“Achoo!”
Page Turner shook her head, wiping at her snout with the side of her hoof. Even after working in the Royal Archives for three years, she still found herself irritated by the layers of dust covering every surface of the back rooms. When she’d started, she had spent the first few weeks obsessively cleaning every surface she could find, but it just kept coming back.
Even then, most rooms weren’t as bad as this one. Her department was Ancient History, texts on civilizations long since departed, and it was ironically one of the most used parts of the Archives. Especially since, as had been found in recent years, some of those civilizations weren’t so departed after all. There were texts that had been there decades that had become completely obsolete in the short time Page had been there, thanks to Princess Twilight and her friends. As a result, barely anything sat still long enough to accrue that dreaded grey coating.
The Fiction department, on the other hoof, was a completely different story. The Archives were required, by law, to contain a copy of every single book published in Equestria. Every single shoddy romance novel, every cheap pulp fiction book… Piles upon piles of ‘literature’ with barely more merit than the paper they were printed on. There was quality fiction there, of course, but Page had found (through experience) that only about ten percent of what made it to print was actually worth reading.
What that meant was that the Fiction department was massively overstocked and, as a result, hideously understaffed. Hence both the disgusting amount of dust, and why ponies from other departments were temporarily assigned to attempt to wrangle the endless stacks into something usable.
With a tired sigh, Page brushed away more dust with her magic, making sure to keep it out of her face this time. Once the dust was cleared enough that she could actually read the spines of the books in front of her, she set out on her actual task of reshelving them with a modern sorting system. Nobody had touched these books in decades, and they were still sorted alphabetically, with no care for genre or author. It honestly made Page uncomfortable just to look at them.
Pushing a strand of her reddish brown mane out of her vision, Page got to work. She floated the checklist of shelf’s contents up to her face and started running through each book on the shelf to make sure they were all accounted for.
“Ranger Quest… Redmane… Rhombus…” Page murmured, quietly reading the titles on the spines to herself as she checked them off. “The Sad Mule… Shilic… Silk-”
Page froze, her brain processing the title she had just skimmed over. Confused, she looked back at the book, in case she had just misread the title. But she hadn’t. That same six letter word stared back at her. A nonsense word, one that couldn’t be found in any dictionary. And yet, it was a word Page was very familiar with.
Because she had been the one who had made it up. A random word that had sprung into her mind years ago, when she was just a filly. She’d had silly, childish dreams of being a mysterious, reclusive author, signing her work with the word as a mononym. Stupid, impractial dreams, ones she cringed at to think to about.
She looked back to her list. Sure enough, it had a book with that title listed as well. Assuming she wasn’t just tired and hallucinating, there was a book titled Shilic on the shelf in front of her. Weird coincidence… Page thought.
Curiosity getting the better of her, she pulled the large, black tome off the shelf with her magic, holding it in her aura’s faint green glow. The cover had no words on it, but instead a large purple symbol, one Page didn’t recognize. It was mostly circular, with a small ring in the middle surrounding a solid circle, and a rectangular extension at the bottom giving it a slight keyhole shape. Two more solid circles marked the spots where the circle jutted down, and three thin, parallel lines in the middle of the extension ran from its bottom to its top. It made Page vaguely uneasy; it had an eye-like quality, like the dot in the middle was watching her.
Slightly creeped out, Page cracked the book open to a random page and started reading.
“LOOK OUT!” Typhoon lept, grabbing Misty and pushing her out of the way just before the blade fell. The ancient axe-blade slammed into the ground, slicing off the end hairs of Typhoon’s tail.
Neither of them said anything for a while. Misty stared at Typhoon, eyes wide in fear, processing her close brush with death, while Typhoon himself breathed a sigh of relief. Eventually, Misty spoke. “T-thanks…” she muttered, flustered.
Page snapped the book shut, eyes bulging. That’s mine. I wrote that. This is one of my stories and it’s in a book here what is going on-
She felt her breathing pace increase, and she forced herself to stop, to calm down a little. Taking a deep breath, she opened the book again, scanning the pages. Sure enough, it was one of hers, word for word. One of the stories she had bits and pieces of written down in a notebook in a drawer next to her bed. This is impossible. This is all kinds of impossible.
Page ran through the possibilities in her mind. Was this a prank? Had somepony printed out her stories and placed this book here, as a joke? No, that can’t be right. She’d never shown any anypony her stories, she was too embarrassed to. And even if somepony had read them without her permission, there was no way they could have planted it; it had been covered in the same amount of dust as the rest of the shelf.
