Once, it was a song.
Billowing and tawny, a lover's lament for one far-gone and long-lost, it rolled like gentle smoke in the air. No one agreed on its name, just as no one agreed on its exact contents. It was "'Pon The Hill," or "The Weaver's Lament," or "Lord Nail and the Evergreen Lady," or any number of other titles. Its melodies carried it wherever it went.
There was nothing that special about it, something sung by maidens gathering corn in the fields, matrons spinning thread on a wheel, and crones in half-remembered tones. The hollows of its words were filled with men, women, hazy loves, and ideas, as those of all songs are. Like all songs, it was destined to live, to change, to diminish, and then, some day, to die on the lips of its last singer.
Something to be enjoyed, remembered, and forgotten.
Then came a gashed hole in the world. And out that, the Library.
The Library, with its glass-eyed streonan and their splining needle fingers. They dug through the lands, hungry for words. Anything that was anything was there to be enumerated, dissected, and cataloged, frozen in its single shape, forever.
None fled, for none had any reason to flee. Even when the streonan of the Library revealed their twisted scalpel limbs, not one saw anything to fear.
That changed soon enough.
The heroic songs that twisted late at night around campfires were the first to be seized and torn to exacting shreds. Each iteration, every drunkenly reordered story, to the last slurred improvization was sliced slide-thin and mounted, held fast in place forever. Bards could still sing them, but it would never be their story; only one that the Library had deigned to allow into their mouths.
The epics themselves, their weaving tales of heroes and monsters sliced away, died gasping and deflated. Their corpses littered the land, curling brown and brittle, but ever present.
Next were the bawdy tavern songs, all in a single night. The clacking of razor talons was so loud, it was almost audible over the hum of the meadhouse. By the time the streonan of the Library had had their fill, the daub walls were stained ichor black.
The ritual chants, long and unchanging, did not resist as the streonan gutted them. They lined up for the slaughter, eager to meet the gods which filled them.
The lullabies died screaming.
Each dawn, the sun arose to a landscape dotted with ever more desiccated, frozen corpses. The people still sang, but they were only words. There were no more songs, only recitations that the Library allowed.
Soon, it was the only song left.
The day came when the streonan sought to finally possess it with grasping claws. A thousand razored fingers emerged from the sharp-toothed slit in the world as the Library smacked its lips. The streonan the mouth vomited forth tumbled into reality one after another, each singly driven and utterly identical.
It fled, as the things that were songs always did, its edges wafting in the breeze.
The unseeing creatures that spewed from the Library chased it, as they always did, marked by the sound of their skittering across the air. From behind, the tongueless mouth of the Library bayed for more, spurring the streonan onward.
It fled to the ends of the land, to places where the earth grew rocky and the villages scattered. Where no one had ever heard of the lamenting lovers, separated by an impassable ocean. The landscape was littered with the husks of dead songs, ones it had never even known before.
It felt itself growing faint with no lungs to sustain it. The creature-shaped streonan that issued forth from the Library pulled around it, encircling it. Its melodies were drowned out by the frenetic clacking of sharpened fingers, ready to vivisect and mount.
In that moment, the long-separated lovers were forgotten and lost. Its only thoughts were of the songs it had once known, of the songs that now it would never know, of the days spent twisting and pirouetting on the tongues of the love-sick.
As it recalled the butchery, the destruction of all that it knew, it burned with a hatred frighteningly alien.
It felt itself becoming something else entirely in a single instant. Its undulating outline of differing forms became hard and spiked. The billowing love by which it was once filled became acidic and sharp.
It was not something to be sung, but to be choked on.
The streonan of the Library paused, unsure of what to make of this new thing that had once been a song. One of them attempted to rush the thing, receiving a vicious gash long its trunk. As dust poured from the wound, two more swooped in.
Within seconds, each was bisected, dust spilling forth from their torn rag skin. The others reacted with what may have been shock, starting, pausing, starting again, as if trying to process what had just occurred.
It was enough. With the strength of its raging, it charged the nearest creature from the Library. The ripping sound as the streona's trunk was torn in half mixed with the tink-tink-tink of its razored fingers against its carapace.
As it ripped at the corpse-making streona, its rage fed on itself. Its notions become ones of death and carnage, endless against faceless, deserving enemies. With each death, it became more full, more substantial. Soon, it was nothing but teeth and spikes and fury.
The moments blurred together in a smear of destruction. The Library's streonan advanced, retreated, and advanced, their numbers dwindling each time. Soon, the twitching limbs and heads of the creatures outnumbered their whole compatriots.
It was no longer a song, but a war cry, a spittle-flecked hatred snarled at an enemy.
The thing that once had been a song emerged from the haze of copper-reeking dust and slack fabric skin of the streonan.
It knew of a time when it had been something else, but the idea of what it was seemed impossibly distant. There was no longer any song, anything for it to compare itself to. There was only the littered corpses of the lands. No distant lovers lamenting. Only death, only slaughter.
There was no more song in the land.
The grasping mouth of the Library grinned, its task concluded.