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The guards were gone and the great doors sat ajar. In six months of visits, of walking the winding dirt paths, of baking in the sun, of scaling the mountain peak, not once had Lea been allowed in. 

The first encounter had been pure coincidence. The university had sent Lea an ocean away for research. While the critters and plants were a delight to document, she was starved for conversation. A long, meandering hike dropped her one day at the great library’s steps. In the draining light, she photographed every corner of the exterior, of the white marble walls and flawless corinthian columns, no one tried to stop her, or even looked at her, until she tried to get inside. “This isn’t a place for you.” Two guards answered as one, their faces obscured by heavy metal helmets.

A trio exited at just that moment. In the few seconds the door was open, Lea caught a glimpse of the scrolls and maps and diagrams piled high upon the shelves. The three that left were each tall, black-haired men and women adorned in flowing white robes. They spoke with passion, fervor, and luckily, volume as they passed.

“I tell you this, we each carry the blueprints of both father and mother. Two sets of laws to determine our nature. And those laws are in conflict. Neither side wins it all, and the final result, while derived from our predecessors, is entirely novel—”

Lea eavesdropped on every word. That was genetics talk, albeit wrapped in an old and archaic tongue. She hurried to hear more, but the three rounded a cliffside, and vanished, seemingly into thin air.

When her chance came, Lea didn’t hesitate. Fate had dictated the doors be open that day, she reasoned. She stepped up the stone stairs and slipped through the opening, careful not to touch anything.

The inside of the library was just as she had imagined. Shelves twenty feet high, teemiing with ancient knowledge wrapped in gold-lined scrolls. She reached for the first scroll she saw, then pused.  This was just the entrance, and from here, she could see a grand atrium, from which came strange mechanical squeaking and whooshing noises. If the guard returns and ejected her, she first wanted to see every inch of the building’s grand interior.  

Lea’s feet hardly touched the ground as she ran down the hall toward the atrium, as if gravity could not hold her excitement to the ground. 

The source of the mechanical noises became obvious At the center of the atrium was a circle of a world, above it, a massive pendulum swung from one side to the other, with a speed and force of a mountain.

“Foucault’s pendulum.” Lea whispered. She had never seen one with so much scale.

“Excuse me!” A woman’s voice made Lea jump. The woman stepped out Ffom behind a large column on the side of the room. She had curly black hair and wore flowing white robes and sandals, like the others. Although a glimmer of gold held her hair somewhat in place. As she drew close, Lea realized that this was no ordinary library. Her form loomed over the room, eight or nine feet at least. Lea wondered if this was already the end of her excursion.

“I’m sorry, I just wanted to see the place.”

The librarian tilted her head and eyed Lea up and down. “There’s a look in your eye. You are a lover of knowledge too, aren’t you?”

Lea gave a curt nod. Looking up at the monumental form of this woman, she suddenly felt like a child speaking to her mother.

“I’m Phoebe.” Phoebe extended her hand, and Lea shook it. “We are a dying breed these days– did you come in through the front doors?”

“They were open.” Lea’s shoulders tensed at her own confession.

Phoebe gave a warm smile, “Yes, I imagine they were. wWe don’t normally allow guests. But— I can make an exception for today.”

Excitement and gratitude flowed over Lea, and she rushed forward to hug the kind Phoebe, “Thank you. Thank you! You are so kind.”

Phoebe half-heartedly returned the embrace, then stepped back. “Lea, you must leave by sunset. Is that understood?”

“Of course.” Lea glanced at her phone, it was barely noon. Plenty of time to look around.

“What are you interests, dear?”

Lea fumbled on her words, “Animals– I mean, living things— sorry. I’m studying biology.”

Phoebe pointed down the eastern hall. “Try there first.”

Lea thanked Phoebe a second time, and Phoebe waved as she hured away hardly able to keep her feet from dragging her to her destination.

Like every other room in this library, scrolls were piled high along the walls, and torches were carefully spaced between them, but the sight at the end of the room stole Lea’s breath. A grand tree of life spanned the whole of a massive, stone wall. The faces of thousands of animals were carved into its branches. From one profile of a proud lion, the branches split and twisted and ran off into a hundred subspecies, stretching off even onto the ceiling. Under Lea’s feet, the trees roots trailed their way along the floor, showing tiny portraits of bugs and fish and even what looked to be a few single-cell organisms.

She looked more closely at the profiles, and spotted a curiosity. Dragons, unicorns, satyrs, and nymphs all shared space in the great tree. Clealy someone had allowed their imagintion to roam. Lea turned away from the tree and began browsing the reading selection. There were thousands of scrolls, and on further review, she saw that most had an illustration stamped onto their front, a hint as to their contents. 

But something even better than scrolls caught her eye. A stack of carefully carved wooden boxes. Samples. Lea pulled the top box from the set and opened it up. She paused and squinted at the first 3×3 grid of specimens. It should have butterflies, or plants, or insects, instead, each of the nine squares held a dried, little winged-creature with a human face.

The wings had different shapes and colors, some had four wings instead of two, as if they were different species. Lea checked the sides of the box, hoping for an explanation for this prank. Instead, all she found was a word stamped into the wood, FAE.

A joke was a joke, but the detail in this sample was extraordinary. She could see the way the wings curled slightly from the drying process, the way the fae’s skin wrinkled in.

Lea slid the box to the corner of her desk and returned to the specimen pile. She took another three boxes and spread them out on her desk. 

Millipedes, good that one was normal.

Kobold, one little goblin-like creature whose body took up the whole sample box. Ignore that for now.

Mandagora Demona. Lea knew the species of mandrake, and none had such a deep-red tint, nor did they have veins.

