Less Like a Shadow

First Day of Spring | Yr. 3052 | Perduna

The library closes early on festival days. The city of Perduna sighs and the pear trees sing in white blooms, perfuming streets where children blow rainbow bubbles and vendors throw spiced meat and peaches on sizzling grills. Even the Falcons, in their sharp-edged uniforms, watch the revelry with a softer eye. 

The Seamstress walks through the streets. She tips a few coins into a donation basket. She chats with the woman with moss twisted in her hair, and buys a flaky pastry from the man in purple robes embroidered with chestnut shell suns. A child peeks from behind the fabric, playing with a loose thread. She compliments the handiwork, then moves on to another stall to remark on the weather and complain about politics. She may need the witnesses. Someone to attest, yes, the Seamstress was here. She enjoyed the festival, like all citizens of Perduna. She smiled often, but not too often, and spent a respectable amount. 

The Seamstress keeps the messenger bag tucked under her arm. Each step, it thumps against her ribs like a leather-bound heart. 

Too soon for most, the sun hugs the mountain’s ridgeline. Families with small children leave at a trickle. Vendors collapse their fabric stalls, and smoky-eyed illusionists take their places. In the long red shadows, their false fires dance, fixating those who had meant to leave hours ago. Children cry out as tiny salamanders race up their arms, bursting into blue sparks that shimmer on beards and eyelashes and the bare skin of outstretched hands. The Falcons find themselves inching closer. The Seamstress steps back from the crowd.

She runs a hand reverently over the library's carved doors. It is not so hard to jimmy the locks. She has her needles, and quick hands. The Seamstress slips in. The messenger bag thrums faster at her side. 

Too busy acquiring witnesses, the Seamstress does not notice she acquired a shadow.

The Shadow follows behind her, footsteps whispering like flipped pages.

The Seamstress gathers books from many shelves. Volumes on oceanic cartography and radical entomology. A creased novelette with a sun-tanned man scowling on the spine. Novels about rival gardeners, cloud pirates, and the fall of queens. She stacks them all on a carrel. Sitting atop each other, gilded leather against glossy plastic, the only quality linking them together is their size.

The Seamstress places her messenger bag on a carrel desk. She eases open the clasp and withdraws a book. Black cover, no markings. Swiftly and in silence, she takes it apart. 

Fingers fly. There is strength here, and practice. This is not her first book. Glue dissolves and stitches rip until each page sits in a neat tower. 

She picks a leather-bound novel from the top of her stack. Idly, she flips through the pages until she finds one she likes. She licks the end of her thread, wax smooth in her mouth, and draws it through the needle. The first page is sewn into the first book. It goes back to its home on the shelves. Then, the next. The Seamstress finds her rhythm. The tower of pages dwindles until it more closely resembles a turret, a hummock, a stump. The night is nearly over when she sews the last page into the final book.

The Seamstress puts away her needles, checks on each of the altered books tucked back in place, and slips the empty cover back into her bag.

The timing is perfect. She leaves just before the first librarians arrive, and just after the street cleaners have retrieved the last of the broken bubble wands, dropped candies, and orphaned shoes. The Shadow watches the Seamstress from the library steps.

In the early light, the Shadow looks less like a shadow and more like a boy who is up far past his bedtime. He runs after the Seamstress, and, catching up to her, tugs on her sleeve. 

She tenses, expecting a Falcon. But it is only a boy, a very tired and confused boy. She recognizes him as the child of the pastry vendor in purple robes. So much for witnesses. She is about to ask if he is lost when he pokes her messenger bag.

“What’s that book?”

The Seamstress blinks. She opens her bag and shows him the empty cover. “It’s not a book anymore.”

She’s not sure why she gives it to the boy. They never told her what to do with the cover, and he holds it like a bird with a broken wing, short fingers curling around it. He looks up at her.

“What is it now?”

The Seamstress smiles.

“Safe.”

First Day of Spring | Yr. 3062 | Perduna

The Shadow watches the clock run down from the front desk. The library still closes early on festival days. 

Like every year for the past decade, he has claimed the closing shift. Not that his coworkers are reluctant to give it to him. Even in the library’s most sheltered alcoves, the dusty air smells of lilacs and cherry blossoms, caramelized apples and illusion smoke. The other librarians leave, one by one, to buy silk scarves and play games of chance. Soon the Shadow is the only one left.

It is time for his yearly vigil. First, he checks the doors and windows. Through the warped glass panes, he sees illusions burst in red, blue, gold showers. He shakes the lock mechanisms, tightening screws. Everything is secure.

All year long, he fields questions from men in thin dark suits who do not look like radical entomologists or oceanographic cartographers. 

Always, he says the same thing.

“I’m sorry. We don’t have the book you’re looking for.”

The men scrutinize him, as though they could read a lie written in the scrawl of his eyelashes. When they leave without checking anything out, as they all do, the Shadow sighs with relief. 

The Seamstress stops by the Shadow’s father’s bakery often. She never mentions the book, but the Shadow does not mind. She brings other things, like handkerchiefs embroidered with moon phases and freshly darned socks that his father refuses to replace. The Shadow has begun to suspect his father of poking holes in new pairs at night, just to keep her coming around.

And so the seasons spin on.

Yet every so often, something happens. The Shadow catches a hint of daffodils in the middle of autumn. He finds a fresh cherry blossom on his desk after the first frost. He slips on his way inside, and looks down to see a wild strawberry encased in the ice. 

On these days, the Shadow finds his fingers drawn toward the locked bottom drawer of his desk. Inside that drawer, under a stack of rare volumes with spines of solid gold and ink of crushed rubies, past a false bottom panel, wrapped in the plainest muslin: the empty black cover.

