The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)
Olivie Blake
to my physicist boy
and my starry-eyed girl
and to LORD OLIVER,
for all the punches.
BEGINNING.
PERHAPS IT WAS A TIRED THING, all the references the world had already made to the Ptolemaic Royal Library of Alexandria. History had proven it endlessly fascinating as a subject, either because the obsession with what it might have contained was bounded only by the imagination or because humanity typically longs for things most ardently as a collective. All men can love a forbidden thing, generally speaking, and in most cases knowledge is precisely that; lost knowledge even more so. Tired or not, there is something for everyone to long for when it comes to the Library of Alexandria, and we have always been a species highly susceptible to the call of the distant unknown.
Before it was destroyed, the library was said to contain over four hundred thousand papyrus scrolls on history, mathematics, science, engineering, and also magic, which advanced in scope and progress as much as any other topic of study. Many people incorrectly assume time to be a steady incline, a measured arc of growth and progress, but when history is written by the victors the narrative can often misrepresent that shape. In reality, time as we experience it is merely an ebb and flow, more circular than it is direct. Social trends and stigmas change, and the direction is not always forward. Magic is no different.
The little-known truth of the matter is that the Library of Alexandria burned down to save itself. It died to rise again, in something less metaphorically phoenix-like and more strategically Sherlockian. When Julius Caesar rose to power, it became obvious to the ancient Caretakers that an empire could only sit successfully upon a chair of three legs: subjugation, desperation, and ignorance. They knew, too, that the world would forever be besieged by similar pursuits of despotism, and therefore determined that such a valuable archive of wisdom would have to be carefully hidden in order to survive.
It was an old trick, really, death and disappearance so to start again, which depended entirely on the library’s ability to keep its own secret. The medeians, the most learned among the magical population, were permitted to use the pieces they squirreled away so long as they accepted an equal obligation to care for them. In the society that grew from the library’s remains, privileges for its members were as unmatched as their responsibilities. All the knowledge the world possessed existed at their fingertips, and all they had to do in return was continue to nurture it, to make it grow.
As the world spread—expanding beyond the libraries of Babylon, Carthage, Constantinople to the collections of Islamic and Asian libraries lost to imperialism and empire—so did the Alexandrian archives, and as their influence expanded, so did the so-called Society itself. Every ten years a new class of potential initiates was chosen. The candidates spent one year in training, learning the functions of the archives and what would eventually become a lifelong craft. It was, in many ways, comparable to a doctorate or a fellowship. For one year, each individual selected for the Society lived, ate, slept, and breathed the archives and their contents, with five of the six potential candidates being inducted at the end of the year. Following that, the new initiates rigorously pursued their course of study for an additional year before being presented with the opportunity to stay and continue their work, or, more likely, to accept a new offer of employment. Alexandrians typically went on to be political leaders, patrons, CEOs and laureates. The truly curious would remain behind and vie for positions as Caretakers. What awaited an Alexandrian after initiation was wealth, power, prestige, and knowledge beyond their wildest dreams, and thus, to be chosen to sit for initiation was the first in a lifetime of endless possibility.
This was what Dalton Ellery relayed to the most recent class of initiates, none of whom had been informed why they were there or what they would be competing for. Likely they did not yet grasp that by virtue of standing in that room, Dalton Ellery was himself a uniquely skilled medeian, the likes of which they would not encounter again for generations, who had chosen this path over the many others he might have taken. He, like them, had once discarded the person he might have been and the life he might have lived—which would have been ordinary by comparison, most likely. He would have had a profession of some sort, perhaps even a lucrative one, folding into the mortal economy in some useful way, but witnessing nothing like what he’d seen by virtue of his acceptance. He might have done exceptional magic, but would have fallen shy of extraordinary himself. Inevitably he would have succumbed to mundanity, to struggle, to boredom, as all humans eventually did—but now, because of this, he wouldn’t. The pittances of a shrunken existence would count among the many things he would never again encounter from the moment he’d taken his seat in this room.
He looked out at their faces and imagined again the life he might have lived; the lives they all might have lived had they never been offered such… riches. Eternal glory. Unparalleled wisdom. Here they would unlock the secrets the world had kept from itself for centuries, for millennia. Things no ordinary eyes would ever see, and which no lesser minds could possibly understand.
Here, their lives would change. Here their former selves would be destroyed, like the library itself, only to be built back up again and hidden in the shadows, never to be seen except by the Caretakers, by the Alexandrians, and by the ghost of lives uncrossed and paths untaken.
Greatness isn’t easy, Dalton didn’t say, nor did he add that greatness was never offered to anyone who couldn’t stand to bear it. He merely told them of the library, of their paths to initiation, and of what stood within reach—if they only had the courage to reach out and grasp it.