A man was
beset by a fever. So long ago now that we have lost the words and numbers to
give the year a name, the man named Banausic was seized by an unrelenting
fervour and drive to built a great wooden hall that would have the ring of the
gods. He was not blessed with the why of it, but was simply instilled with the
how, and over the years of his life he built a house so magnificent that few
would ever enter without fear of spoiling its acoustic magic and specific
cadences.
When the hall
was finished, he was left at a loss as to its purpose: no one could deny the
beauty and the majesty of the thing he had built, but there was no obvious
answer as to what was meant to dwell there. A travelling salesman came to
Banausic peddling trinkets and jewels: a man who has his own story told some
other place, as important to the gods as Banausic was. He had brought with him
the intended inhabitant of the Acta: a book.
It looked no
more impressive than any other book Banausic had ever laid eyes on- but then,
Banausic could not read, and so the astonishment of letters linked together on
a page was lost on him even when they spelled out his own name. But he did not
need the talent of script to know what he held in his hands, because a man
chosen by fate is often imbued with odd instincts and the right urges so as to
end up in the right place. In the very centre of the back stalls, he laid out a
place for the book that seemed to radiate the sounds and melodies of the hall
itself, and he knew he was right. This place was meant to be a library; a
repository of words and stories and knowledge and fables. Because Banausic’s
part in the shaping of the hall had reached its conclusion, he died then
without much ado and with no fanfare at all. The hall, however, was not yet
finished.
People came
from every corner of the proto-Thulian island to bring written words to feed
the Acta. Wise men wrote ideas and sketched plans for marvellous machines; old,
lonely women scribbled in broken handwriting accounts of their dead husbands
and passed-away sons, just wanting them to be remembered; children drew broad
picture stories of talking animals and imaginary friends, and those were as
important as the histories of the land itself. Men were commissioned to gather
those histories and bind them on parchment, to create analogues for the world
in flat sheaves of paper, and all of them were stored in the annals of the great
hall for wondrous posterity.
Many gods and
sprites take hold on the fabric of the world from the sheer power of belief in
their existence: you cannot vest that much collective energy in one force
without breathing some life into it. The people of the island believed in a
great number of creator gods and hellish devils and lesser imps, and even with
so many faces these gods and devils and imps clawed their way into being on the
back of the tributes offered them- and they were quite right to do so. The creatures
of the Acta, however, did not come to their lives through belief but uniquely
among their kind found hold here by necessity.
The power of
words written down and kept is so immense and so focused that there was created
a deep and abiding need for a personification to be in charge of them. A hall
so inlaid with the meaning people bestowed on it- one so directly guided by the
hands of already-existing gods and fates- could little exist without its own
sprites than a nor’easter wind be talked to sleep. Out of the first book (whose
contents are as much a mystery now as the nature of these forces themselves)
rose a satyr of a kind, the thing which both inhabited and was made of the Acta
and channelled the forces of words and stories stored all in one place. He was
the Omphalos of the Acta; the centre point of the little world it created.
He was a
benevolent thing and slept in a small nest made around the book, lodged high in
the back stalls where he could overlook the wooden hall and simply love all his
words without missing a corner. For a hundred years he was happy and content
like this, and the library thrived. Words were brought in and taken out when
people came to read- they took with them in their heads such varied thoughts
and tales that came from places they had never been and concerned places they
would never go. In this way, the world became bigger.
But even for
the demiurge of words, years become long and oversight becomes less pressing.
The Omphalos spent more and more time asleep, and as the nature of the Acta
changed its needs changed, giving rise to new sprites of necessity.
It came to be
that the Acta carved the first Father Librarian out of need, an old man like a
monk who roamed the stacks and stalls, dry and dusty as the pages themselves. He
was closer to the new idea forming around the books here, the idea that they
were immortal and invulnerable and needed little tending at all. It became
somehow imbedded into the minds of people that words and stories kept
themselves, and because they were there the job was already done, and the value
to be gained from them inherent in their existence. As sacrosanct as the Acta
was, it became a white elephant that held a symbolic worth, and if it was not
completely forgotten it was certainly demoted to a dead hall where few ever
visited.
Of course the
Father Librarian was built specifically for his task, and cared a great deal
about the sacred nature of words. He did not believe them to be playthings
either- the idea that anyone could lay eyes on the scripts in the hall at any
time seemed deeply wrong and he was invested in the protection of their
inaccessibility over all else. He was joined- out of his own need- by a small
thing that had no other purpose but to study the texts and keep them in its
head. The Father Librarian would never have dared the outrage of rising above
his station and studying them himself, so the little thing that followed him
around the maze of the hall became the place where knowledge went, and was the
place where it then stayed.
This is how it
was for an awful long time. For every year that passed, the Father Librarian
would climb the back stall and quietly hang a tributary trinket over the place
where the Omphalos lay sleeping, and for the rest of the year he and his little
thing would be left in peace to roam and read. Nailed over the small nest which
was secreted behind panels and shadows, a collection of small toys collected
and grew: bells, rings, whistles, coins and horns. There seemed no point to
ever rise and disturb the peace of the hall, so the Omphalos simply left the
care of the words to the Father Librarian and his little thing, curling up on
his book and simply slumbering deeper every time he felt the urge to move.
