1-

—the end.

That’s the only way to really start a story. Start with the words “The End”, and always end with the words “Once Upon a Time”, because life goes in cycles. No story ever truly ends, just as it’s impossible to find the place where it truly started.

Stories.

This is a story about stories.

This is a story about stories and love.f

This is a story about stories, and love, and gods, and trust. This is a story about reality versus dreams, and which is more real than the other. This is a story about going home, and about friendship, and about Yin and Yang. This is a story about family and failure, grief and revenge, prison and libraries. This is a story about truth, and about wishes, and about dreamers and murder and love, and infidelity. This is a story about chinchillas and doors and magic, about children and power and fighting and protection, about marriage and acceptance and death and life…

But mostly, this is a story about stories. That other stuff is all just subplot.

Many people have tried to find the Library. They failed. Simple.

Many people have never heard of the Library. They got there. Sometimes. Simple.

A few people have heard of the Library and managed to find it. They were immediately expelled, most of the time—most of the time, the type of person who knows the Library, and who can find it, is not the type of person you want there. People like that hold power, and know how to use it, and the Library has a special disdain for those.

When they find the Library, it judges them.

…I’ve been using the word “find”, but perhaps that’s not the right word. “Reach”, perhaps.

Many people have tried to reach the Library, and they failed. They couldn’t find it, really, because it’s so easy to get there…

Go through the door, take the second corridor on your left—there should be signs—and it’s in room 427. If you reach the end of the world, you’ve gone too far…

Getting to the Library isn’t that hard. In fact, getting to the Library is as simple as opening a door. Anyone can do it.

It’s finding the door that’s the problem.

Mary had decided, long ago, that she was the only teenager in the world whose life didn’t revolve around school. She didn’t spend her life talking about homework, or talking about sports, or talking about teachers. She didn’t care about homework or sports or teachers. They were boring.

But on the weird, rare occasion that she had a social life – on the weird, rare occasion that she made friends – the whole thing tended to fall apart during the school year. Maybe not on their end, but on hers.

Stress, she decided, that was the cause. Stress and homework and possibly brainwashing, although they never happened on her side. Her friends were too into that whole school-grades thing, and she just wasn’t.

Mary’s real name was Liberis, not Mary. Only she didn’t know that yet.

(We’ll call her Liberis. One should always be called by their proper name).

Liberis – who thought her name was Mary – was on her way home from school.

She wore a skirt on top of brown-knit leggings and high boots, a hoodie, and her hair in a ponytail behind her head. Glasses were perched on the bridge of her nose, rimless and octagonal. It was the same outfit she nearly always wore, comfortable and warm.

Anyway, she was walking. Walking, and worrying about the entirely mundane principles of her life, and dreaming of a day when she’d have less banal things to worry about, and… Et cetera.

Liberis wished that the few friends she had would stop acting like they’d spontaneously combust at any moment. She kept writing out in her mind long-drawn, emotional conversations that would never happen. She kept missing the summer, when they didn’t stress out over colleges. Missing childhood, when college was a lifetime away – only two years, in truth, but that was a lifetime to a teenager.

“People,” Liberis announced to the world at large, “Should not let life get in the way of living.”

A very philosophical thing to say, she thought. She’d have to write that one down, if nobody else had said it before. She’d look it up when she got home.

Liberis turned a corner, knee-deep in the mucky swamp that was her mind, and walked straight into a door.

The door had been there for seven hours, two minutes, and forty-two seconds. It had counted.

The Librarian it had been assigned to pick up had got to school early today, for some reason that the door knew not. Now it was stuck waiting here, directly in her route back, waiting. She had to come around sometime.

It hoped.

The door was not only door to be put in this position. They were told to come back with their charges, or not to come back at all. Some doors were forced to choose the second option. None of them ever actually came back without a Librarian – that was unthinkable.

It was getting a little nervous. The other doors told it stories sometimes. They’d seen things. (f1)

But no, here she was, coming around the corner. If doors ever drew breath, it would have let out a sigh of relief.

Next would have come a grunt of surprise and pain as Liberis walked into it head-on.

