The Library of Dreamers
A Short Story for Dual Prompts
This is a short story that was inspired by prompts from both Luna Asli Kolcu’s 30 Days of Fantasy Challenge, and Bradley Ramsey’s Power Up Prompt (Level 3). I’m not sure how it all came together, but this is the result. Enjoy <3
The labyrinth of corridors was knotted with shadows and made of bone that curved like pale, gleaming archways.
Lyra’s heartbeat danced in the hollows of her ears. A lantern dangled from her fingertips, diffusing a soft, orange glow across the hallways of bone and sinew before her, and deepening the webs of shadow that clung to the corners of the library. The arching bones were strung with time-darkened silver, chandeliers that wept to the floor on thick, coiling chains, yet did not offer any light. Strands of sinew, ancient and rotting as cobwebs, clumped near the ceiling, shedding an odd, old glow.
Lyra’s breath fogged before her, shimmering orange in the lantern light.
Veins in pale blues and violets crawled around her, and she took care not to trample any of them as she moved towards the nearest of the corridors.
The shadows parted. Walls of bone and sinew closed around her, seeming to undulate before the flame in her grasp. When she hefted her lantern to the nearest wall, she saw lettering, scrawled and slanted, descending into a corridor she had thought stood upright, but now found sloped downwards, like a rabbit hole.
Memento Mori: Death Finds Us All.
A chill glazed Lyra’s skin, as she began her descent through the corridor of bones.
A velvet, dreamlike silence hung about her, and the corridor seemed to slip, unsteady, below her feet. Lyra’s lantern fluttered in her hand. She could not remember how she had found herself here, in this library, nor how she even knew it was a library, when there was nothing but dust and bone. But her unsteady memory told her she was searching for something.
She reached a strange crossroads that branched off into five directions, like a star.
Below her bare feet, scrawled into the floor, were more words.
Here, time is nothing but a trick of the light, and the world stands still. Breaths make no sound and footfalls disappear before they can be made. Voices echo, where there should be none. Hallways curve in impossible shapes. The dead dream, unless the living sleep.
Lyra’s lantern gilded a final phrase, etched below the others.
The Giant knows all. Pray to Him.
When Lyra lifted her lantern to the hallways once more, she found that one curved deeper into itself, like a folding spiral. And she chose that one.
The spiral ascended, like a winding stairwell. Her lantern smeared across the floors. Her footsteps were quiet as dust and, when she listened, she could not hear her own breaths, despite the rise and fall of her chest.
The walls were made of glistening bone, wrapping around her like a cocoon as she ascended, ever further, into the parting shadows.
Words were carved into these walls, too.
The dreamers die before all others. They are the imaginations that keep Him breathing. The thoughts that feed Him. He needs them to survive. To create.
The words stirred something deep within her, but she could not make out what it was.
The spiraling bone bloomed into a massive, domed chamber.
Shelves made of bone and stitched together with muscle slanted against the walls, filled with heavy, old tomes. Countless of them. The shelves bent against their weight; some had broken in half. The walls here, Lyra discovered, as she swung her lantern about, were made of rotting skulls.
She stumbled back, a shriek pressed against her teeth.
The catacombs should have smelled of age and rot, but all she could smell was the thick, biting scent of ink and parchment. When she tore her gaze from the skulls lining the walls, she found a large, wooden table at the center of the room, on which a lantern, twin to her own, sat. Its glow was warm and inviting. Yet, as Lyra crossed the room, sifting between shelves of bone and rotting knowledge, she found herself more afraid than she could ever remember being. Her limbs were cold, heavy with dread, and her breath was strangled. As she neared the table, she noticed a long, blank scroll sitting on it, beside a pot of fresh ink. A needle, sharp and bony, crowned the parchment.
Her fingers closed around the needle, and she knew that it was what had carved all those words into the walls.
The Giant knows all. Pray to Him.
She set her lantern down, across from its twin, and took in the library with its walls of human skulls. The chamber had five sides, she noted, and a chandelier had tumbled from its ceiling and crashed into the floor, just behind the desk, so that shards of bone sprang up at sharp angles.
