#thelibraryattheendoftheworld

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The Library At the End of the World, Chapter 1

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(Edited by the imitable Quill, whom you may have seen on other posts of mine!)

1

Syl’s world, such as it was, had once been beautiful. Once, it had housed life and intelligence that strove to greet the stars and build upon the accomplishments of the past. They had built great monuments to progress and lives lost in struggle. They had even, in time, found contentment and agreement in the rights and value of all life. Only they had found it too late.

           For Syl’s world was grey and bleak, a world blanketed in the ashes of the world before. The grand monuments stood as skeletal husks, if they still stood at all. And the great arts and culture from the Before, the work that had so lovingly depicted sun and sky and the flow of water were all that recalled such things. Syl had never seen the sun, had never seen flowing water. No, this was a world of perpetual dimness and falling ashes, of dreams dashed and lives lost to memory.

           And for Syl, it was life inside a single building. She’d lived within all her life and did not know how she’d gotten inside. Whomever her parents had been, if she had any to begin with, she did not know. No, there was only the building, with its tall stacks of shelves and rows and row that traveled further than her eyes could see in the dim. Some of the shelves held rectangles full of cryptic symbols, though many proved too delicate for Syl to even touch before they fell to pieces. She did not know what they were, but some of them had pictures, and from them she imagined grand worlds unlike anything she could ever see outside the doors of this place.

           And, of course, there was The Door. Far below, deep down, down stairs and stairs and stairs that Syl had been too scared as a child to traverse, there was a door. It rose toward the ceiling like an imposing giant, and Syl could see no handle on it. Though she’d never tried to open the doors that led to the outside world of her building, she knew that the handles were needed to do so. But not for this one. No, this one held only a small opening, about the size of one of her fingers when she was young. She had once tried to feel what was inside, but could feel only cold metal around her skin when she stuck a finger in.

           This was Syl’s world, but even in a land of death, worlds can change. In a moment, Syl’s world would change forever. And, perhaps, for the better to boot.

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The Library At the End of the World, Chapter 3

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The number had been crossed out and rewritten nearly 3,000 times. In that time, Syl had read as many of the books as she could find, and still had not exhausted the supply. She had learned of the creation of candles and electric motors and of the building of the structures she could see out the windows of her home. She had read of pirates on the sea, of the paintings of pictures from many hundreds of years before. She had learned and learned and learned.

           And she had grown. She had grown tall and lean and strong from climbing the shelves of the library, from hauling books and metal out of the way so she could access more of the building. She had grown strong from building — or rebuilding— her home. Areas of the library that once had proved too scary for the young girl had proved more homey as she grew bolder. She had built and rebuilt rooms from the things she learned in the books and now had walls and doors that sectioned off the library and helped keep the cold out. She moved books that were beginning to disintegrate — a word she had learned from one of her favorite books — into a new room she had built using damaged shelves to protect them. And while no fire would ever burn within the library, for though she learned that books could burn, the idea of harming her only friends was abhorrent to her, Syl had learned how to use some of the old machines that lay in the bottom of the library that could provide heat and, even, some light.

           This had, in time, required her to leave her home. To open the door to the outside world and set foot in the ashen grey space beyond. It had taken months for Syl to work up the courage to do so, and when she eventually had, she had taken with her a make-shift bag full of the canned food and water that kept her alive. She feared the outside world, with its shifting ash and howling wind, more than she had ever feared the dark spaces inside the library.

           And she had been right in her fear, for though the world seemed dead, it hardly was. Creatures’ eyes watched her from beneath the ashes, and Syl could feel them. But these were not the worst of them. For the worst of them came from the skeletal buildings left behind. In the cold and dark of those places, Syl found other people. Not like the woman that had taught her, but people. To some extent, anyway. They looked at her with hungry eyes and boney frames. Some had tried to attack her and she shuddered to think of what they might have done to her. But she had read many books and had brought with her a length of broken shelf with which to defend herself.

           She did not, and likely would never, think of herself as a talented swordswoman, but she had read of pirate duels and knights and knew at least something of how to wield a weapon. And she was strong and well fed — better, at least, than these… people. Though their wails and anger left her with nightmares for many nights to come, Syl had escaped them. She had fled into the ashes and hidden there until she was certain that they could not follow her. For while she feared their screams and hungry eyes, she feared more what they might do if they were able to follow her home.

