The Library of All Knowledge stands at the heart of Numedios, the divine realm created by Thar Oghmus. Despite its name, the Library is not merely a collection of books, nor does it contain literal omniscience. It is an immense effort to preserve everything that has been learned, witnessed, recorded, remembered, created, or meaningfully communicated throughout Creation. Written records form only one part of that undertaking.
Its halls contain books, scrolls, tablets, maps, inscriptions, correspondence, legal records, scientific observations, religious texts, and countless other works gathered from civilizations across many worlds and planes. Some survive nowhere else. Others are preserved in thousands of contradictory versions, each carefully catalogued with its origin, context, and reliability. The scribes of Numedios do not assume that something becomes true merely because it was recorded, and they distinguish carefully between direct observation, testimony, rumor, inference, interpretation, and established fact.
A claim that a king murdered his predecessor is not transformed into truth merely because it appears in ten thousand histories. The Library preserves who made the claim, what evidence supported it, what contradicted it, and how later generations understood the event. Conflicting accounts are therefore not considered failures of the collection. They are themselves valuable records, revealing not only what may have happened but what different peoples believed had happened and why.
Beyond Written Knowledge
Thar Oghmus does not regard writing as the only meaningful way to preserve knowledge. Many things cannot be understood properly once separated from the people, senses, techniques, or circumstances through which they were known, so entire regions of the Library are devoted to forms of preservation that no ordinary archive could maintain.
Songs can be heard in the voices and musical traditions for which they were composed. Lost languages are spoken fluently by those who preserve them, and workshops maintain crafts whose last mortal practitioners died thousands of years ago. Culinary traditions are preserved through kitchens and practitioners rather than reduced to lists of ingredients, while art may be maintained alongside the techniques, materials, symbols, rituals, and cultural assumptions necessary to understand it.
The Library also preserves portions of the natural world. Gardens and enclosed environments contain plants and lesser creatures lost elsewhere in Creation, and some collections reproduce vanished landscapes so precisely that a visitor may walk through a street belonging to a city destroyed ages earlier or hear the sounds of an ecosystem that no longer survives in its native world. These recreations are not always perfect copies, but they preserve enough context to convey knowledge that would otherwise be reduced to abstraction.
Memory itself can also be preserved. Some collections cannot be read or viewed but must instead be experienced, allowing a visitor to encounter recollections willingly entrusted to the Library. Such records are treated carefully because memory carries emotion, misunderstanding, bias, and incomplete perception alongside factual information. To Thar Oghmus, those imperfections are not necessarily flaws. They are often part of what makes a memory valuable.
Stories
Stories occupy a place of particular importance within the Library because Thar Oghmus recognizes that facts alone do not preserve meaning. A chronicle may establish when a war began, how armies moved, and which ruler ultimately prevailed, yet those facts cannot fully describe what the war meant to those who endured it. A frightened soldier’s account, a child’s memory of fleeing a burning town, a song written by the victors, and a tale told generations later by the defeated may all preserve truths that no battlefield map can contain.
The scribes therefore collect folklore, family histories, oral traditions, legends, jokes, songs, personal journals, performances, and other narratives with the same seriousness they give to formal scholarship. They do not necessarily treat these accounts as literal history, but neither do they consider factual accuracy the only measure of worth. A story can preserve how a people understood themselves even when nearly every event within it is impossible, and that understanding may survive long after the people themselves are gone.
Organization
The Library has no single arrangement comprehensible to a mortal mind. Its collections are too large, too diverse, and too interconnected for any conventional system of shelves, buildings, or indexes to contain them. What appears to one visitor as a sequence of adjoining halls may extend farther than the visible boundaries of the structure should permit, while a doorway passed many times may lead somewhere entirely different when approached in pursuit of another subject.
This is not disorder. The Library is organized according to relationships between knowledge rather than ordinary physical distance. Records concerning the same event may be separated according to provenance while remaining metaphysically adjacent through subject, consequence, or interpretation. A visitor studying the construction of an ancient bridge might move naturally from engineering records into biographies of its builders, histories of the city surrounding it, geological surveys of the stone used in its construction, songs sung by the laborers, and accounts of the war that eventually destroyed it.
The scribes navigate these relationships with ease, while mortal visitors usually require guidance. A question asked too broadly may lead into collections so enormous that a lifetime would be insufficient to examine them, and the path to a useful answer often depends upon understanding what question is actually being asked. Scholars who enter Numedios expecting a simple catalogue can find the Library bewildering until they learn to think of it less as a building filled with records and more as a vast landscape shaped by connections between ideas.
The Scribes
The Library is maintained by the celestial scribes of Thar Oghmus, whose work extends far beyond copying texts. When Thar Oghmus created Numedios, he also created the first of these beings to gather, preserve, organize, interpret, and carry knowledge. They travel throughout Creation as observers, archivists, researchers, chroniclers, translators, and collectors of testimony, sometimes remaining near a single civilization for centuries and sometimes ranging continually through The Verge and distant realms.