Lyra swallowed. She steepled her hands. And, when she prayed, though her lips parted, she made no sound. As though the library had stolen her voice.
“Giant, give me strength and knowledge. Help me understand why I’m here, and how I can find a way out.”
It was the dust that whispered the answer. It scrolled the pages of one of the heavy tomes with a heavy flutter and Lyra, having not heard a sound since she found herself in this strange place, startled in its direction.
The tome was scribbled in the same hurried hand that had scrawled the writing on the walls. It read:
The Library of the Giant is an impossible place. It is crafted from thoughts and dreams. When a dreamer sinks into an induced dream, they create a new branch of the library, from which they are unable to escape or tear themselves away, as it is a part of their own mind. Essentially, they are stuck in a perpetual dream. The Giant feeds off of these dreams, and the thoughts written down by the dreamer, and sustains itself in this way. Then, once the dreamer dies, inevitably, their body becomes suffused into the library, and their dreams continue to shape it.
The only way for a dreamer to escape such a place – a thought of my own, which is nothing but theory as of this moment – is to stop dreaming entirely. To stop thinking. Such a thing is impossible, of course, in any living human being. Therefore, one must die in order to stop dreaming. Yet, in a blatant contradiction, the library forces even its dead to dream. Perhaps, then, it is impossible to escape.
Lyra’s fingers fluttered to her lips, and she uttered a soft gasp that was swallowed whole by the chamber.
Her legs folded like a broken doll’s, and she found herself sitting at the wooden table, staring at the gleaming needle and the pot of fresh ink and the empty scroll before her.
“The Giant feeds off my thoughts,” she said, though the words made no sound. Perhaps the Giant had already eaten her voice. Perhaps it would eat her words next.
Lyra buried her face in her hands and sobbed, amidst the dust and silence.
Her thoughts glistened in fresh ink against the page. There were more of them than she had thought, given that she could remember nothing from before the library, and had few answers to the countless questions she scribbled down. She had searched through endless tomes, and found the stories of so many dreamers before her. She had searched for answers, for escape, but none held them.
The library had been imprisoning people for as long as they had existed.
So, with nothing else to do but follow the example of those around her, she sat down and wrote her thoughts on the scroll.
The first tome she had read said that every dreamer created their own branch of the library though, if that was true, she did not think that was where she was. The skulls of previous dreamers glinted darkly from the walls, and made her wonder again how many came before her. What were they dreaming of? And whose dream had birthed this chamber?
She wondered what the Giant was, and if it was His ribs that shaped the labyrinth of corridors.
She wondered what her own branch of the library looked like.
She wondered if the same dreams that created the library could cause it to collapse.
Lyra found she could no longer leave the library. As though the mouth of the labyrinth of corridors had simply stitched itself shut. Trapping her amidst tomes and skulls.
In the tomes she leafed through, she found scribblings in ancient letters and ancient languages, ones that she did not understand. The ones she did recognize, she devoured, finding life stories, strange dreams, and prayers to the Giant. All seemed to succumb to prayer, in the end, as though it was the one thing they remembered from their humanity.
One line stood out to her, a line she had seen written on the wall as well as in a tome.
The dead dream, unless the living sleep.
But she hardly knew anymore whether she was alive or dead, dreaming or awake.
So, she wrote. She wrote until her hand ached and her fingers cramped and still the pot never dried and the space on the parchment never filled. She wrote until a certain thought wormed its way into her mind, and burrowed there, and her writing slowed.
If the Giant fed on her thoughts, could she not poison them?
Thus far, all she had read in the tomes seemed defeated, accepting of the role of builder of this ancient, impossible library. She had read imaginings of fresh branches of the library, and deliberations about its layout; maps and questions and prayers. Yet each of them supported the library, in some form. What if she wrote against it?
She dipped into the pot of ink and scratched out: The dead never dream. The living sleep.
Her heart was caught in her throat, a moth trapped in a spider’s web.
But, before her eyes, the ink began to fade, as though the parchment was swallowing it. And in a couple of heartbeats, it was as if it had never been there in the first place.
Time hung, thick and heavy with dust and lantern light; standing still, despite how long Lyra thought she must have already been there. She walked along the library walls, her fingers dancing across skulls, both fresh and rotting. Their eyeless sockets watched her. Dreaming.
