Byron’s Tale – The Engine of Memory – 058

Well, Molly, they have given you flowers and oceans and carnivals, so I suppose I must supply the ruin — for what is beauty without a little decay?

Picture, if you will, the year when the world holds but one library. It is not a building, but a city entire — the streets are its aisles, the houses its shelves, the very stones inscribed with the memory of every book ever written. The air smells of paper and rain, and the light is forever that of late afternoon, when shadows grow long and the heart grows restless.

There are no librarians. Instead, the books come to you. You have but to speak your desire aloud — an epic, a letter, a scandalous memoir — and the volume will appear in your hands, warm as though freshly printed. The words shift and rearrange themselves as you read, so that no two tellings are alike. In this way, no book is ever finished, and no reader ever satisfied.

Ah, but here is the catch (and yes, Polidori, I see you smirking): the library contains not only what has been written, but what might have been. It will tempt you with the book your mother might have authored had she lived another year, or the poem you yourself might have penned had you dared. And should you linger too long in those unwritten pages, you may forget entirely which life was yours.

And you, Molly — you are the ink. Without you, the library falls silent. With you, it breathes and shifts, forever weaving new stories from the old. But tell me, would you resist the temptation to read the unwritten chapters of your own tale?

My candle gutters. The game is done, and I suspect we have left you with more questions than answers.

—Byron