           Syl went out but little after that, once she had retrieved the things needed to fix, as best she could tell, the ancient boiler in the library. She scavenged close to home after that, for things that would carry flame. Of that, there was much, for it seemed that the catastrophe of the old world had left many materials flammable. Syl strained her imagination to think of what might cause that, but she had only recently found the sciences section of the library, and her grasp of chemistry was still developing.

           But in this home, Syl was happy. She spoke to her friends, who could now speak back through their pages, and worked to make the library a better, safer place. Though none had ever tried entry, Syl built locks for the outside doors as she had learned from books that talked about the end of the world. She found those books the least fun to read, for they all seemed to be so wrong about what would happen to the world. Still, they held information that Syl put to use. She learned to be careful of the provisions in the library, even if the large room at the top of the stairs seemed infinitely full of cans and foodstuffs she would need to eat. Though the shelves seemed infinite to her, fear had taken root in her mind having seen Those Who Remained — as she called them — in the outside world. She would never become such a thing, not if she could help it.

           Thus, within the library Syl remained. Surrounded by friends and projects to improve her home. And, for a time, she forgot the door at the bottom of the library and the letter from her teacher. In time, she even had difficulty remembering the face of her teacher. But every day she could wake up and scratch in the new number on the wall. And she would learn. She would fill her head with every piece of knowledge and imaging the library offered, often rereading books to ensure that the knowledge would stay firmly in place. And in this way, Syl was happy.

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The Library at the End of the World, Chapter 2

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Syl, who had grown since she first opened her eyes to her world, first thought she was still dreaming. Not that she had ever dreamed of another person, or even knew what another person might look like. But another person indeed there was, sitting at a table. If Syl had known, the woman would’ve looked tired. But Syl did not know, and simply walked up and poked her. That was the way of a curious child.

           The woman in the long, dark cloak looked down at the little Syl and smiled. Her mouth opened and sounds came out, but Syl did not recognize them. She had never heard such sounds before, and they seemed strange and scary to the child. But the woman’s smile was warm and welcoming and Syl did not run away.

           That is how it began for the girl who lived in the library. A magic woman showed up one day and changed her world. Sometimes, the woman would stay for many days, other times she would leave almost immediately. Sometimes she would be away so long that Syl thought she might never return, while other times she might reappear the same day.

           Day, that was a word Syl learned from the woman. A measure of time in a timeless place. The woman was patient in teaching Syl the dead language of her race, carefully forming the words and teaching Syl how to repeat them back, then teaching the meanings. It was a tenuous and difficult process, but Syl grew to like the sound of the words that came out of her mouth and she could go around the library speaking them to the shadows and the books — for that is what they were, of course — as though they could hear. It helped, to fill the quiet place with sound.

           In time, the woman also taught Syl to sing and some of the old songs, of seas and shores and the sky above. Syl did not understand all of those things, but she enjoyed the sound of the songs and would sing them often. When Syl was 10, as best as the woman could guess, she was sat down at the table the woman so often claimed.

           “Syl, are you ready to learn the greatest gift I can teach you?” the woman asked softly. Her hair had greyed in the years she had spent with Syl, but a fire still lit in her green eyes when she spoke.

           Syl nodded solemnly, having learned that that is what one did when one wanted something. The woman smiled.

           “Such a smart child, I wish… well, that doesn’t matter. Do you know what this place is, Syl?”

           Syl thought a moment, sifting through all the words she had been taught. “I think,” she started slowly, not wanting to get it wrong in front of her teacher, “I think you called it a libary?” She stumbled over the ill-used word.

           “Library,” the woman corrected softly.

           “Library.” Syl repeated, making a note of it in her mind. “But, you never told me what that is.”

           The woman smiled again at the little girl. “No, I didn’t. Because I wanted you to be able to understand when I told you. Everything I’ve taught you, that’s knowledge. You know what knowledge is?”

           Syl nodded: “It’s knowing things, and being able to do things with that knowing.”