Not to mention, the book was very clearly decently old. It wasn’t in poor condition, but the slight whitening at the corners of the cover and faint yellowing of the pages indicated it was far from recently printed. It was most likely from the same timeframe as the other books on the shelf, and of them, the newest release Page recognized was around fifty years old.
She opened the book to the first page, hoping to find an author name or publisher, but she had no such luck. There was nothing on the interior cover, and the first page only held a chapter list – Page noted the name “Quake”, a character in another of her stories – and nothing else. The back cover was similarly empty, with only a stamp marking it as property of the Royal Archives. No checkout slip, meaning it was never kept in the public library parts of the Archives, nor the name of a donor.
For a while, Page just held the book in her magic in front of her. She felt slightly dizzy and light-headed, and she sat down on the floor, taking several deep, slow breaths. Eventually, she decided to finish her job first. This shelf was probably going to be the last thing she would do before clocking out, after all. Slotting the book back into the shelf, Page stood back up. With one last deep breath, she moved on the next book, trying to keep the mysterious tome out of her thoughts.
At least, out of her thoughts enough to do her job.
By the time Page finished reshelving, clocked out, gathered her things, and made her way out of the Royal Archives, it was so late it couldn’t even be called late anymore. A faint hint of light glimmered at the edge of the horizon, a sign that Princess Celestia was in the process of raising the sun.
Page didn’t mind working the nightshift. The public library part of the Archives were closed for most of it, meaning she was rarely pestered by its patrons, and most of the archives proper had no windows and were lit the same at all hours. Sometimes, Page even forgot it was the middle of the night while she was working, since there was barely a way to tell.
The sun continued to rise as she made her way home. The few ponies she passed on the way stopped to watch, but she didn’t bother. She’d seen it a thousand times, and if she was being honest, she didn’t see much special about it anyway. It was impressive how it rose, the sheer magical power of the Princess, but it didn’t strike her as particularly beautiful. She had been called weird for thinking that. She had been called weird for a lot of things.
By the time she made it back to her apartment, the sky had lightened to a pinkish color, the sun fully above the horizon. A new day had dawned, and ponies had begun to venture out of their homes, ready to greet it.
Page was glad her apartment had thick walls and blackout curtains.
She climbed the exterior stairs to the second floor, fishing her keys out of her bag. Canterlot being the kind of place it was, her apartment building wasn’t one of those boxy grey high rises found in Manehattan or Fillydelphia, but an elegant, three story building with golden railing and an honest to goodness tower that served as the penthouse. The point, Page supposed, was to make it not look like an apartment building from the outside, because that would ‘make the area look lower class’ or something otherwise.
Canterlot ponies could be such snobs sometimes.
Unlocking her door and slipping inside, Page let out a tired sigh of relief, hanging her bag on a hook. Her apartment wasn’t massive, but it was big enough for her, all things considered. A living space with her bed pushed up against the wall, a kitchen nook, a bathroom with a shower… It was nice and cozy. Considering what she was paying in rent, it ought to have been.
She glanced into her mirror. A tired unicorn mare looked back at her: Off white coat roughly the color of parchment covered in countless specks of grey dust, moderately long reddish brown mane and tail she barely bothered to style a complete disaster even in her book, murky green eyes drained of energy… she looked a mess.
I need a shower… she thought. Before anything, a nice, long, hot shower…
Nearly an hour passed by the time Page, fully washed and dried, stepped out of her bathroom. Like always, her mane and tail were still ever so slightly damp, but she never had quite gotten the trick to completely drying them down, and she always felt anxious using the hair drying spell, like her hair was about to catch fire. Regardless, the pony in the mirror looked much more energised and presentable. Not that she had anyone to present herself to.
Feeling her stomach rumble, Page moved over to the kitchen nook, opening a cupboard and pulling out a packet of instant noodles. Cooking had never been something she was particularly good at, and the old college staple worked just as well now that she was employed. Celestia bless Neighpon. Pretty sure half of all students would starve otherwise.
She filled a pot with water and placed it on her stove to boil, then broke the block of noodles into several pieces, taking a crunchy bite of one of them while she waited. In some ways, they were better dry.
Page went about cooking her meal in relative silence, occasionally humming to herself. There was nobody to talk to, after all, and Page preferred it that way. Living with somepony else sounded like a stressful nightmare. It made things quiet, but that wasn’t so bad either.
She finished boiling her noodles, poured them into a bowl, and sat it down on the small table she ate at. Before she sat down herself, however, she dug through her bag, pulling out the strange black book she had found in the archives. Since it wasn’t a rare or valuable document, she had been allowed to simply take it home with her. One of the perks of the job.
