After the murmuring in the grand bedroom petered off,

  Fiddle came out of his room and put out the lights, knowing La’a would

  be back when she chose and no sooner, and wouldn’t have trouble in the

  dark anyway. Once the common room was done he could easily see the light

  leaking from under Anne’s curtain, and went to poke his nose in. She

  and Ever were curled up in a heap, looking a bit like a pile of dirty

  clothes. Ever’s breathing was slow and steady, with the occasional

  whisper of a snore, but Anne was still partly awake, as evidenced by the

  eye she opened at his intrusion.

  For a moment, he was awash in a desperate desire to just

  leap onto the bed himself and wriggle his way into the middle of their

  puddle, but he took a deep breath instead, winked once at Anne and put

  out their light, then retreated to his own comfortable but lonely bed.

  He let himself have some normal dream time to start the

  night, only the vaguest consciousness monitoring the contents for

  nightmare seeds or useful insights. But once his second round of dreams

  began, he rose to full alertness—in the midst of splashing about in a

  wilderness pond with a motley crew of friends from his childhood, cooks

  from the castle, and three exceptionally pretty wolf guardswomen. He

  hopped out of the water, sorted his appearance with a flicker of

  thought, and moved himself to the Great Library. He had a lot to talk to

  his father about.

  Arriving in the entry hall filled him with the same sense

  of comfortable anticipation it always did. The faint scents of ink and

  paper and soft shuffling and whisking sounds of movement from off in the

  stacks welcomed him back. He hardly spared a glance for the thirteen

  elegant columns that circled the rotunda, or the ever-shifting mosaic

  that filled its center, a void-like darkness that endlessly ate away at

  the world map that circled it. They were familiar landmarks. Instead he

  turned to the second arch to his right and set off in search of the

  elder squirrel.

  An unquantifiable but irritatingly large amount of time

  later, he found himself back in the entry, having searched through all

  his father’s usual haunts without finding him. He might already have

  left for the night, or might not arrive for quite some time still. That

  was one of the innate inconveniences of the dream realm, and nothing to

  be done about it. But that was fine in the end. Fiddle had his own work

  to do here as well. He oriented himself by the columns again and headed

  for the Autobiography wing.

  Some time later, he was carefully following the splatter

  of letters and numbers on a piece of scratch paper held in one hand,

  searching the effectively endless aisles of the autobiographies from

  several hundred years ago for one particular volume when his

  concentration was disrupted by an unfamiliar sound. The other patrons of

  the library normally made little noise padding around the marble

  floors, beyond the faint tick of the occasional un-trimmed claw. And the

  librarians themselves usually flew between tasks on near-silent wings.

  So when his ears picked up a rhythmic clop clop, as though someone had

  brought a very small horse into the stacks, his attention was caught

  quite thoroughly.

  He turned toward the sound just in time to see a librarian dart past the end of the row of shelves where he stood.

  “Ah, there he is!” it called over its shoulder, pointing

  him out to someone behind it. “Have fun!” and zipped off as the clopping

  approached.

  Still more curious, Fiddle folded his note back into a pocket and went to meet the sound.

  “Thank you!” An unfamiliar alto voice, with an oddly familiar cadence called out. “Fiddle? You around here?”

  He stepped around the corner and came face to face with an

  utterly bizarre aberration. Pure startlement produced its usual

  reaction and he leapt backwards several feet, banging into the shelves

  behind himself before catching his balance, tail thrashing.

  The figure before him was shaped vaguely like a person,

  but only barely. It stood with heels flat to the ground like an Ursur,

  but no more than a head taller than himself. It was bald and pallid,

  except for the dark mane on top of its head, with a face of alien

  simplicity, almost perfectly flat. A small, vertical plane poked out of

  the middle of the face, separating two strangely shaped, slightly sunken

  eyes. Thin ridges of hair decorated the top of the sockets, and even

  the globes of the eyes were strange, with large, distinct arcs of white

  sclera easily visible to both sides of the irises.

  The strange being flinched back from him as well, but

  caught itself before it moved very far at all. Its strange face showed

  an almost comically exaggerated expression of surprise as a bare hand

  rose to the middle of its chest. chest, he supposed. He stared, mouth agape.

