In the Library, there are two manners of Learning. The first is intentional. Student to teacher, student to student, and, of course, book to reader. But there is a second way as well, that of unintentional Learning. The half-heard whisper, the fragments of a thought penciled in the margins of a book, the abandoned sheet of paper covered in mad scrawlings. Some times, this method of Learning can be the most fruitful.
This is a place for bits of stories/general ideas that you might not ever write, but would still like to share and let others use. They can be as long or short as you please and can be in any particular style. Please add new additions to the top of the list.
Turning the key I opened the door to my apartment. Setting my wallet and keys on the side table I bent down to untie my shoelaces, then I heard a crash. “What was that?” I asked. A voice from the kitchen answered, “It was just the cat.” Unfazed, I slipped off my shoe, then I realized… I don’t have a cat… or a roommate…
I choose to tell you my memories. For anything that truly happened is too sad a tale, too sorrowful, to tell you how it happened, as a story. I choose to (must) tell you my memories, for if I told you a story, your tears would blur the ink and it would be lost to time. But memories are held forever in our hearts, and so perhaps by sharing mine with yours, it may add to your life a little seed.
Beneath the stormy waters, something sleeps. Beneath the shifting tides, something waits. Beneath the crashing waves, something lurks. Beneath the rushing currents, Something— Wakes.
Empires meld their myths with cultures: rewriting history by imposing their own founding myths. The question is, should we play along, incorporating ourselves with the narrative of the world as they tell it, or are our stories worth fighting for?
Humans are very fascinating creatures. Always moving and never being content with what they already have.
In the far-off regions of space, those who breathe neon go to war with themselves over whether they should embrace the future of their world, or live in the past.
A notebook is found filled with incoherent, meaningless scribbles. The more you look at it, the more you understand what the author wrote.
A man is compelled to to hang bones on an old tree.
Semi-comedic story from the perspective of a Docent going on an adventure to punish a late book returner.
An antique store with items from long-dead civilizations. It's not grave robbing if you were there to see the society die.
Everything changes when a character steps on an orange.
A blog for describing and reviewing music the reviewer hears in their dreams, called Somni-Musicology. Typical content found there:
- in-depth analysis of the sophomore album of a former night terror monster turned singer-songwriter
- attempted transcription and reinterpretation of pieces played by minstrels in a fairytale-like dream
- paintings and poems based on ambient music heard in lush dreamscapes
- theories and speculation as to the story behind a rock opera concept album, heard in muffled snippets near a boarder crossing in a dream about working at a border checkpoint in a dystopian future
- sketched diagrams for constructing unrecognizable musical instruments from a dream where sapient life on Earth first evolved in the ocean
A person recieves a letter from the future. Written to them, by them, for them. Dear Me, is written on the front.
1920s mobsters, but they're birds.
A ladder with empty slots where rungs should be extends up to the heavens. A lone rung rests at the bottom.
The other day mama told me, that the sky is controlled by a naughty child, and when he finally fed up with raining, wind blowing, clouding and so on, the sky will rain beautiful little stars to us, and if you breathe it in by accident, there will appear another memory in your mind, which didn't belong to you.
And that's the only piece of my memory that I'm convinced belong to my childhood, after sink in this inevitable star ocean for such a long time.
I have studied history from every angle, every perspective. I weighed the collective good committed by humanity against the collective evil. I now rest judgement on my own species, and I find us to be…
A woman is approached by a shadowy entity at her darkest hour- and is offered a deal.
Much have I heard of the fear and suffering undergone by those who can hear the voices of the dead.
But before today, never had I heard of the sorrow of the dead who can still hear the voices of the living.
I've told you, you motherfucker, that game must be shut down regularly! The conciousness in your dumb head would have degenerated to Paramecium if I didn't wake you up!
—How could I know the "animal function" in it would contain automatic degenerations…Anyway that was damn cool. Now I even have a sexual appetite for pigeons.
It can't end like this… Not this way… There has to be something I can do about this… I just… need… to get to the top of that hill…
Is a garden only a garden if it
Ripens with flowers and seeds?
Or is it more like a tale,
Respected and hailed,
No matter the storytellers that bleed?
"You've missed the action again, Osorio." No, I'm just fashionably late.
"Back off, Trin, we handled it fine ourselves anyway." I'm sure you all did.
Footsteps were heard from behind. "Hell, did anyone manage to catch the Itch Spider back in the main hall? It grabs onto clothes, so search people for it before they leave the building." Oh wait, didn't I just walk through that hallway—
I felt a sharp tingle on my back, like my back was a carpet with a pine cone rolling over it. Oh dear…
There are always eyes watching me in the woods. I always thought they were waiting for the right moment to strike me, like the monsters I had read about online for so long. One night, some random person attacked me, and the hundreds of pairs of glowing eyes came to help…
They don't really talk about the time the Library took in those Dachau escapees. I can't blame them.
