Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Ulus Vin Tengen, the People’s Margrave
A report prepared for the Emperor, the Imperial chancery, and the Landsrat

Unlike many of the Death Brigades leaders, detailed information is available on Ulus Vin Tengen. The eldest son of Linne Vin Tengen, Margrave of Anna, his records are complete and available for perusal. It seems that he was the only child of the Margrave’s first wife to survive infancy, and attended the Imperial Military Academy as well as the Eisburg University. It would seem that this education would have prepared him for assuming his father’s lands and titles, but a major controversy erupted surrounding this.

To wit, Linne Vin Tengen, his second wife, and their young son–Ulus’s half-brother–all perished very suddenly and within a day of one another. It was widely rumored, though never proven, that Ulus had poisoned them, perhaps only intending to poison his father. Ulus, for his part, claimed that the deaths were natural, but the uncertainty resulted in the Imperial Chancery being called upon to mediate, and the matter was put to the Landsrat. As a result, the Margravate of Anna went to Hume Vin Tengen, Ulus’s uncle and a Landsrat member himself. Ulus was formally accused of murder and placed under arrest.

The circumstances surrounding his escape are, as yet, unclear. Suffice to say that he was able to amass a following in the Margravate of Anna, claiming to be the true Margrave and pledging reforms. Now, to the experienced statesman these empty promises are revealed to be the hollow and naked bid for power that they are, but among the serfs of Anna, these falsehoods soon found a willing audience. Ulus was also able to draw on former connections to gain supplies, arms, and armor for a time, and his knowledge of tactics used by Landsknechte made him exceptionally dangerous even with untrained troops.

After Hume Vin Tengen was killed in battle, Ulus declared himself Margrave–a “People’s Margrave,” a term he did not deign to define. The Landsrat declared him an outlaw and awarded the Margravate to a cousin, who has since been unable to fully pacify it. At present, the Margravate of Anna is rent and lawless, a major stronghold of anti-Imperial peasant unrest, and a prime target for Landsknechte to reclaim for the Emperor. Ulus himself, as a noble, has been sentenced to death by silk strangulation, and a purple cord currently awaits his throat in the Ratisbon Town Hall.

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Vasili the Steel Hand
A report prepared for the Emperor, the Imperial chancery, and the Landsrat

It is believed that Vasili, called the Steel Hand, was born to peasant farmers in the marches attached to the Free Imperial City of Flussburg, although the fiefs int he area keep very poor records and this cannot be confirmed at present.

What is certain is that he was one of a number of peasants who abandoned their lieges and turned to brigandry in the face of the Long Hunger, and he and his band were captured in a sweep by the landsknechte in the employ of the Bishop of Flussburg. The leaders of said band were of course hung and beheaded for their crimes, while the lesser members were merely made to suffer amputation, upon the Bishop’s mercy.

This Vasili’s right hand was therefore amputated, which indicates that he was of middling importance in the bandit gang, as the lower members lost only a finger. It is safe to assume, though, that this event embittered him despite the mercy he was shown, as upon his return to his holding Vasili fashioned a steel prosthesis for himself of a hand holding a sword, and took to organizing and inciting peasants to unlawful acts of disobedience against their lieges.

It is important to note here that, despite legends to the contrary, it is quite impossible for this Vasili to fight with his steel hand–this has been attested by several sources who have been in his presence. It is, rather, a decorative item with the detachable sword being simply a melodramatic and decorative touch. Vasili, when he has been observed in battle, seems to quietly switch to a shield on his right arm and an actual, if improvised, sword in his left hand.

In any case, Vasili’s striking appearance and outspoken oratory, combined with the continuing emergency of the Long Hunger, quickly led him to amass a large number of followers. They were responsible for several ambushes of landsknechte near Flussburg, raiding manor houses, and stealing grain and supplies. The Bishop of Flussburg personally led a force against them after this; his defeat and subsequent burning at the stake by peasants is a grim and heretical chapter in the current crisis.

Currently, Vasili and his followers are believed to have joined with several other groups in an attempt to bolster their numbers and training for an expected confrontation with Imperial troops.