Over time, individual scribes often develop specialties. Some devote themselves to natural phenomena, magic, war, theology, language, art, extinct peoples, or the histories of particular worlds, while others seek stories and traditions that would otherwise never be recorded. Their commitment to observation generally mirrors the neutrality of Thar Oghmus. A scribe may witness an event of terrible consequence without intervening, even when capable of doing so, if intervention would transform the observer into a participant and materially alter the course of events. This detachment has earned them admiration from those who value their impartiality and hatred from those who believe knowledge without compassion is merely another form of cowardice.
The records they bring back to Numedios are handled with great care. Whenever possible, the Library preserves not only a claim but the circumstances under which it was learned, who provided it, whether it was directly observed, what evidence supports it, and what uncertainty remains. Provenance matters deeply because the purpose of the Library is not merely to accumulate statements, but to preserve enough context that later readers can understand what may reasonably be concluded from them.
Not every scribe was created by Thar Oghmus. Some were once mortal souls judged suitable for Numedios who chose to enter the Eternal Scribe’s service. At first they remain much as they were in mortal life, carrying their individual skills, interests, memories, and habits of thought with them. Over long periods of service, however, their continuing relationship with Thar Oghmus, Numedios, and the preservation of knowledge gradually transforms them until they acquire the same celestial nature as the beings originally created to maintain the Library.
This transformation does not erase their mortal origins. A former explorer may remain drawn to distant worlds, a storyteller may spend ages preserving oral traditions, and a scholar may devote centuries to a question first encountered during mortal life. Their identities persist because their service gives them new relationships strong enough to replace the mortal connections that slowly weaken after death. In this way, the scribes are both a created celestial people and a calling into which mortal souls may eventually grow.
Secrets and Unknowns
The Library of All Knowledge is not literally complete, although keeping something hidden from Thar Oghmus and his servants indefinitely is extraordinarily difficult. Events witnessed by no one may leave too little evidence to reconstruct, knowledge can disappear when everyone who possessed it is lost, and powerful magic or divine intervention can conceal information successfully. Other mysteries remain unresolved simply because Creation has not yet produced enough evidence for a reliable answer.
There is also a rarer and more dangerous category of knowledge that Thar Oghmus deliberately refuses to place within the Library. The Eternal Scribe does not withhold information merely because it is politically inconvenient, disturbing, or dangerous in ordinary hands. When he decides that preserving an accessible record would itself create an unacceptable threat to Creation, the knowledge may remain with him alone or be excluded entirely from any collection his servants can reach. The existence of such omissions is known among the scribes, but their contents are not.
The Future
The Library contains records of prophecies, divinations, predictions, models, visions, and warnings, but they are preserved as statements about what may happen rather than accounts of events that have already occurred. Even a prophecy of exceptional reliability remains distinct from history until the predicted event actually takes place.
When such an event occurs, the Library preserves both the original prediction and the eventual outcome, including the ways in which the prophecy was fulfilled, misunderstood, avoided, or rendered irrelevant by later choices. This distinction reflects one of Thar Oghmus’s deepest convictions: Creation remains capable of producing genuinely new outcomes, and knowledge of possibility is not the same thing as possession of the future.
Access to the Library
Living mortals can reach the Library, although travel to Numedios is extraordinarily difficult. Stable Vergeways to divine realms are rare, and those leading to Numedios may be hidden, conditional, difficult to navigate, or protected by circumstances that prevent casual travel. Reaching the realm is itself often evidence of extraordinary determination, scholarship, fortune, or divine assistance.
Those who succeed are not ordinarily denied entry simply because they are mortal. Thar Oghmus values the pursuit of knowledge, but permission to enter the Library does not guarantee access to every record within it. The answer a visitor seeks may be preserved exactly as hoped, yet Thar Oghmus or his scribes may refuse to provide it when revealing the information would constitute unacceptable interference in the progression of events. In other cases, the records may be offered freely while interpretation is withheld, leaving the visitor responsible for determining what the information actually means.
The greatest danger to mortal visitors is usually not violence but abundance. No lifetime is sufficient to explore even a meaningful fraction of the Library, and one answer naturally exposes another question, which leads to another collection, another lost civilization, another mystery, and another field of study. Mortals have entered Numedios seeking a single piece of information and remained long after finding it because returning to an ordinary life meant willingly abandoning more knowledge than they could ever hope to understand. The Library does not imprison them; the temptation lies in the fact that there is always something else worth learning.
Purpose
The Library of All Knowledge exists because knowledge can be lost. Civilizations fall, languages die, memories fade, books burn, ecosystems disappear, and discoveries are forgotten. Even gods can die, and Creation itself bears scars where things once understood have become difficult or impossible to recover.
Thar Oghmus cannot prevent every loss without abandoning the neutrality he considers essential to his purpose, so Numedios serves as his answer to impermanence. The Library preserves what can be preserved, allowing Creation to retain a memory of what it has experienced even when the worlds, peoples, and cultures that produced that knowledge have disappeared.
It does not promise that every question has an answer, nor that every answer will be given to whoever asks. Its deeper promise is that what has truly been learned need not vanish merely because those who first knew it are gone.