Pixels in the Library

Editor's Note: This tale inspired by the Forgotten Tomes community project.

X:@ForgottenTomes_

Web:https://forgotten-tomes.vercel.app

---

Arcadia…my non-magical incantation, a word that shut doors before anyone stepped through. But the doors in my mind are capricious, sometimes opening when I sleep (rare), when I dream (dangerous), when Ali, my other half, decides I’ve carried enough and sweeps my memories clean.

At a safe-house window, I watched a world I didn’t belong to keep turning. Stillness is easy in this form; staying still isn’t. The pull returns: Travel, observe, and keep moving, so that nothing can catch me.

If I stop, I remember. Memories of fire and ash.

My identity prior to becoming Druid Faiz of Arcadia has been wiped from my mind, but certain thoughts still have the power to burn. And yet…the curiosity nagged at my mind and wouldn’t let go. Perhaps there was another way.

I closed my eyes, gripped my staff, and Traveled.

---

In the central Runiverse, the Blue Wizard Bastion’s deep-blue towers rose sharply against the sky, old battle-scars softened by ivy and study. Between Dream Master Lake and the Fey, it had once been an outpost, an ancient army’s clenched fist. Now it was an open hand, a fortress that had outgrown war.

Inside the gates, cafés glowed in the dusk. Blue Hat wizards spoke in precise bursts, words clicking into place like parts of a theorem. A group of Purple Hat envoys drifted through like ink in water, their debate sweetened with absinthe and ale. I passed among them as a shadow accustomed to passing through unnoticed.

At the Bastion’s heart sat the Great Library, a cathedral of stone. Buttresses braced its flanks; tall, narrow windows and needle-spires climbed into the gray light like quills. Broad steps led to heavy doors beneath a pointed arch, an entrance severe and somehow welcoming…like it had been waiting for me to arrive.

At the threshold, I paused, took a deep breath (old habits die hard), then stepped inside.

Inside, the air cooled at once, the lobby rising like a nave. Pillars climbed into ribbed vaulting, and the shadows between the ribs held a soft, bluish gloom. High, narrow windows admitted pale light in long bars, turning dust motes into slow constellations. Along the walls, carved reliefs showed wizards bent over open tomes, gears interlaced with vines, constellations stitched into marble - magic and method sharing the same frame.

And in the center of the hall, beneath the gaze of stone, sat Uvlius the Librarian behind a broad wooden desk.

Intent on his work, his quill kept moving until he finally blinked up at me over spectacles riding low on his nose.

“Druid Faiz of Arcadia,” he said, as if confirming a line he’d already written. If the emptiness beneath my hood unsettled him, he didn’t show it. He simply regarded me the way he might regard a new entry in a ledger.

“My reputation arrives before me,” I said. “Or your library is simply…thorough.”

Uvlius’s mouth twitched, half amusement, half fatigue. “Here, many things arrive before they are sought.” His voice carried the hush of the stacks, but it still filled the hall. “There are many tomes waiting to be discovered, and secrets that reveal themselves only to the most curious of souls.”

My fingers tightened on my staff. Curiosity had split me in two, literally. Curiosity led to thin places and permanent change.

And yet, I had come.

“I’m not here to relive my past,” I said. “Only to understand it…without touching it directly.”

His gaze held mine, sharp, measuring, not unkind. For a moment I had the sensation of being read like a page. Then the smallest softening, the look of someone who knew some chapters were painful to open. “The Great Library does not force knowledge,” he said. “It offers. It waits. You choose the speed at which you turn the page.”

He lifted his hand, quill still between his fingers, and the corridors beyond seemed to open wider, as if the building itself leaned in to listen. “Wander. Meet the books, and the seekers. Listen. Sometimes the library answers in the language you’d least expect.”

I bowed, showing gratitude as best my form allowed, and stepped into the labyrinth.

---

Wizards filled the Library, curled in alcoves, leaned over balconies, sprawled on couches with scrolls across their knees. Shelves climbed into shadow, and ladders slid along their rails as if guided by unseen hands.

I wandered through rooms of rotating puzzles and hovering runes, where debates over magic and science crackled like duels.

Knowledge was everywhere. So was the temptation to reach too far.

And whenever a sentence in a book leaned too close, whenever it sounded like my own voice, I shut it and stepped back.

Not that way, I told myself. Not through pain.

That was when I noticed the mushrooms.

At first there were only a few. Pale caps wedged between volumes, gills faintly luminous, growing where nothing should. Then the scent found me: earthy, rich, almost comforting.

Rounding a corner, I saw Magus Devon of the Quantum Downs. She stood among blue flames and containers of bubbling blue liquid - mana, perhaps, caught in glass. She looked half-arrived, like someone stepping from another reality, posture steady while her attention drifted to things only she could see.

At her feet, coiled like a question mark, was a sleek snake with an intelligent, steady gaze.

Spinor.

I knew Devon by reputation: quantum mushrooms, impossible artifacts, a familiar she could speak to across any distance. We’d never met.

She turned, face unreadable until her eyes found mine. “You,” she said, less greeting than bookmark.

“Magus Devon, I presume,” I replied. “I’m Faiz.”

Spinor’s tongue flicked.

Devon’s attention drifted, as if listening past the room. Then, in that slow certainty of hers, she recited: “Spinor tells me this library holds paths to places that shouldn't exist. My game buddy showed me once - in a world of jungles and alien invaders, there was a code. A dance of directions that granted warriors thirty chances instead of three.”

The library didn’t truly go quiet, but something in me did.

A memory stirred, safe, warm. Plastic in my hands. A screen lit by electricity, not spellwork. Laughter that felt like it belonged to me.

