‘The pen is mightier than the sword, that much is true, but, as every Librarian learns, there is a force even greater than the device that lets us put words to page. Aether help the poor fool that finds themselves at odds with a book.’

– Introduction to ‘Kildair’s Guide to Surviving the Library’

Amadeus Hindleton, Head Librarian of Hollow University and, much to his displeasure, Professor of History, was having a terrible day. That isn’t to say that the description of ‘terrible’ does it justice, it is just that language lacks the words to properly define just how ‘terrible’ his day was. It was one of those days composed of a slew of tiny details that would, on their own, constitute a bad day, but together formed a layered symphony of misery he would not wish upon his greatest enemy.

To start, it was Reading Day at the University which meant that every single student was currently trying to borrow a book on topics ranging from ‘The Distinctive Herbology of Blyst’ to ‘A Detailed Examination on the Fundamentals of Aether’ so that they might prepare for Exams the following week. This would be a logistical nightmare even if The Library were in a cooperative mood, but that leads to the next issue— The Library was unhappy.

Earlier that morning, while trying to find a book to help brush up on their knowledge of fire magic, a student had stumbled across the original copy of Understanding the Flame in the Open Stacks.

Now, while Amadeus will admit there is no way that book should have been in the Open Stacks for the student to find in the first place, he couldn’t help but be a little disappointed that they had opened a book composed entirely of fire (believe it or not, most books in The Library were parchment, ink, and leather) without consulting library staff.

The student was unharmed having rightly cast a spell to resist fire before handling a flaming book, but the resulting blaze had damaged a few shelves worth of books and The Library hates when its books get damaged.

How exactly that book escaped containment and ended up in the Open Stacks was being hotly debated by some of the younger staff of The Library, but Amadeus had a sinking suspicion.

Once he had finished resealing Understanding the Flame— a delicate endeavor for anyone who enjoyed not being charred to ash— Amadeus had gone to return it to its place in the Vault at the heart of the Restricted Stacks where the more problematic books are stored. It is here that he discovered, much to his disappointment, that The Tome of Most Things had escaped the Vault. Again.

This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back..

To understand why that was so terrible, one must first know a bit about the history of The Tome of Most Things (affectionately named ‘Tome’ by The Library’s staff).

As long as Amadeus had been at The Library, a staggering number of years truth be told, there have been disagreements over how it should be organized. And it wasn’t just an issue of the staff unable to reach a compromise with each other— that would have been too simple; The Library itself had an opinion and would rearrange its shelf’s if it disliked how they were being organized. Tired of having to track down volumes in the ever changing labyrinth that is The Library, a much younger Amadeus had decided on the solution most wizards use to fix their problems.

Magic.

His younger self had consulted a number of dust covered artificy books, made a list of what he would need, took a leave of absence from The Library (a fairly common occurrence due to the… stresses… of the job), and set off to begin gathering what would be needed for his solution.

The details of his ensuing adventures are, for the purposes of understanding the history of Tome, unimportant and best left for a time when he is much less sober than he is now. What does matter is that he returned to The Library some time later with the requisite ingredients and ready to craft the answer to his problems.

For the vellum, he had acquired the hide of a Great Sphinx. The binding was to be threads of Listener Spider silk. Each of the spell glyphs that would power it would be scribed with the feather of a Simurgh.

Last were the pages and while the wood they came from was the most impressive ingredient of the lot, the less that is said about how he got it the better. Amadeus had enough issues without having to deal with a whole city of angry Elves.

Eager to put it all together, he had gone to his office and begun to channel an Aether flow. It would’ve been much safer practice to go to the Block instead to craft a magical artifact (and in hindsight would also have prevented a lot of what happened next) but he had been confident he had it right. After the Aether flow had filled the spell circuitry he had constructed to capacity, he cut it off and beheld his creation.

Sitting on his office table was a book that was just the right size; It looked as if it had some heft about it, but would still be comfortable to read in any position. The binding was immaculate, unmarried by the stretching of the leather you can sometimes see on books that were rushed in their creation. Each page had a perfect flatness to it, not yet wrinkled with the ripples left behind by fingers being pressed against their edge. Emblazoned across the desert tan leather of the cover in a gold that seemed to glow was the title: The Tome of Nothing.

It was those words that first gave Amadeus pause; That was not the title he had given it.

He did not get the chance to question this because, while he stood there with a dumb look on his face, the book opened its mouth— A mouth that it did not have— and ate Amadeus’s journal which, until that moment, had been resting quite peacefully on the table beside it.

