Aether Library Terminus and the Bookworm

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The Aether Library breathed when no one was looking. Then the dust rose and fell in long, silvery puffs, and the shelves creaked like old ships on a calm sea. At this hour, Terminus patrolled—small as a child, with the tilt of his ears catlike, yet constructed of fine brass and spring steel. His belly was a clock with Roman numerals, whose hands he gently adjusted with a paw when he was thinking. A red beret sat over one eye; on his back hung a leather satchel filled with bookmarks, keys, and time pins. "Quiet today," he murmured, and the clock on his belly answered with a soft tick. Of the eight robot librarians, seven were asleep; only Tiktora, the clockwork wizard with the dial face, was awake enough to leave a lantern in an aisle of shelves. Its light traced spiritual circles on the floor—as if someone had burned time itself into smoke. Then Terminus heard a sound that had no order of its own: a plucking, a patient gnawing, not of wood, but of meaning. He followed the sound through the map cabinet, past the chronomirrors that held other eras like glass water, to the room of marginal notes. There lay the books that were never quite finished and the notes of those who believed that a thought counts even if it only lives in the margins. Open lay "The Herbaria of the Unspoken." Page 73 had a hole that hadn't been there yesterday: round, clean, as if someone had drilled the textual fiber out of the world. Around the hole, letters scattered like startled beetles. When Terminus raised his paw, a creature crawled out of the paper—slender, milky transparent, with a head made of punctuation marks. Two commas were its eyes, its back was made of question marks that could twitch softly. "Aha," said Terminus. "You're the bookworm." The creature paused, as if considering whether it already had a name or would like a new one. Then it tapped the margin of the page. A few words slipped loose and curled away like wood shavings. "Stop!" Terminus pulled a time pin from his pocket and stuck it into the margin. The page froze, but the hole didn't. "No eating here." The worm looked guilty. A dot rolled from its head and landed next to Terminus's toes. "Hunger," the creature mouthed, mouthless, only by quietly rearranging the letters. "Unread hours. I live off them." Terminus sat down as best he could on spring legs. His clock face cast a warm brass light onto the paper. "Unread hours come from waiting. Read your fill, don't eat what's missing." He glanced at the hole. "What did you take from page 73?" The worm writhed guiltily. Something like a worn sentence glittered in its body. Terminus held out his paw. Hesitantly, the creature released its prey: It was a nondescript "yet." Without the "yet," the sentence lost its hope. It stood there like a chair without a fourth leg. "This is dangerous," Terminus said quietly. "If the 'yet's' disappear, the Library will think everything is over." The worm writhed. "Hunger," he repeated.