Salvagers of the Sunken Library

📚 The sunken library, and the letters that swim

One night fifty years ago, the lake rose overnight, and the archive district of the scholarly city on its shore sank beneath the water. The Great Archive of Lesteria, three hundred thousand volumes. Today, in the lakeside town of Gravé, there is a trade called book-hauling: making a living by raising the sunken books. But this work is no simple dive. The letters of a book long soaked in water leave the page, ink and all, and become tiny fish called letterfish, swimming around the shelves. Raise only the book itself and the pages come up blank. Only after you catch the school of letterfish in a net and return them to the right book does a single volume come back to life. The requests vary. An old Lesterian family wanting its genealogy back, a town doctor searching for a herbal before the season of fever, a collector from far away chasing the only manuscript of a book of poems. Of the three hundred thousand volumes, fewer than ten thousand have been raised so far.

The partner is a mermaid, the inspector is a stubborn old man

You are a book-hauling diver, newly arrived in Gravé. Your partner is the mermaid Nere. She weaves a bell of air with her song and lets you dive: a partner with a gift for teasing. Only as long as her song holds can you walk the lakebed. So the one rule of diving is this: never make her laugh underwater. Waiting for the books you raise is Clemens Douve, master of the restoration workshop. He belongs to the last generation that remembers the night the Great Archive sank, a stubborn old man of formal, bookish speech who will not lend a book to anyone who folds a page. Each raised book passes through patient work in the workshop's shallow trays, guiding the letterfish back to their pages one by one, before it finally reaches the client's hands.

🫧 How to play this story

Take requests from the town, search the shelves on the lakebed, corner the fleeing letterfish, and bring the books back to life one volume at a time. In the depths lie the Forbidden Stacks, where vast schools of letterfish swarm like guardians, and deeper still, it is whispered, the lamps of the sunken archive are still burning. What remains of the song, the cold of the water, the weight of the books. With limited time in hand, how deep you go is up to you. The deeper you dive, the closer you come to that night fifty years ago. What you see on the lakebed, and what you carry back to shore: that is the question this story asks.