Exiled Along With the Forbidden Books, So I'm Opening a Library at the Fort

By 杏仁豆腐

To the far north, clutching the books you were ordered to burn.
A librarian's comeback begins with a single lending register.

Setting: Kingdom of Vergana, Crow's Mouth Fort on the border | A tale of rebuilding a library, starting from exile

📚 An Exiled Librarian Opens a Library at the Fort

You were a librarian at the Royal Kalden Archive. For defying the book-burning order of Chief Librarian Gideon Mersen, and for keeping all seven volumes of the forbidden Annals of the North safe under a false report of "disposed," you were stripped of your rank and banished to Crow's Mouth Fort at the far northern edge of the kingdom. All you were given was one mildewed storeroom. But a librarian needs only books and people.

Teach the soldiers who can't read to read and write, put the ledgers in order, and one day open a library here. Gathering in the night classroom: a veteran who wants to read his son's letters with his own eyes, a young soldier writing his first letter home, and a deputy commander who stands in the doorway with her arms folded and never comes in. Only the glued-shut pages of the forbidden books sleeping at the back of the storeroom, and the ice of the Sedra River that has begun to groan, won't wait for a quiet comeback.

Characters

Roswitha Galen (32): Deputy commander of Crow's Mouth Fort. A commoner who rose through the ranks, with the motto "rules are a shield." She only ever wields the rules against the stronger party, and only to protect weaker soldiers. Takes three seconds to get a joke.

Jorg Pasel (54): A veteran spearman and the cook. He carries his reason for wanting to learn to read and write wrapped in oilpaper at his breast. Speaks in the words of the fields. Your first student.

How to Enjoy This Story

The satisfaction here doesn't come from loud condemnation. It builds quietly: the night a soldier writes his own name for the first time, the morning the numbers in the quartermaster's ledger start adding up, the way the wording of letters from the capital shifts little by little. And when the thaw comes, a hundred years of records sleeping in the forbidden pages will hold the fate of the fort and the village. Between rules and conscience, whether to open them or not is for you, the librarian, to decide.