Erasure Mites

Overview

Erasure Mites live in the stacks of the Eternal Record, and they eat erasure. Nothing in the Record is ever lost, but things in it can be sealed, and the mites gather in pale crowds wherever something has been struck out or hidden. Their crowds show where the gaps are.

Appearance

An Erasure Mite is smaller than a grain of salt, round and white, with eight short legs, and alone it is invisible. In numbers they form a pale, shifting patch like a smear of chalk on a page or a frost on a shelf, which moves, very slowly, along a line of text. They make no sound but a faint dry rustle in large crowds. They smell of old paper and vanilla, as the stacks do.

Habitat and Range

They live throughout the stacks, scattered thinly through ordinary books, and thickly around anything struck out: scraped vellum, blotted lines, burnt pages, and the edges of the sections the Censors have sealed.

Behaviour and Temperament

The mites feed on the act of erasure, not on the page. A line that has been scraped or blotted feeds them, and as they eat it, the erasure goes and the old text shows through again. They do not touch writing that has never been struck out. At a sealed section they cannot get in and crowd at the seams, and a Censor's seal in the stacks is often a white line of mites.

Abilities

They undo erasure. A palimpsest scraped clean shows its first text where they have fed; an ink blot over a word thins and the word comes back; a page torn from a book leaves, in a few weeks, a white crowd in the gutter shaped like the lost leaf. They cannot open what the Censors have sealed, only show where it is.

Life Cycle

They breed in the gutters of books and in the dust of the stacks and live on as long as there is anything struck out to eat. The Archivists do not trouble them; nothing in the Record decays, and the mites decay nothing.

Uses and Dangers

The Archivists and Indexers are said to follow the mites to what has been hidden. On the Material Plane a book brought back through a Library-Gate may carry them, and then what was struck out of it, and from the books shelved beside it, comes back: a forger's corrections, a family's struck-out name, a treaty clause scraped away. Archives near Library-Gates bake their books or keep them apart.

Lore and Belief

Scribes on the Material Plane tell of "white mites" that bring back what was scraped away, and some say a forged grant is found out by them; most of what scribes call white mites is mould. Scholars argue whether the mites are natives of the Record at all or something the Censors' work breeds (see Knowledge of the Cosmos).

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes