"During our journey, as you all know, I sojourned often alone in the wilderness, borne upon an ensorcelled fottermee. Beneath the glaciers Lairmanul and Senemene, deep about the roots of the Risgal mountains, and underneath the northern steppes and taiga themselves, rest the shadows of extinct personalities, shed from long-departed or dissipated entities which once had great efficacy. The names of these vanished entities are of no consequence, but their memories are, and these they emanated to me, after I fooled them into believing they lived again."

--Wm. Michael Mott, PULSIFER: A FABLE (Book One of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


Howmish Kaalmale nodded his leonine head. "In spirit I have travelled deep beneath the frozen earth--far below the icy surface, the inner fires still burn. Into the unplumbable pit which we examined northwest of the Wastalres, I projected my essence; there I encountered a species of sentient lichen-beings, where they grew outspread over miles of warm rock, in dry, oven-hot caverns. They are eons old, perhaps the most ancient natural beings in the world--some of them are aged in the millions of years. They have watched both the inner and outer worlds for ages uncounted, and know the histories of all the inner concentricities. From them I coaxed taciturn replies, and they told, through tremblings and oscillations of their outermost layers, of matters which pertain to our situation here on the surface. Let it be noted also that I am the first and only person among human wizards to have contacted and conversed with these ancient fungi."

--Wm. Michael Mott, PULSIFER: A FABLE (Book One of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


"Welcome, Skulker," he said. "Join me by the fire--warm yourself! Or at least come closer, so that I might see your face; the rudeness of your anonymity is bothersome."

Without a word, the figure stepped closer; firelight illumined both its face and form. Pulsifer felt a lump rising in his throat--the thing was a parsennoc, one of the fiercest of the dwellers of the waste-places, created long-ago by the sorceries of a mighty wizard-geneticist, a madman who had harbored a hatred of his fellow human beings. Many of the man-eating, night-roaming denizens of the continent Teumdoth had been this sorcerer's creations--his name was forgotten by all but other wizards, but the descendants of his mutations lived on. And of them all, the parsennoc was perhaps the deadliest, for not only was it physically formidable, but it was also possessed of a devious cunning, and a twisted sense of humor. It was the most unpredictable of creatures, after man; but it was said that it could be placed under an obligation of servitude, according to specific and non-sorcerous means known only to mages. Pulsifer suddenly wished that he had acquired that knowledge, while questioning Pog Trimmanax the night before.

It stood well over a head higher than Pulsifer himself, who was taller than average. In a fashion typical of its kind, the parsennoc wore many layers of thick clothing over its long, thin frame; above its sallow features and double-pupiled eyes there rested a tall, brimless hat of stiffened felt. The only parts of its body which were exposed to view were its hairless face and long, seven-fingered hands. With a quick crooked smile it nodded in greeting, and squatted on its lengthy haunches across from the man, well back from the fire.

"Hello, man." Its voice was incredibly deep. "You are blocking the entrance to my home--you are a trespasser on my doorstep. Rake your fire aside, so that I might squeeze by--"

"And fall upon me for your evening meal? I know that you were drawn here by the smoke of my fire! I warn you--I am a magician of great renown! My name is Morskured Montath!" He fumbled for the certificate, and held it up to be viewed by the creature. "Here are my credentials, signed by no lesser personages than Ongliath the Red, and Porvul Shuk! Now begone, or I shall be forced to render an uncomfortable condition upon you!"

"I hesitate to cast doubt upon your word," the parsennoc retorted with a facetious politeness, "--but I see only a piece of paper, and a man with more the look of the scoundrel about him than the appearance of a Man of Power. Let us end this charade, now; I will kill you quickly and almost painlessly, sparing you the tedious anticipation of your own demise--then I will satisfy the hunger burning within my own belly."

"Let us converse first," Pulsifer hastened to interject. "It has been long since last I spoke with one of your breed. You do not mind?"

The parsennoc shrugged. "I have all night, and longer--I am out of the range of the sun. I can wait until the world freezes into a motionless lump--and, I admit, I do enjoy conversation."

--Wm. Michael Mott, PULSIFER: A FABLE (Book One of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


After his underground walk had begun, he eventually grew uncomfortably warm, for the age of ice was far above. Now his outerwear was rolled upon his back, and the valise hung at his left side in a makeshift harness, fashioned from the rope he'd taken from Jabroal's supplies. After the flaming torch he carried had burned out, he would have one brand left--fortunately he hadn't used them all, since the black recesses had recently begun alternating with larger, phosphorescent areas where water lay in still pools, and layers of a glowing, slightly-quivering substance resembling lichen coated the ceiling, walls, and floors. He'd stepped on one patch of the glowing carpet, and it had emitted a strange sound like lips smacking; he hurried from that chamber, for the rustlings of the lichen-things had increased in their degree of agitation.