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Further up the road, a member of the elite Seagull Guard was drinking with an Ur-orc Deathbloom, both with their helmets off and sharing their rations. The Seagull Guard had a piece of Dormorian blackbread in his mouth, while the Deathbloom had his lips around a flask of Mirithian ale.

“What are you two doing?” cried B’carmna. “Fraternizing like that, when the grim Lord Khyr is on the verge of total victory once he obtains the True Circlet!”

“I no longer obey Lord Khyr,” the Ur-orc said. “I consider my oath of falty absolved and my loyalty transferred to a committee elected by my unit.”

“For my part, I have foresworn the Grey City and its Wizard-King,” the Seagull Guard said. “They would throw my life away for their own gain.”

“I don’t think a final all-out assault on the Dormorian Grimgate to distract Lord Khyr while the True Circlet is destroyed is throwing your life away,” B’carmna said.

“Oh no?” said the Seagull. “Marching into impossible odds to give someone else a chance to survive? You tell me how that’s fair, at war’s end.”

“The war will end, with total victory for evil, if you don’t remember your duty!” said B’carmna.

“Bollocks,” the Deathbloom said. “Do you think we Ur-orcs, or even the Unterorchen, want to have our lives thrown away at the last minute either? When the Deathly Horde swept the Grey City clean, was it Lord Khyr there getting slaughtered? No! And now he expects us to go on as if we hasn’t all lost brothers, sisters, lovers in the defeat?”

“What of the True Circlet, then?” said B’carmna, desperate. “If Lord Khyr attains it, he will-”

“He will what? He don’t do nothin’ we don’t do for him.” The orc spat on the ground. “You ain’t all-powerful if no one listens to you, that’s for damn sure.”

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Spite is a thing with feathers
With jealously guarded nests
Squabbles that break out at feeders
Territorial songs without rest

Aggressive displays for the neighbors
Even if they’ve done nothing to chide
Greedy tearing apart of their labors
For the eggs and the young ones inside

Nature is no Disney movie
When everyone’s out for a meal
Even when the others are flighty
You beg and you borrow and steal

Flocks are a last resort only
Tree branches with room for just one
It may seem like you are quite lonely
But you’ll have more kids when you’re done

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The first mention of Blurface was in a Reddit post on January 17, 2018 in the thread “make a horror monster in one image 2.0.” Reddit user xXx-ewesirname posted an image that recieved over 1000 upvotes before the thread was archived–an image of the archtypical “creepy Victorian doll” with its face blurred out. The image was originally from the South London Doll Museum Facebook page, part of their 2015 “Creepy Dolls of Halloween” compilation. xXx-ewesirname apparently blurred the face themselves, doing so in a way that accentuated the image’s overall creepiness.

Reddit users immediately began speculating on how, why, and with what rules the image could be a “horror monster.” Dubbing it “Blurface,” a suggestion of a now-deleted account, the users eventually drew up several rules for the being:

1. Blurface hates faces and wishes to destroy them
2. Blurface must possess something with a face
3. If all faces you see are blurred, you are on the verge of being possessed

As a result, a new thread spun off from the first called “Blurface sightings” in which Reddit users attempted to blur the face of a human, doll, or other object in the most creepy way possible. The ultimate winner, with 2500 upvotes, was the blurred face of a fiberglass clown in a dead suburban mall. The character began to gain popularity around this time, with a number of other threads, a “Blurface filter,” and translucent “Blurface stickers” being exchanged.

An internet historian, known as the Redditor Auditor Jr., produced a YouTube video on Blurface as part of their “Demons of the Digital Age” series on internet horror figures. The videos put Blurface in the rarefied company of such boogeys as Slenderman and Siren Head, but it also raised some questions about the origins of the original image. The Redditor Auditor Jr. reached out to xXx-ewesirname for comment, with a series of questions.

There were two odd things about the circumstance. First, as detailed in their YouTube video, the Redditor Auditor found that xXx-ewesirname had never made another post. They had created their account after the thread had been created, apparently for the sole purprose of responding.

