The Readers of the Grand Library

Prelude

It was the dead of the blackest winter nights. So black that even the stars were drowned out by the oppressive, weighty darkness. She was asleep in her bed, curled under a comforter and a woven blanket that her grandmother had brought from her home across the sea forty years earlier. The night shivered, trembled, pulled itself into the gaping maw of fear and terror that the dark thrived upon.

And N'oji slept on.

Outside the safe cocoon of warmth, a book was opened, pages turned quietly, silently, and words were spoken. Words have power, everyone knew that. Books read by those with the skill to pull the meaning from those words and to force them into reality were rare, and rarer still were those with the ability to read them.

The reader stood in the middle of the central square, before a fountain capped in an obelisk bearing the names of those long-dead. The book, a simple novel from days long-forgotten, lay open in his hands. He stepped forward, walking in a slower counterclockwise circle. A flashlight was tucked under his chin, a pool of yellow light reflecting on the pages before him.

He spoke the words to pull this night to the blackest of them all, to draw it down, down deep and quiet. Down destitute, down to destruction. A hole which would swallow the very ground upon which he stood.

A shepherd's son, it was oddly fitting. The reader scratched at his beard and twisted the words, letting them rise across the silent square.

Behind him, the fountain fell silent. A crack had appeared in the collecting pool and the water had slowly run out and into the void beneath the square. His lips quirk upwards, and the sneer pulled at his features. He read on, the words rounding at his lips and twisting as he spoke them, the ground cracked beneath his feet.

This was his revenge, staring up at the obelisk like man witnessing the future for the first time. He willed it to crack, to shatter the black marble, this choked-off memory that held no weight at all on the pitiful minds of these people.

All around the reader the city crumbled, an earthquake they would say later, but he knew better. He would always know better. The book of power was his weapon against the ignorance of these people, against their mentality and their bigotry.

He closed his eyes and tilted his head backwards. There were no stars in the sky.

"And so he rent the world asunder."

The sleeping town crumbled to the ground around him.