Codes.

Words.

History.

Everything within the pages had morphed and rotted into an indescribable, unintelligible, and completely foreign code. One word, swirling and swimming over the cream pages of each book, tens of thousands of them. Every unique individual, every single soul, boiled down into one word, or string of words, almost as a taunt to Laurelai.

Time passed, at first with some semblance of schedule, but then days slipped by between longer and longer rests. The council had long since stopped responding, even as she knew that new generations had popped up while whatever was going on outside the walls of the library ran its course.

She didn’t understand, couldn’t really, as she shouldn’t have kept clinging to life without the things she would normally have needed. Food had long faded away into her memories, both the taste and feel of it against her tongue. Water had manage to trickle in through holes that had formed, though she couldn’t be sure of when they had formed. It helped her know that time indeed was passing, that it hadn’t stilled like her own time. No matter how many cycles passed, her skin and hair never changed to grey, and no white or red hairs peaked through to mark her getting older.

It had befuddled her, isolated her, and left her pacing until the very stone floor beneath her showed signs of the passage of time. A path of her heeled steps worn deep into the stone, the cold marble giving way while her own shoes showed no such sign of wear. It was as if everything tied to her while powered up in the mantel of Portia left her untouchable by the corruption and gnarled hand of time.

At one point, the books stopped changing, new ones stopped filling, and a stagnant air filled the library. The stale smell of books that once comforted her did nothing of the sort now, they were out of her reach and locked behind an encryption she hadn’t been able to decipher even with having what seemed like an endless amount of time.

There was no pull anymore, no motivation for her to keep looking through things, nobody else’s books had anything she could glean insight from. It was a void now, full of swirling ink, so thick that nothing could be read even if she could have figured out the cipher.

Leaning against the library door, unaware of the passage of time, she felt something nagging in the back of her chest. Something prickling and pulling her, leaving her wondering if she was finally going to be free from this prison she’d been left in.

Torn pages flew as she screamed and threw books at the door, the softened thuds as they hit the rotting wood and fell into a pile before the door. Finally, something shifted, as she drew herself up and pounded against the ancient wood. What was once a solid sign of the unyielding four walls she’d been boxed up in for hundreds of years finally creaked and groaned before giving way for the first time.

With a bewildered and tired gasp, Laurelai stepped outside and winced against the unforgiving sun. That smoldering ember of hate grew brighter as she stepped through the rubble from the crumbling towers that had once surrounded the library. Everything was silent, everything was still, and a thick haze floated on that stagnant air.

That pull tugged again, a new sort of cipher but at least one that she could begin to untangle. A feeling of escape, something that she was all too ready to grab onto. The more she saw as she followed that feeling, the brighter that ember within burned. It was a cold heat, uncaring and silent. This planet, the name tied to it, and her duty, she wanted to burn it all down along with that taunting cipher that had eluded her for hundreds of years. But to do that she needed fuel, and there wasn’t anything left here to help.

Ciphers were all the same to her, riddles too, and now she had to solve this new one. Where would be the best place to start the fire?


WC 698