Graduation Day for the Bookworm Scholar - Legend CX – Of a Harvard Educated Bookworm

More about Graduation Day for the Bookworm Scholar - Legend CX – Of a Harvard Educated Bookworm

Legend CX begins in a library older than any system by which its books had ever been arranged, a space that seemed not to have been built but conceived over centuries, shelf upon shelf, volume upon volume, sustained by the unspoken understanding that knowledge takes time and time takes patience. The dust on the bindings was not a sign of oblivion but a fine archive of the years, and those who looked closely could discern traces of hands that had long since become stories. The tall windows showed not an ordinary night sky but a slow, circling motion of moons, stars, and spiraling light, as if the cosmos itself were learning to read out there, page by page, thought by thought, without haste and without purpose. In the middle of this room lived the Bookworm, a small, green creature with softly rounded segments, round glasses, and a simple academic cap that had once been placed almost casually on his head and which he had worn ever since, not as a badge of honor, but as a silent memento of a place no one would have associated with him. No one knew exactly how he had gotten there, to that venerable university whose name carried weight among people, but it was said that he hadn't passed through gates, but through spaces between them, through book spines, marginalia, footnotes, and the patience of time itself, which had allowed him to stay. While other worms devoured, he learned to read; while others burrowed through pages, he lingered in sentences, letting words wander through him until they acquired meaning, and eventually he understood that knowledge lies not in possession, but in dwelling. He read nights that stretched into years, and years that felt like a single paragraph, until even the library began to recognize him, to anticipate his arrival whenever a new book was opened. When his studies ended, not with a degree but with a quiet inner silence, he returned to the edge of the world, to a deserted library no one ever entered again, and sat down on a stack of old volumes as if he were a forgotten bookmark that had never lost its place. From that moment on, the room began to change, for green-wax candles burned longer than usual, drops fell slowly like thoughts onto the wooden floor, and golden sparks floated through the air like punctuation marks in a story writing itself. People who entered this place felt their questions lighten, their thoughts fall into place as if invisible hands had rearranged their inner shelves, and some swore they heard a voice, little more than a whisper, telling them that all knowledge must begin with wonder and end with humility.