Stepping through the portal, you are surrounded once more by brilliant, dazzling light. You squeeze your eyes shut until you feel your feet on solid ground and the light around you disappears. Even then you keep them closed for a moment longer, smelling a faint scent of ozone and feeling a distant thrumming through the ground.
“Ma? Mum?”
You open your eyes. You stand in an ovoidal room similar in design to Amelia and Tegan’s Personal Libraries, and two, little children are staring up at you.
In an instant, Amelia and Tegan are upon them, scooping them up and clutching them tightly, kissing and holding them desperately, as though terrified they were going to be taken away again. There are tears glistening in both of their eyes. The children look flabbergasted.
“What did we do?”
“Nothing, sweetie,” sobs Tegan.
You stand back and let this tender scene play out, smiling thoughtfully. Eventually, once Tegan and Amelia have collected themselves enough to put down their children, one of them, a young boy, wanders up to you. “Who is she?” he asks, pointing brazenly.
“That is Carmen, Draco,” explains Amelia. “She is going to be staying with us for a while.”
“Hello Carmen,” beams Draco.
“Hello Draco,” you smile back.
Tegan steps over. “You’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you like. Or, if you’d rather be dropped off somewhere, we can put you anywhere in the galaxy.”
Anywhere in the galaxy… such an infinity of possibilities you never even knew existed. But you know there’s only one place you’d like to be.
“I’d like to find a library.”
The little girl danced around the amphitheatre. In her head, she was not in a library, but on a stage in the galaxy’s largest theatre, giving the best performance the audience had ever seen. Silent spectators applauded furiously, showering her with mute praises. She smiled and curtseyed, and as she did, she caught sight of a warrior’s garb. The audience vanished as she approached the shimmering bronze breastplate, waist-high rectangular shield, and red mohawk-adorned helmet.
Suddenly, she wasn’t in the theatre, but on a battlefield, fighting with sword and shield against alien monsters. She rushed up bookshelf-lined canyons and leapt over couch-sized boulders after her quarry, but never once did a sound escape her lips, for her parents had taught her well that she must never shout in a library.
As she rounded a corner, her adversaries vanished into thin air as she beheld a room full of treasures. Foreign jewels, strange outfits, items she had never seen before but which her mind immediately created the history of. Now she was a treasure hunter, skulking an ancient tomb for hidden artefacts, always mindful of her step, for the room was rife with traps.
Until finally the little girl found herself in a small courtyard basking in the double suns. In its very centre sat a small tree, no taller than she was, and borne on its hanging branches were a small number of small, prickly-looking fruits.
“It’s called a durian tree,” said a voice from behind her.
The girl spun around, finding the wrinkled face of the ancient librarian smiling down at her. Her friends said that the librarian had fallen through a wormhole, and that she was actually an alien disguised as a lady, which was why her library looked like no other building in the galaxy. Suddenly, the little girl became shy, all her boisterous energy wilting away before the gaze of the old librarian. But the librarian didn’t seem to mind.
“They smell a little funny, but they’re quite tasty.” The lady picked a single durian, split it in half, then picked out a piece of yellow flesh from the inside and ate it. “Would you like to try one?”
Now curiosity began to war with the shyness of the child. She nodded, accepting the smelly fruit offered, and gulped it down. It wasn’t nearly as tasty as toffees, but it wasn’t so bad.
“I’m afraid there’s not much in my library for you to read. I really should add a children’s section,” mused the lady. “Do you have any suggestions?”
The girl thought for a moment. “Stories!”
The lady laughed. “Yes, I suppose it could do with a few more stories. Sometimes they hold more truth in them than even history books.” The lady looked thoughtful for a second, then she smiled. “I do have one story. But it is quite silly.”
“Tell me!” begged the girl, her shyness now fully evaporated at the promise of a story. The lady laughed again.
“Very well then. Let me tell you the story of One Last Fire…”
The not-so-little woman wandered the stacks feeling very empty. Normally when she felt down, she would read about history, of ancient times when empires were measured in land, not planets, and people made the most incredible structures with little more than their bare hands; that always cheered her up.
But today she didn’t feel like reading about the Incan Empire, or the Persians, or the Tang Dynasty, or the Babylonians.
She rounded a corner and came upon a place she had visited many times. A humble office with two chairs, a pair of slightly different scrolls mounted on one wall, and a tin box that had always been filled with toffees. She lifted the lid now. It was empty.
Adorning the desk was an enormously thick book the woman had seen a hundred times but never read. She knew that it had meant a lot to the librarian, and she hadn’t wanted to ask. Now though, she came around the desk for the first time, opened the keepsake of Carmen Jana, and began to read.
Behind her, a soft, well-spoken voice called out, “Excuse me. You haven’t happened to have seen my spectacles, have you?”