A half dozen students at the University of Constantinople, dressed all in black, stood in a sub-basement of the Tobias Bosefelt Library.

“You said that Slippery Cellar Stairs was playing here,” said Cindy, a girl who looked like a blanched potato that had been dipped into a vat of hot mascara.

“They must be late,” Dan said, unwrapping a set of knives on top of a Formica table.

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Snow drifted down past the torches of the local moving picture emporium and landed on the fur caps and bare, muscled shoulders of a group of cyclops. They hefted their signs in the air as they chanted.

“We have one eye! Your tickets we won’t buy! To a discriminatory technique! Your process of foresight is weak!”

The cyclops were not known throughout the land as the best slogan-makers, but rare and short-lived were the critics as the cyclops were known throughout the land as the best corpse-makers.

That is why the wizards who operated the moving picture emporium and had developed the decried technique sequestered themselves in a garret tower high above said moving picture emporium. They dropped a magic can tethered to a magic string down from the garret and yelled down for the cyclops to use it to talk.

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Just over a year ago, I posted a little story about banana peels. It began as a modest way to keep myself honest, writing-wise. I have a lot of small ideas that are mostly too weird to be woven into a proper story, I thought, so why not write them down as one-offs? So began the Guide to Moral Living in Examples, now a bit over a year old.

The seeds of the Guide to Moral Living in Examples were sown within the proto-Moral A Preventable Tragedy, proving to me two things: one, writing about monsters was fun; two, that I didn’t need a plot if I had some monsters. In some sense I re-made the wheel, because it had already worked for the X-Files.

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Flornor pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders and cursed his fellows at the Secret and Covert BrotherHood of the Adept. He’d drawn the short straw when drawing for guard duty that evening. Kevin had told Flornor that the other guys went to one of the witches who had been invited to a party the previous night and explained that Flornor was the one who had conjured a toad in the punchbowl. Her broom had contributed the straws.

Flornor couldn’t believe it. The third guard duty that he’d pulled that week!

The breeze coming across the water made the fire sputter, so Flornor leaned his staff against the rock and threw another log into the fire. A shower of sparks flew into the air and floated along on the air currents from the west. He could see the candles and lamps of the city of Wick glimmering on the other side of the bay, backlit by the great, ever-burning fires of Wickwood, tended to by the pyromancers. Flornor wondered why he needed to keep guard tonight. Nobody in their right mind would be out. It was far too cold. Those pyromancers keeping the fires of Wickwood burning had it right. They’d be downright toasty, that close to the inferno.

Every night, a wizard watched the Plug, set into place to keep the magic of Orb from leaking into Globe. Flornor didn’t remember why. He must have dozed off during that lesson. The older wizards used to guard the Plug themselves, dozens every night. The other students said that’s why their hair had gone silver while most wizards kept their youthful appearance.

An unreal creak drifted across the water. Flornor turned from toasting his eyeballs in the fire, and turned to look out across the water, away from Wick.

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“I don’t feel alive anymore,” Sheila said. She stood near a counter, and stared off into the darkness. “And, I might add, this dress makes me feel fat. Every dress makes me feel fat.”

Brendon sighed. “Must we go through this every night? You are not fat, and you have all the verve and pizazz that you were made with.”

“But I do the same things every day. I don’t go out and broaden my horizons and we never have friends in anymore, not since so many of them had to move away. Remember Kimmy and Don? What a hoot! I never got tired of their stories, always watching and commenting with those sharp little snips about society! How I hate them.”

“They had to move away for work, Sheila. You know that. It’s not fair for you to say. I know that before we met you were always moving around,” Brendon said. “Weren’t you in Paris? Didn’t you leave friends behind?”

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Erikreek scratched the floor of the access tunnel with his clawed foot. It made a faint grinding noise in the tunnel, whose darkness consumed all of the ambient noise like an acoustic black hole. Above, through the steam grate, he saw holiday shoppers rushing home with their treasures. Now and then, a snowflake floated through the grate and Erikreek’s companion would use one of his tongues to snatch it out of the air.

“Bored,” Erikreek said. “So bored. So bored that I might die.”

Polungruss raised the eyebrows over several of his eyes and retracted a tongue so that he might speak.

“That cannot be,” Polungruss said. “We are of Them Eternal. You can no more die than one of these creatures stomping on the grate can live forever.”

“It’s a metaphor,” Erikreek said.

“Useless,” Polungruss said.

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