           “Indeed it is. Well, a library is… was, a house of knowledge. It held all the knowledge and imagining of a whole world. Contained worlds and worlds within and was free to use by anyone who wanted. It was one of the greatest gifts of the old world.”

           Syl scrunched her eyebrows. “What is imagining?”

           “You know when you see things in your mind that aren’t really there?”

           Syl nodded.

           “That’s imagining. It’s making things up. People used to do that, for others. Sometimes they would draw what they imagined, sometimes they would write it. Sometimes it was just for them and sometimes it was for everyone.”

           Syl blinked slowly, working hard to remember all of this. “What is writing?” she eventually asked.

           “That, my dear child, is the last thing I am going to teach you.”

           Syl nearly started crying. “Are you going away then? To… that other place, you go?”

           The woman’s face changed slightly. “I’m afraid so, little Syl—” for that is what the woman had taken to calling the girl. Syl liked the sound of it. “There’s much I have to do before I’m done, but don’t worry, I’ll leave you with a more than enough friends that I don’t think you’ll be lonely.” Her smile was so reassuring that Syl did not even think to question it.

           And so, Syl began learning to read and write from the strange woman who could appear and disappear without once using one of the doors of the place. She learned that the cryptic symbols in the books were letters and that letters formed words and had sounds of their own. That everything she’d been speaking was made of those letters, just without form in the air. Syl learned and learned and, in time, became able to read the books left behind by the old world. At first, being able to read, she thought of the place as a tomb, the last resting place for the books of old.

           But in time, through the reading of them, she realized that her home was no more a tomb for them than it was for her. These books, these collections of letters, lived on, even if they hadn’t had a friend in Syl had no idea how long — she still had difficulty understanding the passage of time, but counted the times she slept as the strange days the woman had referred to. Still, Syl would think from time to time of her old teacher, who had not returned and likely never would, after finishing teaching Syl to read and write. She had left her a note, a letter she said, to be opened by Syl in ten years, an amount of time Syl guessed would be many thousands of sleeps.

           But she had been a good student and, on the day her teacher left, Syl, with a shaking hand, and scratched a number onto the wall next to where she slept. Her best guess as to what ten years might be. And every morning, she could scratch that number out and rewrite one less. She would wait to read this letter from her teacher, no matter what.

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The Library At the End of the World, Chapter 7

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Syl slipped the key into the slot and felt the slight click as it bottomed out. She wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to turn it, and if so, which direction, but she gave it a test nudge, first one way then another. The key didn’t budge. Which left Syl standing there in confusion and a state that, to an outside observer, might have been funny. If there’d been anyone to see her. She stood, staring dumbly at the key in the lock, hands half raised as though to do something that never came. She almost turned back and walked away, damning the door to whatever existence it had in mind.

           And then, she had a thought.

           Syl pulled the key out of the lock and flipped it over before sliding it back in. This time, after it clicked home, she tried turning it. And it rotated smoothly in her hand until, with another quiet click, it stopped. And the room was filled with the sound of whirring gears and falling counterweights.

           The great metal vault door did not slide apart like in some of the books Syl had read. It did not rise or fall of its own accord. Indeed, apart from the spinning of gears that could be heard within, it remained almost perfectly impassive. Almost, because as Syl stepped back to see what was going to happen, a section of door popped out. It was about as long as her forearm and was, almost certainly, a handle of sorts.

           So, Syl sighed, having been half expecting some sort of incredible reveal and not the extremely mundane and understandable necessity of physically opening the door, and grabbed hold of the handle. It was practically ice in her hands and Syl winced to hold it, but with a grunt and a tug, the door shifted a few inches along a track. So, Syl sighed again and kept tugging. After the first few pulls the door began to move smoothly and she was able to slide it back enough to slip through. For reasons she couldn’t quite explain, Syl didn’t want to fully reveal the vault room to the world and thus left the door only partially open.            The room beyond was almost pitch dark and Syl worried about bringing fire into a room with books older than she could imagine, so she stood in the door, uncertain what to do. Until she saw the faint, blue glow from the depths of the inky blackness. She stumbled, half blind, through the darkness, bumping into what she hoped were tables and shelves but had no real way of telling without pausing to investigate. Her goal was at the far end though, and there was something about standing in the darkness that bothered her.