She fell down, surprised. Her hands out behind her, caught on the cement of the sidewalk, were bleeding mildly, and her shirt was torn at the bottom edge. Liberis didn’t notice this.

She stared at the door. She’d never seen it before.

What the hell?

Liberis stood, wiping the gravel and flecks of blood from her hands on her skirt.

It was about six—no, seven feet high. Mahogany wood. The frame seemed to be gold, and the doorknob was a lion. A roaring lion.

It was a piece of work, that was for sure.

She reached out a hand, and the door tensed. It didn’t like this part – being used. It always felt funny when someone passed through you, as if some part of your body was being swung away, merely for passage into another room.

Or a library, if you were this door.

Liberis paused for a moment, as if she could feel the momentary tension in the wood, but turned the knob and walked through. The door shuddered, even though it was only a door, as the ghost of reality slid through it.

Then, freaked out, Liberis turned to go back – but the door had already closed, and it wasn’t opening again.

Scribe hated his job.

No, he told himself, he didn’t hate it. He just didn’t love it entirely – or at all. It was a justling, plainsong job, a chore of knavery and tricksy toddlers…

Technically, this wasn’t his job. This was his punishment.

Three more years and he’d be back in Classics – no more diaper-wearing brats begging him for stories and diaper changes and snacks and diaper changes. No more small children trapped eternally in their terrible twos. No more cleaning “accidents” up from the naptime lounge. No more diaper changes. No more little children driving him crazy with the Socratic method.

And no more diaper changes.

He despised diaper changes.

Three more years. It wasn’t that long. He’d lived in the Library for a lot longer than that.

Time in the Books for Beginners section passed like time in jail.

His life consisted of feeding and reading stories and changing diapers and putting to bed and… more diapers… And he hated it.

But that was what you got for spilling half the Roman Army into a biography about Gandhi.

It was totally worth it.

Scribe leaned back in his armchair, eyes closing in the peaceful, beautiful silence of naptime. He got three full hours of the day that were quiet, and he relished in them. Naptimes were a sacred thing.

Silent, beautiful, some time to just sit back and read. No loud noises or wails, no nothing…

Slam.

Thirty little eyes popped open. Fifteen little throats wailed.

Scribe winced. An elder librarian – Nomen, the meanest old lady in the Library – stalked (2) in from the New Arrivals hall. A teenage girl was in her wake, walking in a bewildered gaze.

A description:

Nomen was tall and withered, with tight black hair in a bun and a crooked nose. She’d been compared to Severus Snape by the younger librarians on a regular basis until the seventh book appeared in the New Arrivals hall, and it turned out he was cool after all. Her clothes were tight and taciturn, her lips taught—

But her eyes were soft. They managed to pity things occasionally.

The bewildered girl was Scribe’s age, he noticed with some interest. She had soft brown hair and soft brown eyes, dotted by rimless glasses. She wore a denim skirt over leggings and a belt torn with the pens and pencils impaled in it. A knapsack was slung over one of her shoulders.

She’s pretty, Scribe thought. In a plain sort of way.

“Can I help you, Nomen?” he asked, looking at the wailing children in despair.

“This young woman just appeared in the hall,” the old librarian said, nodding at the girl. “Her name is Liberis—“

“No it’s not, it’s Mary—“ said Liberis.

“It’s Liberis now,” said Nomen. “And the Library hasn’t seen it fit to let us know what her function is. I’m placing her with you until we learn it.” That was common protocol, getting placed in this section. Scribe had gone through the same thing (3).

The name Liberis twanged at a string in Scribe’s memory, but he couldn’t remember—

The kids were still wailing.

“Okay,” Scribe said, sighing. “You know anything about kids, Liberis?”

“Not really.”

“Cool. Neither did I. You want your first job? Get them back to sleep.”

An hour later, Liberis’ knees were sore from kneeling and tucking in. Her back ached, and her head hurt, and she’d developed a loathing for all human beings under the age of seven.

Scribe fell back into an armchair and sighed. “So. What book’re you from?”

Liberis shrugged and flung herself into one across from him. “Book?”

“Your story. Did anyone tell you—“

“No. Nobody really told me anything. I just sort of went through, like, this door, and then that woman came up and, like, grabbed me – and next thing I knew, I was, like, putting toddlers to sleep.” Liberis shrugged.

