Lady of Lost Shelves

Lore

Mistress Eleanwy was once a celebrated teacher of alchemy at the Solstice Academy, a school of learning so ancient that even its stones hummed with forgotten spells. Her days were spent teaching the volatile dance of elements, her evenings shelving tomes too wise and too dangerous to be left alone.

Though her passion was knowledge, her heart was tender, and she could never bear to turn away a creature in need. It began with a sparrow with a broken wing. Then a fox cub left behind by a caravan. A hedgehog shivering in the herbarium during the first frost.

Slowly, without meaning to, Eleanwy built a second library within the first — not of books and scrolls, but of tiny lost lives, nested in a hidden world between the walls, far from the stern eyes of the Academy's masters. To peer into one of those narrow cracks was to glimpse something impossible: not stone and dust, but warm light, soft earth, and winding paths lined with tiny growing things. It was as if the small creatures she sheltered had not been hidden away, but carried into an entirely new realm — a secret world, vast and alive, stitched into the bones of the Academy itself.

In the course of her work, Eleanwy met another teacher — a physicist named Merrowen, a man of rigorous thought and reckless ideas. Where she brewed stability, he chased chaos. Their meetings were stormy, sharp with debate, but behind the quarrels, love grew. However, theirs was a love forbidden.

Faculty ties were not allowed, and the Academy, proud and ancient, enforced its codes harshly. Rather than face expulsion and disgrace, the two devised a final, desperate alchemy: a potion to remake themselves into simpler, smaller forms, so they could remain together unseen. Thus Eleanwy became a silver-furred mouse, Merrowen a miniature moose no larger than a curled leaf. They vanished into the labyrinthine walls of the Academy, where none could find them but the lost and the forgotten.

Even now, it is said that students who wander the library late at night, searching for an elusive book or a lost trinket, might catch a glimpse of her — a gleaming mouse with soft blue eyes — offering guidance with a whisper and a nod. And if one listens very carefully, the distant tapping of tiny hooves might be heard, pacing patiently behind her. Mistress Eleanwy remains the guardian of all who are small, overlooked, or out of place. In the silent hours between the turning of pages, her story still unfolds.