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She derived such a sense of peace from this place.

Taking a look around, she saw nothing but shelves and shelves of books everywhere around her. Every table was covered in stacks and piles of books and pieces of paper, scattered all over the place as though they'd been lazily lounging about on a Sunday morning, which they were. While she, unlike most rats, didn't need to sleep to live as such, when she would feel exhausted from her work and feel like at least resting with one eye open for a while, she'd just lie down on a pile of books and scraps of paper, gathering around her as if to serve as her mattress and blanket, and she'd feel safe wrapped snugly in them the way she would be.

Rats had already been scurrying around the ancient temples of Ganesh thousands of years ago, his temples having served as places where rats had been allowed to come and go as they pleased. She'd been to these temples a few times, but she hadn't seen them in a long time. She lived a complicated life, and often had to keep going just to stay where she was, so to speak. This library made a welcoming stopping point, one she hoped she could stay in for long this time.

She didn't think of herself as a librarian as such. On some level, it was up to her to watch over these books and to make sure that nothing bad would happen to them, so that they could meet new readers someday who, by reading them anew, would give them new life of their own. While her library was secluded, if someone harmless had found it somehow, and asked to check out a book, she probably would've agreed, as unlikely as that scenario would've been. As long as they promised not to harm it, and to take good care of it, she'd even have let them keep it, without having asked for anything in return. It wasn't that kind of library.

She was more like the caretaker to her own kind of aviary, as far as she was concerned - an aviary that required a unique kind of caretaking, at that. Because she was a necromancer, a visitor might have assumed that the reason for which the books that flapped their pages as they flew around from shelf to shelf just like books flying from perch to perch flew the way they did because she was animating them in some way. In spite of this, nothing could have been further from the truth. The books flew because they had a life all of their own. She wouldn't have wanted to control them, even though she probably could've done so if she'd chosen to.

They were her pets. She wanted them to be free.

Most of them had been banned. They weren't seen as fit to be consumed by anyone, only to be consumed by the fires of hell. From her perspective, this put them in a similar situation to animals that had been reduced to near-extinction because of over-hunting. As she saw it, her banned books were the same as an endangered species, and her library was really a nature preserve in which she hoped they could thrive. The Middle Ages had seen her spend a lot of time working as a scribe by candlelight secluded from public society, pouring over and copying page after page of manuscripts that, if she hadn't copied them, would've completely disappeared.

It wasn't that she agreed with the content of every single one. There were so many contradictions between all of the different points that their authors had all been trying to make that she couldn't possibly have agreed with all of them, even if she'd wanted to. It wasn't a kind of package deal like that. But just as for biodiversity, she felt that it was important that no species of books be altogether eradicated, because every species played a role in its ecosystem, however troublesome it could be. She sometimes had to separate some of her books that disagreed the most with each other from fighting, as one separates a cat and dog that one both keeps as pets.

On some level, she accepted all of them, even though some of them had caused harm to others because of their existence. She was not all goddess, but half-goddess, half-demon, after all. Memory was good, she believed. Knowledge was always better than ignorance. But everyone also carries painful memories, memories that they sometimes wish that they could get rid of, even if it meant losing some of the good memories associated with them. She didn't always know if she could have defended her existence as ethical, but she existed. Like everything else that existed, she had a survival instinct - she did everything she could to continue to exist.

A fidgety notebook came fluttering into the room through one of the library's windows while she was using one of her own pigeon feathers dipped in ink to write on a piece of parchment by candlelight. Putting aside her work, she extended her arm up like a falconer so that the notebook could come down to her from the window and could perch itself on her finger. The notebook was reporting back to her from a scouting mission that it had gone on, exploring their surroundings for signs of danger for her to watch out for. She'd been awaiting its return with some measure of trepidation, and whatever it had to communicate to her seemed important.

The notebook positioned itself so that she could hold her ink-dipped pigeon feather in her other hand near it in a way in which the notebook could scratch its own 'back' made of its own pages against the feather. The notebook looked like it was trying to scratch a persistent itch, but what it was really doing was that it was using her feather to write against its own back, having learned how to do it so that she could read it. The notebook struggled in its nervousness not to shake too much, so that the writing on its papery back would remain legible enough for the rat to have been able to read it well enough, but it wrote fast, like its life depended on it.

Which it did. They'd found her, just as she'd always lived in fear that they would in time.

She was always trying to stay just a step ahead of them, but they'd never made it easy on her, and she knew they weren't about to start anytime soon. When they'd sent Graograman the Rainbow Death after her back in ancient times, with his quicksand shapeshifting abilities and his theoretically infinite color-based elemental powers, she'd had no choice but to release all of her books by using a secret mechanism to open up the ceiling of the library that she'd kept them in at the time. Every time she'd hear people talk about 'releasing books' around her, she'd been grimly reminded of when she'd been forced to do that.

If it had been for a better reason, it would probably have looked quite beautiful from the outside, she couldn't help but muse. At the time, the Romans had loved to release flocks of doves at major events. It had represented a form of celebration to them. In some ways, her release of books would probably have looked at least somewhat similar to those events from the perspective of an external observer.

