Aristide Twain

This idea has followed me, occupying my notebook margins and doodles, from my first year of college, through grad school, and into my early career. I planted seeds: Callum and the Library in "The Library at the End of the Universe"; a mysterious cactus boy and the Plume Coteries in the background of my Faction Paradox stories; and the Bookkeeper and birdhemoths in one of my Book of the Peace Dossier fics. But when it came to the debut Coloth novella, demands on my time pulled me in other directions. Instead others carried the torch.

It was James Wylder of Arcbeatle Press who introduced Coloth and his Bookkeeper friends in the 10,000 Dawns crossover stories "White Canvas" and And Today, You. It was my brilliant co-brainstormer Tyche who peeked at Coloth's future with Rich in "Sonnenblumen". And finally, it was the inestimable @AristideTwain who took the initiative and debuted the Coloth series title in the Auteur crossover story "The Cactus and the Corpse".

So when Aristide told me he wanted to use Coloth in the framing narrative of Arcbeatle's winter anthology The Book of the Snowstorm, and that the anthology would have a big COLOTH logo on the cover (!!!), I knew I couldn't miss it!

I could go on and on with more behind-the-scenes tidbits, or wax poetic about all the emotions this brings up in me (and Holly's cover art! by god!), but ultimately this is not the last Coloth-related story annotation I expect to write, and I have to save something for next time. The topic is the story at hand: and the topic of that story is the Library.

"The First Noël"

Our protagonist is named Caspar, just like the Biblical mage of the same name. This is the story of his pilgrimage, his sojourn.

"long-lost schismatics" — I believe this is the first published hint that not all of the Plume Coteries who originally discovered and settled the Library became "Bookkeepers".

"a Valid book" — A reference to the Tardis Wiki, where for years "validity" is the term which stands in place of is distinct from, and should not be confused with, "canonicity".

"1177 levels up, 312 miles over" — A quaint number compared to the Floor 899,167,435,042 mentioned in "The Cactus and the Corpse". This story is set some generations in Coloth, Callum, and Maritsa's past.

"random gibberish" — When the Library first appeared in "The Library at the End of the Universe", my intention was that it was more-or-less the Library of Babel: finding a readable book in the haystack is like a monkey at a typewriter plunking out This Town Will Never Let Us Go. You can experience it yourself by spending a few minutes clicking through LibraryOfBabel.info; the snippet of gibberish was sampled from that website. Since people are really bad at comprehending true randomness, it's easy to slip into treating the Library's contents as less dauntingly incomprehensible, but part of my motivation for this story was to grapple with the implications head-on – more on this in a moment.

"⁎⁎⁎" — Snowflakes :)

"He had asked Mother," — Originally, there was no stylistic distinction for the dialogue; I've always been delighted by how disorienting this is in Cormac McCarthy's writing. The editor and I settled on italics as a compromise.

"veins of Validity" — Despite my original focus on randomness, it has been more convenient for other stories set in the Library to assume that all the books on the shelves are coherent. Stories such as the framing narrative of this very anthology! These stories all must be set in veins, known or unknown, or otherwise in the neatly organized inhabited section.

"progress had slowed" — If only they had some means to interview eyewitnesses… This particular case may be part of the Bookkeeper's motivation for asking the Great Houses for time ladle technology in "A Farewell to R.M.S.".

"fantastical stories about some random passerby, whom all other accounts agreed had been killed and devoured without further incident" — Not unlike the Coloth series, come to think of it…

"the investigators wouldn't miss it" — Maybe not, but it might explain why they didn't expect anything to go awry when they later ladled up one particular specimen!

"The leather blackened and curled in the heat." — This idea might be new to the Library, but on Earth it's a well-established mode of divination: fire serves as a random number generator which, when hunting for caribou (or for books), yields better results than human approximation.

"amaranthine, or indigo, or both at once" — Colors with significance in one of my prior stories, as I noted in my notes on "A Farewell to Arms". Maybe the results of Caspar's particular number generator aren't purely random, after all?

"vandalism" — A major concern on any wiki!

"The endless rows of spines gave him solace in their monotony. Sometimes he didn't sleep at all." — Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is both an aesthetic inspiration and one of my favorite stories.

"no time at all" — A beloved thought experiment. I like the idea that the clock "started" for the Library when the Plume Coteries showed up. Or did it?

"strange aeons" — An obvious nod to Lovecraft as well as Caspar's mental state.

Of course, the mystery box is the identify of the "wader". Their three annotations:

"A single line had been crossed out… This family of antivirals is effective for two-hearted populations, but it is inevitably toxic to other human species."

"the necessity of mechanical protection in the face of temporal winds. Unless a timeship digests you and your bloodline & you recreate a recording of its signals. That's how I waded here & how I'll wade away."

Random letters, like a recording of signals ritually recreated in handwriting.

I think it's fairly obvious – the connection between the stories that I'm drawing together is an open secret, after all – but then again I'm the author, so of course I would!

Finally, in parallel to the first Noël, just as the Biblical Caspar found the end of his pilgrimage in a place he least expected, our Caspar stumbles into the climax of his sojourn: a wintry snowscape. But his reaction is grief rather than joy, and his burnt offering … well, it's not frankincense.

We leave Caspar in "ash, and smoke, and tyranny." We'll meet him again, although perhaps not by this name!