Thirty chances instead of three.

I tightened my grip on my staff, and forced myself back into the present.

“The path,” I asked softly. “Have you found it?”

Devon’s eyes slid to the seams of stone where the light looked wrong. “Paths aren’t always found,” she said. “Sometimes they… notice you.”

Spinor lifted its head, meeting my gaze like it could read straight through me.

Then Devon drifted away, fingers trailing across book spines as if plucking music only she could hear. I stayed behind, the warmth still in my chest, longing for something I couldn’t yet describe.

---

I looked at the chamber I was in with new eyes. It had doors that did not match the architecture around them. Each was plain, wooden, old-fashioned, with a simple handle.

I remembered Uvlius’s words: secrets… only to the most curious of souls.

I remembered Devon’s trance-like voice: a dance of directions.

And I remembered, from that sudden safe flicker, the way a sequence could be entered, by muscle memory.

I approached the first door I must traverse. My hand hovered.

This is foolish, I told myself. And yet.

I opened it and stepped through.

Up.

The space on the other side was another chamber, filled with curiosities. I ignored them all, intent on my mission. I crossed to the door opposite me, and went through it.

Up.

After crossing into a second chamber, I immediately turned heel and returned the way I came.

Down.

Down.

Each threshold felt like crossing a line between realities.

Left.

Right.

Left.

Right.

The eighth door swung inward, and I stepped through…

…and found myself back in the chamber where I had met Magus Devon.

The shelves were the same. The blue flames and mana repositories remained. The air still smelled faintly of mushrooms.

But in the center of the room, where there had been an empty floor, a massive object now sat like an altar.

A controller.

Ancient in design, oversized, carved of stone and metal and something that looked like lacquered wood, as if an artifact of play had been elevated into a relic. Its buttons were wide enough for my hands, and as I stared, they began to glow softly, one by one, like stars waking in a night sky.

I approached cautiously. I saw the necessary buttons.

I pressed B.

The glow deepened.

I pressed A.

The controller hummed, low and resonant, as if the building itself was attuned to this moment.

I pressed START.

The room folded.

---

I landed, feather-light.

The air was warmer here, heavier. It smelled like carpet and cardboard and the faint bite of old electronics. The lighting was soft and yellow, not magical, but domestic.

I looked around and my mind stuttered.

I saw a couch, the cushions sagging with the memory of bodies that had once claimed it. In front of it, a CRT television waited, thick and square, its glass dark but expectant. Beneath it, an Xbox rested like a sleeping familiar, and beside it a case where I could read the familiar, “Halo,” its cover a symbol that struck my chest with that same safe warmth.

Nearby, a Mountain Dew vending machine leaned slightly, humming with a tired, nostalgic persistence. The front was lit, the logo bright and absurdly cheerful in this hidden place.

A circular table stood nearby, scattered with dice, worn notebooks, and a model tower. A D&D setup, as if all had simply stepped away mid-session.

A half-eaten pizza sat on a low table, hardened at the edges, cheese congealed in time. The smell should have been unpleasant, and yet it made my throat tighten with something like hunger, though I did not eat the way I once must have.

Posters covered the walls: games from the last age of another world, colors vivid, titles like incantations. Some were from the 1990s, some from the early 2000s. They promised adventures that fit inside a screen.

A ping pong table took up too much space, its net slightly crooked, paddles abandoned on the surface.

Networked PC stations stood in a row. Keyboards sat neatly, mice aligned. On the screens were the familiar images of a Counter-Strike match, the action held in paused limbo.

And in the corner, almost shy, was a green pipe.

Bright, cartoonish, unmistakable.

Super Mario Bros.

I stood very still.

I know this, I realized. Not as lore. Not as a story someone else had written. As something I had lived.

I walked toward the pipe like someone approaching a grave they were not sure they were allowed to mourn.

Its surface was smooth, painted perfectly, as if it had never known wear. I hopped up, leaned over and peered inside.

There, wedged in the shadowed curve, was a book.

A tome, its cover worn leather displaying a motif of an old terminal hidden among a ruin, embossed with gold letters that caught the basement’s soft light:

Forgotten Gaming

My fingers slid beneath it, and when I lifted it free, the weight settled into my arms.

It was a nostalgic exploration of ancient enchanted games once played in arcane halls. Some consoles, it whispered, were rumored to still function… if powered correctly.

The words struck me with a strange, aching hope. As if something that should have been dead might still, with care, light up again.

My grip tightened around the tome.

Emotion rose in me all at once, flooding the hollow places memory magic had scoured clean. It tightened my throat, pressed behind my eyes where tears should have been.

I couldn’t cry, not in this form. No cheeks, no ducts. Only darkness beneath my hood and two luminous orbs.

But sound was still mine. A sob ripped out of me, loud in the basement hush. Then another, until I collapsed onto the carpet by the green pipe, clutching the tome to my chest like an anchor.

I stayed there a long time in that warm, impossible room, the couch waiting, the CRT dark and patient, the posters bright as friendly ghosts, holding a past that didn’t feel like a blade.

When the shaking finally eased, I stood, cradled the book as if it were breakable, and understood why the hidden annex had shown itself: to remind me I had once been someone who played, someone who loved lore for its own sake.

I pressed the tome to my body once, a silent promise, then lifted my staff and Traveled.

---

Back in the Bastion’s night, café debates still braided Blue and Purple voices into uneasy harmony. The Great Library still loomed.

Inside, Uvlius kept watch. Devon listened through Spinor.

And beneath it all, that hidden basement waited, green pipe and all.

I left quietly, Forgotten Gaming held close, grateful for what the Library returned to me across the Singularity.

Entered by: 0x9Baf…9a49