"A question?" I tightened my grip on the cup until the heat started to sting my palms, which helped. "All right."
The Keeper didn't answer right away. The fire popped and shifted. Somewhere far off in the shelves, a page turned by itself.
"If you had all the knowledge in the world," the Keeper said at last, "every book, every spell, every secret, every forgotten craft, what would you do with it?"
One word snagged. "Spell?" I repeated, and the Keeper told me to answer the question first. Then I could ask mine.
I would like to say I answered right away, with something wise. I didn't.
The first thing that went through my head was a reflex drilled in by twelve years of Japanese schooling: This is a test. There is a correct answer. Do not embarrass yourself. My face went hot from the collar up, exactly the way it used to when a teacher called on me without warning and thirty heads turned in my direction, and my brain began scrambling for whichever answer would end the moment fastest.
It offered me impressive ones, in order.
Cure every disease. Good. Noble. The line the hero delivers in a film right before the strings come in.
End all wars. Bigger. Better.
Make the world a perfect place. Too vague, and when I actually thought about it for two seconds, frightening. Nearly everyone in history who'd set out to make the world perfect had finished by building prisons for the people who disagreed with them.
I opened my mouth to say the one about disease. Then I looked at the Keeper, at the place under the hood where a face should have been, the dark full of slow-drifting letters, and I was suddenly certain that this being had heard every impressive answer there was. Thousands of times. Maybe millions. And was very, very tired of them.
I shut my mouth. I set the cup down on the table, carefully, inside the ring of moisture it had already left.
"Honestly?" I asked, and the Keeper said honestly.
"I'd grow vegetables."
The letters inside the hood stopped moving.
My ears were burning, but I'd started, and I couldn't find a way to stop that wouldn't be worse than finishing. "I mean, not only vegetables. I'd read everything. All of it. I've wanted to my whole life. Every book, every margin note, every recipe somebody's grandmother wrote on the back of an envelope." I rubbed the back of my neck until the skin there stung. "And then I'd use it. I'd want to help people who need it, the ones nobody else is helping. Not by ruling over them or anything like that. Just, if someone's sick and I know the cure, I'd want to give it to them. If a village keeps losing its harvest and there's a better way to farm, I'd teach them. If someone's lost something, like their grandfather's shop, or a recipe, or the name of a song their mother used to sing, I'd want to find it for them. I don't want any of it to be wasted." I took a breath. "And I'd still grow vegetables. I really like growing vegetables. I had tomatoes that were almost ready, and I never got to—"
My voice cracked on the last word, and I stopped.
It was a ridiculous thing to break over. Not my life. Not my parents. Tomatoes. But the pressure was there behind my eyes anyway, hot and stinging, and I had to stare hard at the grain of the tabletop until it eased.
The silence went on long enough that I started cataloguing the ways I might have offended a being older than my sun.
Then the Keeper's shoulders began to shake.
I took it for a trick of the firelight at first. Then the sound arrived: a rustling, like wind through a thousand pages at once, building until it filled the clearing. The lanterns overhead lurched and spun as if a gust had caught them. Loose sheets of paper came drifting down from somewhere high in the haze, turning slowly, and one settled across my knee. It was a shopping list, in a script I couldn't read.
The Keeper of Tomes was laughing. Not the polite breath from before. A real laugh, helpless and caught off guard, the laugh of someone who had forgotten they were capable of it.
"Vegetables," the Keeper managed, and then again, as if testing the word to see whether it would hold weight. I protested, weakly, that I'd said I would help people too, and the Keeper agreed, "You did. You did," while the laughter wound down into something quieter. One vellum hand rose and pressed against the dark beneath the hood, the way a person wipes their eyes. "Forgive me, Haruto Kanzaki. I am not laughing at you. I am laughing because I have asked that question more times than there are stars you could see from your balcony, and no one has ever answered it that way."
I laid the shopping list flat on the table, smoothing the fold, and asked what people usually said.