You know those Beaux-Arts buildings you see in a lot of older towns? That froo-froo style that was big in the late 19th century, with all of the gold and statues of naked women representing abstract ideas and such? Well, in Berlin, all of those statues were modeled by a young woman named Ursula Wurfel. Although she was only active for a few years, every sculptor she modeled for claimed that she added something of herself to every piece they did. She disappears from the historical record around 1921, but people say that she still keeps an eye on the city.
With the right hardware, dreamcatchers can store and transfer dreams. Dreamharvesters, they call them. You can do an awful lot with a hard drive full of dreams.
Nobody can deny that seeking out sources of unintentional Learning is oftentimes an adventurous activity, akin to the old mystery novels. But is it a form of wisdom? Or something else?
Nobody had ever stopped to ask the obvious question… A question so obvious it had become more obscure than the grains of sand that filled his eyes at night.
Jim walked without stopping, as he tended to do. He watched the chaos around him: the ground cracking, meteors hitting the tops of skyscrapers, probably some aliens. He always wondered how it was going to go down in the very end: he supposed it was a nice show. Nothing really surprised him anymore, even the stuff he'd been look forward to for literally the beginning of time. Well, not nothing. The boy Jim had just spotted about fifty yards from him doing the same thing he was doing surprised him a fair amount.
One Hundred Recipes For Pig's Squeal by Granny Solomon
It's widely held in certain circles that three of the competitors in the 1957 World Chess Championship were in actuality demons in human form. A small but robust cottage industry has sprung up around attempting to identify these diabolical Grandmasters. Once identified, their games are minutely analyzed, in the hopes of learning of the future.
….little is spoken of the native tribes and people of the Library….
….shaman opening Ways, discovering the Rules of the Library by trial and error then tribes living within the Library for warmth and….
What are the voting rights and criminal prosecution laws regarding the Hive-Minded? What legalities can prevent single Drones from committing crimes, then being sacrificed by the Queen, or the Hive winning all elections by sheer numbers?
What happens when magic is subject to DRM?
I do not know, because I grew up beside the bed snake in the garden of dreams.
We know that her mother died, they look better.
Cracks decorate their last song.
The naked truth of the disastrous Lake, sulfur foams.
At the end of September as the stars who died in the King's field.
And float lanterns in prison.
Long, long ago, there were men and women who could shape the natural world to their whim, without a need for specific spells and rituals. People called them many things: prophets, warlocks, magi, demi-gods. But these titles were merely a distraction, obscuring the true source of their powers. In truth, these people were Judges, commanding the trees and air with the same authority that they could condemn a man to death.
One could conceive that things such as the Foundation or GOC, gods, antigods, heroes, monsters, worlds and even the Library itself are not the first of their kind. They are simply another incarnation of a recurring idea, which survives through the history of humanity. Where the world is a stage, the current form of these groups and beings are actors, playing a well-known character. They are but a slightly different face playing a role in much the same way as their predecessors.
Now, if you accept this, it raises the question: what did some of the former forms of these things look like?
They say the mngwa is a purely malicious being, driven only by the urge to kill.
Lies. They are nothing of the kind.
The mngwa is an entity as old as Africa itself, reincarnated through countless forms down the ages. It is wily, it is clever, and it has only one purpose: to restore Africa to a pristine state.
More specifically, the exact state it was during the Paleogene.
There's the old superstition of the spotted hyena, which describes its yipping as something like human laughter - the idea that it reflects either malice or amusement on the animal's part. This is well known.
It is of course a mis-conception. What's somewhat less well-known is that the hyena is just a body produced by the laughter to warn off competitors.
In the tale of the Golem and the Rabbi of Prague, they say that to deactivate the Golem, Rabbi Loew erased a letter from the Hebrew word "truth" to render it "death." What they don't tell you is that later, feeling remorse, Rabbi Loew reactivated the Golem by writing a different word on its head. What's the word, you ask? Try looking at a layout of the Library and tell me yourself.
Somewhere in Wisconsin, there's a factory that does nothing but manufacture jinn. Day in and day out, thousands at a time. No one's gotten close enough to figure out why they're doing it, but word is in the past two years, they've more than tripled their daily output.
On the streets of the city of Al-Azbah, there's a single torch that has never gone out. Supposedly, the day that it is extinguished is the day that the world begins to tear itself apart. Supposedly.
If you're ever really lost in the Library, you'll find the junk sections. The books that the Library is trying to hide. Books filled with nothing but gibberish and word salad. But that's not when you should be worried. You should be worried when those books start to make sense.