Librarians
Order, such as it is, is kept by the Librarians in the Lost Archive, the library of every book never written, every letter burned, and every history that could have been; they belong to it as nothing else does. They call themselves Curators of the Lost. They spend their lives trying to order a chaos that rewrites itself, and they warn readers against the obsession that turns visitors into books.
Appearance
A Librarian has a slight person’s shape and stoops, as if from a lifetime of shelves. Its skin is parchment, cream to brown, faintly lined like old vellum and sometimes marked with faded writing that is not quite legible. Its eyes are inkwells, black and wet, and a drop of ink can gather at the corner and run. Its face is often blank or shifting, taking on the look of whatever book it is reading. It wears robes of woven pages that rustle as it moves.
It moves quietly between the shelves, a rustle and a scratch, and its voice is dry and soft. It smells of old paper, vanilla, and ink.
Habitat and Range
They live throughout the Archive, among the twisting shelves and stairs to nowhere, each with sections it tends. An Archive of any size holds a number of them.
Behaviour and Temperament
Librarians are cryptic and elusive, and speak in riddles and metaphors. They value curiosity, but they have watched too many readers vanish into the books to encourage it, and their warnings are earnest even when their words are hard to follow. They think of visitors as readers who might disturb the balance, and they will steer a reader away from a book that would rewrite them, if they like the reader.
Abilities
They do not eat or sleep. They consume knowledge and give off stories, so that an Archive with Librarians in it fills, slowly, with tales no one wrote. They can read the Archive’s books without being changed, or with less change than any reader, and they know, more often than not, which shelf a lost thing is on. They last as long as the Archive does.
Life Cycle
Some believe Librarians are made by the Archive from what was lost in the place it grew; others that they were scholars who stayed and were changed, but not into books. They do not age. When an Archive fades, its Librarians are thought to fade with it.