Mirewood Library
The Mirewood Library is the largest public collection of books, maps, records, and preserved documents within several days' travel. It serves as a place of learning, a civic archive, and a neutral meeting ground for scholars, merchants, clergy, and officials. The ground floor is open to the public and contains the general stacks, reading rooms, a map gallery, and a small copying office. The upper floor holds administrative rooms, private studies, restoration workshops, and the restricted collections.
Mirewood Library
Quiet, orderly, and welcoming. The air smells of dust, beeswax, leather, and dried herbs used to protect the older books. Sunlight falls through colored glass panels in the upper windows, and the soft sounds of turning pages, scratching quills, and distant clockwork give the building a steady rhythm. Even crowded reading rooms rarely become truly loud.
The Mirewood Library is the largest public collection of books, maps, records, and preserved documents within several days' travel. It serves as a place of learning, a civic archive, and a neutral meeting ground for scholars, merchants, clergy, and officials. The ground floor is open to the public and contains the general stacks, reading rooms, a map gallery, and a small copying office. The upper floor holds administrative rooms, private studies, restoration workshops, and the restricted collections.
Patient, observant, and quietly stubborn. Marra speaks plainly, dislikes wasted time, and has little tolerance for people who treat books as disposable objects. She is generous toward sincere students and adventurers who return what they borrow, but she becomes cold and relentless when someone threatens the library or its records.
History
Rare Tomes and Important Collections
The main collection contains histories, maps, legal records, religious texts, agricultural manuals, military treatises, genealogies, plays, and travel accounts from across the region. The most valuable works include the original charter of the river kingdom, a complete set of pre-war tax ledgers, several illustrated bestiaries, and a first-edition treatise on local ley lines. The library also holds a sealed collection of books recovered from ruined estates and abandoned wizard towers.
Restricted Collections
The west wing contains the restricted stacks, accessible only with written approval from the owner or the senior archivist. These shelves hold dangerous magical texts, banned political histories, records concerning noble scandals, and books whose contents have caused illness, nightmares, or accidental spellcasting in the past. The wing is protected by a mundane iron gate, a silent alarm bell, and a simple ward that causes unauthorized visitors to become conspicuously covered in blue ink.
Services and Research Work
Visitors may request research assistance, copy documents for a modest fee, consult maps, or reserve one of the upper reading rooms. Local scholars and guild representatives often work here during daylight hours. Adventurers may be hired to locate missing volumes, verify disputed historical claims, recover texts from dangerous sites, or determine whether a suspicious book is genuine.
Catalog and Archives
The library maintains a careful catalog divided by subject, region, language, and condition. Most books are shelved by topic, but older sections use a numbering system created by several generations of librarians. The catalog is accurate in the public rooms, though the restricted collection contains gaps, false entries, and several books that appear in the index but cannot be found on any shelf.
Denizens
Patient, observant, and quietly stubborn. Marra speaks plainly, dislikes wasted time, and has little tolerance for people who treat books as disposable objects. She is generous toward sincere students and adventurers who return what they borrow, but she becomes cold and relentless when someone threatens the library or its records.
A practical woman in her late fifties with silver-streaked hair and an exacting manner. She knows the location and condition of nearly every important item in the collection. Marra believes books should serve living people, but she will risk considerable danger to prevent valuable knowledge from being destroyed.
A thin, soft-spoken scholar who specializes in local history and disputed genealogies. He has an extraordinary memory for names and dates, but becomes evasive whenever anyone asks about his former employer, a disgraced noble family.
A young gnome with ink-stained fingers and a talent for repairing damaged manuscripts. Pella is cheerful, curious, and prone to opening books that clearly should remain closed. She has recently discovered that several volumes in the restricted stacks have been moved after midnight.
A retired caravan guard who now serves as the library's night watchman. Harl is patient with honest mistakes but immediately suspicious of anyone who avoids the reading rooms or carries a bag large enough to conceal a book. He keeps a crossbow under the front desk and knows several hidden passages left from the original manor.
A reserved half-elf researcher who studies old magical practices and pays for access to difficult texts. Sera is polite, well-informed, and apparently helpful, but she is secretly searching for a lost volume that contains instructions for binding a spirit to written words.
Rumors & Plot Hooks
- 1.A book in the restricted stacks writes a new page whenever someone in town dies under mysterious circumstances.
- 2.The library's oldest map shows a road leading beneath the town, although no such road exists today.
- 3.A former archivist hid a royal ransom somewhere among the common history shelves before vanishing.
- 4.The brass entrance clock is not broken. It is counting down to something.
- 5.Several books have been returned with damp pages that smell of river water, even though they were borrowed by people who never left town.
- 6.A noble family has been paying for private access to records about an inheritance dispute and may be preparing to forge a claim.
- 7.At least one volume in the library is an intelligent mimic that has learned to imitate an ordinary book.
Classified Entry
Beneath the records vault is a sealed chamber from the original manor. Marra believes it was built by Magistrate Voss to hide documents that could discredit several respected local families. She has never opened it because the three-key lock is connected to an old protective oath. Recently, the seal has begun to weaken, and books throughout the library have started rearranging themselves to form a sequence of directions. The chamber contains not treasure, but evidence that the river wars were prolonged by a hidden alliance between merchants, nobles, and a powerful undead adviser who may still exist.
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