Silas was not human, not entirely. He was a , built eighty years ago by a melancholic inventor who wanted his library to never sleep. Silas’s chest housed a delicate system of gears and a single, humming vacuum tube that served as his heart.
Silas returned to his dusting, his gears moving softly. He had thousands of books, but in that moment, he felt the faint, unfamiliar thrumming in his vacuum tube heart—a fleeting desire to read it himself. He knew he never would, for his purpose was to serve, not to consume. ja_jij
In the city of Oakhaven, where the rain smelled faintly of ozone and old parchment, Silas ran a library that didn’t exist on any map. It was housed inside the hollowed-out carcass of a massive, decommissioned cathedral clock tower. Silas was not human, not entirely