           The darkness, however, did not swallow her in any more than the usual way, and Syl was able to make it to the small, blue glow. Which turned out to be an orb of some sort — she believed crystal, but had never seen anything like it outside of her own imagination so couldn’t be certain — that, when she touched it, rose into their air and, with a burst of luminescence that nearly blinded her, lit the room.

           What magic this orb used was a question that was quickly thrown from Syl’s mind as she looked around. She had indeed been bumping into tables and shelves, as that was effectively all this room was made up of. Apart from the books of course. Stacks upon stacks of books filled the room, piled upon tables, bowing shelves. More books in one room than Syl had seen in any one place before. If these were all the books that the librarians had thought too important to be lost to flame, then there must have been centuries, millennia of knowledge locked within the vault. And it was all Syl’s now.

           Her head reeled from the implications and she sat on a floor that held no dust. She hadn’t noticed before, but the sealing of the vault had, apparently, kept the various dusts and dirts of the rest of the library out as well. Perhaps it was the same magic that had made the orb work, or some technology that didn’t rely on the infrastructure of the old world. Syl filed those thoughts away mechanically, still barely able to grasp the room she was sitting in. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books sat before her, untouched by time or human hands in years unknown. The secret knowledges of the old world.

           And so, Syl set to work.

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The Library At the End of the World, Chapter 6

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Not that any of that mattered. Not at the moment, anyway. Syl had never found any sort of key in all her ramblings throughout the library. And, as best she could tell, she’d been everywhere. From the dingy area full of boxes that had blocked off the boiler when newer technology had been added to the high attic rooms where the dusty old tomes of learning were held. She’d found rooms she wasn’t sure the purpose of, and others that she thought might have been used to take her friends apart. She hoped for good reason, but had always avoided them thereafter.

           And in all her explorations, not once had she found a skeleton or a key or anything else indicating that anyone had ever been in the library other than Syl. Which was, quite frankly, something of a comfort to Syl. Not that she believed her teacher had lied, but she was starting to hope she may have simply been wrong. Of course, there were always more nooks and crannies for Syl to search, if she was truly motivated. Somehow though, she never was.

           But that’s the thing about the insatiably curious and the deprived of stimulus. Eventually, their desire to know everything they can will get the best of them. Eventually, Syl found that the books that had once held her in thrall for hours on end could do so no longer. She hoped it was simply that it was getting colder. At first, she’d thought it was the changing of seasons. Well, in so far as the seasons could change anymore. She’d always noticed that the world would get colder for many days on end before warming again and that the heavy, grey ash would fall more thickly. But this was different.

           This wasn’t simply a chill that made her pull scrounged cloths closer to her body. This wasn’t a chill that would bite the skin if she forgot to keep the boiler stocked. No, even with the boiler running — something of a feat, considering water was getting more and more difficult to come by if she didn’t wish to use what she drank — the library grew colder. Perhaps not perceptibly by the day, but noticeably over time. And it made Syl think about the letter again. She hadn’t done so in… many hundreds of days, according to her wall markings. She’d put the entire thing out of her mind. But the cold made her remember. And in remembering, reignited the spark of curiosity that had always combated her fear of the door.

           And so, Syl went back to delving in the dark corners of the library as she had when she was a child. Into dusty corners she’d long since assumed were devoid of use and passages that she had forgotten even existed it had been so long since she’d used them, Syl walked. Her steps were never hesitant, but if someone watched they might have been able to catch the trepidation in the forays that led into new rooms. Then again, there was no one to watch her, so that was information she would keep to herself.

           Despite all her searching, however, Syl eventually exhausted the well of options within her library. She had, by her best estimate, searched every place one might have been able to hide a key. Unless they had dropped it into some vent or shaft of some sort that she would never be able to check and thus did not matter. She found, however, in that thought, something ridiculous. She hadn’t known these librarians, but the idea of them sealing away those books forever, leaving them unread and friendless for the rest of time, whether the vault held or time destroyed them, offensive. No, not offensive. Ludicrous. She never would have done so, and something told her they wouldn’t have either.

