SoullessSingularity

To many, the Library was all the knowledge in the world locked behind many dangerous and dark Ways. Knowledge meant so much to so many. To some, it was salvation. To others, it was its own kind of Way to anywhere they would ever desire. But what was always understood is that the Library's coils had wrapped itself around everything there was to know. To think otherwise was foolish.

Those that needed the Library most, however, felt the Library's ignorance most sharply. They are those that sought the Library's shelves to find a Way to themselves. They are those that sought the endless shelves, only to be told that the Library that knew all there was to know did not know of them. But they are also those who were not allowed in the Library at all, so unknown that no gates would open for them.

These abandoned children of knowledge wandered the Ways, looking for their Way home. To say their existence is suffering would be to insult the degree of their pain.

But this story is of the first abandoned child. She cares for all the other children in her shadowed orphanage, from great forgotten gods to lost idle daydreams. It is her hope that makes their half-existences a just a little more bearable. Together, they make their own kind of Library in their collective darkness.

She bears no name. She was never given a name. But she was there from the very beginning of the Library's birth. It could be said that when the Library was first put together, she lit the Ways. Under her watchful eye and care, the Ways were alight will warmth and safety for all creatures. It was the reason she was brought into existence and she would follow that reason into an infinite future.

The Library would have in its books that the Ways were dimmed by the presence of the Neverwere, dimmed until a dark and dangerous black. It was a convenient and logical conclusion drawn, but not necessarily the truth. To the Library, light and safety mattered more. But the Library did not maintain the Ways. She did not have her light taken. She gave it freely, welcoming these lost children into herself and swaddling them to make their lives a little bit better.

Later, so did the Remnants arrive to the Ways. Lost, unnamed, forgotten, they wandered the Ways looking for the Way to a home that no longer existed. In her great pity, she, too, took these children into herself. Within her embrace, being unknown was not so bad. It was almost tolerable, for she knew them even if they were unknown. She knew them for their specific degrees of unknowing.

The Library deemed her dead even when she lived. The Ways were dangerous now, unlit and filled to the brim with dangerous monsters. Who could blame them for believing the gatekeeper still lived? The Library couldn't comprehend that there was more than light and safety in the world. And in so, she, too, became as much of a Remnant as the many children that came to her.

She kept this pain to herself, but did not once forget it.

And when she heard the names that the Library gave to these orphaned children of knowledge, she wept for the damning nature of these names. Remnant. Neverwere. It sentenced them as half-things without hope. She offered new names in the darkness. She would call the Remnants Sunrise in order to express entering a new day in their lives. To the Neverwere, she comforted to call them the Notyet. Together, she called them the People of Twilight.

The Sunrise took forays into the Library, not to seek themselves but to seek others like them. They came home with their new brothers and sisters. The Notyet couldn't enter the Library, but they arrived with their own wild minds. With her observance, the Notyet built a massive library of their own. They would stay here in this Unlibrary, collecting the unknown against the Library's known.

Itself crafted of unknowing, the Library couldn't be aware of its shadowed counterpart. But it mattered not to her. It was not her concern what the Library knew. She was there to care for all those entering the Ways, to turn away no creature that needed a home.

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