--Wm. Michael Mott, LAND OF ICE, A VELVET KNIFE (Book Two of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


Jabroal nodded, his eyes lighting with recognition. "Yes! Three miles below is the Sea of Breel, wherein float the giant slugs Jersh. On the shore of the sea is a dead Nole city, haunted by the ghost of the Perfidic, Pondion Zagresis. Adjoining caverns lead to the Lower Cavern Realms, including the sentient and carnivorous Caverns of Yoch, from which few return. Deceptive tunnels also lead down past the mantle, to first a shell of magma, and then the Inner Concentricities. The latter are the haunts of viodoms, jrets, djinn, and other unpredictable entities--thus it is truly an ill-advised route."

--Wm. Michael Mott, LAND OF ICE, A VELVET KNIFE (Book Two of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


Once a white, eyeless newt some fifteen feet long rose from an inky pool, apparently drawn by his movements--it rushed him with gills fluttering and saw-toothed jaws agape, but he dissuaded it with the hot end of his torch. Periodically it seemed that he sensed distant rumblings, felt more than heard, through miles of stone. Upon another occasion he passed a natural window in a wall of limestone, where an enormously vast, glowing cavern was revealed--there he saw what looked to be thirty or more nude men and women, their skins transparent as glass after countless generations away from the sun; the details of their musculature and circulatory systems were exposed to view. They toiled with crude tools among patches of puffy brown fungi, while a pair of enigmatic talycents supervised their actions.

--Wm. Michael Mott, LAND OF ICE, A VELVET KNIFE (Book Two of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


Pulsifer squatted ten feet away--there was a name he had heard before. Whatever caused the tremor, he wanted to avoid it at all costs. "What is Rewelquian?" he interjected.

The talycent tilted its head to regard him. After a moment, it replied in a slow, didactic tone. "Rewelquian: Creature of another epoch, of the Phylum of Ancient Titans, also called Draumiank Colossi. Draumiank Colossi: The seven species are Mamonlexes, Pirkests, Gulch Demonics, Sea Lordids, Stridulating Thunderers, Attitudinal Reshi, and Indefinite Hybrids. The Colossi were generated by the energies of unconscious human thought, accumulating and assuming entity-forms over seventy-million years, in various subterranean strata. To begin descriptions, the mamonlex physiology is regulated by an adjustable metabolism, in which--"

"You digress," Pulsifer interrupted. "What is Rewelquian? A mamonlex? Where does he dwell?"

"Rewelquian is of the Indefinite Hybrid species, and is the last of his kind. He has been bound in the lower basaltic caverns, twenty miles above the First Layer of Fire, by the ingenuity of the extinct Nole civilization. The Nole: Highly-cognitive insectoid omnivores, active in the Bessential and Vaglusian Epochs, three million years past; exterminated by plague. Briefly revived by the power of Pammoth the Singularity, to serve the purposes of the insatiable human miscreant, Calim Pulsifer--"

"Enough of the Nole!" Pulsifer snapped. "Tell me of the nearest pathway leading to the surface world--a route with few hazards, if you know of such...."

The creature replied instantly. "The Spiral Boreway is but a half-mile toward the--"

Its head slumped, and it slowly sank to the cavern floor. The talycent was dead. Pulsifer yelled in disgust....

--Wm. Michael Mott, LAND OF ICE, A VELVET KNIFE (Book Two of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


The talycent's mellow voice held a note of surprise. "You are so ignorant? The stone is called sescren; we quarry it from pockets and veins below this level. These were apparently once repositories of discarded materials--garbage, we have decided--from past ages, which have been compressed and transformed by the pressures of the Earth's mantle into metamorphic rock. From fossils found, we have determined that the material was originally human in origin, from a time of your species' overproliferation. We are not certain, however, if Man as we know him is a recent phenomenon, or if evolution repeats itself. No other creature seems to have plagued the Earth with such persistence."

--Wm. Michael Mott, LAND OF ICE, A VELVET KNIFE (Book Two of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


They rounded the pool, to stand upon a wider shelf of stone, from which one of the pool's streams poured into a titanic, luminous cavern. They stopped near the brink, gazing with awe.

The cavern floor was eighty feet below, the ceiling three and four hundred feet above. The cavity vanished into distance, without even an intimation of a farther wall. The radiance came from a forest of tree-sized fungi which coated the cavern floor as far as they could see, and bat-like shapes dipped and fluttered among the glowing fronds. In a number of locations there were cones of igneous rock, some of them glowing with heat, or dribbling lava in orange streams. Flames flickered at the tops of some. Perhaps as far as four or five miles away, there was a mountainous brown-black mound, reaching two-thirds of the way to the ceiling of the grotto; a pleasant warmth radiated from the entire vista.