She set it down on the table as well, then moved to the drawers next to her bed. Pulling one open, she pulled out another book; a thick notebook. Her cutie mark, an open book propped up next to a stack of more books, was stitched onto the cover. A going away present from a childhood friend when she had moved off to college.
Page finally sat down, her food cooled enough that she could eat without burning her mouth. As she ate, she flipped through both books, making sure not to stain either of them. She quickly found the part she had read earlier that day, and compared it to her notebook. Sure enough, apart from a few grammar mistakes in her own writing, the archive tome was identical.
Time seemed to fly by as she compared the two books. Her food was gone before she knew it, her fork clinking against an empty bowl. Page took the briefest moment to move it to the sink before continuing her reading.
The more she read the black tome, the more things she found. All her stories were there: The tales of Quake, a stoic earth pony that wandered a post-apocalyptic Equestria, of Typhoon, a Wonderbolt roped into a quest for ancient treasures, and of Grace, a griffon diplomat uncovering a sinister conspiracy. Every little snippet she had scrawled down, every fragment of the larger narrative she never had found the time or motivation to fully write.
That wasn’t all, though. Her notebook may have only contained fragments, but the tome had everything. The full stories; every idea she’d had at work and never had the energy to write, every scene she’d been unable to make satisfying enough to put to paper, even connective tissue she’d barely thought about. Completed stories, with good pacing and satisfying endings.
More than once, Page wondered if she was just dreaming. It certainly seemed like a dream: Finding the passion projects she’d always put off in a complete state inside a book printed before she was born? That sort of thing only happened in dreams. But if it was a dream, it was an exceptionally vivid one. Her dreams weren’t ever coherent enough to pass for reality.
It wasn’t until she was at the very end of Grace’s story that Page realized there was still a fair amount of book left. She only had three stories, but the book had space for four. What, then, took up the rest of the space?
She turned the page, and froze.
Page Turner
What?
Almost instinctively, she turned the page again, reading the words printed there in a daze. It was a story… starring her. Like the rest, it was written in her style, but it was about her. She’d never written anything like that. Yet, here it was, in a tome with the rest of them.
The more she read, the more she found herself sucked in. This version of herself was slightly different than her; she worked at a museum instead of the Archives, for one thing, and she seemed slightly more meek. She also seemed to live in the near future, one where Princess Twilight had ruled alone for several decades.
The story progressed, depicting the fictional Page uncovering an ancient prophecy from a lost civilization. It certainly seemed like something Page would want to write; the historical angle led to lots of expositional tangents she found almost as interesting as the main plot. A lot of it was complete nonsense, but it was internally consistent, and that was what mattered in fiction, after all.
By the time she reached the climax, with her fictional self narrowly averting the end of the world brought about by a magical throne, Page had almost forgotten that she was supposedly reading about herself, instead treating the main character like an uncannily good reader surrogate. She read the final page, the story Page receiving a letter of invitation from Princess Twilight, and turned it, only to find nothing but the back cover, blank but for the Royal Archive stamp.
With a deep sigh, Page set the tome down, leaning back on her chair. She glanced at her clock; sure enough, she had stayed up all day reading, and it was nearly sunset. It’s a good thing I don’t have to work tonight…
She stared at the book on the desk, the symbol on the back seeming to stare back at her. Reading it had been enjoyable, but she was no closer to an answer than when she had started: How did this book exist, and why was it in the Archives? The fourth story, the one with a version of her, only raised more questions.
And the title. Or, perhaps, the author? Shilic. She’d planned to use it as a name, once, so maybe that was what it was supposed to mean. So then, what was the book’s title? Did it not have one? Was there a missing dust cover that contained that information, and more?
Page yawned. She had been so invested in reading she hadn’t noticed how tired she was, but now that she was done, the exhaustion hit her like a load of bricks. Questions for tomorrow, I guess… she thought, standing up and staggering over to bed.
“Tomorrow…” she said, out loud to herself. “There’s got to be somepony who knows something…”
She reached out with her magic, flicking off her lights, and collapsed into her bed.
“Tomorrow…”
She expected to be awake thinking to herself for ages, but she was asleep within minutes.
Outside Page’s apartment, a hooded figure looked up at her apartment. Ponies walked past them obliviously, seemingly unaware of their existence.
“So, it begins…” they said.
They turned, walking away from Page’s apartment building, but after only a few steps, they simply vanished. Not a single pony noticed, the bustle of the city continuing on in ignorance.