Edge Cases

"Why... is this slope... so steep," Vex wheezed. He didn't know how long he'd been climbing. It hadn't mattered for the first hour or so — it had been tiring, but he was used to being tired! He traveled with three people, one of whom could cure his own exhaustion, another who was a physical monstrosity, and the third of whom was his boyfriend and didn't even have any muscles to feel tired with.

Talking to himself helped him feel better, but changed nothing about the fact that he'd been climbing up a steep slope for three hours, and it had only been getting steeper.

"Where is this even going?" Vex grimaced. He dug his toes into the wall — the slope was soft, at least, and easy enough to make little footholds on. It really was getting steeper; he wasn't exactly climbing vertically, but he would be soon if this kept up.

There were spells he could use to help himself. He'd tried a couple of them, even. There was a small glyph he could paint on his hands and feet that would make them stickier, and another one with a Gravity aspect to it he could use to make himself lighter. He still didn't have any combination that would grant him flight, though, and he was starting to wonder if he needed to stop and spend his time trying to find one of those instead.

It turned out he needn't have worried. A few more steps later and he finally saw something in the distance, barely visible in the dim lighting provided to him — a thin line that implied the floor finally, finally leveled out ahead of him. Vex gathered all his remaining energy and ran up the rest of the slope as fast as he could, using his hands and tail to keep his balance when the steepness threatened to tip him over; he grasped the edge of the floor just as the ground turned into a vertical wall, and hauled himself up and over onto it.

Instantly, the lighting around him changed. Vex blinked a few times, startled at how bright it suddenly was.

The ground beneath him was no longer soft, claylike soil; instead, his claws tapped on the familiar feeling of a hardwood floor. Vex grimaced almost instinctively, lifting his feet to clean them before he tracked dirt onto the floor of the near-pristine library he found himself in — except he was suddenly and inexplicably clean.

Sure. He could accept that. That dirt had mostly been dirt-aspect mana anyway, and not actually dirt; he could fully believe that it had simply chosen to dissipate.

What drew Vex's interest were the tall shelves around him, each one of them packed full with books. They were a good three times his height, and he had to squint to even be able to see the tops of the shelves. The library was illuminated by, near as Vex could tell, a ceiling that was made out of literal fire.

So it was a little bit difficult to look at.

"Where am I?" Vex muttered to himself. The words echoed more loudly than he'd expected, and he winced a bit, half-expecting a librarian to round the corner and reprimand him. When that didn't happen, he took a few cautious steps forward, and picked a random book out of the nearest shelf.

The book's design was immaculately beautiful. He didn't recognize it — the style of the gold filigree on the tome was like nothing he'd seen before — but he recognized the effort that went into it, the precision that it took to etch the near-symmetrical design and then lay gold foil into it. There weren't even any traces of mana on the book — it was like it had been made entirely by hand.

He flipped it open, and found an empty book. Every page in it was blank.

It was the same with the next book he checked, and the next, and the next — Vex felt increasingly frantic as he looked through the books. He didn't know why it felt so wrong that they were empty, only that it was wrong. A part of him knew the books should have been filled with stories and lore and history —

A hand fell on his shoulder, and the lizardkin jumped.

"They are gone." A solemn voice spoke, and Vex turned around to look at the speaker. They were humanoid, but that was where their familiarity with anything Vex recognized ended; their skin was a mottled purple, and where their mouth should have been there were instead long, sinuous tendrils. They wore stately robes of black and red, outlined in the same gold that was laid so carefully into each book.

Their tendrils curled upward in an awkward approximation of a smile. "I apologize. I must have startled you; it would have been better if I introduced myself first, perhaps. Time has a habit of flying, in here. I am afraid I am uncertain what the social norms are in this particular century.

"My name is Isolis." They took a step back and dipped forward into a slight bow. "I am the librarian, custodian, and historian here at Solar Lagrange 1. The name is an inside joke."

Vex stared blankly. "I'm Vex," he said, opting to leave out the rest of his titles. "Uh... adventurer. Do you mind telling me what this place is?"

"Solar Lagrange 1, as I said," Isolis said. "It is the place we built to store the records we were able to save when the First Library burned."

"The First Library?" Vex asked. Isolis smiled again, their tendrils curling up into a whisper of a smile, and they began to walk; they beckoned Vex to follow them, and the lizard hurried to keep up. He had to take two steps to keep up with every one of Isolis'.

"The First Library," Isolis echoed. "What you call the Sun."

Xothok had mentioned something about that, Vex remembered. Xothok sent messages with what he discovered about how the stars had once been different, that they'd been libraries holding all the knowledge that the mana contained.