His journal was a book that was not the right size; an unwieldy amalgamation that was closer in shape to an artificers toolbox than a work of literature. It had been gifted to Amadeus when he began his first year at the University he now worked for, and he had rebound it over the years to add even more pages. It contained the first spell circuit he ever made, notes from his four years of study prior to graduation, the original copy of the thesis he wrote in his studies after graduation, a myriad of his personal diary entries, and basically every meaningful piece of information he had every thought to write down. All told, this made for a journal that was twice again as large as Tome.

It vanished in a single bite.

He had blinked in disbelief, staring at the book which had just ate his life’s work despite the fact it did not have a mouth and saw that the title had changed. The Tome of Some Things now stood out across the top in that beautiful glowing gold lettering.

To this day, he wished he knew what error he made in the spell glyphs that animated Tome, an answer he would never get on account of the only copy of the circuitry having been in his journal. Life tends to be funny that way.

A tension had formed in the room then, Amadeus staring at the book that he could feel was staring back.

It broke when the book rose into the air— an occurrence that should not have shocked Amadeus as much as it did given the events immediately preceding it— then fled from the room in a secluded corner of the Restricted Stacks he had made into his office.

It had taken five sleepless days of searching for Amadeus to find the book, which had changed its title to The Tome of Several Things, lying strewn out next to the shredded remains of An Examination of the Rhinean-Tarth Conflicts and their Effects on the Modern Political Climate by Maxwell Romans.

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Remembering that made him smile. He detested Romans and thought it fitting that Tome, which at that point had consumed a number of The Library’s volumes that would probably never be fully known, had elected to shred this book instead of consuming it.

Seizing the opportunity, he had placed Tome under a binding spell to prevent it from running away again. Amadeus then brought it to the Vault where he had placed it in an iron lockbox, activated the locking glyph, and set off to get some sleep.

Of course at the time he hadn’t understood just what Tome was, nor what they were capable of.

In the years since, Tome has escaped the Vault on twenty-seven separate occasions, and Amadeus has learned quite a bit about it in the process.

The first thing he realized is that Tome is capable of channeling Aether. This was revealed to him when he returned the following morning to the Vault and found a shredded heap of iron where he had left Tome.

When Amadeus examined the spell circuit he had found inside of the demolished iron lockbox after Tome’s first escape, he was shocked to find that the spell circuit was, infact, one of his very own making.

The only place he had ever written it down was his journal, which led him to his second realization. When Tome ate a book, they retained all the information that had been in it, and they could recall it perfectly. Given the number of books Tome has consumed, it is probably the most knowledgeable entity in the entire world. Fortunately for Amadeus, knowledgeable does not necessarily mean intelligent.

That was his third realization— Tome is just a little bit stupid.

While it may have access to more information than most Elves would ever glimpse in their immortal lives, it didn’t know how to use it very well.

Amadeus liked to imagine Tome as an overly eager toddler that had enough magical power to level a city. If Tome came across a closed door, they were as likely to use magic to open it as they were to destroy the door, the frame, as well as half the wall it was attached to. In Tome’s mind, the means in which it accomplished a task were unimportant, as long as that task was accomplished.

Amadeus’s final realization was that what Tome wanted most of all, besides eating books, was to help. It just didn’t know how to do so all that well.

When he had originally created the spell circuit that animated Tome, he had been trying to create a tool which would help you find the book you needed most in The Library. He figured that it didn’t matter how The Library was sorted if you had something that could lead you directly to the book you wanted.

No one knows how many books are really in The Library, it’s as old as the University itself and has been growing for the same amount of time. There are countless volumes within it that have been lost to time, and it was Amadeus’s hope that he might be able to find anything he wanted with such an artifact. Despite Tome being vastly different from what he had intended, it still had that purpose instilled into it.

So every time Tome escaped it did one of two things. It either sought new books to add to itself, or it tried to bring a book to someone in The Library that would help them out.

What Tome failed to understand, and what Amadeus himself hadn’t considered when he had come up with his idea for finding books, is that there are some books in The Library that should be lost. It was on Tome’s 5th escape that Amadeus came to this realization.

Adelaide Glasston’s time at the University had been coming to an end. She was top of her class, set to graduate with highest honors, and had been accepted to pursue postgraduate studies in the Department of Healing. On the day of Tome’s 5th escape Adelaide was in the Restricted Stacks, which she had permission to be in, looking for a book that might help her find a solution to the one ailment magic had yet to find a cure to. Death.

Her present theory was that in the moments after death, as the soul began to leave our mortal plane, it was possible to keep it in place long enough that a healer could repair their body and bring them back to the light. Adelaide hoped that such a spell would allow for a much reduced mortality rate in medical procedures, and she had a mostly complete spell circuit for it. All that was missing was the final piece of the puzzle which she was seeking now. She wanted a way to see the soul as it escapes so that the spell can latch on and bring it back.

