Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

It has entered the annals of history as Libris, but to those who lived there and trod its white marble streets it had no such name. They knew it only as the City of Literature.

Nestled at the edge of the great floodplain, against the backdrop of the mountain range which had ever been the border of the known world, the City had been the pet project of a long-dead and long-forgotten emperor. He had realized, in the canny way rulers often do, that culture and learning were potent weapons in their own right, and even more so when combined with strength of arms. So he had laid out a city to attract the great writers, sculptors, painters, and artists of all persuasions throughout his land.

The Old Laws were promulgated by him. Those who traveled to the City of Literature and demonstrated their skills would be admitted to live for free among the columned gardens and terraced cascades of the Great River that made up the Inner City. All that was required of them was to produce their art. Those of skilled trades related to art–bookbinders, paint mixers, canvasmakers–were also admitted and lived for free, though only in the less opulent area of the Outer City.

Beyond the great walls of the Outer City was the great sprawl of the Warrens. It had originally been nothing but a few dusty inns and hitching posts to service travelers who arrived to apply for admission, but over time it grew into a city of its own, ten times larger than the Inner and Outer Cities combined, that saw to their needs. The Old Laws levied a tax on the farmers of the area, requiring a portion of the harvest for the City; they also stipulated that the mundane day-to-day affairs and policing of the city be done by outsiders admitted for the purpose at sunup and expelled at sundown.

The City was a light unto the world for hundreds of years, even as the great old empire fell and the fierce winds of time swept away its successors one by one. There eventually came a time when the great army of the Conqueror approached, in the process of building an empire that would stand a thousand years after his death. As was his custom, the Conqueror paused a week’s ride from the City and demanded an audience with its elders to negotiate a peaceful surrender and the protection of their property.

This touched off a fierce discussion about who the elders were, and which of the artists was qualified to treat with the Conqueror. No conclusion was reached, and thus no emissary was dispatched. With no one to treat with, the Conqueror assumed that his offer had been rejected. His army advanced, and the smallholders he encountered pledged their fealty in exchange for the lifting of the Old Laws. The soldiers and peacekeepers of the City, drawn from the Warrens, had tired of their treatment at the hands of the artists and deserted their posts en masse to join the Conqueror.

Even so, the Conqueror was greatly vexed. The City was protected by walls of the oldest and strongest making, of a sort that mankind no longer had the skill to create or destroy. A token force could have held it against all comers indefinitely. Yet the artists in the City were unable to agree to a unified command, and to a man and to a woman they each held themselves too important to be sullied with the menial task of fighting, to say nothing of representing an unacceptable loss to the City should they fall in combat.

Advancing through the unfortified Warrens to a wary welcome, the Conqueror found the walls undefended and the gates open. His forces burst in on the final meeting of the Artists’ Moot, leading the luminaries therein out in chains. The Conqueror was a pragmatic man with little patience for ostentation or ornamentation, and he was frustrated by his inability to find leaders to execute or turncoats willing to serve. In a fit of anger, he massacred the entire Moot and dispersed the remainder of the Inner City as slaves. The Outer City was purged of its craftspeople, who were appropriated for military purposes, and the art and literature of a thousand years was dispersed over the new empire as the spoils of war.

The City itself became little more than a military garrison and stockpile of building materials…and a monument to the simple axiom that art and literature are only as strong as the will to defend them.

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Sit tight, child, and let me tell you the tale of the Masked Queen.

No one could say where she came from, what noble family or poor line of farmers, but whispers of a female warrior of peerless skill and outstanding fairness spread in the Rosca Woods long ago. Long oppressed by the cruel and arbitrary kings of the great riverine city of Seven Isles, the people of the Woods flocked to her banner. After the defeat of the King’s men at the terrible Battle of the Fords, she entered the city in triumph and was pronounced its leader by acclimation.

A curious turn of events, as none had ever seen her face. Nor did any know her name.

The new queen of the Seven Isles was always berobed, and always wore a mask. In her early days it had been wooden, but the only luxuries that she allowed herself in latter days were masks of ornate silver and robes of fine silk. She would choose different masks for different occasions, to express pleasure or displeasure, as her words were always perfectly free of inflection.

The Masked Queen, as she became known due to her refusal to give her true name, was a fair, just, and equitable monarch. By the time of her passing, the Seven Isles had expanded its territory a hundredfold; an elected Duma ran most affairs, and the Queen’s Code regulated the formerly chaotic and despotic lands over which she ruled.

Upon her passing, the Duma removed the Queen’s mask and robes, curious to see at last the form of she who had been their guide for so long. To their great and lasting surprise, there was no face at all beneath the mask, and no body beneath the robes.

There was, instead, only a tangle of brambly branches, grown weak and wormy with age.

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It is a question oft-asked: why, with magic fading from the world, do the fae seem to be increasing in numbers? Every other creature of magic and spirit is becoming increasingly rare as reason assaults belief, which is the basic necessity for the existence of the transmundane. And why is it that no one has ever seen a young fae, despite intense interest in their habits on the part of innumerable scholars?

In truth, the solution to that riddle has long been known by the learned of the nations, just as it has been vehemently rejected by their peers.

Man has long been known to be unique among the creatures of his world because he is equal parts spiritual magic and mundane clay. The mundane animals hunted for food or kept as companions are all mundane clay, while the dragons and will-o’-the-wisps and such are pure spirit and magic. In man alone are they present in nearly equal measure.

In the waning days of bronze, when man first began to master the forces mundane and magical of his world, the fae were exceedingly rare and regarded as symbols and portents, their tiny flitting forms omens of great good or calamitous evil. In the present age of iron and reason, they are common enough that whole areas are infested with them, so much that one of the few callings remaining to those skilled in the ark and knack of magic is shooing them away.

The bitter truth is that the delicate and ephemeral fae are, in fact, the sloughed-off spirits of men.

When mankind gives itself wholly over to reason and cruel calculation, tearing out the part of itself that deals in wonder and magic, that ripped-out soul takes the form of a flitting fae, all the spirit and magic of humanity in miniature. That is why they bear no young, and that is why they only seem to fade and die when nobles, mercenaries, or men of means themselves sicken.

For, although separated, they are still bound by a silver thread of common destiny. Sorrowful predictions, unheeded by those who have cast out the spiritual from their souls, see mankind as a race wholly divested of its fae shards within the next hundred years at the current rate.

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