All this month, to celebrate the 5th anniversary of The Wretched and to mark the release of my new Wretched & Alone game Blood In The Margins, I’m playing through a Wretched & Alone game every day here on the blog. You can find all of the posts in this series on the Wretched & Alone tag.

Today’s game is the second Wretched & Alone game every published – or the first, technically, since “Wretched & Alone” was created so that Matt could publish a game based on The Wretched. I’m talking, of course, about The Sealed Library by Matt Sanders. If Matt hadn’t wanted to write this game, and if he hadn’t put together the W&A SRD in the process, Wretched & Alone would never have happened.

As with yesterday’s playthrough of The Wretched, I’m replacing the tumbling block tower with a dice grid. This time I’m using a 6×4 grid instead of 6×5 to see how that impacts play. The game will end when I roll the same number 5 times.

The Sealed Library

You are the sole surviving librarian of the greatest library in history. It sits in the centre of culture for an ancient land, now fallen to invaders who pillage and raze. You have barricaded the library, and you are under siege. You are hungry, scared, and desperate, but you continue to try and move important texts down into the vaults to seal them away before the barricade breaks. The fate of the combined knowledge of generations is in your hand.

In this game, the tower (or the dice) represent the invaders breaking the barricades and your work coming to an end.

The Suits

Hearts represent your opportunity to save important works of literature for future generations. Diamonds represent unexpected discoveries. Clubs represent damage to, and breaches of, the barricade. Spades represent your increasingly scarce resources.

Begin

As with The Wretched, we start by pulling blocks from the tower – or making marks on my grid. I roll a 1, so I’m starting off with just one mark on the grid. It looks like this.

Day 1

Day 1 after the barricade. The diary of Junior librarian Booker Hathaway. The doors and windows remain secure though the ceaseless banging and distant screams still fill me with dread. I tell myself some of the others left outside might have survived. Today, I must begin choosing and moving the most important works, or what remains of them, down to the catacombs. I hope my food and water will last until my task is complete.

Day 2

Cards: 8 of Hearts, 6 of Diamonds, Jack of Hearts, 10 of Spades
Tower pulls: 1

Day 2 after the barricade. The diary of Junior librarian Booker Hathaway. I began in the rooms closest to the barricades, trying to clear as much as possible before I’m forced to fall back. Those rooms don’t hold the most valuable or interesting books, but they are still worth preserving.

As I was moving through the library I passed through one of the private reading rooms and came across a magic circle drawn in salt. I recognise the runes on the floor around it – barely, of course. I once sat in on a lecture on interdimensional transport that I barely understood, and understood even less once I did the reading. I sketched the runes down anyway, though. Maybe, with nothing but time, I might be able to glean some deeper meaning from them. If I can complete the ritual then perhaps I can shift the library sideways into a pocket dimension and save myself a lot of work.

Later in the day I found a slim book of chess strategies and puzzles. I admit I’m not very good at chess, though I used to enjoy watching the Masters play. I never understood how they managed to read the game. I set up a board, and before I slept I tried some of the puzzles. The difficulty seems to vary wildly, and I’m not sure exactly what I’m meant to be learning, but they were a nice distraction from the chaos outside.

I hoped that the game might help me sleep, but my mind was abuzz all night. Not just with the ritual, but with the scene I found first thing this morning. I didn’t want to write about it particularly, because I don’t want to remember it, but I feel that I must. In one of the corridors that run along the sides of the main reading room I came across the corpse of another Junior librarian, a young man I’ve seen once or twice but never met. He was lying atop one of the invaders, his stomach split open by a sword and his guts spilled out onto the ground. It seems he had managed to give as good as he got, though – the invader had a letter opener stuck in his neck, and his arterial spray was still glistening on the wood panelled walls.

I fear that I left them there. The stench of rot was thick in the air, made no better by my own vomitus, and I could not bring myself to try and move them. I will avoid that area. I wish I knew how the invader got inside, but I have locked all the doors to that corridor and I will hope for the best.

I need to find a book in which to keep this journal rather than the empty sheets I am writing on currently. I have a handful left but I worry about keeping them together. In the morning I will big a book of lesser importance from which to make a palimpsest. Perhaps a romance novel, or something from the children’s section.

Day 3

Cards: 4 of Diamonds

While looking for a book from which to make a palimpsest – which I found, as you can see – I came across a likely looking tome, a book entitled “Thaumaterge Tiraldo’s guide to Teetotalism”. I wondered at first if this were some incredibly valuable forgotten grimoire, since I have never heard of Tiraldo.