He knows so little about the Seamstress’s organization, and even less about the fate they are desperate to avoid. He’s been content with that until now.

Now, the book-that-is-no-longer-a-book won’t leave him alone.

One morning, the Seamstress comes into the bakery. She brings a bread bag embroidered with a parade of laughing foxes. The Shadow’s father greets her with a plate of pastries, fragrant with fresh rosemary and sweet strawberries. The Shadow smiles, watching them exchange their gifts and talk about their days, but he says nothing.

The Seamstress leaves. The Shadow waits a moment, then tells his father he’s going out for more strawberries. He catches a glimpse of the Seamstress’s coat just as she whirls around a corner. He follows.

The Seamstress slows and steps off the sidewalk. To anyone watching, it would look like she stopped to smell a cherry tree in full bloom.

Without looking at him, she says, “You wanted to talk to me?”

“I need to know more. Please. I’ve asked so little. I’ve trusted so little, beyond this. I need to understand. The organization — your people — are they good?”

“Their intentions are good.”

The Shadow scoffs. “That’s not a real answer.”

“And that’s not your real question. Let me ask one of my own. Why now?”

The Shadow pauses. It’s a hard feeling to articulate. “I haven’t opened that drawer in ten years. Not once. But now, whenever I see daffodils, or catch the breeze …” he sighs.

“I see. My superiors failed to consider this.” She nods, half to herself. “It may not be a book anymore, but it’s still a story.”

Of course it is. 

Working at the library, the Shadow learned that stories never stayed where you put them. They sprung from their author’s fingers, defied genre, challenged history, reimagined futures, and told themselves slightly differently to every person they met. No story would be content to sit untold in a locked drawer for long.

“What should I do?”

The Seamstress plucks a cherry blossom and tucks it behind her ear. The Shadow plucks another and threads it through a button of his shirt.

The Seamstress smiles. “I trusted you then, on the library steps. I still do.”

Somehow, on his way back to the bakery, he remembers to pick up strawberries.

Later, he watches his father work. There is something hypnotic about the way the bread dough is worked, something elusive about its rise. This is the kind of stuff the illusionists want to master. The natural ease of being and becoming. 

He’s so lost in watching his father’s work that he doesn’t notice his father watching him in turn.

“You look like there’s something on your mind,” he says to his son.

“I’m trying to make a difficult decision.”

“Well, if it’s difficult, it must be worthwhile.”

“I’m not so sure.”

His father hums. “Do you know why the dough rises?”

The Shadow has read dozens of books on fermentation. He could draw the life cycle of yeast and trace the cultural lineage of breads for his father, but instead, he watches him roll out sheets of dough so thin they look like pages.

He sets his elbows on the floured counter.

“Why does dough rise, Papa?”

“Because it wants to be bread.”

“It’s that simple?”

The baker hands his son a loaf, warm from the oven.

“It’s that simple.”

The Shadow thinks of the lock on the bottom drawer and looks to his father. 

“I need that key I gave you.”

First Day of Spring | Yr. 3063 | Perduna

On the first day of Spring, in a dusty, disused corner of the library, the Shadow tries to keep his hands from shaking.

The Seamstress did her job well. It took the Shadow a full year to find all the pages. He pries loose the last stitch of a dry, technical volume on navigational asymmetries and spatial aberrations. He’s impressed. If he hadn’t spent his tenure at the library learning the intricacies of paper-craft, he never would have been able to pick out the imposter. Gently, he removes a single page.

He is careful not to read a word.

He tucks it into his sleeve until he can add it to the others, piled together without order between two dark covers, tucked into the very bottom of the bottom drawer. There are no page numbers, no table of contents. He knows, somehow, that the book is complete.

He’s not the only one. 

The library stacks, usually so quiet on festival days, suddenly swarm with dark-suited silhouettes. Men approach with slack faces and perfectly charming manners. They sniff the air like hunting hounds. They circle the desk with no books in their arms. Their smiles are trapped, caught things — paralyzed halfway between predator and prey. 

For the first time in the library’s walls, the Shadow is afraid.

Each time, he gives them the same answer.

“I’m sorry. We don’t have the book you’re looking for.”

The hours pass. One by one, the men give up and slink away, but they’ll be back. The Shadow lets himself wonder, for a brief and bitter moment, if he was terribly wrong.

The late sun spills honeyed through the windows. The sounds of the festival mingle with the library’s murmur of turning pages and soft footsteps. The last patrons leave, and the library sinks into uneasy silence. It’s nearly closing time. The book sits, lifeless, in the drawer. Slowly, the Shadow gets up from the circulation desk to make his rounds.

A flicker of movement makes him pause. 

He spies someone between the shelves: a girl, as young as he’d been on the library steps so many years ago. A precarious stack of books sits in the crook of her arm. She’s walking to the desk with purpose, clearly aware of closing time, but then another book catches her eye. She stops. Tilts her head just like a bird considering a seed. Smiles, and adds the book to the stack.

The Shadow unlocks the bottom drawer of his desk. 

His footsteps walking towards her make a gentle rhythm, like the thrumming of wings.

“If you’re looking for a book, I recommend this one.”

The girl peers at the plain black book in his hand. She looks to his library badge, then back to the unmarked cover and haphazard pages. Her eyes grow wide and dark, hungry like a magpie locked onto something shining.

“What is it about?”

“Lost things. Living things.”

“All that, in one tiny book?”

“I wouldn’t know.” The Shadow smiles. “I’ve never read it. You’ll have to tell me what it’s about.”

She takes the book, curiosity plain on her face. “I will.”

Together, they walk to the checkout desk. The Bird leaves just as the sun sets. 

In the lengthening darkness, the Shadow looks less like a shadow and more like a Librarian.