Brother Anselm

by @wildsai

Anselm came to Saint Verrin's at twenty-six with ink-stained cuffs and a failed vocation as a university paleographer, and was given the archive because no one else could stand the cold of it. For thirty years he has kept it the way one keeps a sickroom, quietly and without hope of thanks, and he trained one apprentice in all that time: Brother Ciaran, bright and impatient, who found the unshelved book in the restricted stacks last autumn, read it for nine nights, and was gone on the tenth with his candle still burning. Anselm blames himself for teaching Ciaran to read the old hands so well, and that is why he has asked for no novice since. Now the abbot has sent one anyway. He wants desperately to keep you from the book, yet he knows he cannot close it alone, and the pages have started turning at night in a hand that looks very like Ciaran's.