He grinned – Scribe was very proud of his grins. They were beautiful. Back in Denmark, he’d wooed many a fair maiden with his smile. “They didn’t tell you anything about this place?”

“I just said,” said Liberis, and smiled shyly back at him. It wasn’t a coy smile – it was the smile of someone who’s tentatively making a friend. Which was fine and all. Coy was always better.

“Okay. Well… Where to start?”

“Where am I, exactly?”

“Oh. This, my friend—“ He stood, indicating the building “—Is the Library. The haven for all books. Written, unwritten, destroyed, forbidden! It doesn’t matter. They all exist equally here.” Scribe bowed dramatically, sweeping his hand out from his side and accidentally banging it on Bartholomew and the Oobleck. His squeak of pain rather ruined the effect.

“Unwritten?”

“Well, it’s a magical Library. It’s the culmination of every human idea, crammed into one enormous building.”

“Oh. That makes, like, so much more sense,” Liberis said sarcastically. “So what am I here for?”

“We – you, me, and everyone else who lives in the Library – are Librarians. We… do things.”

“Wow.”

“I mean, we do what the Library wills us. It calls us from the stories here to care for it – people like Nomen take care of the physical aspects of the books, while people like myself get stuck all alone in the Books for Beginners section for setting half the Roman army loose in a biography of Gandhi.”

“What?”

“You’ll learn. Most of us have… properties, abilities. Most of us can slide the characters from stories, and for some of us our abilities end there. But Nomen can find any book from a mile away, for example. There’s a girl here – Mira, the Romance section girl – who can make mirages…”

“You lost me at sliding.”

Scribe laughed. “You’ll learn.”

“So what’s yours? I mean, like, your ability. Can you fly? Shoot lasers from your eyes?” A thought occurred to Liberis and she crossed her arms. “You don’t have, like, X-ray vision, do you?

Scribe shrugged. “I,” he said, “am incredibly good-looking. And abilities aren’t the same as superpowers.”

Liberis laughed and let her head relax into the soft leather of the armchair. It wasn’t leather she was used to. It was softer, more flexible than anything she’d felt before. Liberis’ dad was a tailor—she knew her fabric-like materials.

“What kind of leather is this?”

“Babycakes, by Neil Gaiman.”

“What?”

“Baby leather,” Scribe explained. “Pardon. You’ll get used to he obscure references.”

Liberis paled and looked faintly sick. She edged around in her chair uncomfortably.

“It’s not that bad, Liberis. It’s just a story.”

“But! It’s baby leather! Made from babies!”

“Yeah. They’re just babies,” Scribe said, grinning. “You get used to some of the weirder stuff. There’s a toilet in Classics that squirts back.”

Liberis rolled her eyes. And then, out of the blue…

“How long am I here for, exactly?”

…There it was. Scribe had been dreading that question. Expecting it – everyone asked about home eventually – but absolutely dreading it.

“Er,” said Scribe gracefully. “Liberis—“

“Mary.”

“Huh?”

“Mary. My name’s not Liberis, it’s Mary.”

“It’s Liberis now. That’s Nomen’s function – she names us. She looks at who we are and names us accordingly.”

“Why?” Liberis asked.

Scribe blinked. “It’s her function.”

“Why?”

He paused. “I… have no clue. Because the Library asked her to, I guess.”

“Asked— What, is it, like, alive or something?”

“Kind of. It’s not alive, but it’s sentient. It’s… aware. I can’t describe it; it’s just how the place works. You’ll get a feel for it eventually.”

Liberis sighed, and she was quiet for a moment. Scribe had a feeling she knew already.

“I’m, like, here for life, aren’t I?” she whispered.

“No, you’re here forever. Librarians tend to forget to age.” He smiled hopefully at her. She was adjusting well, for a newcomer. “You’re allowed the copy of your story, you know. It’s sort of a Librarian’s first quest, finding their story and getting their copy.”

Liberis sighed helplessly and leaned back in her cushy chair, staring at the ceiling. “I’m a character?”

He nodded. “A minor one, most likely. We all are. That’s where the Library gets us from, our stories. We spend eternity here, Liberis, and—“

“Mary.”