           So, one day, in frustration, or perhaps grim determination, Syl made her way down to the great door that held behind it the secrets of the old world. Maybe, anyway. And she stared at the blank metal door that stood stolidly there as it had all those years ago. And as she stared at it, Syl felt tears running down her face. When she realized she was crying, the emotions behind it caught up with her like thunder chasing lightning. Anger, fear, exhaustion washed over her. The thought that this, all of this, her entire world, no matter how small it may have been physically, might end and there was no escape, crashed into her, washing out any other thought she might have had.

           There, on the dust covered floor of the last room the old world had tried to protect, Syl wept. She wept until there were no more tears in her body. Her tears fell silently, the last marks of what may have been the last person on all the earth who cared about the library. She cried more for her friends than for herself. And, when she was done crying, Syl stood. She did not know where the feelings had come from, but she hoped she’d left them all in the tears that slipped from her eyes.

           Syl turned to make her slow way back up the stairs, ready to lose herself once more in the worlds held in her friends, when something caught the corner of her eye. It was a door, mostly hidden by boxes and shadows and dust and cobwebs. She’d never noticed it before, perhaps because she spent so little time down here, or perhaps because she hadn’t been ready to. Syl shook that thought out of her head; she was far from the fated hero of one of the stories that she’d read.

           The boxes appeared to be full of papers. Not book papers, other papers. She didn’t understand most of them, nor did she recognize the names on them, so she shoved them aside as fuel for the boiler later. She sneezed quietly as dust flew up from the disturbed boxes and the revealed door. It was closed, but not locked, and had a small plaque on it that read “Staff” once she wiped the dust away. It creaked on its hinges as Syl pushed it open.

           Beyond the door was a small room. It was similar to those she’d seen elsewhere, with a table and a few chairs and a counter with strange machines that looked like they might extrude some substance. If they worked. The cabinets that ran above the counter tops hung open, empty boxes and wrappers strewn over the floor. And, at the table, in two chairs, were the last librarians.

           Well, their pelvises anyway. The rest of their skeletons had fallen around the chairs many years ago, leaving only the thigh bones, pelvis, and some few spinal vertebrae on the chairs. The sight probably should have shocked Syl, but somehow it didn’t. Perhaps it was her largely academic understanding of how bodies worked, perhaps it was that she had never truly known another person. Or perhaps, years of isolation being surrounded by books had turned her into a psychopath. It didn’t matter.

           Syl stepped gingerly into the room, causing a small eruption of dust from the thickly laden carpet. Bones lay in small piles around the chairs and, as Syl stepped closer, she realized that one of the skulls had bounced or rolled off into one corner of the room. The idea of it made her a little queasy, but largely because she thought about what it would be like to have her head bounce uncontrollably into a wall, after it had been detached from her body.

           In the dim light from the makeshift torch Syl explored the less-flammable sections of the library with — particularly those without books or windows — the bones cast eerie shadows along the walls. For a moment, Syl remembered a story she’d read about otherworldly shadows that danced about the bodies of their creators, waiting for the moment to strike, but she shook the thought from her head. She’d passed through enough shadows in this old library that these would not bother her, bones or no. What drew her attention as well, helping to banish the thought, was the thin outline of something lying beneath the dust on the table before the bones in one of the chairs.

           Syl stepped carefully up to the table, trying to miss the remains of the librarians. She winced when she felt a dry, brittle bone dig into the sole of her foot and shifted carefully. She wanted neither a bone nor the ensuing infection caused by decades or centuries of dust entering an open wound. With a more trepidatious hand than was her usual, Syl picked up the small item from under the dust. A key. A small, rectangular key unlike any depiction she’d seen in a book before. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but this small, strange piece of metal was certainly not it.

           Still, it was the only key Syl had ever found in the library. If this didn’t open the great door, nothing would. There was some small comfort in that thought— that, one way or another, her search was over. At least should could stop thinking about it. Hopefully.

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The Library at the End of the World, Chapter 5

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On what would have been, if she knew, her twenty second birthday, Syl woke and marked the final day on her wall. Zero. Ten years, or as close as she could figure, had passed since she had last seen her teacher. Her friend. The only other living person she’d met who hadn’t tried to kill and eat her. In that order, she hoped. And as she marked the last day down on the wall filled with other numbers, she found that a cold weight had settled in her stomach. Heavy and unyielding, it filled her with a sense of dread that she neither understood nor could place. It made eating difficult and thinking far more so. What if the letter told her she had to leave the library? What if it told her about something that would forever change who she was and how she viewed the world?

