The crest of the Vulsan highlands gave way to the ice-wraithing peaks of razor white and endless brutal cold, through which a snow leopard girl ran barefoot through the frozen hellscape of northern Vulsa. Though born to the cold, she had never known it like this. The wind flayed her skin raw. Ice bit her pads until blood streaked the stone behind her. Her arms were crossed tight over her bared breast , not from modesty but to shield what little warmth remained.
Behind her came laughter.
Rats. Hounds. Masked raccoon handlers. Chains clinked. Knives rang. They had chased her through the night, chained her, broken her, and worse. Now they ran her for sport, calling out between laughs, savoring the way she stumbled and slipped.
She ran until her lungs burned and her legs shook, until the land itself seemed to end.
At the crown of a peak she stopped, stunned, sobbing, and saw it.
A great tower of shimmering crystal stood there, impossibly tall, its facets catching moonlight like frozen fire. At its base, before doors larger than a temple gate, stood an old owl. He tottered. He muttered. He fumbled with a ring of keys, squinting as though locked out of his own home.
She had nowhere else to go.
She staggered to him, trembling, violated, desperate, and fell to her knees.
“Sanctuary, sir,” she cried. “Please.”
The old owl cocked his head.
“Sanctuary?” he said mildly. “Oh no, not here. Far too cluttered, methinks.”
He did not seem threatened. He did not seem to register her terror at all.
“They’re coming,” she sobbed. “Slavers. My tribe is gone. I’m alone. They want to—”
Her voice broke. She could not finish.
The owl blinked and peered past her, into the snow and empty wind.
“I see no one.”
“They’re coming,” she said again, voice cracking. “Please.”
“Well, if you’re not in need of a book,” he replied, distracted, “I’m afraid I cannot help you with—oh feathers, I’m terribly sorry, what did you say you were looking for in the index?”
“No,” she cried. “Sanctuary. Please. I beg you.”
“ ‘No Sanctuary,’ ” the owl murmured thoughtfully. “Hmm. Can’t say I’ve heard of that one. Sounds like a dire yarn.”
Behind her, laughter carried on the wind.
The owl leaned closer and whispered, not unkindly,
“I’m sorry, my dear, but I am only the guardian of this librarium. The sum of all libraries and the Librarium entire. If you have need of a book, there are countless others inside who can help you.”
She finally understood.
She turned, and now she could see them—shapes moving fast over the ice, teeth flashing, voices raised.
“Oh,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t trouble you… for anything but a recommendation.”
The owl’s face brightened with relief.
“Ah,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?”
The massive doors opened without him touching them, wider than mercy should allow.
“Top floor,” he said. “Ask for Beatryx of Whondor, the all-seeing—if she hasn’t spotted you already.”
He wrapped his scarf around her shoulders, covering her shaking body, and ushered her inside as the scoundrels closed in.
She walked inside, looking back as the doors framed the pack of slavers closing in on the little owl steward, obliviously still chattering away with that knowing smile. He winked at her.
“Oh,” he added pleasantly, “there is tea and cakes, if you desire—”
“OLD BIRD!” a voice barked. “You’ve got something that belongs to us!”
The doors slammed shut.
The owl turned.
“If you seek a book request,” he said calmly, “you’ll need to speak with old Julius, and I rather doubt he takes orders barked by riffraff.”
“Fek off, owlette,” sneered a rat, twirling a hooked knife beneath a vulgar scrap of mustache.
“We saw her go in,” growled the hound. “Now you bring her out, or we start getting violent.”
“Oh dear,” the owl said, smacking his lips. “I don’t think that will work.”
“I’m warning you,” the dog snarled. “Fetch the bitch or we kick in that door, nail her to the floor, Rape her what she’s worth, and burn this place to the ground with you muttering inside. Clear enough?”
The owl smiled.
“Perfectly.”
With a sudden, ear-shattering screech—far louder than anything thrice the size of the old owl could make—he erupted in sheer, irrational defiance. The doors burst open—not outward, but inward, dragged by a force like gravity reversed. Shadows lashed out. Five screams became one.
An ashen white gust pulled them in. The owl himself was drawn back into the shadows of the hall as though they had all been cast into the bellows of some ornate hell meant to confound both helion and heathen alike.
Then, they saw what had come from somewhere far beyond to join them. In place of the steward now stood a horrible titan of a thing, for where the owl had stood moments before now towered a terror vast enough to dwarf the hall itself: a white dragonbird, horned, feathered, scaled, one eye ruined, the other burning violet with judgment. Its breath pulled the slavers from their feet as if they were dust—a beast known only to pre-cataclysmic lore as a Tytotitanus Voremithadrax.
A roar shattered the nature of both the situation and reality itself. Where there had been a tottering old owl moments before now stood a terror already towering over them, standing atop the ruin of the largest hound and already swallowing the gurgling half of the other who had been pulled into the massive beast’s mouth when it had breathed them into the shadows of the hall. The rat screamed, and deep inside something snapped and countless ancestors recoiled in terror as the scale of verminous rodent to a beast of an owl matched that all-natural scale of silent predator and moist, shrieking prey.
His ordeal did not last long; snatched from squealing, the rat was thrown into the air, then caught by the owl-dragon’s massive tongue—snakelike and covered in sharp, writhing, dark red tendrils that hissed with their own hunger—tendrils that sliced, split, silenced, and snapped back into the owl-dragon’s mouth in a second.
By now, fear had taken the remaining two, but they both tripped on blood. They did not have time to attempt getting back up. A sweep of wings longer than a bridge sliced the boar into four even slabs of armored ham hock, while the wolf—now ended at the knees—shrieked as he was caught in mid-run, his torso crunched and he spat a chest-worth of blood as his head was pulled into the beast’s mouth, eyes darting as his mind raced for solutions that yielded only darkness and digestion most unkind—which I will not trouble you with here.
From the tower above, the snow leopard girl watched with shaking hands as the doors slammed shut once more.
Three days later, she left clothed, healed, provisioned, with a map leading her back toward Vulsan civility and far from coastal raiders: and the guardian slept in the loft study beneath a purple fez, tea cooling on a small table beside him.
The Librarium endured.
