I've decided to take up another prompt-based writing challenge, using Voretober 2022 as a prompt list.
I will take it easy with the writing, so there won't probably be regular / daily updates. I want this to be a fun exercise, not a chore.

Warning: despite my choice of promptlist, this is NOT vore or vore-related content.

Character used are some of my originals (with one exception), part of my worldbuilding project "Orion".
Note that most of it will be written in one go for the sake of a faster delivery, so there might be any typos or mistakes here and there.


DAY 1 - VILLAIN

In the beginning there was silence. A calm, peaceful silence regularly interrupted by the sound of a ticking mechanism hidden behind a brightly decorated bookshelf.
Some stories begin in a village. Some others, in a city. Others in a castle of a far, far away realm.

This story begins in a library.

It was an oddly unusual place, a portmanteau of ancient, old and modern at the same time. Entering this place felt like walking into the abridged history of civilisation itself – the architecture was blocky and essential, its crudeness carefully hidden by bas relieves and geometric patterns painted with a limited palette of bright, natural colours. Then as you moved your eyes you could see metal beams, pipes and gears all around the room in the fashion of a mechanical skeleton partially visible and partially running under what appeared to be limestone blocks.

A ‘ding’ echoed in one of the chambers, setting in motion a number of mechanisms that started to move the bookshelves along its rails, changing its configuration according to the Librarian’s chosen theme for the day. It was fully automated and controlled by a sequence of switches, handles and levers in a colossal control room where the Librarian was currently taking a sound nap.

This mechanism, however, wasn’t fail safe. Maybe the steam engine was underperforming, maybe a gear got stuck, maybe the Librarian genuinely made a mistake when setting up the machine before going to sleep.

A bookshelf stood still in the middle of its room, with the others dancing around it at the repetitive rhythm of metal clashing against metal until a loud ‘bang’ echoed in the space separating its origin from the Librarian’s ears.

The griffon woke up with a start, confusedly looking around in search for any hint on what that sound might have been about. They stood up and stretched their limbs on the mattress, first the owl-like forelegs and then the feline hind ones, then walked towards what they roughly assumed to have been the wing where that sound originated from.

And then they saw it. A cluttering mess of shelves layering on top of each other and bleeding books all over the surrounding space.
A regular librarian would’ve been fairly annoyed by the perspective of having to spend what was most likely to be a few days’ worth of work to tidy up all that mess, but the Librarian wasn’t any ordinary librarian.

Hence the definite article and the uppercase L.

Each of those books was a universe, filled with history and living, breathing creatures obliviously getting along with their lives.

And some of them were just set loose.