Library of Lady Catherine
The Complex is located in the hot, arid desert region, where low humidity helps protect and preserve parchments and other documents. The library, which comprises several buildings, dormitories, and gardens, serves as a learning center and is open to all.
The main library building has multiple basement levels, one of which houses the library's restricted section. The books and parchments contained there are either considered controversial in some manner or are extremely rare. In either case, access to these documents is minimal. Many of the most valuable documents are stored in the Styder Tower.
In addition to the library and its study centers, the complex also houses an extensive scriptorium. The intent is to preserve essential documents and make multiple, accurate copies so they can be more widely distributed and studied. Lady Catherine's vision of a place of learning was realized in the library complex and in the distribution of documents to other centers around the kingdom.
There is a story, a myth really, concerning the Library and the daughter of Lady Katherine. The daughter was named Desire, and her story is presented here for your enjoyment.
The Scribe of the Sand
Desire was not born in a crib, but in a scriptorium. Her first scent was not milk, but the sharp tang of binding glue and the dry dust of crumbled papyrus. Her mother, Lady Katherine, was the High Archivist of the Spire of Astronomy, a woman obsessed with the preservation of history. She raised her daughter not as a child, but as a living vessel for her legacy. She named her Desire not out of maternal affection, but as a command: Desire to know. Desire to understand. Desire the truth.
It worked too well.
By the age of ten, Desire had mastered the High Dialects of the ancient kingdoms. By fifteen, she had read every scroll in the main stacks. She grew into a quiet, intense young woman, pale from days spent in the shadows of the shelves, her fingers permanently stained charcoal-black from ink and graphite.
The rift between mother and daughter began on her eighteenth birthday. As a gift, Lady Katherine presented Desire with the heavy iron keys to the Vault of Origins, the deepest sublevel containing the rarest tomes of the known world. Katherine stood tall, expecting gratitude. Instead, she saw only a profound disappointment in Desire’s eyes.
"Is this all?" Desire asked, her voice echoing in the stone chamber.
"It is the sum of human knowledge," Katherine replied stiffly.
"It is the sum of what is already known," Desire countered, turning away from the shelves. "It is a record of the past. I desire what is not written."
In that moment, Desire realized that the Library, for all its grandeur, was a cage. It was a place where knowledge went to rest, not where it was born. Her hunger, cultivated so carefully by her mother, had outgrown the food provided.
Desire began seeking sanctuary in the only place the Library’s order failed: a small, unkempt courtyard in the center of the complex. Here, weeds were allowed to grow. Desire sat for hours, noting how the plants changed daily—growing, wilting, blooming—unlike the static, dead ink in the books surrounding her. She called it the "Garden of the Unwritten," because a flower does not need to be read to be understood.
But even the garden was too small. Her eyes turned toward the precipice: The Bonne.
The Library stands on the edge of the Bonne Desert, a vast, shifting ocean of white silica sand. Locals claimed it was cursed; travelers heard voices and saw cities that weren't there. Lady Katherine forbade looking at the horizon, claiming the heat warped the mind. But Desire spent her nights on the highest balcony, staring into the dunes. She didn't see heat haze; she saw patterns. She began to believe that the Bonne was a book—a book written in wind and silicon that changed every second, concealing the Athenaeum of the First Men.
The departure happened during the height of a lunar eclipse. When the sun rose the next morning, the reading room was empty.
On Desire’s desk, there was no note of goodbye. There was only a heavy, leather-bound book—blank. On the first page, in wet ink, she had written: "The Library of Lady Katherine contains the answers to every question man has asked. I go to find the questions that man has forgotten to ask."
Footprints led from the bronze doors directly into the Bonne, walking in a straight, purposeful line toward the deep desert until the wind scrubbed them away.
Lady Katherine sent trackers, soldiers, and mages into the white waste. They found nothing—no body, no scraps of clothing, no bleached bones. The desert had swallowed her whole. Katherine died years later, heartbroken, surrounded by books that could not comfort her.
However, before she passed, Katherine’s grief drove her to commission one final work. She ordered the wall separating the Great Hall from Desire’s wild garden to be torn down. In its place, masons constructed a massive archway carved from alabaster, the same milky white as the sands that took her daughter.
She named it the Arch of Desire. It was a contradiction in stone. The arch itself was perfectly symmetrical, covered in geometric carvings representing Katherine’s love of order. But it framed the view of the chaotic, untended garden—Desire’s longing for the living and the unknown. At the apex, Katherine had a final admission chiseled into the stone: "Knowledge is the cage. Wonder is the key."
Decades passed. The story of the runaway scribe became a legend, and the threshold between the Hall and the Arch became known as the Storyteller's Steps.
Ironically, the Library used this site to discipline the imagination. In her later years, Katherine had instituted the "Rite of Correction" to stamp out the fables Desire used to tell the younger students. It was a grim performance where a senior scholar would recite history, and students were required to shout "Correction!" if a single date or name was missed. Accuracy was worshipped; creativity was punished.
But on a warm autumn twilight, long after Katherine was buried, a quiet subversion took place.
Mistress Elara, an elderly storyteller with soft eyes, sat on the steps with her back to the Arch and the wild garden. Below her sat three young students, the heavy Chronicle of the Iron Age open on their laps.
"And so," Elara recited, "on the third day of winter, the Iron Legion breached the walls of Oakhaven. The defenders retreated to the citadel. There, Lord Gregor, seeing the battle was lost, threw down his sword."
Elara paused. She looked over the heads of the students, through the Arch of Desire, and into the swaying, chaotic greenery of the garden. She thought of the legends of the Scribe of the Sands—the woman who walks without footprints, writing the history of the wind.
Elara continued, her voice changing pitch. "But General Vane, moved by the bravery of the defense, granted one mercy. He allowed the women and children to flee through the hidden postern gate before the fires were lit. Lord Gregor did not watch the burning; he watched the forest edge, seeing his family escape into the safety of the trees."
The silence on the steps was absolute.
The students looked down at the text. The ink clearly read: "No quarter was given. All perished or were enslaved."
The youngest student’s finger hovered over the sentence. He knew the rule. He knew he should shout "Correction!" and recite the grim statistics of the massacre. He looked up at Mistress Elara, then past her, to the white alabaster of the Arch and the unwritten garden beyond.
He understood, for the first time, that sometimes the heart matters more than the archive.
The student closed the book gently.
"The record is preserved," he whispered.
"The record is preserved," the others echoed.
And somewhere deep in the Bonne, where the compass is confused, and the wind writes secrets in the silica, the Scribe of the Sands smiled, and turned the page.
The End
