The Lost Library - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

Type: Ruined library, and fortress of the Never Loom Region: The deep desert of The SunSpun Sands Built by: Unknown Held by: The Obscurists Holds: The Never Loom, one of The Denial Looms, and the stolen element Ever's Shuttle Creatures: Storyvores: Gnashers, Nippers, Gulpers, Bloaters and Gobblers Guardian: BookBelly, a three-headed Storyvore (Mash, Gnash and Lash) Status: Ruined, half-buried in sand

Not to be confused with The EverLasting Library in Frays End, the eternal repository of story.

"Every book in there has a beginning. That's the cruel part." -- Rook RagRavel - His Tattered Majesty, the Rag King of the Performance Playa

Overview

The Lost Library is a great library half-buried in the deep desert of The SunSpun Sands, far beyond the Performance Playa, where no road runs and no traveller has reason to go. No one knows who built it, or when. The dunes shift around it as they do everywhere in the Sands, burying one wing and uncovering another, so that it is never quite the same shape twice, and almost no one who has gone looking for it has ever found it. It is hidden, and very hard to reach, and it is where Null keeps the Never Loom.

The Lost Library is Never made into a place: a library of stories that will never be finished.

A Library Older Than Memory

Everything in the Lost Library is marked in a script no one living can read, and scholars of The University of the Unseen still argue over whether it is writing at all. What can be pieced together comes from pictures: sketches in the margins, etchings on the shelf-ends, carvings over the doors. They show a great hall full of people reading together, with a schoolhouse beside it and a lamplit street beyond. Whoever built the Library, they loved this place, and they meant for it to last.

The Sands

No road reaches the Lost Library. Only the Obscurists know the way, and their caravans, loaded with stolen endings, cross the deep desert and vanish into it. Around the Library, the tops of its towers and domes break the surface of the dunes, and wind-carved arches mark where whole wings lie buried. Storyvores pour out of it to meet anyone who comes near.

The Ruin

The Library's great dome has half fallen in, and sand pours through it in slow golden falls onto the stacks below. Many of its halls are filled to the ceiling with drifted sand. Others open onto staircases that sink into the dunes, or balconies that hang over nothing. Many of its shelves hold only empty covers, spines with nothing inside, eaten hollow by Storyvores.

The StoryWeaver fights their way through it room by room and level by level: down sand-choked corridors, across reading rooms, up and down its stairways and balconies, towards the great reading room at its heart.

The piles of last pages. The Obscurists have made the Library their stronghold. The last pages they tear from books across Threadbare, from the EverLasting Library to the HemsHollow Lending Library, are carried here and heaped among the stacks: a library of endings no one is allowed to read. Wherever a last page is taken, a book loses its ending, and any reader still inside it is left lost between the lines, with no way home.

The BookWorm. Beneath the Library, coiled in the bedrock under the sand, lies a BookWorm, still waiting for an ending.

Puzzles of the Library

  • The scattered catalogue. The Library's catalogue cards are strewn through its sand-filled halls. Recovering them and putting the stacks back in order unlocks each wing in turn.
  • Reading the pictures. Doors are sealed with symbols in the Library's unreadable script, and opened by matching them to the sketches and etchings found around the Library.
  • Finishing what was started. BookWorms wait beside unfinished books throughout the Library. Finishing a story opens a WormHole shortcut between the Library's wings.

The Never Loom

The Never Loom stands in the Library's great reading room. With every pass, Ever's Shuttle carries another ending across its warp, so that every story near it stops short, and the Loom weaves another Storyvore. From here the packs spill out of the broken windows and across the Sands.

Defenders of the Library

The Never Loom weaves every kind of Storyvore, and all of them defend the Library and the dunes around it (see Storyvores):

Kind Size How it hunts How the StoryWeaver drives it off
Gnashers Small to middling Slow, always hungry, eats anything in its way Finish a story aloud, or fill it with PomPuffs until it sleeps
Nippers Small Hovers, darts, bites through grappling rope mid-swing Swing fast and time it well, or toss a PomPuff to lure it off
Gulpers Large Bounces, lands on its prey and gulps it down Read its bounce and dodge, then slip past while it is dizzy
Bloaters Swells as it eats Gorges until it is fit to burst, then explodes beside the unwary Keep your distance, or lure it into exploding somewhere useful
Gobblers Giant Digs into the ground and waits to snaffle up whoever walks over Read the signs, or drop a PomPuff into the hole and cross while it sleeps

Nippers harry the balconies and stairwells, Gobblers lie buried in the sand-filled courtyards, Bloaters drift through the reading rooms, and Gulpers and Gnashers crowd the stacks.

The Guardian

The guardian of the Lost Library is BookBelly, a giant, three-headed Storyvore, swollen with every ending in the Library, crouched beside the Never Loom. Its three heads are Mash, Gnash and Lash, and each hungers for a different kind of story: Mash for stories spoken, Gnash for stories written, and Lash for stories told in pictures. As the battle goes on, BookBelly chews through the shelves, and the Library breaks apart around the StoryWeaver, balcony by balcony, stack by stack. Grappling between what still stands, the StoryWeaver gathers last pages from the Obscurists' piles and turns each ending against the head that hungers for it: reading endings aloud to Mash, writing them out for Gnash, and piecing together the pictured endings in the Library's sketches and etchings for Lash. A Storyvore cannot bear a tale told all the way to its end, and every ending drives a head back. Last of all, the StoryWeaver pieces together the Library's own story, scattered across its halls, and finishes it.

BookBelly unravels, and every book it swallowed spills out in a great pile on the floor of the reading room, to be returned to their rightful place in the HemsHollow Lending Library. The StoryWeaver destroys the Never Loom, which unravels back to loose fibre, and takes Ever's Shuttle home to the Eternal Loom. The finished story wakes the BookWorm beneath the Library, which opens a WormHole from one of the Library's books to the shelves of The EverLasting Library, and carries the StoryWeaver home to Frays End.

In the Threadbare Plot

The Lost Library ends the arc for the Never Loom in Act Two of the Threadbare Plot, guided by the LoomWarden Vigil. In Hold the Fort, the StoryWeaver helps defend HemsHollow, and Peg PomPocket teaches them her PomPuff lure. In the chaos of the battle, the Obscurists tear the endings from the books of the HemsHollow Lending Library and flee, and in Paper Trail the StoryWeaver follows their trail of stolen pages east across the SunSpun Sands. At the Performance Playa, in The Show Must Go On, they save Rook RagRavel's great show in The Canopy of Curiosity, and Rook gives them a map to the Library. In Heads or Tales, they fight their way through the Library to BookBelly.

For Contributors

  • A library of endings. Every corner should feel like a story stopped short: a book open at its last page, with the last page gone; a bookmark that never reached the end.
  • Sand and ruin. The Library is half-buried and always shifting. Halls fill with sand, and towers rise out of the dunes.
  • Read through pictures. The Library's script cannot be read, so clues come from sketches, etchings and symbols.
  • Endings win. Storyvores are driven off by finished stories, and BookBelly is unravelled, freeing every book it swallowed. See Content Guidelines.

Connections

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Audio and source files

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