  The pale, naked, almost translucent skin hid no twitch of a

  muscle, and the entirety of the face seemed designed to display every

  faintest hint of emotion or reaction with theatrical intensity. The lack

  of angles allowed all the features to be seen at once, and he realized

  even the undersized irises with their highlighting white marks indicated

  the direction of its gaze with perfect clarity.

  “Hey, Fiddle. What’s the matter, never seen a human

  before?” The smile that accompanied the crack was lopsided, gentle, the

  subtle gestures of the facial muscles conveying welcome and an almost

  motherly affection, with undertones of hope.

  “I. Um. Wha— Anne?”

  “In the flesh, as far as I can tell,” she answered, waving

  one pale hand. “Haven’t come across a mirror yet, to be completely

  sure.”

  “You’re. So—Different.”

  “Yeah. I noticed.” The expression now was wistful. A little lonely, and perhaps uncomfortable at his continuing discomfort.

  “So,” she drawled, turning away from him to gaze around at

  the near-endless stacks and high, vaulted ceiling. “I gotta say, I was

  told to expect an infinite magical library, and I am not disappointed in

  the slightest. But I can’t believe you didn’t tell me the place is full

  of adorable little dragon guys!”

  He scratched the back of his head uncomfortably. “Uh. The librarians really prefer their privacy. You’ll see in time.”

  She frowned at him, confusion rather than anger, then shrugged and changed the subject again.

  “You’re the expert around here. You wanna show me around?”

  “Oh. Yeah! I can give you a tour,” he said, “Just let me

  bookmark this reference before we wander away.” He quickly turned away

  from the strange apparition and pulled the crumpled note back out of his

  pocket.

  Her noisy footsteps followed him as he headed down the aisle, following the alphanumeric breadcrumbs toward his target.

  With his free hand, Fiddle gestured vaguely to the stacks all around them.

  “This is the autobiographies. Probably the hardest part of

  the place to wrap your mind around, but also its greatest resource.

  Every person who has ever lived has a book here. Until we die, our book

  is intangible, taking up its space on a shelf, but unable to be

  interacted with aside from seeing the name and date of birth. Once we

  pass away, the book solidifies, and over the course of a decade or so it

  fills itself with all the details of our lives.”

  “Wow, that’s weird. Cool! But weird. Why does it take so long?”

  “There are different theories. Some think it’s because the

  magic that draws in the knowledge just takes time to complete its work.

  Others think it’s arranged that way to let the librarians classify the

  books more easily as they become available. You can see the general arc

  of someone’s life much more easily from a handful of pages summarizing

  it than from thousands and thousands full of details.”

  He paused at the end of a row, double checking the digits

  on his note with those at the very end of the bottom shelf. “Nope, a bit

  further on,” he muttered to himself, heading further down the aisle.

  “This is also the area the librarians have the least

  ability to influence,” he told the steady clacking. “Otherwise it would

  be much easier to navigate. But the autobiographies are arranged in

  chronological order by moment of birth, and that’s the way they stay no

  matter what. You can grab a book and bring it elsewhere to read or

  reference, but once you leave the library it’ll pop back to its same

  spot on the shelf.

  “I mean, that’s true of all of them, but the librarians

  can get together to make large changes to how the other sections are

  organized, and they have a few times over the eons to make things easier

  to find. That’s not possible here.”

  He paused, finally having arrived at his destination, ran

  his fingers down the spines of the books on the third shelf up from the

  bottom till he found the name he was looking for, and pulled it free.

  “, that really is an amazing resource. Also a little creepy. Do I have a book here?”

  He looked up from the volume in his hand at that. “Huh. I assume so. I haven’t actually looked yet. One moment.”

  Collecting his focus, he ran his fingers over the spine

  and cover of the book, pushing his will into the spell-like bookmark

  ability and then into the object in his hands. With the mental sense of

  pieces clicking neatly into place he relaxed slightly, and reached to

  return the book to its spot on the shelf, then turned back to his

  unexpected guest.