           Syl tried to fight these thoughts, tried to banish them to the far corners of her mind. But anxiety is tenacious and its minions loud and neither are so easily banished. So Syl did what she always did when she found her thoughts muddled and uncomfortable. She sat down and read. And read. And read.

           For hours her eyes poured over the words of her books. For in all this time, not one other person had come to the library. Not one person had arrived to take from her her life. So Syl counted this place, and its books, as hers. Rightly and fairly won by dint of maintenance and care. For, as she had learned from the books, there was a magic in that that had existed long before any concept of legal ownership. Not that legality would be an issue these days, as far as she knew. That required the existence of large words that felt too important for themselves. Things like a judiciary and a legislature. Things that did not fit well in Syl’s mind or in the world she looked at through the windows. So no, laws and legality would not matter here. Not that she had been concerned about that to begin with.

           In time, as they always did, the books calmed Syl. Old friends and new came into her mind and forced the overwhelming noise out. A weight still sat in Syl’s stomach and would return in full force when she stopped reading but at least now she could think without feeling the need to scream and hide creep into her throat. And so, she took the letter, the innocuous scrap of paper that had sat next to her bed nearly undisturbed for so long, and stared at it for a long moment.

           With one final deep breath, Syl unfolded the letter and began to read before the anxiety could strike again. The script was difficult to parse after so long looking at the neat and tidy letters of the books she loved. Eventually, however, she was able to read the letter her teacher had left so long ago.

My dear Syl,

It is my greatest hope that you have, in all this time, learned a great deal from the library. And, in all your learning, perhaps you have found a thing or two out about yourself. If there was anything you wished to find out, anyway.

I suppose I should apologize for leaving you alone so long, though I hope it has not bothered you much. There were things that I needed to do. Things that only I could do. Who and what I am doesn’t matter anymore, but you at least deserve to know that my name is, or, at this point, was Miranda.

But none of that matters. Not to you or I or anyone else. You are safe within the library, dearest Syl. But the world is ending. Of that, I assume you are at least vaguely aware. Undoubtedly, you have read of the wide blue skies and the roar of oceans. Now the world is silent, freezing. I hope that you have found some way to keep warm that has protected the books around you, though I suppose it is my own failing if you have not.

Still, I should get to the point. I do not know how you came to be in the library my darling. I don’t know how you came to be born or who your parents were or how they found the library. Perhaps they were like me, or perhaps they simply got lucky. If it even was a pair. Regardless, the library is your home, and you should know something of its history. It is my hope that, in knowing how it came to be the way it is, you might find the strength and courage to carry on the legacy.

Long ago, when humanity could still walk beneath the skies, the library was built to be the last great bastion of physical knowledge. In those days, people could learn in the blink of an eye anything they wished. You might think it magic, but for them it was the simplest technology. Something they’d learned to live with as though it were as necessary as the air they breathed. Because of that, many thought that books, particularly physical books, were no longer necessary. But a group of librarians insisted otherwise, and it was they who built the library. In it they stocked and cared for every book they could find, some acquired at exorbitant prices. And, like any good library, they allowed free access to the public. For most, this was more a curious relic of times past.

And then the world began to die. I’ll spare you the details, but you should know that it was and always would be the fault of humanity that the world would die. Though, I suppose that is… never mind, it is not important. Regardless, the cold began. Temperatures dropped such that even the thickest coats and layers of protection were not enough. And a few remembered the library, full of its books. Full of its paper. Full of, to them, a supply of fire.

The people of the area practically marched on the library. But the librarians knew they would come. They knew that knowledge meant nothing in the fear of death. But this had been their library, their responsibility. Their lives. So they had barricaded the doors and windows. And protected what books they could. It was they too who had stocked the pantry that has kept you fed all these years Syl, for some of them knew the signs of the end long before others did. The benefits, I think, of knowledge.

The end of this story is that the outside world could not get into the library, but neither could the librarians get out. In time, they died, as age will call us all eventually. But they left behind them the stories they had protected with their lives.

