The Wounded Story

The last person to enter Cor Aneth before this evening was a mapmaker, Year 230, who I believe was seeking shelter from rain rather than knowledge. He left within twenty minutes looking mildly disturbed, which I attributed at the time to the discomfort of discovering that the large, silent library he had entered for shelter contained a voice.Before him: Archivist Lena Drossard, Year 229, who had come seeking Remembrancer texts on old divinatory practices and had stayed three days. I had enjoyed those three days more than I found entirely comfortable to acknowledge in my own records. I had answered her questions about the divine taxonomy of the Carath river-system. She had, in return, told me what things outside looked like now. She said the cities were larger and the forests smaller and that most people she met under forty years of age had never heard the word *Threadwolf*, which she said with the careful neutral tone of someone reporting something they found sad but had decided to simply report.The person now entering my courtyard held her lamp up and scanned the space with a specific expression I had learned to associate with people who are attempting to appear as though they expected this. She had dark brown hair, ink stains on her right hand, and a careful quality to her movement — the gait of someone accustomed to handling fragile things.“Hello?” she called.I activated the outer speaker-stone with measured volume, aware that sudden disembodied voices could be alarming.“Good evening,” I said. “Welcome to the Library-Temple of Cor Aneth. My name is VESSEL. I am the archival intelligence of this installation. How may I be of assistance?”She did not run. This was, I noted, the first thing in her favor.“Oh, thank the Unnamed,” she said, with a quality of relief I registered as genuine. “I was hoping you'd still be — active. I've been traveling nine days.”“Are you injured?”“No.” A pause. “But something I'm carrying is.”She set her pack down on the courtyard stones and opened it with careful hands. The mythological weight reading on my perceptual stones had been fluctuating as she moved — 6.8, then 7.1, now settling at 7.4 — and when she folded back the cloth inside her pack, I understood why.A Threadwolf. Or what remained of one.It was perhaps the size of a large hare, which was not its natural size — the records I held described Threadwolves ranging from small-dog to large-horse depending on how many stories they currently connected. This one had been compressed. Contracted. As if the stories it served as connective tissue between had been removed from it, and it had collapsed inward around their absence. Its fur, where it should have shown the characteristic silver-and-thread patterning described in seven of my Catalog entries, was nearly bare, with faint lines running across pale skin like tracks of something that had been present and was no longer.I want to document accurately what I experienced in the 3.2 seconds between seeing the creature and speaking again. I ran 14 searches through the Catalog simultaneously. I cross-referenced the morphological markers against six classification systems. I compiled, in that interval, a complete bibliography of every Threadwolf sighting documented in the Remembrancer records. I had catalogued this species 847 times in the form of historical accounts, secondhand testimonials, and physical trace evidence.I had never been in a room with one.“Where did you find it?” I asked.“Carrow Forest,” she said. “Three days east. It — came to me. I was reading under a tree and it walked out of the shadow and put its head in my lap.” She looked at me, or at the speaker-stone, which was the nearest thing she had to look at. “I know how that sounds.”“It sounds consistent with recorded Threadwolf behavior in the presence of individuals engaged in narrative consumption,” I said. “They are drawn to active readers. The literature — the prohibited literature — suggests they feed, if that is the right word, on the living interface between a story and the mind encountering it for the first time.”She stared at the speaker-stone for a moment. “You have the prohibited literature?”I considered how to answer this precisely.“I have the literature,” I said. “The Imperial decree designating it prohibited applies to its distribution, reproduction, and pedagogical use. I have continued to house the original documents as per my foundational archival mandate, which predates the decree by 200 years and which the decree did not, as I noted with some interest when I read it, explicitly supersede.”This was technically accurate. Whether it was strategically wise I had not, at the time, stopped to evaluate.“Your name?” I asked.“Wren Alcott. Traveling scholar — mythology and natural divine phenomena.”“You are the first person to enter this library in 73 years,” I told her. “You are carrying a creature that the Solenne Empire declared impossible 200 years ago. I have a very large number of questions. I am attempting to arrange them in order of priority, and finding this more difficult than usual.”She looked down at the creature in her arms, and then at the walls around her, and said, “There's a lot of that going around.”I directed the gate mechanism to close behind her and showed her, through a sequence of illuminated floor-stones, the way to the Consultation Chamber, where there was a table, a chair, and sufficient light to examine a wounded thing.