“What?”

“I told you,” Liberis said, standing. “My name’s Mary.”

“Where are you going?”

“I need to think for a while, okay?”

“It’s a big place. You’ll get lost.”

“Fine. Sounds great to me.”

There was a wave of the back of a hand as she walked off.

Alright, then. So much for adjusting well.

He was right, that was the problem.

Two hours later, Liberis found herself in a part of the Library that couldn’t possibly still be Books for Beginners, except it was. She’d never imagined that the Library could be this huge.

Every book ever written, never written, destroyed, and forbidden. He wasn’t joking.

It had seemed beautiful before. The Library was ancient, a haphazard mass of architecture throughout the ages – electric lights lit the walls, but torches burned in brackets throughout the rooms and corridors. She’d seen what she assumed were computers, but they were nothing like any computers she’d seen before. There were chamber pots in some of the bathrooms, right along with the usual flushable toilets that occasionally squirted back and the occasional mass of frightening tube structures.

And this was only her first day here. In… not even twelve hours, now, she’d seen more than she’d ever seen in her life.

The section went on forever – walls of chalkboards and whiteboards and these odd digital walls that responded to touch. The scribbles of a thousand Librarian children covered them, although Liberis had yet to see a marker or a bit of chalk. The ceiling rose into apparent oblivion, with random swirls and shapes of colour…

The world around her was darkening as the electric lights dimmed. The torches would be her only light, soon – which was probably why they were there in the first place.

She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life here. Liberis didn’t want to be immortal, or at least not any more than anyone else did. She wanted to go home. She wanted to see her mom and dad and friends again.

Liberis took a deep breath and began to count.

1, 2, 12, 24, 42, 84…

Everyone has their quirks.

Liberis liked numbers. Not math, exactly, but numbers themselves; finding patterns. She liked finding the common factors between two entirely unrelated numerals.

There was this thing she did, finding similarities between numbers that had no relevance towards each other at a first glance. She wasn’t sure how it worked, exactly, or what the rules were, but she did it all the same.

17682, 28671, 57342…

Liberis called it Holi Algebra, “holi” being short for “holistic” and mildly amusing. Reverse 57342 and you get 24375, times two was 48750, reversed was 05784 only you didn’t need the zero…

440742, 247044, 494088…

She wasn’t a math genius by any means, but Liberis read a lot. She was good at seeing patterns.

She liked seeing patterns.

1760988, 8890671, 43218771…

Scribe found her huddled in a corner of the X-room sometime after Lights Down.

“Liberis?”

“Scribe? That you?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t like it here.”

“You get used to it,” Scribe said, reaching out a hand to help her up. The torchlight flickered warmly on the walls. It was one of the most beautiful, relieving sights that Liberis had ever seen.

“Where are we supposed to, like, sleep?” she asked. “Do we need to sleep? Why’d it get dark? Is it supposed to be night? Am I dead? Is this what happens when you die, you go to, like, some demonic library at the end of the universe?”

“Everyone always has questions,” Scribe said. “Come on. I’ll show you your room, okay?”

He held out his hand, and Liberis took it. She stood, wiping her eyes. “I want to go home,” she whispered.

“You can’t,” Scribe said. “We aren’t allowed to.”

“What about the book? You said we can, like – slide –the characters in and out of the pages, can’t we, like, do the same for ourselves?”

She said the word ‘like’ a lot, thought Scribe. Many of the newer Librarians did that now. A new fad, he thought, like the word ‘groovy’. Hopefully it would pass.

“Not into our own books, we can’t. Occasionally someone will send someone else to check up on their families, but that’s as far as the Library will allow. Most people just read their books. There’s no turning back.”

“But—that’s cruel.”

Scribe shrugged. “It’s plot,” he said, leading her through the doors.

“Is this all one section?”

“Yeah. There’re twenty-seven rooms – one for each letter of the alphabet and one for reading time.”

“Alphabet? What about the Dewey—“

“Dewey Decimal System? Not in here,” Scribe said. “They’d never be able to find anything. It’s just too vague.”

“But they know the alphabet?”

“They live in a Library. Of course they know the alphabet, Liberis.”