"Power." The Keeper said it flatly, like reading a title off a spine. "To rule. To conquer. To take revenge on those who wronged them. One wished to become a god. Several wished to become several gods. Many said they wanted to save the world, and some even believed it, but when I looked closely, what they wanted was to be the one who saved it, and to be thanked forever afterward." The letters began to drift again, slowly. "No one has ever asked to grow tomatoes. Or worried about tea spilling on the shelves."
I thought that might be the end of it. It wasn't.
The Keeper settled back, picked up their own cup, and held it without drinking, both hands around it, as if they simply liked the warmth. "Let me ask you something smaller, then. Suppose you did as you say. Suppose you helped people, freely, with what you knew. And suppose helping them made others angry. People who profited from the sickness you cured. People who preferred the farmers hungry and grateful. Suppose it put you in danger."
This time there was no heat in my face, no scramble. I turned the question over and looked at its underside, the way I'd check the back of a document for a second date.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
"I'd be scared," I said finally. "I'm not brave. I've never been in a fight in my life. I once hid in a bathroom at a work party for forty minutes because a coworker wanted me to do karaoke." The letters flickered, and I was starting to suspect that meant the Keeper found something funny. I kept going anyway, slower. "But I think I'd still do it. Carefully. I wouldn't run around announcing it. I'd try to be smart. Find people I could trust. Learn to protect myself before I tried to protect anyone else." I picked the cup back up and turned it a quarter rotation in my hands, then another. "And if someone was dying in front of me and I knew how to save them, I don't think I could just not. Even if it was dangerous. I couldn't live with myself."
The Keeper was quiet for a while. The fire settled with a soft crunch of ash.
"Carefully," they repeated. "Yes. That is a good word. Most who answer the first question as you did fail at the second. They are so eager to give that they hand their light to anyone who asks, and the wrong hands snuff it out." A pause. "Carefully is good."
The Keeper rose, crossed to a shelf at the edge of the clearing, and drew out a book. It was large and heavy, black leather with silver clasps, but its edges were scorched dark brown, and one corner of the cover had burned clean away, leaving a curved, crumbling line of char.
"I will show you one," they said, and set it on the table between us. The smell of old smoke came off it, sharp enough to catch at the back of my throat. "Do not worry. You may touch this one."
I opened it from the clasp side, keeping my fingers off the burned edge out of habit. The pages were packed with tight, slashing handwriting in a language I didn't know, and yet as I looked at it, the meaning lifted off the page and arrived in my head as easily as steam rising from the cup.
It was a journal. The first pages brimmed with excitement and big plans: lists of kingdoms, maps with arrows sweeping across them, tallies of men and horses. Then the handwriting grew harder and faster, the pen pressed so deep in places that it had torn the paper. Names crossed out. Cities crossed out. Page after page about enemies and traitors, about how nobody could be trusted, about needing more, always more. Near the end the script shrank and wavered, until it became a single line repeated over and over, filling page after page in a hand that could barely hold the pen:
Why does no one come to see me anymore?
The last pages were blank, their edges black with soot.
I closed it slowly and asked what had happened to him.
"He ruled half a continent for forty years," the Keeper said. "He knew everything, and he trusted no one with any of it. When he died, his libraries were burned by the people he had ruled, because they had learned to fear anything he had touched." The hood tilted toward the scorched cover. "Everything he knew, he took with him. It helped no one. It did not even help him."
The Keeper returned the book to its shelf with exactly the care I'd used on the Edo cookbook, and nudged its spine level with its neighbors.
"That," they said, "is the most common ending."
I took a breath that shook on the way in, and finally asked the question that had been lodged under my sternum since I woke on that floor. "I'm not going back, am I? To Earth."
"No." The Keeper's voice was gentle, but it didn't soften the fact. "Your body did not survive. I am sorry."
I nodded. I'd known. Hearing it still felt like missing the bottom stair in the dark, that jolt up through the knees when the floor isn't where you expected it. I started to ask about my parents and got as far as the first word.