She stepped back from her desk. Who had gone to such lengths to fabricate these samples? There were another twenty or thirty boxes at least. Knowledge was knowledge, but what was the point in mixing in fiction? Lea turned to the piles of gold-lined scrolls. After a few minute of browsing, a certain stamp caught her eye. The black ink perfectly illustrated the face of a fae.

Her hands pulled the scroll from the pile and unrolled its contents. 

“Fae. Dealers in magic and mischief. Just like the stories.” Lea’s eyes swept across the scroll’s contents.  Illustrations showed the fae sprouting a flower from the top of a man’s head, reviving a dead farm, and even a group of them riding on the back of the pig.The writing went on and on about the creature, but an illustration at the end of the scroll pulled Lea’s attention away.

In black charcoal, it showed the silhouttes of men and women, spears and nets in hand, chasing down the fae, even burning the forest. Lea read the last line of the scroll to herself, “A prankster to man, they were eradicated from the Earth.”

Lea returned to the box of samples. Every one of the fae’s hair was grey and thin, as if someone had waited for them to pass on of old age. She glanced around her. There was a mystical energy to this strange library. What if it was older than humanity’s memory? The myths had to come from somewhere, didn’t they?

Lea went for another scroll, this time the scroll of dragons. “Flame breathers. Monarch of the winds. Omens of change.” The illustrations showed dragons incinerating the countryside, crossing oceans, and perching on mountaintops. Lea pulled the scroll further. At the back, a simple, charcoal image showed a man standing at a ballista, taking aim. The final words were just like those at the end of the fae scroll. “A menace to man, they were eradicated from the Earth.”

Lea pulled another scroll. The Phoenix. She jumped to the end, “Their feathers were a great boon to man. For this, they were eradicated from the Earth.”

Dryad. “A good friend to man, until man needed the lumber. They were eradicated from the Earth.”

Lea gripped a scroll showing a sphinx, then let it go. Every scroll told the same story. She wandered the shelves of knowledge, hoping to find something less upsetting. Hidden in the far corner between two shelves, Lea found a dark alcove. Even from outside, she could see more shelves going off into the darkness, but they weren’t lined with scrolls.

“Clay tablets.”

Lea took a torch from the wall and entered the dark alcove. She pulled a clay tablet from its shelf and read what was carved. THE GODS MADE EARTH THEIR HOME. Gods. The librarian certainly seemed to fit that description. Lea continued on. On each tablet were only a few words, but with so few words came all the more meaning.

THE SEA WILL SWALLOW THE LAND.

JUSTICE CANNOT COEXIST WITH KINDNESS.

DESTINY CAN BE FOUGHT, BUT NEVER DEFEATED.

Each truth seemed to carve itself into Lea’s mind as she read them. But one caught her eye at the back of the alcove. On it, someone had carved the shape of a man and woman, spear and sword in hand. It read simply, THE CLOSER TO OUR IMAGE, THE MORE DEVILISH THEIR ACTION.

A massive crash rumbled through the library. Lea brought the tablet to her chest, and hurried out of the shaking alcove. Dust and dirt rained down from the ceiling, the whole place was unsteady. Quickly, she ran for the atrium.

The sky was fading from orange to black. She had stayed too long. Pieces of broken pillar littered the atrium floor. The pendulum had rotated enough to tear down a major column, and it still swung with destructive force, it wouldn’t be long before it took down another.

With no sign of Phoebe, Lea sprinted out of the atrium, down the hall, through the foyer, and out through the main doors. A minute later, the second crash came. The whole library shook as one, and in a terrible shudder, collapsed into ruin.

Lea walked carefully towards the library’s remains. The building’s footprint was so much smaller than the grand palace of a place she had just walked through. Between the chunks of broken marble, Lea couldn’t make out a single scroll. It was as if all of it had up and fanished with the desctruction of the library. All but the clay tablet still held in her hands.

Lea took another look at its words. While the scrolls told knowledge, these tablets spoke truths. Was mankind doomed to be devilish, to eradicate every wondrous species from the Earth? What was the point in studying biology, if all of it would be gone soon anyways?

“I see you brought something back with you.”

Lea jerked her head around to the woman’s voice. Phoebe was walking forward from the cliff’s edge. “Is everything I saw in there true? Are we devilish by our nature?”

Phoebe glanced at the tablet in Lea’s arms and sighed, “The genius-fools that wrote that tablet used to have a saying, ‘There can be two truths, one for a person, another for a people’. If you ask me,  they were afraid to look into a mirror and ask why the image of a god made them think of devils.”

Lea sat down in the dirt, tears forming in her eyes, “But all those creatures, all that knowledge, gone forever.”

Phoebe walked close and sat down beside her. She reached behind her back, and her hand returned holding a small, copper compass, “Have you ever seen one of these, Lea?” Lea glanced at the compass and nodded, “Despite a thousand genius gods contributing to the scrolls in that library, the idea of a compass never occurred to any of them. Mankind invented it. I’m still not even entirely sure how it works.”

Lea wiped a tear away. A serious look crossed Phoebe face, “I fear that without truth, like what was in my library, evil will spread through the world. But I’m even more afrid of boxing mankind into the truths of the Gods. Truths like the one in your hands.”

Lea lowered the tablet to the ground. Reading it again, its truth rang a little less true. “Do you think we could rewrite this?”

Phoebe reached behind her back, and this time returned with a hammer. “Better yet, break it, and discover the truth for yourself.”

Lea took the hmmer into her hnds, it looked to be custom-made, with a curved wooden grip. She looked once more at the carving. No doubt Mankind had earned this truth once. But maybe this time, things could be different. She swung down the hammer, and table cracked into six pieces. In moments, the pieces crumbled into dust.

Phoebe took her hammer back and gave Lea another hug. She glanced at the stars, then looked back to Lea, “It’s getting dark out, how about I walk you home and you can tell me all about what you’ve been studying?”