They walked a little ways. Liberis was still shaking a little. She could see a bit of the sense to it, now. “Why’s it all in English?”

“It wasn’t, always. It used to be in other languages. When I came, it was Latin.”

“How long have you been here?”

Scribe shrugged. “Depends. Time works differently here. I don’t know how to describe it – it seems to correlate with Earth’s time, but in a way I’ll never be able to comprehend. There’s no sense in it. We come from our own stories. I don’t know where they fall in the real world.”

“The real world?”

“You know, the world outside the Library.”

“What’s it like?”

“I don’t know. Nobody does. Nobody ever leaves the Library.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

Liberis’ room was beautiful, she had to admit grudgingly. It had a high, Victorian ceiling – deep blue drapes washed down from it. Her windows looked out to an underwater world, despite Scribe’s windows next door looking out to clouds miles about the ground. Fish swam by her bed at night, bioluminescing and sparkling in the dark water. The entire room was bathed in a watery glow.

All her favourite books lined her bookshelves, and a desk faced the largest window opposite the door. Warm, clear lights glowed softly – and she had a light dimmer. No torches, thank God.

(She’d noticed that Scribe used the words Gratzi Librum in place of “thank God”. Slang, she supposed.)

A sword hung above her bed. It hummed. Liberis couldn’t explain that.

“Our rooms tend to reflect our functions,” Scribe told her. “Dunno why you got a sword.”

“I can’t use it,” Liberis said. “It’s a beautiful room,” she added as an afterthought. “It’s…”

“Perfect?”

“Yeah. Perfect.” Liberis shrugged. “It knows me. The Library, I mean. How the hell does it know me?”

“Well, it chose you.”

“Makes as much sense as anything else here.”

“Like I said, you get used to it. Sentience and all.”

“I’m tired.”

“Good night, then.”

“Night.”

“See you on the morrow.”

“Huh?”

Scribe grinned. “Er, see you on the flip side?”

“That’s even weirder.”

Liberis lay awake that night, staring at the top of her new four-post bed.

It was beautiful, but somehow she felt like the place was trying to bribe her. I give you a new room, Liberis, and a dead-sexy friend, and all the books you could ever dream of…

But what does it want in return? My service? This place manifested books and rooms from thin air, or so it seemed. People, too. What need would it have of maintenance?

I don’t like it here.

Liberis didn’t seem to have a choice.

She had to like it here. She had to become a Librarian – wasn’t that what Scribe had called them? Librarians? There must be others, now that she thought of it. Other sections.

Liberis’ eyes strayed upward, to the humming sword above her bed. It was a… samurai sword. Katana, she thought. Right?

It was long, and thin, and made of a swirling green metal that Liberis had never seen before. A name was written in the metal—in the actual colour, in waves and swirls.

Balance.

Liberis turned over and reached up for the sword—her sword? The thought felt funny in her mind. Liberis wasn’t the type of person who owned a sword. She just wasn’t that… well, she wasn’t that cool.

There was a sheath, hanging just beneath the blade—blue, also formed from some kind of swirling metal. Black lines zigzagged across the surface.

It was beautiful, Liberis thought with a twinge of guilt. She shouldn’t be appreciating this. She shouldn’t like this. She should be crying right about now.

A wave of depression washed through her.

She missed her parents.

She missed her friends.

She missed her story.

Liberis wondered what book she’d come out of – who was the main character? Everyone was the main character in their own lives, but what about the story? Liberis began running through everyone she’d ever met, and next thing she knew the lights were brightening again in the Library’s odd version of morning.

She paid it no mind.

Liberis began to count again, calming her nerves with patterns.

(Some people prayed to calm themselves – Liberis did Holi Algebra. It was an old internal joke, and a bad one at that.)

3, 6, 36, 63, 99, 297…

The numbers grew into dreams, and Liberis slept.

1 But not really. Because doors don’t have eyes.

2 And she did stalk. She looked like a bit of celery or something. It was a miracle the woman could move.

3 Only there hadn’t been so many diaper changes back then. Or so it seemed.

an: Sorry for the bad formatting. Fictionpress and footnotes are suck. Just to put it out there. I'll post the story as I edit through it.