Second, the IP address was spoofed–it was impossible to learn where the poster had come from. A message purporting to be from the author eventually arrived via a throwaway email service, but the only response was about the creation of Blurface: “it is a visual representation of a recurring, waking nightmare that i live.”

One month later, the first Blurface murder was committed, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead many at Reddit who had been involved with the original thread to close their accounts, and which eventually led to several YouTubers being demonetized and banned from the platform.

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What is language if not a prosaic etude?
Words as pearls chosen for sound, radiance
String them together not for mere utility
Find joy in their choice, sound, cadance
Life is all about enjoying the mundane
Looking for joy where it may be found
A hundred joyous sentences per day

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“I think I would make a pretty good longbowman, don’t you think?” said Chaz, flexing his arms. “Maybe even better than the original ones. After all, they had to farm and stuff. I’ve been focused on being an athlete the whole time.”

“Uh, you have to train from childhood just to be a longbowman,” Markus said. “Your bones have to move.”

“What are you saying?” snapped Chaz.

“You probably couldn’t even draw, much less string, an English longbow. Your football skills are useless here.”

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Mrs. Daniels looked out over the field in shock. The easter eggs which she had carefully filled with treats and scattered in such a way that toddlers could easily find them–all gone. Only a few shattered plastic shell pieces remained.

“Easter egg pirates,” she said, picking up one of the plastic pieces and crushing it in her palm until she drew blood.

“What’s that?” Mrs. Jeffries said.

Daniels didn’t answer; she was scanning the horizon for any unusual behavior. The pirates couldn’t have gotten far in less than ten minutes. A moment later, her scrutiny was rewarded at the sound of a big truck peeling out of a nearby parking lot.

“No one needs to be in that much of a hurry at this time of day,” she said through clenched teeth. “Especially not in a car with so much…cargo capacity.”

“Huh?” Jeffries said.

“Get the Volvo, Deidre, dear,” Mrs. Daniels said. “We’re hunting down some pirates.”

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The group’s reign atop the charts came to an abrupt end the following month, when lead singer Trainor attempted to murder Phillip Pixa, a documentary filmmaker and journalist covering Port-of-Call’s tour.

Allegedly, Trainor had been drinking and had narcotics in his system while reading Nietszche, something that his bandmates confirmed was a regular occurrance. An argument with bassist Joyeuse over whether the members of Port-of-Call were wealthy and powerful enough to be beyond the concept of good and evil ensued. At some point, Pixa was called in to join the discussion, and some time thereafter Trainor produced a shotgun. Both Pixa and Joyeuse claimed that Trainor played with the weapon, ejecting several live rounds, before abruptly declaring that he would test his theory by seeing if he could get away with killing Pixa.

Miraculously, the weapon was loaded with birdhot rather than buckshot, which left Pixa with serious but not fatal injuries in his hand and right arm. Accounts differ with how the other members of Port-of-Call reacted to the shooting, with Joyeuse claiming that he ran and hid and Pixa insisting that the whole band and several roadies proceeded to hunt him like an animal.

In any case, Pixa ran into a December snowstorm with no proper winter attire, and was suffering from frostbite when he was finally able to flag down a car nearly five miles down the road from the cabins the band had rented. The driver took Pixa to the nearest aid, a ranger station, where first aid was administered. Due to the storm, he was not able to be evacuated for several hours, and the first law enforcement on the scene with Port-of-Call were rangers, who arrested the band members despite not having the legal authority to do so.

Phillip Pixa survived, though he lost three fingers on his right hand and part of his left ear. The legal situation took months to wrangle out, due to conflicting jurisdictional issues and other oddities, but Trainor was ultimately tried for attempted murder, aggrivated assault, and resisting arrest. The other members were seperately tried as accessories.

John Trainor was convicted and eventually served seventeen months behind bars, a sentance criticized by the media as laughably light. Chis Joyeuse and the other band members were acquitted of all charges. Port-of-Call was disbanded for nearly ten years, and when it was reformed it was without its lead singer, serving more as a tribute band than anything.

For his part, Trainor never commented on the events of that night other than a cryptic remark made over a hot mike after refusing to answer a question: “I knew what I was doing.”

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