  “Shall we?”

  “Oh, didn’t you need that book?” she asked, confused again.

  “I bookmarked it, so I can pop back here whenever I’m

  ready to continue the project. It’s one of the best perks of higher

  levels of library access. I can mark a certain volume or a certain spot

  in the stacks and transport myself back to it later, just like that.” He

  snapped his fingers together to demonstrate. “With the most basic

  access, you can pop yourself back to the entry rotunda from anywhere in

  the library, but not to anyplace else. Keeps you from staying lost if

  you get turned around.”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Oh. I can see how that would be useful.”

  “I, however, can pop to all sorts of spots, and I can

  bring company too. Shall I show you?” He held out his hand to the

  unsettling person who was also his new friend Anne, and she placed her

  small, bare, clawless, hand in it.

  “Sure.” Despite the weird anatomy, the smile she gave him

  was much reminiscent of the ones he’d seen from Kiri’s face these last

  few days. His return smile came more easily than he expected.

  #

  After Fiddle’s minor boast of all the places he could

  “pop” to, I was surprised when the brief moment of disorientation left

  us back in the lovely rotunda at which I’d arrived when I first managed

  to find coherence in my dreams and wrangle my library access into

  activating for the first time.

  He didn’t leave me much time to re-appreciate the

  architecture, tugging me across the room, over the eerie

  mosaic vortex, and through the archway to the same huge room we’d just

  been in.

  “Seems weird, I know,” he tossed over his shoulder at me. “But it’s far faster than retracing your steps through history.”

  From one perspective I believed him. The trip through the

  stacks—once I’d gotten the assistance of one of the lovely little

  dragons flitting about the place—had been quite the walk, making me very

  glad that my current return to my own appearance hadn’t been a hundred

  percent accurate. My knees weren’t screaming pain at me, and nor were

  any of the other litany of osteoarthritic joints. Extra good, since my

  cane hadn’t made an appearance. In fact, aside from my favorite

  comfortable pair of shoes, the outfit I’d found myself in here consisted

  of the same embroidered tunic and oddly-fastened pants I had been

  wearing during the day, just shrunk down to fit my original unimposing

  frame.

  From another perspective, I was already very curious about

  what constituted time here in the dream library. And therefore of

  course what could constitute speed or slowness. My newly innate sense of

  time passing told me it was an hour and a bit past midnight. But it

  also said that time wasn’t moving ahead at all. At least not noticeably.

  When I’d been struggling to reach consciousness in my earlier dreams,

  the sense of time was one of the first markers of having made it. But

  each time I was able to note the interior clock, its report of time

  passing had seemed almost random. Sometimes a huge swath of dream time

  would skip by but my mental minute hand would barely shift. Others very

  little might seem to have happened but the time would have jumped

  forward by minutes or hours. I did feel as though my consciousness was

  far closer to completely awake now than it had been when surfacing in

  dreams. That had been similar to my handful of former experiences of

  lucid dreaming. The sense of lucidity made a huge contrast with the

  usual lack of coherence of a dream, but even so, when seen in the light

  of morning one’s thought processes were still tangled up in dream logic

  and inexplicable leaps. It was almost as if there were more to the

  difference than a switch to be flipped.

  I smiled at the random thoughts, and let myself be pulled along.

  We entered the “Autobiography” room at a corner, with the

  walls stretching away to right and left, and the rows and rows of stacks

  spreading out before us. Along each wall stretched rows of cabinets,

  full of little drawers, almost painfully familiar to me as card

  catalogues. Fiddle gestured toward them, to the left and then right,

  saying, “That’s the listing by name, the other’s by subject, more or

  less. The librarians are always working on updating them.” And indeed,

  at least half a dozen of the lithe, dog-sized dragons, all scaled in

  gradients of blue and teal, were working at sections of the catalogues--sorting and adding pages.

  He turned sharply to the right, and lead me into the very

  first row of the stacks, shelves rising well above our heads to either

  side.

