The sands of time swirled as they marked the passage of the age. The great pendulum on the clock swung back and forth, slicing time into little pieces with each pass. People were born, lived, and died, empires rose and fell, and the scritch-scratching of the invisible pens recorded it all. Every story that ever unfolded was written down in a book, and stored securely on a shelf, to bear witness to time.
Whether the story started and reached it's end in a single day, or carried on for millennium, it all appeared, like magic, on it's page as it happened. The sound of a single story happening was not audible, but when thousands, millions of them were all being written at once an eerie scratching filled the vast library, as if incorporeal, nearly-silent pens were hovering over the page, waiting to record time as it happened.
The sound grew dimmer and was nearly engulfed if you visited the back of the library, where no one lit the candles anymore and dust blanketed every surface, yet even here you could not quite block out the sound of time ploughing on it's unstoppable path.
The only other sound in the place, apart from the scritch-scratch of the books, was the swishing of a robe. The man wearing the robe had little to do in the place; his only job was to organize the stories that were finished. He couldn't remember how long he had been there, though he could recall when all of these shelves had been empty and the whole place smelled fresh and new, so he supposed he had been there forever.
People were few and things changed slowly at the beginning. Back then he was able to organize everything by person and place, but now stories reached across ages and included many people moving around to many different places, and his system of organization was very complicated indeed. He was certain he could find any book, but that theory had never been tested, as no one had ever come to request one. Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he just stopped organizing, and let the books pile up and crowd the shelves in any order they wanted; would anybody care?
Yes, he would care.
Finally he reached the end of the aisle. Here was the great oak table upon which new stories appeared when he wasn't looking. Some extremely short stories had already grown silent, and the familiar yet somehow very sad "The End" had already appeared at the at the bottom of the last page. He picked them up and put them on a cart to shelve. Some were only a few pages thick; every story had it's own cover and binding. There were no anthologies in the library.
He carried the others of various sizes to other tables and placed them on stacks. Surprised, he found one today that was absolutely massive. He pulled it toward him, looking at the few pages of writing and stroking it's spine lovingly. The longest stories were always the best. He would add this one to his special pile, the pile of books that he would read.
The man had never known anything besides stories. He spent his time, after he shelved the books for that day, immersed in them. He would never be able to read them all, so he chose the ones to keep by his bedside very carefully. He had no family or friends of his own, no wilderness to explore and no story of his own ever to see recorded, so he grew very attached to the people he read about. His saddest moments were when he turned the last page of a book and saw the horrible, inevitable 'The End' scrawled mockingly at the bottom. Every last page felt like saying good bye to a very close friend knowing you would never see them again.
He never reread anything.
The longest books meant the pain came less frequently. His happiest moments were when he found such a colossus on his table. He took it back to his room filled with eagerness. He contemplated whether he should add it to the small pile of books that he would allow to run their lengths before picking it up, so he could devour it all at once or if he should give into temptation and allow himself to read what had happened so far.
Painfully he put it away, under his bed so he would maybe forget about it and be surprised sometime in the future when he reached under there and pulled out a giant megalith all done and waiting for him to read.
In the meantime he picked up a rather short book and flipped hopefully through the pages. He rarely allowed himself to read the shorter stories, but this one he had started a very long time ago. Usually the length gave some indication of the time spanned within the pages, but in some rare cases he had to wait years and years for the end. This was one such a story; it was a love story, begun in the golden years of youth. The lovers had laughed and played and loved, overcame their obstacles and came to what seemed like the end of the affair . . . but there were still blank pages left, and he had been waiting for a life time to see them filled.
Another vast surprise today, a few lines of text were slowly appearing. He sat down and read them eagerly. Now in the winter of their lives, one lover had learned that the other lay dieing in a nearby hospital. Both had no husband or wife to complicate issues, yet the lover was still hesitant to visit the other.
The man felt like banging his hand angrily on the page. It felt like being stuck on one side of a sound-proof window as something went horribly wrong on the other and you could do nothing but watch in agony.
Giveitahappyendinghe begged the universe. He waited for more, but that seemed to be all for now. The lover would not make his final decision just yet.
Brooding, he went over to his desk and slumped in his chair. He was too worked up right now to get involved in another book. He picked up his pen, which never ran out of ink, and made a few dots on the paper which never ran out, but wasn't feeling daring enough to write anything.
The first time he had written anything, he felt so guilty afterwards that he threw it in the fire, scared that his story might actually come true if he put it on a shelf.
Soon after that, after reading a particularly unbearably frustrating ending, he had stomped over to his desk and wrote an alternate ending to the story, stuffing the pages in the back of the book and shoving it on a shelf; his way of giving the middle finger to whoever was letting it all happen.
His paper was the same thick, creamy stuff that real life happened on, but his stories were not bound and had no cover. He usually managed to convince himself that nothing he wrote became real, but he was still nervous at times. If he ever saw anyone else in the library, he would have to ask them about that.
