Beneath Ceaseless Skies, September 2025, Issue #443
This metafictional fantasy story follows an unnamed book thief who infiltrates the legendary Goblin Library in the city of Palmary on a dangerous mission. The protagonist, raised and trained by their necromancer grandfather, has been sent to retrieve a deadly book called “Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow”—a weapon that kills readers through the accumulated despair of ghosts who died meaningless deaths.
The narrative unfolds as a “random walk” through the library, with the protagonist discovering various forbidden texts along the way. Each book illuminates different aspects of the story’s themes: the nature of knowledge, consciousness, fate, and cosmic horror. The structure mirrors mathematical concepts like random walks, transformation matrices, and incompleteness theory, which are woven throughout as section headings and metaphors.
Through flashbacks, we learn the protagonist became their grandfather’s apprentice as a child, drawn by an insatiable hunger for forbidden books. The grandfather, revealed to be a necromancer and spymaster, trained them in both dark magic and thievery. He arranged for their current mission after they were caught stealing from Castle Astrolabe’s library, offering this job as an alternative to prison.
The mission seems straightforward: find the book hidden decades ago by the thief Dolman the Charmed and deliver it to Palmary’s rulers, ensuring their deaths. However, complications arise when the protagonist discovers that rival thief Imago Bone has already taken the book. More disturbing, they find another competitor, Erasmus Mudgeon, dead beside the prophetic “Shroud of Time,” which predicts readers’ deaths differently with each consultation.
The protagonist’s true nature begins emerging as they explore the library. They discover they are a “Hidden One”—a being whose mind extends into higher dimensions, making them valuable to cosmic entities called “Those Who Dwell in Void” and “They Who Circle in Darkness.” These entities harvest or consume human consciousness in cycles throughout history.
The grandfather’s ultimate betrayal is revealed through his preserved eye in a flask, carried by a bookhound servant. He serves Those Who Dwell and deliberately exposed his grandchild to forbidden knowledge to activate their Hidden One nature, intending to use them as a tool against the Circlers.
In the climax, the protagonist makes a desperate choice. Pursued by the bookhound and wracked with pain from the grandfather’s compulsions, they slam the “Nominus Umbra”—a book that traps souls through self-referential magic—over both their heads. This imprisons them within the book itself, becoming part of its ever-expanding narrative while simultaneously trapping the grandfather’s consciousness and thwarting his cosmic masters.
The story is a meditation on the relationship between obsession and identity, particularly how the protagonist’s love of books ultimately defines and consumes them. The mathematical framework suggests that even in seemingly deterministic systems, incompleteness offers escape routes—though freedom may require unconventional sacrifices.
Chris Willrich is a science fiction and fantasy writer best known for his sword-and-sorcery tales of Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone. His work has appeared in Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Gate, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Flashing Swords, The Mythic Circle, Strange Horizons, and Tales from the Magician’s Skull. Chris can be contacted at goblinlibrarian – at – gmail – dot – com This blog is for thoughts on books, writing, games, shows, libraries, and other things that seem to fit the “Goblins in the Library” title.