The skulls, the dreamers… they were intertwined, amongst themselves. She had read their voices, their words and, now that they were dead, she had begun to catch glimmers of their dreams, whispers in the corners of the chamber, or flickers of shadow. She was a dreamer, too, after all. And, unless she slept, the dreamers dreamt, weaving the space around her.
They told her what to do, in fractured, hidden messages across pools of time. A spool of crimson thread that rolled to her bare feet from the thick, honeyed shadows. A string of voices that threaded through her thoughts. A tome that tumbled from the shelves, blooming open at a page about the Giant.
She knew, eventually, what she must do.
And so, once she was certain, she took a seat at the table, picked up the needle that balanced across the parchment, and tore open her forearm.
The pain was a sharp, hot gasp. Blood welled, thick and dark. She bottled a shriek within the cage of her teeth. With trembling fingers, she took up the pen, and dipped it into her blood.
Her words glistened on the parchment. A bloody poison.
She did not notice the shadows that thickened and squirmed, or the shelves that seemed to yellow and rot as she wrote.
The dreamers whispered to her, telling her what to write. She listened. She dreamed her own dreams. And she wrote all that she could, against the library, her arms trembling. Her breaths came shallow and her neck was damp with perspiration, yet she wrote until her wrist felt bruised and her fingers weak.
The books shook on their shelves. The skulls of the dreamers seemed to grin.
When she was finished, the pen tumbled from her fingers, and she reached for the spool of thread. A final act of defiance; a seal. Her heart fluttered in her throat, quick and breathless, and her hands shook so that she was not certain she would be able to finish. The lanterns flickered, and the chamber danced in both darkness and light. But the dreamers urged her on, with voices made of time and thought.
The crimson string would not thread through the needle, no matter how she tried. Sweat and tears salted her lips. The dreamers’ voices built in her head, like a chorus, chanting in the hollows of her ears, reverberating through her bones. The chorus reached a deafening point, and the thread slipped through the eye of the needle.
Pain blossomed across her forearm as she knitted the skin together. She concentrated on the movements, the dip and sweep of the needle, the tug of thread. Slowly, too slowly, her arm began to close. The needle was stained with her blood. She yanked in through one last time, and her skin was closed, and her dreams were sealed, and the dreamers chanting hovered about her. Victorious.
Above it all, she heard the Giant’s bellow. It was the sound of madness and nightmare, the sound of shrieking glass and crushed bone and teeth sinking into bloody pulp, and Lyra’s lips parted into a scream, a sound that spilled out of her, so sharp and agonized, that it muffled her own hearing, like cotton draped over her ears.
The library burst into shards of dream and thought and nightmare, and Lyra knew no more.
Somewhere within the depths of the library, a branch of it burst. Tomes scattered into dust and shelves screeched as they splintered. The lanterns exhaled and extinguished. The dreams weaving it had unraveled, and the branch of the library came undone without them, like a pool of tangled, loose thread.
The branch that had been built in the Giant’s spine crumbled, and the Giant’s shrieks trembled throughout its entire body, rattling the library that spanned it.
In the catacombs, the dreamers grinned. Their prayers were no longer to the Giant, but to the dreamer who had escaped her forced fate.
They dreamed on, but it was of the withering library, and of defiance.
Lyra awoke in a tangle of damp sheets and curling hair and blood.
She gasped through gritted teeth. The sound filtered in, but it was broken and whistling in her ears. The thread stitching her arm together was wet with blood. Her head fell back into her pillows. She took quick, sharp breaths through her teeth, soaking in the dimness of her own bedroom.
She was home.
The questions flooded in, questions about the library and the dreamers and the Giant, but she shut her eyes against them. The last thing she wanted to do was sleep, dream, but her body was exhausted and her mind weak with exertion.
Her eyes fluttered. Her heart slowed.
Lyra fell into a dreamless sleep.
Such an interesting story and how you started it just like a dream—dropped in the middle with questions and unfamiliar knowledge and no understanding of either, merely the desire to escape the nightmare and change the dream.
What a vast story. Could easily be a novel. Great job.