She had gone to Amadeus for help, asking where she might find a book with such information. He had told her that he did not know any book in The Library that would be able to help her, but seeing her determination and knowing she was of upstanding character he gave her leave to enter the Restricted Stacks to look on her own.

While he didn’t know it at the time, Amadeus has since discovered that she likely would never have found what she was looking for— A previous Librarian had buried any books related to meddling with the soul in a deep dark corner of The Library so that they would never be seen again, and for good reason too.

But Tome had escaped that day. They saw a student in need and left a book where Adelaide would find it that had exactly what she was looking for.

Knowing what he knows about it now, Amadeus would never have let a student read that book, but that was something Tome did not understand.

To See Beyond the Veil by Ansh’na’kal the Damned is a despicable book, and it is currently under very heavy warding in the Vault. The experiments Ansh’na’kal conducted to write it are things that should never have been allowed to happen, let alone be recorded so that any might read of them. However, as Ansh’na’kal’s experiments were based around the soul, the book contained exactly the spell Adelaide was looking for.

It also happens to be the most cursed book Amadeus has come across in his time working in The Library.

Her body was found later that day, sprawled out in a pool of blood. Next to her was a hastily constructed containment circle with a book in its center.

In her hand she was clutching a page torn from the book that had the circuit for the exact sort of spell she had been looking for. In a congealed scarlet on the back of the page she had managed to write, ‘This is the key’ in her last moments.

Today, one of the requirements to graduate as an accredited Healer from Hollow University is the ability to cast ‘Adelaide’s Respite’. Amadeus likes to imagine that would have made her happy.

Amadeus stirred from his thoughts as Tome sped into the room. He was currently sitting alone, under the most intricate concealment spell he knew, in one of The Library’s many hidden reading nooks. At some point, he had learned to keep a room like this specially prepared for Tome’s escapes. It was the fastest way he had found to catch him again.

Lining the walls were shelves filled with journals, essays, manuals, how-to’s, diaries, and just about every type of information you could think of. No copies of anything in this room could be found anywhere else in The Library— Amadeus had made sure of that. He was also sure that they would all be new to Tome. The contents of the room were changed regularly to consist only of things written after its last escape.

Amadeus allowed the Aether flow feeding his shroud to drop and in the same moment opened a new one to feed the hidden glyphs scattered about the room. Together, they formed a barrier around the room which Tome had no hope of breaking before Amadeus could subdue them.

Tome hovered frozen in the air, recognizing what the sudden appearance of Amadeus meant.

While most would have simply seen a book hovering in midair, Amadeus saw something more— he had known Tome for far too long at this point not to. He felt as though Tome had the look of a puppy that someone had just kicked.

”You have five minutes Tome, then we must depart.”

The book regained some bit of joy and began zipping around the room, eating as many books as it could in the time it had left. While it may not have been advisable for Amadeus to let Tome gather more knowledge, he knew that it would make what came next less painful.

He ended up giving Tome seven minutes before he said, “It is time, come here or I will be forced to do this the hard way.”

With obvious reluctance, Tome floated over to Amadeus and allowed itself to be wrapped up tightly in a spell meant to prevent it from grasping an Aether flow. After checking over the spell once to verify it was as perfect as could be, Amadeus took Tome in his hands and set off towards the Vault. Once there, Tome was placed at the center of the cold iron cell that was its home and left alone in the dark as Amadeus exited, closing and latching the door behind him.

—

Inside the cell sat Tome. It knew that on the outside Amadeus was reapplying layer after layer of ward glyphs, as well as adding new ones that he had been working on in the years since Tome last escaped.

Tome also knew that this was a moment in which the characters in the mountains of books it had consumed would begin to despair. But Tome was a book. Books could not cry. And so in the center of that cold iron prison Tome sat, trying to drown out the need it felt pressing against its consciousness. There were countless students in The Library who were trying to find the right book— after all it was Reading Day. Tome wanted to help them.

—

Amadeus, having finished resealing Tome, informed one of the members of The Library’s staff he trusted that he was not to be disturbed for the rest of the day for anything less than The Library being engulfed, yet again, in flames. This upset some of the younger librarians who heard about it, it was the busiest day of the year afterall, but from the sullen expressions on the faces of the veteran staff, as well as Amadeus himself, they knew not to protest.

Content that The Library would be in good hands, Amadeus then retreated to the comfort of his office, the very same one he had accidentally created Tome in all those years ago. It was here that he sat in his chair, placed his head in his hands, and allowed himself to weep.

Amadeus Hindleton, Head Librarian of Hollow University and, much to his displeasure, Professor of History, was having a terrible day.