In a forgotten wing of the Zibaldone Library—whose stones sweated salt and whose staircases shifted slightly every solstice—Katerina Goltzwart kept her vigil. They said she was an archivist, though none could remember when she’d first appeared. Perhaps it was in the autumn of the lightning tree, or perhaps before the war that erased dates. Her keyring held rusted teeth for locks that no longer existed. Her wrists bore faint smudges of ink like the fingerprints of ghosts.
She lived among books that had no authors, tomes that sighed when you opened them and wept when shut. These weren’t cataloged. The library’s central registry—run by grey men with tight mouths and immaculate gloves—insisted those books did not exist. Yet each midnight, a new volume would appear on Katerina’s desk, its title etched in a dead language, its spine dusted with ash or pollen, depending on whether the dream that birthed it had ended in fire or bloom.
No one else dared visit the fourth sublevel, not since the incident with the mirror-scribe in Room D17. But Katerina, whose black skirts trailed like shadow-smoke and whose spectacles blinked light from angles unknown to geometry, felt only kinship with the haunted stacks. She spoke to the books and, worse, they spoke back.
They told her of errant scribes who bound demons into prefaces. Of lost empires preserved only in footnotes. Of dreamers whose sleeping minds wrote entire trilogies before their hearts gave out. She recorded it all, with trembling hands, in a great red ledger bound in skin—though whose, she wouldn’t say.
Yet even her fervor had limits. When, one violet dusk, a book appeared that bore no title, no spine, no pages—just a heavy velvet cover trembling with the throb of a hidden heartbeat—Katerina hesitated.
She did not open it.
She dreamed it instead.
And the dream was not hers.
It began with a corridor. Endless, archivally correct, with filigreed catalog drawers stretching to a ceiling too far to see. Each drawer, when opened, whispered her name. “Katerina,” they said, in voices that grew younger the deeper she reached. At last, from a drawer labeled TEMPVS FVGIT, she pulled a page. Just one. Upon it, a single sentence repeated: You are not the first. You will not be the last.
She awoke with her hair damp, her fingertips stained with ink from a book she’d never opened.
Time began to slip.
At first, small things. A teacup that returned to fullness after she drank it. A clock whose hands moved only when she wasn’t looking. She re-read a chapter of The Binding of Basilisk Hearts, only to find its ending rewritten each time: first tragic, then romantic, then disturbingly autobiographical.
Then the library began rearranging itself. Not just shelves, but history. Colleagues she swore had died long ago nodded to her in hallways. Familiar faces aged backward. A novice archivist named Edmund began greeting her daily, always claiming it was their first meeting. His breath always smelled of smoke and cloves.
“Katerina,” he said once, brushing ash from her shoulder, “do you remember the fire?”
She didn’t.
Until she did.
It came in flickers. Dreams bled into memory. The day the West Annex burned, she had been cataloging The Dreamers’ Index. Flames crawled like ink up the marble columns. She should have died. Perhaps she had. But in the margins of the dream-book, she’d scribbled something. A plea? A command? She couldn’t remember. All she knew was that ever since, the library whispered when she passed, and her reflection in the mirrored corridors blinked one heartbeat after she did.
One night, a strange calm settled. The wind outside stilled. The candles refused to gutter. And the velvet-covered book lay open on her desk, though no one—least of all Katerina—had opened it.
Inside: nothing.
Then, slowly, ink formed. Lines not written, but remembered. She saw them before they appeared, each word a pulse behind her eyes. The book wrote her life. Her birth in the village of Komorów, her first notebook at six, the paper-cut that bled for hours when she annotated The Children of Mnemosyne. The fire. The forgetting. And now, the unravelling.
On the final page: a blank space. Then a quill appeared beside her, impossibly old, the feather the color of eclipse. A whisper (or was it her own voice?): Write.
When the central registry came looking—after time hiccupped so severely the moon paused in its orbit and a junior clerk aged seven years in a breath—they found nothing in the fourth sublevel but a velvet book, still trembling, still breathing. Her desk remained untouched. Her glasses rested atop the red ledger. One page lay torn beside them, and on it, in looping script that shimmered like oil on water:
Katerina Goltzwart, Archivist of Forgotten Time.
By her ink, the library remembers. By her silence, it dreams.
They closed the sublevel after that.
But sometimes, deep in the stacks, you might still hear the scratch of a pen. Or a whisper, terribly close to your ear, that says:
“You are not the first.”