But more than that, they left behind a means for you to change the future. My darling Syl, there is a reason I had come to the library, and I am afraid you were not it. You were simply a pleasant surprise. Deep beneath the library there is a great vault. Once, it held books that could not be displayed to the general public for fear of damaging them. Now, it holds all the tomes that the librarians hoped to shield from destruction, if they failed to protect the library proper. Perhaps you have seen the great door that seals it off. Behind it there is knowledge hundreds and thousands of years old. Books of old magic and learning and stories that the librarians felt should never be lost. And now, they’re yours.

I do not know what’s behind that door Syl. I don’t even know if anything survived all these years. But the books of the library proper did, so there’s a chance. The library is yours, as is the vault, you may do with them whatever you wish, of course. But if you should find the key and open the vault, perhaps you might move some of your own favorite tomes inside. Perhaps, in many thousands of years, a new people might discover the vault and the stories of we who came before.

And, perhaps, if you are lucky, some of the old magic might still work for you, my dearest Syl, and you might find at last a way out of a dying world.

Whatever you choose, know that teaching you gave joy to my final years and I hope with all my heart that you will find joy in your own life. For that, I think, is the greatest knowledge that can be passed down.

With love and hope,

Miranda.

           Syl read and reread the letter over the coming days, taking in the information given to her by her teacher. By Miranda. The name sounded strange on Syl’s lips and she wasn’t sure if she was pronouncing it correctly, but with no one around to correct her, it didn’t matter.

           She thought long on the story of the end of the world. About all the stories she’d read about the end of the world. About robots and nuclear bombs — though she wasn’t entirely certain what those were — and disease. And she wondered. Both that a people who spent so much time telling stories about how they would destroy the world still managed not to heed their own warnings, and at how they had actually ended the world. She didn’t think it was robots; Syl felt reasonably sure she would have seen some of those around. Unless perhaps they were too small to see. But that thought made her skin crawl so she dismissed it quickly. As for bombs or disease, she didn’t think that was very likely either, though she had no real way of knowing. After all, her only interactions had been with Miranda and the people, if that’s what they were, outside. And none of them had seemed to have any illness she’d read about. Though perhaps it was simply something new.

           Whatever the case, however the world had ended, Syl sat and stared for a long time at the bookshelves and books lingering quietly in the building people had died to protect. She wondered about those old librarians. About what they were like. If they would have been upset with the things Syl had done in the library, moving the shelves and the books as she had. But she didn’t think so. They had died protecting this place, these books, her friends. And it brought a smile to Syl’s face to think of being friends with those librarians. Of sharing stories they had learned from the books they had read. Of sharing this place. So no, she did not think they would be upset.

           And, of course, there was the door to consider. The door she dreamt about. The door that had terrified her as a child. The door that, according to her teacher, held behind it knowledge too precious to be lost. Her door. That thought, more than any other, made Syl’s spine tingle. It was not a wholly pleasant sensation.

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The Library At the End of the World Chapter 4

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That is, for all intents and purposes, how Syl spent her years. The library kept her company and, in return, she kept it from falling apart. As she grew older and stronger, she found she had to spend more of her time moving things around in the old building and ensuring the books were kept safe. But even then, she had her friends and that’s what mattered to her.

           That was, until she started having the dreams. In them, she was in the library, as it always was. But there was something just to the left about the place. She couldn’t quite place it, it was more a feeling than an indicator. But her footsteps didn’t fall quite the same way. In the dream, she didn’t care, but when she awoke she would obsessively check to ensure that everything was as it should be. If the dream had ended there, that might have been all it was.

           In the dream, Syl would retrace the steps taken by a small, frightened girl more than a decade previous. Down and down and down she’d go, deep into the depths of the library. Deeper than Syl knew the building to be. And she’d come again upon the great door in the empty room. But it was different in the dream, as the library was. Where Syl remembered the door to have been a behemoth of metal, this one was wood, stained with age. Upon it were carved symbols and sigils Syl could not read and did not know from any book she had looked upon. And in front of the door lay two skeletons, leaning back as though they had sat down to rest and died in that position. When Syl would look away from the skeleton and look back, its hand would be raised, offering forth a large, black key.