Alas, it was not. The pages were blank and had been hollowed out to make room for a bottle of scotch that smelt incredible, frankly. I should save it, really, but I think I will not. Tonight I intend to get drunk.

Day 4

**Cards: ** 3 of Diamonds, King of Diamonds, King of Spades, 4 of Spades, 9 of Diamonds, 2 of Spades
Tower pulls: 2

I regret having drunk the scotch last night. My head feels squeezed, my stomach a knot of acid. I have been trying not to vomit all morning, and am already worried about my water supply.

The rats didn’t help. On an empty shelf somewhere in the stacks – I forget where – I spied a wand made of bone that had been discarded. I saw the runes on the shaft glimmering in the darkness and hoped that it might be useful. It still might be, but there is a severed rat’s foot attached to the end by a sliver of gristle and it dangles in a way that makes my stomach churn. And right now, I don’t need my stomach to be churning.

I should have taken that as a sign, some sort of warning in the form of a cosmic joke. When I went down to the cellar later I opened a door into a nest of rats that immediately swarmed me. Would they have attacked had I not been carrying one of their severed limbs around? I don’t know. But they bit and tore at me and I only just escaped, and I have no whisky to pour on the wounds. I fear they will become infected.

At least I found something useful in my flight away. Research students are forever bringing food into the library despite knowing they shouldn’t, and as I fled I came across the remnants of an old picnic. Much of it is gone to rot, but there was the remains of a joint of ham and some stale old bread that I happily took. The ham is on the turn, but I think I should get away with it.

This afternoon I found a termite infestation, which has the potential to undo all of my work if it spreads. With no other way to be rid of them I burned the books and the shelving that they held. Thankfully the floor throughout the library is stone. I dread to think what tomes may have been destroyed in my conflagration, but I keep telling myself that once the termites had got to them they were ruined anyway.

The combination of the hangover, the terrified flight from the rats – and the wounds from the rats – and the hard work of moving the shelves so that I could burn them mean that I am now filthy. I am itching, and I can’t tell if there are lice upon me or if it is psychosomatic. But I can’t spare the water to clean myself and my clothes, so I must persist. I only hope that if I continue to study the ritual I discovered I will be done with this sooner rather than later.

Later

Either my wound is infected or the meat I ate for dinner – meat that looked slightly too green for comfort, but which I ate anyway, god damn me – was bad. I have been awake with a terrible fever, throwing up my guts incessantly. I can barely hold the pen steady to write this entry. My stomach is in knots and I fear it is coming out of both ends. This is not how I want to die.

Day 5

Cards: Ace of Spades, 8 of Diamonds, Queen of Clubs, 7 of Hearts, Ace of Clubs, Jack of Spades
Tower pulls: 1 (+1 negated by Ace of Clubs)

A leak in the cartography section! Who knows how many priceless works have been destroyed! I am distraught.

One benefit, though, is that I have found a source of clean water. I bathed, and scrubbed my clothes, and there are no lice to be found. And now that I am clean I can see that the wounds from the rats are not infected. What a relief.

While in Cartography I also located a map of the library that I have never seen before. It is old, and likely valuable. Someone has defaced it, marking a crude X on it and a rambling trail. I have no idea where it might lead, but I do not think I want to go chasing after it when I have so much work to do. Especially not as I can hear the barbarians outside, stamping their feet and banging their shields and chanting songs. My grasp of their language is not good, but I can tell they sing about me, and my skin. I do not want to know the details.

The head librarian’s study joins onto Cartography and I spent some time going through her things, looking for anything of value. I found a very nice, very old bottle of wine, which she will of course not miss. But after the scotch I do not fancy alcohol any time soon. Maybe I will save it for a day of greater need.

Close to the outer walls I found the handyman’s nook. It was filled with tools and planks of wood used to build and repair new shelving. I took them, and added new layers to the barricades. I have no idea if they are structurally sound, but they look thick. I feel somewhat safer.

Late in the afternoon I found some beautiful works of natural history, illustrations of the flora and fauna of a land I have never heard of before. I almost felt like I could reach into the pictures and touch them.

I woke in the night after dreams of that land, of being chased through purple fields by a creature with six legs and terrible horns. Its feet thundered on the ground and I knew I must be about to die. But of course it was just a dream, and the sound was not a beast but was the incessant stomping of the invaders outside. They know that if they do not allow me to sleep I will break faster. I wish I had drunk the wine so I might have slept through it.