  “I assume your time of birth will have registered as the

  moment your spirit arrived in Kiri’s body, four days ago. If it

  registers as the moment of your birth in your home world it’ll be much

  harder to find.” He made a thoughtful noise. He’d slowed down once we

  moved into the aisle and let me have my hand back. I was glad he’d

  finally started looking less spooked every time he glanced at me. “I’m

  very interested to find out, anyway. It might tell us very significant

  things, both about your situation and about the way the library’s

  records work.”

  The shelves we were walking past were filled with what I

  could only think of as ghost books. They had faint colors, and clear

  shapes to them, with a surprising amount of variety, but each one was

  translucent, the back of the shelf clearly visible behind it. I waved my

  hand along one shelf, passing easily through all the books lined up, as

  though they were just illusions. They didn’t ripple or deform as I went

  by either, entirely unaffected by my presence.

  Each spine carried the date and a time, all easy for me to

  read, though not actually to understand, as I still didn’t know much

  about the local calendar. Most also carried a name, in one of several

  different languages. Many were the same sharp, linear writing I had seen

  while awake, and was able to read, but there were also others with

  clearly much different origins whose meanings were entirely opaque to

  me.

  We reached the first break in the rows of shelves before I

  saw a different date on any of the books. But a few strides down the

  next section it ticked up by one.

  “So the shelf sections don’t correspond to a day?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, not particularly. It’d be more convenient if they did, wouldn’t it?” He chuckled softly.

  A moment later I caught sight of something odd, and

  paused, crouched down to the bottom shelf and reached out to a rust

  colored binding much more solid looking than those next to it. It felt

  real and solid under my fingers, and I was able to pluck it off the

  shelf. There was no name on the spine, just the date. I opened the

  slender volume to see a single page. Several lines of flowing, rounded

  script met my eye, and meant nothing to me. I frowned.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t—” Fiddle called out, then stopped and waited with a somber expression.

  I held it up for him, and he shook his head. “That’s

  written in Talakite. I only know a little of it, but I can tell you all

  it says. The mother’s name, maybe the father’s. Cause of death, if it

  was something obvious. Or maybe just ’died of birth complications’. It happens

  sometimes, if there’s no yellow mage nearby.”

  I closed the cover of the book and ran my hand over it

  again. This immensely enchanted book existed on behalf of an infant who

  had died less than a day after they were born? That felt like an

  incomprehensible incongruity.

  The little book fit neatly back between its ghostly

  neighbors. I sighed as I turned away from it and followed my squirrel

  friend further into the past.

  A couple more date changes in the books around us and

  Fiddle slowed to a halt, scanning carefully over all the shelves. I

  considered what we were looking for. I was still alive, at least as far

  as this library was concerned, so my book should also be ghostly and

  untouchable. Would it look the same as the rest?

  I stepped past him, moving toward earlier hours of the day

  I had arrived, letting my eyes drift across the shelves and shelves

  full of ghostly volumes.

  “Oh!” I called out involuntarily. “Seriously? An iPhone?”

  I stepped up to the odd book out that had caught my

  attention, drawing Fiddle’s eye to it as well. My book was thicker than

  the others along here, but it stood out for the glossy red metal of its

  cover. It only bore a surface resemblance to a piece of tech from home,

  but the smooth planes and sharp edges definitely stood out from all the

  normal bindings around it.

  Plus, while the engraved date and time matched those

  around it on the shelf, the name on the spine read “Anne Jennifer

  Magnusson” in English.

  #

  I got the rest of my tour of the library, as promised, but

  it was obvious Fiddle was still distracted and distressed by the

  discovery of my book. I got it. Assuming—reasonably—that I was the only

  person in this world who spoke English, if everything inside the book

  also got transcribed in my native tongue instead of a local one, then

  when I died nobody would be able to read what was written in it. It

  would be a closed book to him and anyone else forever, there being no

  relationship between my language and any of theirs.

  He’d returned us to the lovely entry rotunda, taking me

  around all the archways in order to explain which was what. Most of them

  led to large sections of less magically-created literature. The

  different areas were sorted into broad categories, some familiar to me

  from structures back home, and some not. The ’Arts, Literature and

  Music’ section through the first arch on the left made sense enough, but

  others felt a bit stranger, like ’Material Creations,’ the one just

  past it. That apparently included anything technological, maps, and

  various areas of material-based magic whose lingo went straight over my

  head.

