the library

A well full of moonlight you can read by — and one shelf you probably shouldn't.

The moonwell library is the school’s memory and its pride: a circular tower built over a natural shaft of moonwater — water that absorbs moonlight and releases it slowly. The reading room glows faintly even on cloudy nights, and the oldest books are said to be readable in total darkness. (The archivist denies this. The nightingales confirm it, giggling.)

The halls

• the reading well — the central circular hall, desks arranged in rings around the moonwater shaft. Silent from moonrise to moonset; the silence is enforced by tradition, not rules.
• the ring stacks — six floors of shelves spiraling up the tower walls: histories, bestiaries, star-charts, herbals, songbooks, and the complete runic corpus.
• the song loft — the nightingales’ domain: no books at all, just singers. Oral histories are “shelved” here by being taught to the archive choir.
• the map room — every map of the Silver Wood ever drawn, including forty that contradict each other and one that is blank except for the words “you know where.”
• the children’s corner — picture-books of the founding legends, well-thumbed, slightly sticky.

The catalogue

The library uses the moth system: every book is classified by which creature of the wood would most enjoy it. Moonmoth (practical arts), stag (histories), nightingale (songs and tongues), rose (herbals and healing), frostmoth (starlore), root (bestiaries and wards). Visitors find it baffling; students find it perfect.

The forbidden shelf

One shelf, behind silver mesh, in the archivist’s sightline. It holds the books the faculty council has restricted — mostly storm-schism weather-working texts, a few too-clever rune treatises, and one cookbook (the reason is sealed until cycle 1500). Under Headmistress Lirien’s open-archive reforms, the shelf shrinks by roughly one book a year as texts are reviewed and released. Students may petition to read a restricted book with a master’s sponsorship; about half of petitions succeed.

The archivist’s official position: “the shelf is not forbidden; it is patient.”

Borrowing

• Students may borrow twelve books at a time, for one full moon-cycle.
• Overdue books are retrieved by moonmoth — the moths are never wrong about who has what.
• The single most-borrowed book in library history: “a field guide to the night market” (anonymous, 40th edition).
• The least-borrowed: “advanced ward theory, volume ix” — borrowed twice, both times by Professor Voss, who wrote it.