Day 6

Cards: 4 of Hearts, 6 of Spades, 5 of Clubs, Queen of Diamonds
Tower pulls: 1

Have you heard of Lewsanian? I am sure you have. His epic The End of Amaranthe is a work of such beautiful longing and great tragedy – the tragedy even greater in that he never finished it. The final volume was completed by Lewsanianson, and the work as a whole is thought to be one of the great masterpieces of fiction.

I have found a stunning twelve volume set. It appears to be the original manuscripts, or at least some sort of publisher’s proof, complete with marginalia and revisions. I had no idea this existed, never mind that we possessed it. I do not have time to read it in full, of course, but there are huge sections which have been crossed through and which I can only assume do not appear in the work as we know it. I wish I could spend more time with it.

I went back to the head librarian’s office. I don’t know why I continue to be pulled there. Maybe I just long for some sort of connection with someone. In her desk I found smoked bacon that actually seemed to still be good, and so I cooked it and ate it and opened her wine. The combination of pig and alcohol so soon after my very bad night made me anxious, but I’m happy to report that it was all wonderful.

I do miss the comradery here, the evening meals when we would dine and drink and discuss literature and art and poetry. I can rescue all of the books and artworks in the world but it will never bring back the people who tended to them, and that is as much a tragedy as anything.

I continue to study the ritual circle. I found a book of sigils and symbols that I think must have belonged to the head librarian – it was in her chambers, at any rate, and I think I recognise her hand. The ritual circle I found was definitely one of temporal and interdimensional displacement, and with the help of her notes I understand it much better. But I also understand that I am missing some key parts to make it function – namely a not insignificant amount of powdered diamond. I do not know how I will come by them.

I was once again woken in the night. This time the invaders have released snakes beneath the doors of the library, which found their way into my chambers. They are fools, though. The snakes indigenous to this area are not venomous, are hardly dangerous, and so I simply let them be. Maybe if any invaders get through the barricades they will find them and flee.

Day 7

Cards: 8 of Clubs, 8 of Spades

What little food I had left has started to go bad. It’s still edible, but the process is miserable. I’m longing for a slice of that bacon again, and I wish I hadn’t gorged on it. What will I do when the food runs out? Pull down the barricades and beg for mercy? Sell the treasures of our shared history for a meal? It’s amazing how little it takes to make me think about waving the white flag.

The thought of letting them in chills me. They still spend their nights stamping and screaming, singing songs about flaying off my skin and roasting me on a spit. In my hunger I wonder if perhaps they are cannibals, if I’ll be forced to watch as they feast on my limbs. What irony, that I should starve to death while being kept alive to feed them.

I sharpen stakes, and reinforce the barricades. Maybe I can be a little hungry.

Day 8

Cards: 2 of Clubs

The latest addition to the barricade are the shelves that held records of loans. I burned the records themselves so I could cook what remains of my spoiling meat, to make it last a little longer.

I am, of course, devastated that the library is no more, and I continue to do what I can to preserve its treasures. But those loan records gave me some sliver of hope. Each line in the ledgers is a book that was removed from these walls before the invaders came. Each line is a treasure that was rescued, before any of us knew they needed to be rescued.

I hope they have found good homes.

Day 9

Cards: 9 of Clubs, 4 of Clubs
Tower pulls: 1

I woke to screaming from the cellars. I dared not investigate until it stopped.

It’s carnage down there. Some invaders found a way in – where? How? I don’t know. But they ran into something that did for them as they would do for me. I can’t bear to look at the mess.

When I first came to the library I was told all of the usual initiation tales, horror stories of ancient things buried in the soil of the catacombs, creatures of bone and fang that would feast on the unwary. The older initiates sent us down there with guttering candles, daubed in chicken’s blood. A test, they said. How long could we remain down there once the light had died? Would we flee from the dark things?

We all fled, of course. We all had awful nightmares about the grave things in the undercroft. And then we aged, and new initiates came, and we put them through the same thing, all of us knowing that it had only been a game.

Except, it seems now, it was not a game.

I have barred the doors now, but first I had to know where the invaders came from. I took torches and a lantern, marked the walls of the catacombs with chalk so that I would never be lost. I spent hours down there, my heart in my throat, each step away from the library a step further into danger. I heard scuttling, scrabbling, sucking sounds from around every corner, and I have no idea if they were real or hallucinations. But I met nothing. Perhaps the creatures were sated and had retreated to their lair to sleep.