  Past that was the Autobiography wing, followed by one he

  simply designated as ’Life.’ When I asked for specifics, he looked a

  little confused, but eventually came up with, “You know, anatomy,

  agriculture, any knowledge about the animals and plants and monsters of

  the world.”

  “Oh, biology. Okay.”

  “Yes, Life.”

  I laughed at him and let him move on to the next.

  The next one he defined as “Social forces and thoughts on

  thought.” Which I decided was a decent description of philosophy and

  social sciences. Probably other things too.

  The arch after that led not to more shelves of books, but a

  large room full of work desks, study carrels, chalk boards, and

  bulletin boards for the use of any and all visitors. We’d almost

  finished circling the rotunda at this point, with only one more archway

  between us and the shimmering entry portal where we’d started. Fiddle

  gestured to that one, saying, “That’s for factual histories, and

  collations of information from autobiographies.” But he nodded toward

  the study room and led me in there to settle at an unused table.

  All the chairs were the kneeling type things we’d come

  across most in the waking world and I frowned at the one next to his. I

  didn’t feel like trying to balance on it with my very differently angled

  legs, but hey, this was actually a dream world, right?

  I leaned down far enough to put a hand on the little stool

  and closed my eyes, trying to imagine it as a regular wooden chair,

  with four legs and a back to rest against. It was too short for that, so

  I grabbed it and lifted, bringing the cushion up to about the right

  height for a seat. I focused as firmly as I could on the image in my

  head, realizing after a moment that I was using the same techniques Fee

  guided me through when we were igniting new abilities. When the image

  was as clear in my head as I could make it, I opened my eyes and gasped

  in surprise at seeing exactly the chair I’d imagined in my hand. I set

  it down again with a giggle and seated myself comfortably.

  “Impressive,” Fiddle said, an eyebrow raised. “Usually

  someone has to have it pointed out that objects are malleable here. Is

  that really what you’re used to sitting on?”

  “The basic shape, yeah. There’s lots of variations, of

  course.” I leaned back and crossed my legs for what seemed like the

  first time in ages.

  He shook his head with a smile.

  “So, what do you think?”

  “It’s really damn amazing is what I think,” I told him.

  “But I still can’t believe you buried the lede about the super cute

  little dragons all over the place.” I glanced over at a group of them a

  few tables down, standing up on the little knee chairs to lean over the

  table and gesture at what appeared to be a collection of maps between

  them. Each was maybe three feet tall, with delicate scales in shades of

  blue and teal, and big bat-like wings trailing behind.

  He looked at them too, but quickly looked away again.

  “It’s not that easy. You’ll understand once we get back. I should warn

  you, while we tend to call them the librarians, they’re not actually

  here to help us visitors, as such. Sometimes they can be convinced to

  lend a hand if they’re not otherwise engaged, but they usually want

  something in exchange. Speaking of which, how did you get that one to

  lead you to me when you arrived?”

  I chuckled. “It was pretty simple, really. When I first

  got here I was just poking around the entryway for a while, enjoying the

  art on the pillars and being a little intimidated by the huge rooms in

  every direction. One of those guys came by, flying between one room and

  another, and stopped to stare at me. Between you and me, I’m pretty sure

  he’d never seen a human before either.” I gave him a smile to soften

  any discomfort. “He started asking me a bunch of questions. I answered

  some, and then asked him about you. He knew right away that you were

  here, and where, but didn’t want to say. But he was very fascinated with

  my skin. The idea of your outsides not being covered with scales or fur

  seemed very strange to him I guess. Anyway, I offered to let him hold

  my hand for a few minutes if he’d lead me to where you were, so there

  you go.”

  Fiddle nodded. “Makes sense. New information tends to be

  their biggest weakness, and you’ve got lots of that to share, don’t

  you.”

  “There are solutions to the problem with my book, you know.”

  He met my eyes, curious if not optimistic. “Like what?”

  “Simplest is for me to teach you English. Or maybe I can write a book.”