"They will grieve. And then, slowly, they will live." The Keeper spoke steadily, as if reading from a record they had already checked twice. "Your mother will keep your old library card in her wallet for the rest of her life. Your father will grow tomatoes in the garden next spring, very badly, and will not tell anyone why. Your neighbor, the old man who complains that young people never greet him, will find your balcony door unlocked when the landlord comes. He will harvest the tomatoes. He will make a very poor pasta with them, with far too much salt, and think of you."
I laughed, and then I was crying properly, both at once, bent over my tea with my elbows on my knees. The Keeper said nothing at all. They simply waited, and that was exactly right.
I cried for my mother, who wouldn't get her tomatoes at Obon. For my father, who had never once said he was proud of me, but who had driven three hours to my university graduation and stood at the very back of the hall so I wouldn't see him wiping his face. For Mr. Fujita and his oversalted pasta. For the Sakamoto ledgers, finished and saved and waiting for someone. For the umbrella maker's granddaughter, who would never know that the archivist who'd helped her had died that same night.
For the small, ordinary life I'd had, which I had liked very much, and never once thought to be grateful for while I was in it.
It took a long time. The fire burned down to orange coals, and the Keeper reached over and laid another log on it without a word. Sparks went up. My nose was running, and my sleeve was the only option, so I used it.
When I could breathe evenly again, I thanked them for telling me.
"You are a keeper of records," the Keeper said. "You deserved to know the end of your own."
Once I trusted my voice again, I asked whether I could ask something. The Keeper said I could ask; they might not answer. So I asked how long they had been here, in the Library.
The letters drifted for a long time before the answer came.
"Longer than your sun has burned. Not always alone. There were others like me, once. Now there is only me, and the shelves, and the visitors who pass through." A small rustle of robes as they shifted. "It is a quiet life. I do not mind quiet. But even a keeper of books grows tired, after enough time."
Anything I said to that would have been smaller than it deserved. The teapot was still warm when I touched its side, so I lifted it and refilled the Keeper's cup, holding the lid down with one finger the way my mother always did. The Keeper looked at the cup for a long moment, as though this too had never happened before. Then they took it.
The word was still nagging at me. "You said 'spell' earlier. Every book, every spell. Earth doesn't have spells."
"Earth does not." The Keeper leaned back. "But there are other worlds. One in particular has been weighing on me. It is a world of magic and steel, of two moons and old forests, where every person is born with a gift that decides what they may become. A world where the knowledge to do great things exists, but is locked away. Hoarded by the few, sold at prices no ordinary person could pay, guarded so jealously that much of it has been forgotten even by those who own it."
Something in me sat up straight: the seven-year-old with the special library card. I asked whether they meant real magic, and the Keeper said real enough.
"There is an energy that runs through that world the way water runs through soil. They call it mana. Those with the right gift can draw on it and shape it into fire, or light, or wind, or healing. They do it by reciting chants. Long, beautiful verses, passed from master to apprentice for centuries. Most mages can recite hundreds of them perfectly." The hood tilted. "And almost none of them understand a single word of what they are saying."
I frowned and asked what they meant.
"Imagine a man who has memorized a poem in a language he does not speak. He can recite it flawlessly. He knows that when he says it, people weep. But he cannot change a line of it, or write a new one, because he has no idea what any of the words mean." The Keeper set down the cup. "That is how most of that world uses magic. Beautifully, faithfully, and blindly."
The archivist in me found that both fascinating and physically uncomfortable, a small itch under the ribs, the same one I got watching a visitor lick a finger to turn a Meiji-era page. "Someone should translate it," I said, before I could stop myself.
The letters in the hood went completely still. Then, slowly, they began to drift again, brighter than before.
"Yes," the Keeper said softly. "Someone should."
The fire sank low, though no one had touched it.
"Its libraries are burning," the Keeper said. "One person at a time. And something worse is beginning, beneath the surface, that very few have noticed."
I asked what they meant by worse, and the Keeper said it was a story for another day. "A great many days from now, I suspect."
They stood. The robes settled with the sound of a page being smoothed flat. They looked down at me for a long moment, and I had the distinct and slightly unnerving sensation of being read, cover to cover, margins included.
"Haruto Kanzaki," they said. "I have decided to give you something."