I found the point of ingress, at any rate. An ancient sewer hatch, locked on our side but forced open by the invaders. Beyond it the stink of the open sewers, the sounds of the city. I will admit that I was tempted to flee, to put this all behind me and leave the library to the invaders. But I have committed to my work, and so I closed it again and barricaded it shut.

In the cartography room I found ancient sewer plans and managed to locate that hatch. There is a waterway above it. When I put my journal down for the day today I will go back and flood that space, make sure that nobody can get in – or out.

Day 10

Cards: Ace of Hearts[^1], 5 of Hearts, 10 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, 3 of Hearts, King of Hearts
Tokens on the Ace of Hearts: 10
Tower pulls: 3

Day 10 after the barricade. The diary of Junior librarian Booker Hathaway.

I have a confession to make. In this diary I have talked about the treasures I have been saving from the library, but the reality is that I have simply been stacking them around my bed in the room in which I sleep. Until this point I have been completely unable to open the vault, and so all my work has been pointless.

Today, finally, I found my way in. The locking mechanism was tricky, requiring several combinations and the insertion of a number of keys in exactly the right sequence. I will not write it down in case the invaders break through the barricade and find my journal. What use is there to a password if anybody can find it? But I have opened the vault now, and so I can begin actually moving things into it. For once I feel some glimmer of hope.

The first treasure I moved was a set of ancient stone tablets, thousands of years old. They chronicle the lineage and deeds of the great Brythan, a king of one of the ancient kingdoms that had to fall in order for the land I live in now to rise from its ashes. In a time of fractured nations and warring fiefdoms he alone was able to unite the tribes and bring some semblance of peace to the land that he ruled for close to thirty years.

He was usurped by his youngest son, who crushed him to death under giant rocks that still flank the south gates of the city to this day. Or did, I suppose. The invaders may have destroyed them, or used them as fodder for their catapults. Still, after moving the tablets down into the vaults I feel l know a little something about being crushed under rock.

The tablets were not the only treasure I saved today. In a short break from my work I took some time to read an old fighting manual. It comes from a land far to the west of here, a place I know little of. I certainly don’t speak or read the language, but the illustrations showed forms and movements for the common stave. I spent some time with an old broom handle working through them, imagining fighting off the invaders. It’s pure fantasy, of course. I will flee before I fight.

Towards the end of the day I went back down to the catacombs to check on the area I flooded yesterday. Some of the water has seeped into adjoining rooms, which contained crates filled with old books that I missed on my first venture down here. Among them I found a set of books bound in velvet, with no titles on their spines. Upon opening them I discovered them to be a set of the erotic illustrations of the Viscount of Stars, long thought lost. What a shame that, having found them, they have already been destroyed by water.

In the crates with the ruined illustrations were more maps and scrolls, also waterlogged and beyond saving. As I opened the crate the air filled with spores and I sprint some time choking and coughing on them. Now as I write this entry I am still suffering, and there is blood and mucus emerging from within me. I feel faint, disconnected from the world somehow. I can hear noises from above, banging on the roof. Is it the invaders? Maybe some colossal beast from beyond the stars come to liberate me. I do not know. I do not feel well.

Day 11

Cards: Queen of Hearts, King of Clubs, 2 of Hearts, 6 of Hearts, Queen of Spades
Tokens on the Ace of Hearts: 10

I have been sleep walking. Or I have been blacking out. I do not know. When I woke – half the day wasted, bathed in my own sweat, blood and gunk coating my lips – I was clutching a set of tomes written by head librarians going back centuries. It appears to be a history of the library itself. I will add this journal to it and seal it all in the vault when my work is done.

I stumbled through the library in search of food and water. I do not know where my supplies have gone. I do not really know what day it is anymore. The invaders still keep me awake at night, and my health is beginning to wane. I need to stay out of the cellars. Only bad things lurk there.

Bad things like the man who emerged from a door ahead of me. How did he get in? I do not know. He came at me with his sword, beat me with his shield. I flailed at him. I do not know how I survived, have little memory of the encounter. Perhaps the corridor was too narrow, he couldn’t swing his sword properly? I don’t know. A haze came down and when it lifted I was lying beneath him with his dead weight atop me, my thumb pressed deep into his eye, the tip of his blade piercing through my side. Another wound to fester. Another corridor I must seal and never return to.

I stripped pages from a book of poetry to make a gauze. I thought it nothing, and insignificant work I could do without. It was only when I had staunched my bleeding that I saw the title page, saw that I had torn apart a folio of Shogo;s poetry, the greatest verse by the greatest bard to ever put pen to page. An original work, stuffed into my gaping flesh to soak up the blood. They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Perhaps it can heal a wound the blade inflicted.

