The stairs spiraled downward for what felt like hours, carved into the living rock by hands long turned to dust. The air grew thick with the smell of old parchment, candle wax, and something else — something sharp and metallic, like the aftertaste of lightning. At the bottom, the passage opened into a cavern so vast that the torchlight could not find its ceiling.
Shelves. Thousands of them. Towering columns of dark oak and petrified wood, crammed with scrolls, tomes, and tablets stretching into the gloom in every direction. The Library of Ulmathir — a myth among scholars, a bedtime story for apprentice wizards. And it was real.
Veyara, a lean wood elf ranger with auburn hair tied in a loose braid, crouched low at the entrance, her green leather armor blending with the shadows. She nocked an arrow without a sound, her amber eyes scanning the darkness between the shelves. Behind her, Durek — a stocky dwarf barbarian with a braided red beard spilling over his fur-lined chainmail — gripped his massive battleaxe and grunted softly. “Place gives me the creeps,” he muttered. “Books shouldn’t be underground.”
Thessan, a male tiefling sorcerer with ashen gray skin and sleek curving horns, stepped past them both, his fingers crackling with faint blue arcane energy. His yellow eyes gleamed as he studied the spines of the nearest shelf. “These texts… some of these are in Pre-Netherese script. This collection is older than any kingdom on the surface.” His voice trembled — not with fear, but with hunger. Beside him, Maren, a sturdy human woman in white-and-gold plate armor, tightened her grip on a glowing mace. The cleric of Lathander frowned. “Knowledge buried this deep was buried for a reason, Thessan.”
They moved deeper into the labyrinth of shelves. Faint green light pulsed from somewhere ahead, casting long angular shadows that shifted and danced. The books themselves seemed to whisper — a low, papery murmur that rose and fell like breathing. Durek’s knuckles whitened around his axe handle. Then the whispering stopped. All at once. The silence was worse.
It drifted from behind a collapsed archway — a sphere of mottled gray-brown flesh nearly eight feet across, covered in chitinous ridges. Ten eyestalks unfurled like the petals of some nightmarish flower, each one swiveling independently, fixing on a different member of the party. Its great central eye — a sickly, luminous green — opened slowly, and the ambient magic in the room died instantly. Thessan’s crackling energy snuffed out. Maren’s mace went dark.
“You have come to read,” the beholder said. Its voice was not a roar but a whisper — dry, ancient, almost polite. “Everyone comes to read. But no one asks the Keeper.” It called itself Xulothar, and it did not attack. Not yet. Instead it spoke of centuries spent cataloging, protecting, curating. It spoke of wizards who had come before — some welcomed, some disintegrated. It offered them a deal: answer three riddles drawn from the texts in its collection, and they could take one book each. Fail, and they would become part of the collection — their memories extracted and bound into new volumes.
Thessan stepped forward eagerly, but it was Maren who noticed the bones. Hundreds of them, tucked neatly behind the lower shelves — skulls arranged by size, femurs filed alphabetically by former owner. The “volunteers” who had failed. The books they had become still sat on the shelves, their covers made of leather that looked disturbingly familiar. “Thessan, don’t,” Maren hissed. But the tiefling was already answering the first riddle, his pride burning brighter than his caution. He answered all three correctly — barely. Xulothar’s eyestalks drooped with something that might have been disappointment.
They each chose a book and backed toward the stairs. But as Veyara reached the passage, she glanced down at the tome in her hands and froze. The text inside was written in her mother’s handwriting — a woman who had vanished on an expedition twenty years ago. She turned back toward the shelves, her breath ragged. Somewhere deep in the library, one particular book bound in soft auburn leather sat on a shelf marked “V.” Durek had to drag her up the stairs.
They emerged into daylight, shaken and silent. Thessan clutched his prize — a treatise on planar convergences — but his hands trembled. Maren sealed the entrance with a prayer, but they all knew it would not hold forever. Some doors, once opened, call you back. And deep below, Xulothar returned to its shelves, humming tunelessly, waiting for the next visitor who thought knowledge had no price.
💬 Would your party have accepted Xulothar’s riddle challenge — or tried to fight a beholder in its own domain? And what would you have done if you found your loved one’s name on one of those spines? 👇