The Lantern Library
The soft hush of turning pages drifted through the Lantern Library like dust motes in golden light. Shadows stretched long across the floorboards, cast by the last of the sun spilling through high-curved windows.
Wren Thistlefeather adjusted her glasses with one wing and peered down a row of oak shelves, her talons clicking softly across the floor.
The fireflies outside had started blinking earlier than usual.
She noticed.
Of course she noticed.
Librarians always noticed things.
“Time to pack up, loves,” she called gently to the last two visitors — a hedgehog cub curled beneath the herbals and a quiet vole studying old maps of root systems. “Come now. Early dusk means early close.”
They nodded, blinking sleepily, and gathered their things. Wren followed them to the door with a polite smile and a firm eye, her feathers pressed flat against the cool evening creeping in through the windows.
As the last one slipped out, she closed the door hard — SLAM — and bolted it in one smooth motion.
The sound echoed strangely in the library’s vast silence.
Wren drew the curtains. Then the shutters. Then, after a pause, she double-checked the locks.
Behind her, a tall book on woodland fables creaked slightly on its shelf, though no one touched it.
She ignored it.
Instead, she murmured to herself in a voice soft as turning pages:
“In moss grove,
when the winds grow cold,
beware the hush
the shadows hold…”
She trailed off, beak pursed in thought.
What came next?
There was something… about breathing. Or silence. Or something lost.
“…forest breathing…” she whispered, trying the words on her tongue.
She sighed.
The rhyme was older than the rafters above her head, maybe older than the hill the library stood on. She had half a mind to call it nonsense… but that would be lying to herself, and Wren never lied to herself.
She turned toward the far wall — where the rare volumes once rested.
The book she wanted…
She wasn’t sure it had ever truly existed.
But tonight, she’d look for it anyway.
Outside, the fireflies blinked out, one by one, like stars giving up on the sky.
And inside, Lantern Library held its breath.
