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Epic of Epochal Accoutrements

Page history last edited by Tim 17 years, 6 months ago

Back to Other Elemenstor Literature

 

Epic of the Epochal Accoutrements

by "Harchus Toogrealds"

 

During the eight-year hiatus that kept Book 2 of the Cycle off the shelves of the few bookstores that bothered to carry it, a series of seven books claiming to be part of the Elemenstor universe appeared. Entitled The Epic of Epochal Accoutrements, they took place during the years 18,107-18,139, in the midst of the rise of Char Reyarteb.

 

In the first book, farmer's son Royce Binwyck returns from the fields to find his family slaughtered by the War Men. In papers scattered in the ashes and splinters of the family cabinet, Binwyck discovers he is the descendant of Lord Frivel Binwyck, the High Barrister of Conclovia (supposedly a formerly great city of The Sickle, now laid low by endless litigation). Lord Frivel, famed for his judiciousness and great knowledge of probate law, was killed by Duke Richtor Kerrik while Frivel was acting as executor of Kerrick's father's estate. Binwyck swears to reclaim the long-lost Law Books of Darrvah and Elay, so as to return peace to the land and replace the outmoded common law of future interests with a more sensible statutory environment. Over the next six books, Binwyck is joined by his friends, the gentle but violent blacksmith Blut; the violent but philosophical savannah warrior Quohot; and the violent but beautiful Ex-Princess Stathia, plus an ever-growing army of commoners and noblepersons seeking to flee the ever more ravaged lands. In the end (over many years and many betrayals, including one that ends with the death of Quohot from a demonically-inspired paper cut), Binwyck does gather together the Law Books to form the Great Hornbook of Blackstone, and uses its mystical power to lead his people to a distant land (later assumed to be the Cataclysmic Bluont, though that land had not yet been introduced at the time of the EoEA's publishing). The final scene, even more hotly disputed than the rest of the books, suggests that Quohot was actually Harbinger Portent in a quasi-reincarnated form.

 

The strange circumstances of the EoEA's publishing, plus the utter nonchalance with which it stomped on established continuity and known facts combined to leave most fans of the Elemenstor Cycle declaring EoEA non-canonical. Indeed, many now believe that its publishing was a "dry run" for the secret replacement of Tycho Brahe with a series of ever-less-talented hacks in order to make up for that author's total inability to meet a business schedule, self-imposed deadline, or anything approaching acceptable publishing standards. (As Brahe himself once admitted, "I love deadlines. Especially the -- fuck! Wha'? Who put them pills in the sky? Up there! Up there!")

 

Skeptics were rewarded in March 2001, when the estate of Douglass Hartchore sued Underhere Publishing, claiming that the entire Epic of Epochal Accoutrements was an illicit republishing of Mr. Hartchore's 1956 legal-fantasy series, The Probate Wizards of Hartley Hall. Hartchore (1902-1987) was a barrister who held the ceremonial position of Serjeant of Cubbyholes, which charged him to defend the Crown against any and all suits filed by members of the Lamb & Lion Inn of Court. Since the Lamb & Lion was all but dissolved in the 1930s, Mr. Hartchore was the last remaining member of that Inn of Court and was thus unlikely to ever appear in court. This afforded him a great deal of time, much of which was evidently spent in writing his epic novels and collecting several unusual and antique varieties of cheese.

 

Since EoEA was provably a direct copy of Probate Wizards with certain names simply found-and-replaced, the lawsuit against Underhere would seem to have been a slam-dunk. However, Underhere claimed that it never published or authorized EoEA, had not in fact even heard of the books despite the viciously-slashing front page review of them in the New York Review of Books, and would like to find out who actually published the damn things so they could file their own suit, thank you very much.

 

Eventually, the publisher was found to be Ho Tay Publishing of Saigon, a small publishing house that appeared to have gone out of business in 1973, after the owner's eight-year-old son died from stepping on an American land mine. No one has yet adequately explained who published the series, or who profited from its sale. Nonetheless, lawsuits languish in over a dozen international jurisdictions, and it is said that the Department of Justice still maintains an open investigation into the matter.

 

Of no small interest is the fact that the The Wizbits character Throtractus the Unusually Long-Lived and Remarkably Verbose, Judge of Choxo Town, appears to be the same character who is the son of Binwyck and Stathia. Series fans are particularly incensed by not only the addition of a noncanonical character to an already questionable show, but also by the fact that he mistakenly summons, in season two, the Gangster Octopus from the Gassy Sea.

Comments (2)

Anonymous said

at 7:45 pm on Jan 5, 2006

Are we going to fill out red links even for the non-canon stuff like this? I think that if we do we should probably make note of the non-canon nature of the content so it doesn't get weaved into the rest of the entries.
thoughts?

Anonymous said

at 7:48 pm on Jan 5, 2006

Yeah, maybe just change it to a **bold** for now instead of a link. We've got enough broken links around here that actually ARE canon as it is.

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