The collection
of gifts over the Omphalos’ sleeping place had grown immense by the time The
Girl came to the Acta. She was as much a part of its story and its personified
powers as the Omphalos and the little thing and the Father Librarian were,
although she came from a separate need and so was not recognised by them. Like
an alien, she was found wandering the aisles, taking down volumes and scrolls
and perusing them before returning them to their resting places. Likely she was
walking there a far longer time than even the sprites of the Acta knew, for
when the Father Librarian spotted her she seemed to know the place well and
felt comfortable breaking the hierarchy of knowledge. She had no regard for the
rights of the books not to be looked on by common eyes, and consumed them
lightly, almost trivially, as though for entertainment. The Father Librarian
seized upon her and- as politely as he could, being so out of practice in
speaking with an outside person and a woman to boot- demanded to know her
purpose there. Admittedly, the words “seized” and “demanded” may be a little
strong for the manner in which he confronted her, but he had surely meant those
sentiments when he had neared her even if his nerved had failed and delivered
softly spoken words instead.
With large
eyes that looked at him so earnestly he was at a loss for himself, she told him
she was there to read. She disarmed him so that he simply led her through the
stacks when she asked for a tale of bravery or a book that could teach her of
birds and even found himself blustering on about certain texts in long-winded
accounts as he did so. The little thing watched sceptically and jealously,
following behind at a pace. It was less charmed by her dark hair and tall
frame, and so was not quite as quick to allow for innocent intent.
The Father
Librarian was so indeeped in a recounting of the census book from the second
stack on the third floor that he did not notice when she leaped off and soared
into the rafters, gleefully climbing into the ceiling beams and jumping from
the top of one stack to another. When he turned around to find her gone, he
looked up and was revolted by the noise of joy and disruption she was emitting
all through the hall. For the first time since a hundred years after its
inception, the wooden walls and paper aisles rang with a beautiful diapason-
the song of the Acta that had lead Banausic to give his life to the building of
it in the first place.
She scrambled
into the buttresses and scampered their length along the walls, the Father
Librarian and the little thing chasing after her as best they could. They had
not been outfitted with agility or flight by their necessity, and found it
terribly hard to keep up. They found the ladders and climbed up the stacks to
catch her, huffing and heaving all the while. She slowed down for a moment to
allow them to catch up, and then stopped. The Father Librarian howled at her,
for all his words at a loss to express to her exactly the damage she was
inflicting here. He could not jump the space between where he stood and she was
perched, so tried to reason in desperate sobs with her to come down and allow
them to restore some balance. She smiled a slow smile that had no malice but
was wicked beyond belief, and in one quick motion her hand shot up through the
rotten wood of the ceiling. When she pulled it back it was smeared with a dark
brown blood, and she held the liver of a bird that had been sat on the roof.
Its life had instantly as her hand had expertly plunged into its belly and
plucked out the liver as though she was picking a lazy fly from the air.
Perhaps the
Father Librarian and the little thing felt a wave of acknowledgment at this.
They could not know it, but this was the first Cantrip in an unspoken,
unwritten prophecy to usher in the next part of the life of the Acta. It was
the first of three defilements of this house, and whether they knew it or not,
this outrage was a part of the mythology that lived there. If they did not feel
the weight of its importance, it certainly held them in place. They found they
could not follow her as she swung and catapulted ever deeper into the attics of
the Acta, and could only stand impotently as she disappeared from their view.
It’s hard to say exactly what The Girl was.
If the Omphalos was a creator demi-god, spawned from the first words of that
book, then the Father Librarian was surely a keeper spirit flanked by a sprite.
She was something wholly unexpected and- by needs- broke the form entirely. She
is now known sometimes as the Dancer or the Terpsichorean, dancing through the
branches of the World Tree, but there’s no one alive to remember her nature
precisely. She moved this way from beam to beam until she came upon the heart
of the hall: the Omphalos’ nest. He awoke and was taken aback to see any
creature at all here where he slept, but to see one so lovely and piercing was
the most unlikely thing. She smiled again, and he could not help but be
seduced.
In taking him,
she had enacted the second defilement of the hall, and everywhere the music
rang.
Afterwards,
she took him by the hand and led him through the place that was his own. She
showed him the tributary wall and he was delighted for a moment before its more
dilapidated nature brought him back down. Going back to the beginning of the
line of silver toys was like looking into a tapestry of history- the first gift
was beautiful and untarnished, and had been placed there with much care. But as
far as he travelled along the line, the further down history he could see, the
gifts became more mottled and cheap and hastily chosen, and it was clear that
the need for him was diminishing.
She asked him
if he read.
He could not
understand why he should have to do so. If he persists here solely as a token
of that first book, is he not already made of words himself?
She fetched
him volumes from high and far shelves and brought them to his nest. She watched
him read for the first time all the anchors of lives and ideas he had presided
over in sleeping and waking times, and it was clear that he had only understood
them now. By taking in the notions and knowledge of others, he began to
understand the need for the Acta, for himself, and- with a growing feeling of
heavy sorrow- the need that had created the Father Librarian.
He knew that
the world understood that words were safe here, and that they could not
possibly need anything more from them if they were. If the work had been done
to gather the words at all, there was no longer a need to spread it and make
the world any bigger. They had made a Librarian who stood in for them in their
contentment with the hoarding of stories and the safekeeping of them, and then
promptly let them sleep there unhindered.
As all the
people of Thule know, water is the fear of the dreaming, and fire is the fear
of the waking.
The Girl took
the Omphalos by the hand and they saw everything that the hall held. Long
forgotten tributes to dead husbands and passed-away sons; minutes, hours, days;
the histories and wisdom of so many tribes there were no numbers to count them.
She took him high into the rafters and smiled. From her pocket, with a hand
covered in dry brown blood, she took a match and lit it, and handed it to him.
The hall rang
happily with deep wooden tones and dry words took light.
Perhaps we need to
lose the words again so we can care for them once more.
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