements in their stories the Collegium is as yet unable to present a coherent explanation for their existence. In every case, a child—usually one, occasionally two, rarely three—with an unusual green hue is found wandering in a rural locale, dressed in strange clothes and speaking an unknown language. They at first refuse all food that is not vegetable in nature, and around half of them soon sicken and die. The survivors gradually lose their green coloration for a normal human hue, are able to learn and speak the common tongue, and have even been reported as marrying and having living descendants.

While the Collegium has been able to identify several supposed descendants of green children, they display no outward signs of being anything other than normal humans. It has also examined written accounts of their strange speech, without conclusive results. The only sure fact is that the one piece of flaxen clothing asserted to have been worn by them does not seem to correspond to any known fiber.

When asked, the surviving children claimed to be from a green land of vegetarians, and professed to have no idea how they came to be found wandering in the countryside other than that it was often portended by a loud bang or a sound of bells. Collegister Eames in particular has put forward a theory that the green children hail from an “alternate fairy plane of existence,” but this theory has thus far found few adherents.

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Sirens are speculated to be related in some way to selkies, but while selkies have been known to sabotage and even murder, they always do so using mundane tools and trickery. Sirens, on the other hand, use a form of song that seems to compel obedience in the listener—one that the Collegium has been unable to fully explain or reproduce. While blocking a siren’s song is possible, hearing the least note is extremely dangerous as sailors have been driven to self-mutilation and even suicide when hearing a siren’s song but being unable to act upon it. In their natural habitat, sirens appear to live amid normal tropical seals as one of them, only emerging and singing during certain phases of the moon—seemingly taking and eating live prey just before they breed.

Despite their high intelligence, and the obvious grasp of human language demonstrated by their lyrics, communication with sirens—unlike selkies—has proven elusive. So far as can be ascertained, they have no interest in human affairs beyond their need to consume a blood meal before breeding. Indeed, they will often mimic other creatures as well in order to devour them, though the song “sung” by a siren to attract a gibbon, and the form it assumes whilst doing so, are unlikely to tempt any human observer.

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Unseelie fae that haunt burial sites, the barrowight differs from the typical wight in that they typically resemble the physical form of those who have died peacefully and been interred, while wights resemble those that died violent, brutal deaths. Considerable debate exists over whether barrowights—indeed, all wights—are truly the dead come back, or whether they represent a wholly new form of (un)life that merely arises from the dead, much as a plant may inherit characteristics of its soil.

In either case, wights seem to be driven to reproduce by creating more of themselves through the interment of more bodies, and to that end they seek to ensicken the living with a variety of fatal diseases and agues. The Collegium believes that they rely solely on natural sources of infection, but nevertheless hoard and cultivate what they are able to produce. In one case, a group of barrowights was able to spread anthrax through a small town, swelling their own ranks while leaving no survivors.

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