Tiktora and the Chronognome of Leaflight

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A Chapter from the Aether Library
The morning in the Aether Library was unusually quiet. Not quiet in the sense of silence—that was almost commonplace in these halls with their whispering shelves and sighing pages—but a kind of extended interstitial space where even the dust hesitated to fall. Tiktora felt it first in the rhythm of her chest cage: a slight stumble in the fourth spring, a barely audible contradiction in the sound of the inner gears. She left her clock-like seat under the window arch, crossed the reading axis of the eleventh hour, and entered the room with the loose light. There were no shelves, only tables of ornate wood, covered with books that seemed to be dreaming. And in the center: a single, open tome, glowing golden, blown by an invisible wind. On it stood a being Tiktora had never seen before. It was barely larger than a stack of notepads, a contradiction from head to toe of fluffy fur and metallic blueprint. From its chest grew a round clock with Roman numerals that seemed to hum rather than tick. Its eyes were large, amber, and full of unease. It wore a red beret and carried a small shoulder bag from which individual notes protruded like fleeting thoughts. "You're too early," the creature said without looking at her. "Or the book is too late." Tiktora approached. "Who are you? And what happens to this manuscript?" "I am Tibbax, third-level chronognomist, on leave but not forgotten." He shrugged. "This book doesn't want to be read. It wants to remember." "It was empty when I left it yesterday." Tibbax laughed softly. "Emptiness is a state of waiting, not lack. Books are not containers. They are questions that want to know who you would have been if you had never read them." Then he extended his small metallic fingers—and the pages began to move. A single leaf detached itself from the spine, hovering in the air, glowing like a twilight thought. Golden letters peeled from the void. "When time walked barefoot, a cogwheel wrote its name in the dust of the first morning." Tiktora felt her inner hands falter. This was no ordinary fragment of text. It was a throwback, an echo from a future dreaming itself. "This is from the collection of sealed beginnings," she whispered. "How can you know this?" "I am a chronognomist," Tibbax replied, without pride. "We don't know futures, but we remember all the possibilities that might have been. This book has chosen to write one of them." A gentle crunching sound echoed through the room as the book began to turn pages—independently, consciously, almost alive. Tiny sparks rose from every page, words that hadn't yet settled. Tibbax gathered them with his little watch like a gardener gathering morning dew. "And what if it's misspelled?" asked Tiktora. The chronognomist looked at her for a long time. Then he said, "Stories don't spell themselves wrong. They spell themselves differently.