Apart from the books and the bed and his desk and his robe, which, when put in the closet, was always clean the next morning, he had a fireplace, though it never got cold, a box of matches that never held any more or less than 20, and an easel with some paints, which he had never really figured out how to use. It had taken him a long time to connect the strange gooey stuff in the tubes and the odd, spindly stand with the "paintings" he had read about. True, the tubes did say "paint" on them, but that word in itself had not been invented for hundreds of thousands of years. When he was really bored, he smeared some colour around the canvass and sometimes even hung it up to brighten up the place, but had always taken it down a few days later.
There were no doors and no windows in the library. There were no pieces of art, or even books with pictures in them. He felt sometimes that whoever had put the easel in his room was playing a very cruel joke on him. Once he carried the thing all the way to the back of the library and abandoned it to grow dusty like the books, but it's strange form had scared him once, looming out of the shadows as he walked down the aisles, and he had promptly put it back in his room, where he could keep an eye on it.
Later that night the lover made his decision; he would not visit his old friend. He would live the rest of his life out without ever finding proper closure, and the other lover would die in the hospital without ever even knowing the other was close. The End.
The man would have screamed if he could. Close to a century of waiting for that. The man ran, trying to vent his anger and push away the sadness. Without really knowing why, he ran to a section of shelves that held similar stories. He grabbed one at random and flipped to the back. He skimmed the sad ending and threw it down, picking up another, and another, looking for a happy one to read. Before long he found what he was looking for. He came across one whose ending was being written as he watched. He told himself that if the ending of this one was happy, he would be too. He carried it back to his desk and watched the words appear anxiously. Finally the climax came, the moment of truth. . .
Just like in real life, time in the book stopped, as the two looked at each other, each trying to decide what to say.
Suddenly, the man did what he had never done before. Rashly, without pausing to think, he grabbed his pen and scribbled on the page " . . . and then he opened his mouth and all his thoughts and feelings came spilling out. He told her everything."
He held his breathe, not daring to believe what he had just done. He had just tried to alter the course of the story. He felt excited and afraid and guilty. He had no idea what would happen now.
For a second it seemed like the story would just stop there; nothing was happening. Had he screwed things up too much? Would the universe just implode upon itself now? The invisible pen paused, digesting this new information before continuing.
"The girl listened, eyes wide, taking it all in. She couldn't believe that . . ."
The man blinked. Was the story accepting the new information he had given it, had that really just happened, somewhere? Would the ending be changed, or would it work around him?
The ending came, and the boy and girl shared their first kiss. A happy ending.
But was the happy ending going to happen anyway? The man ran to find another book. He grabbed one of the short ones. He waited until it was nearly done, then wrote his own line. Again, the story halted and thought for a minute before finishing itself up.
The man went to bed, unhappy and disturbed. He could not sleep; he was too busy worrying that something would suddenly go horribly wrong. All his old doubts that he had pushed back to the recesses of his mind crept out to bother him.
He had often wondered what would happen if he would set a book on fire, the way he did his own writing sometimes, or crossed out some of the writing. He wondered who he was, and why he was really there, and if anything would ever change. He wondered what would happen when time ran out and he reached the end of the shelves, or all humans died and he had no more stories to organize and read. Could he even die?
He tried to beat it back, but his greatest fear of all lay in wait for him. Authors. Storytellers. Narrators. Writers.Liars.
He had read stories about storytellers just as he had read about every other kind of person. Were the books on his shelves . . . written? Were they real or were they fabrication? Did he hold a person's life in his hand, or a novel?
The next day he did not feel up to trooping down to the great oak table and shelving books. There were too many unknowns in his life, too many doubts. It was time to do something about it. He pulled out the giant book he had found yesterday, and read the first few pages. It was shaping up to be an epic, spanning generations, giving him romance, adventure, mystery, horror, and, if he had anything to say about it, a happy ending.
The man knew more stories than you or I could even imagine, and he could smell an event happening before most people could even assess the situation. It was just a line, or maybe just a word, but the man caught a whiff of something foul looming in this epic's future. No,wecan'thavethathappening . . . he mused, taking his pen in hand and, in a few paragraphs, avoiding something that might have happened later.
He sat back, content. The story, until that moment, was done for the day, but the man had just forced it to continue right then.
On and on this went. At every pause the man took at the opportunity to change the story to his liking, forcing it to continue sooner than reality would have liked. He barely had time to sleep before pulling the book back out from under his bed and forcing the story to continue; he had had enough waiting. Not only did he make the story turn out happy, but he twisted the plot to be more entertaining.
Finally, at long last, the man put the book down. The first arc was done with, the people inside were safe for now. He stroked the cover happily. This story, his story, was unlike any other in the library. It was far more exciting, far more interesting. His eyes drifted over to his desk, and the paper, blank but for a few meaningless dots put there a long time ago in boredom.
He frowned and gripped the book tightly. This was different than a story written on some bits of paper, this story was actually happening. He was different from those other humans, writing things that weren't real. This had been recorded, bound, with a cover.
This had been recorded . . .