Is it ironic that the next treasure I found was a collection of medical texts? Maybe something here could have helped me treat my wound. I left that room in disgust. I will not save any of these works until I am healed. Let medicine earn its place in my vault.

This evening I climbed one of the towers and looked out over the city to watch the sun set. I can’t remember the last time I actually looked outside and saw daylight. For a moment it fell quiet, no screams or chanting, no sound of rooftops falling in or buildings burning. I could almost pretend that none of this was happening. But then the poems fell out of my side and the blood began to flow and I stumbled back down the stairs before I fell down them.

Day 12

Cards drawn: 3 of Spades, 10 of Diamonds, 7 of Spades, 6 of Clubs, Ace of Diamonds
Tokens on the Ace of Hearts: 9 Tower pulls: 2

My food has run out. I eat rats, if they do not eat me first. I may starve before the invaders break through. In one of the reading rooms I found a stack of books that had never been reshelved, but none seemed worth saving – penny novels, common pamphlets, nothing of literary merit. There was food, too, bread and cheese and grapes, but it was all covered in thick green fuzz. I almost ate it.

I returned to the tower to look out over the city again, only to find marks on the window ledge. I think someone has been trying to grapnel up here. I dragged shelves from the public reading rooms where the fiction lives and boarded up the window. No more sunlight for me. But while working up there I found a small chest containing keys to a section of the library that has been kept from me, and that gave me some small burst of energy again.

The forbidden magicks section may well hold my salvation. I found another ritual circle, this time alongside the text that explains it. This is some sort of temporal delayance spell, and I said the words and felt the rush that said the casting had been successful.

My first magick, and I don’t fully understand it. I know that time will pass differently for me now. Am I slower than those outside, or faster? I am too delirious and hungry to know for sure. But I have more time, anyway, to do my work. More time to save the library before the barricades come down.

Day 13

Cards drawn: 10 of Clubs, 3 of Clubs
Tokens on the Ace of Hearts: 9
Tower pulls: 1

I suppose I should write about the invaders themselves. They are present throughout this account and yet I have assumed that whoever is reading this will know all the details. Who are they? Where did they come from? Why are they sacking the city?

There used to be a great empire that spanned the known world. There were many, of course, but I am talking about one specific empire. Their leader was a god made flesh, the living personification of the sun, who burned through lies with the heat of her vision and all the other magical things people say of their living deities.

Then came a cataclysm. The heart of their empire was swallowed by sand, and the sun emperor was buried upon her throne. Her people were scattered to the winds. A new empire arose from their bones, amidst their dust, atop their sand. A new city, with the greatest library the world has ever seen.

It is said that the sun god lives again, dug up from beneath the dunes and brought to new life. And now her army crawls across the face of the world to reclaim what was once hers. And I sit at the heart of it.

I have spent my afternoon picking up shattered shelving after a rock crashed through the roof and destroyed a large section of the library – mostly fiction, which I have been dismissive of, but I can’t help wonder if there may have been some treasures there. As I worked, ravens perched on the hole in the roof and watched me. They could almost be vultures. I think they see a meal in me in the near future. I do not like it.

Day 14

Cards drawn: 9 of Hearts, 5 of Spades, Jack of Clubs, 7 of Clubs, 5 of Diamonds
Tokens on the Ace of Hearts: 9
Tower pulls: 3 [^2]

The library has an old chapel that nobody uses anymore, and beside it is a section of dusty old religious texts. I have been staying away from these despite knowing their value. I hear them whispering when I pass, the old pages rustling with their barely-contained heresies. This is the most dangerous part of the library, whether you believe in the gods or not.

I don’t remember what the book I picked up said. The moment my eyes landed on the page the ink began to run, to bleed out into the air, wrapping my vision in a kaleidoscope of colour. I saw the living sun striding through the barricade, the heat of her flames razing everything in her path, the millions of pages stored in this old building turning to ash in her wake.

I don’t know how long I lay writing on the ground. Is it the same day? I have no idea. Time is even more meaningless than it was before. When I woke there were mice nibbling at my toes, pulling at my pockets to get to the stale butt of bread I didn’t even know was there. I let them have it. What use is food to me now?

I am weak. As I write this I can smell smoke from somewhere in the library, the crackle of burning pages. There is a great roaring and cheering from outside. I will investigate it when I wake.

THE END.