In all their years of working at the same table, and later in the same room, the librarian hadn’t spoken all that much with them, always a bit too shy to start up a conversation when the editors seemed to be in their element, but right now the librarian couldn’t worry about that.
The newspaper editors were packing up, ready to head home to their families before leaving the Underground. Anything less than every book was unacceptable the librarian couldn’t bear to leave any book behind, any knowledge lost to their community.
They looked over at the shelves, frantically thinking about how many books they could take with them. The librarian had never thought they would be the one to close the library, had never imagined they would live to see the surface, but here they were.Īnd now that the Underground would be emptied forever, the librarian knew they needed to take the monsters’ history with them, to preserve it for the future generations of monsters who would only ever know life on the surface. The monsters could finally leave the Underground.
And then, they were back, standing behind the desk where they had been, but with new information in their head. Then the light came, and the librarian was gone. If the kid wanted a warm space to read books for a while, the librarian wasn’t going to complain. The librarian had seen a few other humans come through during his tenure. But the library was meant to serve everyone, and the child seemed content to browse the shelves and chat with the other patrons. Someone new came through Snowden and stopped at the library, and the librarian knew it was a human immediately. Give the teen some time, and they would do alright, maybe bring some new energy to the place. For all their cool blustering and defiance of authority, Chilldrake stopped by the library every week and checked out any book besides the one the librarian suggested. They had been keeping an eye on the children who visited regularly, trying to guess who would stay in Snowden, who might be interested in taking over once they reached their own retirement. The librarian never expected to be the one who would close the library. They looked around the library, the walls of books they had grown up in, and said yes. They had moved to Snowden as an adult, and was spending most of their time in the library, writing a history of the Underground with stories from Gerson, sharing a table with the newspaper editors as they all worked. It was snowing the day the previous librarian announced her retirement, and asked if they would be interested in taking over. The child would spend hours absorbed in books about monsters, and humans, their pasts, presents, and futures, and they knew that they wanted to help other monsters find that same information when they grew up. On special days, their mom would hold their hand and they would walk through the fog to Snowden and visit the library. As a child, they spent hours talking to Gerson, learning about the history of the Underground, or reading the ancient glyphs, a museum of sorts, telling the monsters’ story. They had been a Waterfall kid, growing up around the echo flowers and the calm stillness of that damp area. The librarian looked around at this room, the work they had inherited from every librarian before them, and considered what to do.
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