Of course, the reason she'd had to release them had been that, if she hadn't, the Cat's Eye would have captured them and would have burned them all. Her books had all flown away from her library to go hide in different locations because it had been the only way that she'd had to save them from utter destruction at the hands of her pursuers. She certainly hadn't felt very celebratory about it. It had been very difficult for her to track them back down after the fact.

As inconvenient as it had been for her, she still would have gladly taken having had to do it again to the risk of losing them for good. Be that as it may, this was not an option that was even available to her this time. The Cat's Eye may have wanted to destroy her, but they sure seemed to have memory when it came to remembering the tricks that she had used to evade them before well enough to be prepared to counteract them if she ever tried to use the same trick to get away from them more than once. She always had to dig new rat holes in the walls around her to serve as escape hatches when their whiskered noses would catch a whiff of her scent once more.

This time, they had sent as a duo Sieg, the fascist white tiger magician with his flaming hoops, smoke and mirrors, and Cali the four-armed calico with her fire swords and flying skulls. They loved fire, burning books, rats and witches eagerly. Seven out of nine members of the Cat's Eye would have posed no threat to the rat one-on-one. She could've handled any of them on her own without any problem. Two of them, she was able to sort of juggle for a certain amount of time that could partly depend on various outside factors, and also on which specific combination of them they would have sent against her. Some of them made better teams than others.

They were always experimenting with different teams. When they'd send three against her, she couldn't stick around and stand her ground nearly as much. Three was her limit. When they would send three, all that she could do was to run, run as fast as she could, and not look back, even if it cost her because she had to leave something behind to be destroyed to do it in spite of the regrets that she would know that she would have about it after the fact.

The only ones that were able to pose a threat to her on their own had been Graograman and their queen Entropy. Entropy's abilities against memory were so powerful that the rat had not remembered any of the times that she had been up against her. Out of everything else, the rat remembered all of her own life in minor detail ever since when whatever it was that they all were had come into existence.

There were only a handful of pockets of time in her life that the rat didn't remember, that had been completely 'blacked out' of her mind. She'd reconstructed Entropy's existence by a process of deduction based on what she did remember that she had been doing before and after these blackouts had happened to her. The rat had perceived Entropy's only by what she didn't see, the way you make out the outline of someone whose image was cut out of a magazine.

What this amounted to was that she had to come up with a new way to protect her books from them while still escaping from them herself that they hadn't already seen coming and prepared for. The times when they'd caught her before had been extremely unpleasant, and she was not looking forward to ever repeating the experience, if she could avoid it. She thought about it intently as precious seconds ticked by, and finally came up with something.

She grabbed her flute and, bringing it to her lips, began to play.

The books, notebooks, and pieces and scraps of paper that were scattered all over the library around her rose off the ground and, slowly, began to swirl in the air around her, as if she was creating a small whirlwind around herself to draw them in. After she had been playing for a few seconds, it became apparent that they were picking up speed, moving in the air around her faster and faster as she played. For a moment it seemed as though she was going to go off running away from the library to be followed by her books where she would go, just as the pied piper would have been followed by rats, even though she wanted to save books, not drown them.

This would have drawn far too much attention for what was required by the circumstances of her current situation, though. The Cat's Eye would have spotted something like that a mile away, so she'd had to come up with something else, something that they wouldn't have been able to see and track quite as easily. No, instead of that, she was going to leave the books right where they were, to hide them in plain sight, where the Cat's Eye would never find them, where they would never even think to look for them, until she could afford to come back to pick them up where she would have left them later, when they wouldn't notice that she would.

The books, notebooks, and pieces of paper that were swirling in the air around her as she played slowly began to merge with the shelves, tables and the columns that formed the library that she had been living in with them itself. The wood and paper that they were all made from melded together into different, discrete shapes than they had become used to by then, shapes that they had not known for longer than most of them could even remember. She was a necromancer.

They were trees.

All of her books and library had coalesced back into the shapes that they had first known during their previous lives, before they had been known and books and library, back when they had first been the trees that all of her books and library had been constructed from after they had been killed. All necromancers could bring back the dead to a semblance of their former lives. She was just the only necromancer that she had known who had ever brought back to un-life such a large amount of dead trees. Out of all undead armies, hers would be the least likely to ever be detected by anyone, just as she'd wanted it to be.

When she had remained as the only one remaining who had not been transformed yet, still playing her flute in the middle of what was now a forest around her, the maw of a large snake made out of wood seemed to come up out of the ground around her feet. As it seemed to swallow her up, hiding her in the hollow tree trunk that was formed by the body of the wood snake, the wood snake's maw opened up wider and wider until it started splitting itself into various branches over her head. Using the last of the flute's magic, she transformed her head and arms into three feral pigeons, and transformed her feet and torso into three feral rats.

The feral pigeons flew up to the snake tree's branches and the feral rats scurried to its roots as she started thinking about where she would go next. All three pigeons and three rats would have to split up to take separate, unrelated routes only to rejoin at a single location much later on, to reduce the likelihood of them being spotted and tracked to the rest of them, because it would be less conspicuous that way. But which location should that be?

She would have to find somewhere where she would not draw too much attention, somewhere where even a creature that was as unusual as she was would seem commonplace...