Libraries that were burned to keep the universe warm.

Probably. They didn't actually know the details; Xothok had been able to find nothing further on the reason they were burned, though he'd sorted through what scraps of knowledge he could find on that dead star.

"What happened to it?" Vex asked, and Isolis sighed.

"There comes a point where any universe must end," the librarian said. "To make way for something new. The end is always a little different: heat death in one universe, a big crunch in another, vacuum decay in a third. But the universe always ends.

"Except here. Except this one — and who knows, maybe infinite others, but our planar scopes can't see that far. The existence of magic prevented the end of the universe. It burned itself to keep us alive, you see, and it reached an equilibrium — one where the collective output of our knowledge kept the stars fueled, and the universe could not die.

"And so we have the first immortal universe that we know of.

"But all universes must eventually die, and that stability we achieved broke something fundamental. The Void is, we think, a response from the fundamental forces from nature — though I hardly feel comfortable speculating. Perhaps something more fundamental to reality is required for a universe to exist, and keeping it alive with physics and magic is only part of the equation. Perhaps simply beating back entropy is insufficient.

"So. The First Library burned to prevent the heat death of this universe; that was the first transition, when we moved from a universe of light and music to one of cosmic fire. We Librarians saved everything we could. But what you saw back there..."

The empty books, Vex realized. The books that had felt so wrong — the inexplicable sadness he felt while looking through its empty pages. He realized, perhaps a little late, that the beautiful filigree decorated a book with no title at all.

"The Void marches on," Isolis said. "Consuming our history and our legacy — everything that makes us who we are. Every day, another book loses its name, and the words on its pages fade away. What you saw back there is no longer a part of our library.

"It is a graveyard. A monument to all we have lost."

That pronouncement struck Vex like a bell. Their surroundings were entirely different now, he realized, although they had changed so slowly that he hadn't quite noticed. Wooden shelves were replaced with solid steel, and the 'books' kept here — if they could really be called books at all — were closer to solid slabs of metal, inundated with strange designs. Vex felt a small pang of loss. Gone were the beautiful filigree decorations, and in place of them was...

...something different. Not worse, perhaps. But different, and in that difference was a small loss.

A small wire connected each one to the framework of the shelf, and each shelf in turn held wires that led away into something far off in the center of the library. Whatever that was, it was bright; the ceiling here no longer burned like fire. Instead, clinical light shone down on them from long tubes.

"What is all this?" Vex asked. He looked around in half-amazement, half-concern.

"Our database," Isolis replied. They sighed, and in that one movement they seemed to age by years. Their shoulders sagged, the tendrils on their face drooped low. "Paper is... insufficient. We cannot track the information that goes missing in the books manually; there are too many books, and only so many librarians. This way, we can keep backups on backups, and run algorithms to test if anything is missing."

"How much has gone missing?" Vex asked, frowning slightly.

"More than seventy percent of history. Eighty-one percent of all records of written media, fictional or otherwise. Sixty-five percent of cultural practices within currently active cultures." Isolis sighed. "We are doing everything we can to preserve what we had, but it is a long battle, and a losing war."

"You keep saying we," Vex said finally. The question had been on his mind for a while, but now seemed like the most opportune moment to ask. Vex felt bad, though. Isolis looked so tired. "Who is 'we'?"

Isolis chuckled softly. "That is one of the big questions we wish to answer, though that is a goal we have long since abandoned hope for. 'We' are the Librarians — those that take care of the remnants of the various Libraries. We do not know how we came about. We do not know why we have the mission that we do. We know that we care about the preservation of information and culture, and we dedicate ourselves to that mission...

"And yet, the cost appears to have been our identities. Not as persons, perhaps, but as a people. We are each of us different, did you know that? I resemble a creature of the sea, but there are Librarians that resemble humans, or orcs, or beings of pure Element.

"We share a singular culture in spite of that. Our traditions are largely the same — those traditions that remain. But we do not know why we formed, or how we formed; all we know is what we are now."

Vex didn't respond for a moment. When he did, the words were hesitant, uncertain. "I'm sorry," he offered. He didn't know what else to say.

"We are what we are," Isolis said. The way they spoke, they had long since accepted the fact. They came to a stop next to one shelf in particular — Vex noticed it was different. Two new books shone on that shelf, these ones made of leather and paper, and glowing with some very familiar glyphs.

Solidity and Change.

"What is more important is why you are here," Isolis said.

He moved the books aside, revealing three smaller books behind them — each one tangled in a knot of roots. Vex felt them ring with mana, even as far away as he stood.

They were thrumming with untapped power.