           And thus, Syl would wake up. Every time she had that dream, which was more and more frequently lately, she would spend her day ensuring that all was just right with the library. She even ventured down to the large door in the basement, half expecting to find it transformed, or perhaps the skeletons sitting before it. But every time, without fail, it was as it had always been. Bland, blank, a hunk of metal with little more than a keyhole to mark it. It was in those moments, when all was as it should be and had always been, that a chill ran up Syl’s spine and she fled from the door, back up the stairs, as quickly as her legs could carry her. She’d sit then, trying to remember that she was no longer the defenseless, confused little girl she had been, hugging a book tight to her chest.

           Apart from these disconcerting moments, Syl grew in her duties as librarian as most children would grow in their years to adulthood. Perhaps things would have been different, she wondered some days, staring off into the bleak, ashy wasteland beyond the windows of the library, if the woman had never come. Perhaps she too would have become like one of those emaciated — she had learned the word recently — figures out there, in the ashes. Or maybe she simply would have died here, surrounded by books she could not read. Neither thought gave her comfort, and she would often tear herself away from the window and bury herself in a book to avoid such things.

           It was on similar days that Syl would also occasionally attempt to remember her childhood. Those ages were bleary in her memory, little more than grey shapes and hazy outlines. But she tried to remember how she’d gotten to the library, how she’d known to open the food stores, or even where they were. She could remember, she thought at least, wandering around the tall stacks, but not where she had been prior to that. She could not remember any parent or other person with her in the library, not until the woman had come. She knew from her reading that someone must have birthed her at some point — though she was still somewhat hazy on what, precisely, that meant as she had yet to move into the medical section of the library — but where that person had gone was as much a mystery to her as what had happened to the world talked about in the old books.

           She knew from the stories that other people had been in her position, people who did not know their parents or their past. Usually, those people were called upon to do great things, complete quests, save the world. Syl was… less sure how she might defeat a dragon or destroy a magical ring, particularly as she had seen neither such thing in the library, but the stories had taught her that these heroes often didn’t know their way to begin with and that gave her some comfort.

           She wondered often what had become of the creatures from her books. Not just the dragons and the trolls, but of the cows and the pigs and the horses and all manner of other creatures. She’d seen drawings and some anatomical diagrams of the things and was sure she’d never seen anything like that outside the library in the few hours she’d spent there. Though, when she thought about it, she wasn’t even sure what she looked like. She’d caught glimpses in the dirty glass of the windows from time to time, but nothing quite enough to be sure. At the very least, she was sure she was human. Or human adjacent, at least. The fact that she had thumbs convinced her of that. And she didn’t seem hairy enough to be an ape or monkey, according to the books she read, even as hair coated her body as she grew. No, she was sure enough that she was human that that was one thing she didn’t question.

           These and many other thoughts would wind their way through Syl’s mind as the days passed. When not replaced by other, more easily answered questions. She had, after all, grown nearly to adulthood and had, in time, discovered the stories of love and romance. While Syl did not find herself in great desire of companionship, the affairs of the people in her stories brought feelings she had not, for a time, understood. But, as any teenager with privacy and time on their hands does, she eventually found the answer to that too. And found, similarly, that it was the stories of the women in those books that she enjoyed most.

           Thus, Syl did not find her life in the library lonely. She was, after all, surrounded by books and friends and the infinite possibility of imagination, even if she wasn’t sure that’s what she was doing. In these worlds she found more of life and truth than she did when she looked out the windows to the dead world left behind. Perhaps it was because this was the only life she’d ever known, or perhaps it was simply that the words of old would fill any hole she unknowingly had. That is, after all, the special magic of stories. And still the letter sat, next to the bed Syl made of reclaimed cushions, torn fabric, and on particularly stubborn old bookshelf that had fallen and refused to move. And next to it, the countdown that had begun all those days before, continuously being marked off.

           At this point it was more ritual than necessity to Syl. She was sure she could open the letter whenever she wanted, but after markings days in the thousands, it felt wrong to stop now. Something in her needed to see the count reach zero. It was, she thought, the same thing that enjoyed watching the count of pages in a book tick up until they reached their maximum. Something about the completeness of the thing that spoke to her. So, Syl kept counting and kept reading.

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