Pulsifer surveyed the alien environment with queasy intestines--

--Wm. Michael Mott, LAND OF ICE, A VELVET KNIFE (Book Two of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


He eased forward cautiously. This area was filled with softly-glowing heaps and rounded shapes of a transparent material, from which the radiance issued; encased in each was an immobilized being. He looked about in amazement--these were entities almost certainly beyond the ability of the imps or Sheft to capture and restrain! It was like an illustrated scene from a section one might find in a grimoire, on the classifications of potent supernatural beings. A male silver djinni, golden-haired and purple-eyed, nude in the fashion of his kind, stared from one pile; another contained a dread ochdeviant, three-headed and horrible. Small hijrets, larger, ape-bodied, reptilian-headed jrets, a scarlet empusa, two cat-faced demons--even a grey viodom, his massive pinions folded on his back--all these and more were imprisoned, an impressive collection of the entities which haunted the deeper concentricities of the Earth. Pulsifer shook his head in wonder--how were they taken, much less held?

--Wm. Michael Mott, LAND OF ICE, A VELVET KNIFE (Book Two of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


Aflauncu rose, reached out, and lightly tapped Pulsifer on the arm--suddenly the beautiful chamber was gone and, protected by the blue field, the pair passed through layers of rock as if they were strata of vapor. Upon their journey to Grome-Urul, Aflauncu had explained that the density of their bodies grew more vaporous to accommodate lower spheres; now, Pulsifer supposed, their density increased as they moved upward. They passed through caverns filled with fire, unaffected by the fearsome heat of the undying flames. They entered a dim cavern-region where dreamlike meadows rolled away all around, and contented people lounged and disported; in the distance was a shining palace of gorgeous metals. Pulsifer asked the identity of the owner of the keep, and Aflauncu waved a hand--the glamour was removed, and the meadows became ulcerous, cratered rock covered with scrawny figures in agonized poses; the palace was a heap of broken rubble, and giant, monolithic bones. The voluptuous form of the ifrita Lijjelda was seated like a white flame in the center of the pile, apparently watching the man and djinni pass through the High Hells. Aflauncu waved, and she returned the gesture. The djinni explained that she was an aunt of sorts, and they passed to the level above.

--Wm. Michael Mott, LAND OF ICE, A VELVET KNIFE (Book Two of THE PULSIFER SAGA)


"I think he wants his mother," Tulruhk grunted a whisper. Something huge and ungainly was descending the stair, and they could hear its thick hide scraping against the wall. Ponderous footsteps boomed above them. She nodded.

"Maybe. But he is not mine, I just carried him to birth. His father is the wizard, but his mother was a staggering horror out of the underworld, and only Piondoth will be able to control him....We must go! He will descend into the main-house, looking to destroy us!

--Wm. Michael Mott, TALES OF THE LAST PLATEAU


Tulruhk darted in and out repeatedly, like a striking snake, burying his longsword again and again in folds of flesh. Fearful yet furious, the thing danced with him, until finally a giant hand-like appendage jerked him up by one leg and lifted him high into the air. He threw his shortsword downward, burying it to the hilts in the top of thing, which began screaming and thrashing, swinging him around wildly as it dug at its upper regions with its other arm. Tulruhk began chopping as best he could at the arm which held him aloft, but the flesh was scaly and tougher than the flesh of the main bulk. Like glimpses from a nightmare, he saw Bress' tear-stained face looking up at him, the bloody top of his adversary, the limbs of the pulfer-tree--he grabbed at the thorny branches with his free hand, just as the thing began to pull him toward its fetid maw. Ignoring the biting of the thorns in his flesh, he engaged in a tug-of-war, his body taut and hard as a bar of iron.

The face loomed near and he slashed, slicing deep into an eye. With a thundering roar Piondoth's son flailed him about and he lost his grip as leaves, thorns and berries came loose in his hand and he was swept back and over the beast. Discarding the longsword, he grabbed the hilt of the shortsword tenaciously as he swept by, and the thing roared anew, flailing with its other arm and releasing its grip on his leg.

Suddenly he was on top of the creature, clinging to the handle of his short sword, being tossed wildly from side to side. The blade slid free-With a mighty shove, he thrust his other hand, still holding the crushed fruit of the unnatural tree, deep into the gaping wound. Something soft and yielding met his fist, and as his hand sank into its brain, he realized that it had no skull. He opened his hand and slid it out, pushing himself backward.

A tremendous shudder racked the body of the son of Piondoth.

--Wm. Michael Mott, TALES OF THE LAST PLATEAU