The Librarian--Edit

This is a story about a library.

Well.  I lie.  This is a story about more than a library, to be frank.  There's so much more to this place than the storage of books, than the pince-nez glare of a librarian down a long nose, than the hush that comes with the accumulation of so much knowledge in one place.  This story is full of existential crises, big questions--who are we, what are we here for, what's the purpose of it all, why the hell is the answer forty-two?  This story is about the passage of time, space travel, bards, dragons, love, doors, locks, keys, the things that go bump in the night.  Half this story occurs in closets.  There are far too many children to make this story proper for adults.

In summation, this is a story about a library.  It must be admitted that this is an unusual library, with a collection like no other to exist.  Within this library all other libraries exist, including this library itself: it is contained in a small volume in the uppermost tower of its thousands of floors, spires, shifting architecture. It is guarded by a small wooden girl in a paper dress, who has eyes like ink and hair like letters.  She lives alone in the tower and reads all the stories within the Library's walls, learning them intimately.  She has always wondered what it means to be a character, someone worth writing about.

Occasionally this question comes to the fore of her mind, and she reaches into the binding to pluck the characters from the pages.  They come to work in her halls, care for her books, keep the worlds within their pages.  She watches, curious, and reads. A small gold-leafed novel sits forever within a small locked box in her tower room.  Its pages are well-worn, well-perused, well-contemplated.

She wonders what it is to be someone worth writing about.

She is not the main character of this story.

This is a story about a Library.  Therefore, it is a story about a Librarian.



Chapter One
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For most of her life her name had been Mary Warren.  She was seventeen years old as of yesterday, so she knew everything there was to know about the world.  She was prim, although she hated it when people told her that to her face, and she was beautiful, although more often she got called prim.  Her hair was light and brown and fell around her face in carefully-conditioned locks, her eyes were bright and brown.  Glasses, gold-rimmed, framed them like a picture that would never go crooked when you weren't looking and kept all the other wall art in line.

Mary did all her homework when she had spare time, and it was never crinkled with handling when she turned it in. She worked as an editor for the school paper, and she half-dreamed of going journalist.  During Study Hall, she tutored the freshmen in maths and history.  Her mother worked as a secretary for a company that filed insurance claims, and her father was a good-for-nothing that had run off when she was a child.  

Mary wanted very much to work as a lawyer when she got older.  The job was lucrative and somewhat rewarding.  She would attend Harvard upon graduation-- she was merely waiting for the acceptance letter, which was a formality.  She would focus on either international law or some sort of financial law, she really wasn't sure, whichever seemed more lucrative.  While there she would meet a nice young man there, and he would propose to her shortly before she finished school.    They would marry after she'd landed a sensible job and get a moderate family home just outside a decent city (perhaps in the wealthier areas of Chicagoland?), have three children, all boys (none of that silliness with dolls in her house), and after that Mary wasn't really sure.  No need to plan everything in advance, after all.

The walk home from the high school was longish, and perhaps she could have taken the bus.  That certainly would have been simpler, barring the physical abuse of the boys that wouldn't sit down and the potholes of poorly cared-for roads.  She could have sat and read, or tried to read, while inane teenage conversations crept in around the edges of Marlowe.  The bus would have taken its usual route to her stop, winding through the back streets of Virginia boonies, and it would have passed the door without incident.

As it was, Mary, walking home with her nose in a book, walked right into it.