The Estranged Library
Shaeya stared at the scroll in her hands. Would this be the correct one? She sighed, trying not to think of the chances, and set to work. She attuned her bracelet until it started shining with a golden light, then subtly changed the frequencies until the scroll lit up. A faint blue light poured out, and then the scroll became transparent.
Shaeya was inside a story. A young couple had met and were drinking some kind of hot concoction within the confines of one establishment or another. They started kissing, and soon they decided to leave. Shaeya remained for a while, then decided to exit when things started getting intimate.
Not what Shaeya and Kennoc needed.
Shaeya looked at Kennoc. He was immersed in a scroll of his own. She saw him make a couple of gestures, then step out. Kennoc saw her looking and offered her a tired smile. Shaeya replied with one of her own, and picked up the next scroll.
It was a story about the gods. Shaeya stayed a bit longer, because you never knew. Sometimes mythological texts had hints of valid cosmology, and cosmology was one of the possibilities they had. But the story quickly devolved into a fable, she noticed. Well performed, complex and with an ensemble cast, yet still a fable.
Shaeya didn’t allow herself to get angry. The time for anger had passed long ago, and both of them had discovered it led nowhere. Patience would lead them. Patience and hope. What else did they have?
Shaeya felt a pang of hunger and decided to make a break. After all, it wasn’t as if the next scroll was precisely the one they needed, or was it? She paused for a second, then stood. A few minutes wouldn’t change anything. And everything would be useless if they starved themselves to death.
She almost laughed out loud. It wouldn’t have mattered, because Kennoc was inside another scroll and couldn’t have noticed.
The Library was, if nothing else, well catered. They would die of old age long before they could run out of supplies. She missed fresh food, but what they had wasn’t bad at all. She had certainly tasted worse many times. She selected one of her favourite meals, consciously trying once again not to guess what it was really made of. The fact the food was biologically compatible with them was yet another of the Library’s mysteries. Perhaps it had to do with the bracelets and tattoos, as she and Kennoc had discussed sometimes. The biotechnology used here was strange and fascinating: maybe the Library -what remained functional of it- could adapt its systems to their physiology. Who knew.
It must be out there, she thought as she took a forkful of the blue paste. Somewhere. In one of those scrolls. And we’ll find it.
Yet she couldn’t be sure. Even Kennoc, the eternal optimist, had come to recognize their chances were slim. Still, their other option was to wait, or suicide.
Shaeya looked out of the arch, at the lush of the Library. The marble-laden galleries, the silken tapestries, the mysterious gong-shaped golden maps. The gardens with their evergreen bushes and delicate white flowers. The hovering orbs that tended to everything.
But she looked further away, at the spinning armillary sphere and the portal beyond. At the floating rocks she could see there, the doom that loomed closer every day. The Netherworld that consumed the Library dimension bit by bit, unless they could find the scroll with the instructions to close the portal. Or at least, redirect it so they could get home.
Because the scroll had to be here still, in the undamaged sections of the Library.
It had to be.
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This is my accompanying entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: October 9–15, 2017 at the Writer’s Discussion Group on Google+. I am responsible for creating the prompts for the Exercise, so I don’t take part, but I still like to write a story each week.
These last weeks I’m always writing my stories late, and this was no exception. I started with a simple idea, the two characters stranded in a world away from their home, and developed it. It’s strange, because for such a detailed image, my sight was attracted to what’s going on in the background, where the world seems to be coming apart, and I worked from there.
