The library smelled like old paper and older secrets, and I hated every single book in it.
That was probably heresy in a family like mine. My family had been historians for six generations, dedicated to preserving the past, documenting everything that had already happened so future generations could learn from mistakes they'd never personally made. My great-great-grandfather had catalogued the ascension of the gods. My grandfather had written the definitive text on pre-apocalypse society. My mother was currently working on a comprehensive timeline of the our worlds formation. And I was supposed to care about any of it.
MTH: Maeve, focus. This section is important.
I stared at the book in front of me, its pages yellowed with age, its text written in script so elaborate it took genuine effort to decipher. Something about political alliances in the third century after creation. Who had sided with whom, what treaties had been signed, which families had risen and which had collapsed into irrelevance.
All of it had already happened. All of it was done. Fixed. Unchangeable. What was the point of studying something you couldn't affect?
MAE: Why does this matter?
My mother looked up from her own research, her expression carrying that particular patience she reserved for my questions. She'd heard this before. I asked it constantly, in different forms, with escalating frustration. Why study the past? Why memorize dates and names and events that were already concluded?
MTH: History teaches us patterns. If we understand what happened before, we can predict what might happen next.
MAE: Or we could just focus on what's happening now.
FTH: The present moment is informed by everything that preceded it. You can't understand now without understanding then.
My father didn't even look up from the manuscript he was annotating. He was working on something about agricultural practices in the second decade after the war, tracking how communities had rebuilt food systems after the war ended. Important work, probably. Useful to someone, somewhere. Just not to me.
I was eleven years old and had already spent six years in this library, surrounded by books that documented everything except what I actually cared about - what was going to happen next.
MAE: What if I don't want to predict the future? What if I want to change it?
MTH: You can't change what hasn't happened yet.
MAE: Exactly! So why not focus on that instead of things that are already done?
My mother closed her book with a sigh that suggested this conversation was heading toward familiar territory. We'd had this argument before, would probably have it again, because I couldn't make myself care about the past the way my family did.
MTH: Maeve, our family's purpose is preservation. We document, we archive, we ensure that knowledge isn't lost to time. Without historians, humanity would repeat the same mistakes endlessly.
MAE: Maybe we're supposed to repeat mistakes. Maybe that's how we learn.
FTH: That's an incredibly wasteful approach to education.
MAE: At least it's forward-looking.
I stood up from the desk, my chair scraping against stone floors that had probably witnessed hundreds of family arguments about the importance of historical documentation. The library stretched around us, three stories of shelves containing everything my family had deemed worth preserving. Military records. Political treatises. Economic analyses. Cultural observations. Genealogies tracking bloodlines back centuries.
All of it looking backward. All of it focused on what was already written.
MTH: Where are you going?
MAE: Anywhere but here.
I didn't wait for permission. Just walked out of the library into hallways lined with portraits of ancestor-historians, all of them looking stern and serious and completely certain that documenting the past was the highest calling anyone could pursue.
Maybe it was, for them. Maybe they'd found purpose in preservation, meaning in making sure nothing was forgotten. But I couldn't shake the feeling that they were all just staring at shadows, studying echoes, trying to hold onto something that had already slipped away.
The courtyard outside was bright and immediate and gloriously present. No books here, no manuscripts, no careful annotations of events that had concluded before I was born. Just sunlight on stone, wind in the trees, birds moving through air without caring about historical precedent.
I sat on the fountain's edge and pulled out the small journal I kept hidden from my family. They'd probably categorize it as a diary, file it away as primary source material documenting daily life in a historian household. But it wasn't documentation. It was speculation.
What if I could manipulate time? What if instead of studying what had already happened, I could affect what was happening now? What if the future wasn't fixed but malleable, responsive to intervention, changeable by someone willing to reach forward instead of backward?
My family would call it fantasy. History was concrete, factual, grounded in evidence that could be verified and cross-referenced. But the future was possibility, potential, undefined until it arrived and immediately became the past they were so obsessed with preserving.
I started writing, not recording what had happened but imagining what could happen. Not documenting the present but speculating about tomorrow. My hand moved across the page, and for the first time all day I felt engaged, interested, alive in a way that studying three-hundred-year-old political alliances never made me feel.
GRN: Find your mother's rebellion boring, did we?
I looked up to find my grandfather standing at the courtyard entrance, his expression carrying amusement rather than disapproval. He was old enough that his historical knowledge spanned decades of personal experience rather than just archived documentation. The Fall had happened during his childhood. He'd lived through rebuilding, watched society reorganize itself, seen the wars firsthand.
MAE: It's not rebellion if I'm right.
GRN: About what?
MAE: The past is boring. It's already finished. Why spend so much time studying something we can't change?
He crossed the courtyard and sat beside me on the fountain's edge, his joints creaking in ways that suggested age had costs historians couldn't archive away.
GRN: Your mother asked the same question when she was your age.
MAE: She did?
GRN: Almost word for word. Thought history was a waste of time, wanted to focus on the present, couldn't understand why we dedicated our lives to preservation.
MAE: What changed her mind?
GRN: She realized that the present becomes the past faster than you'd expect. And if nobody documents it, if nobody preserves it, then it's just gone. Lost. Like it never happened at all.
He gestured at my journal, at the speculation and imagination I'd been pouring onto its pages.
GRN: What you're writing now - those thoughts, those ideas, those possibilities you're exploring. Five years from now, this will be history. Something that already happened, already concluded. Will you wish you'd documented it? Or will you be content to let it disappear?
I didn't have an answer. Because he was right in a way that made my chest tight. Everything I was experiencing, every moment I considered important and immediate, was actively becoming the past. Today would be yesterday. Now would be then. The present I was so focused on would transform into exactly the kind of historical record my family dedicated their lives to preserving.
GRN: The question isn't whether to study the past or focus on the present. The question is whether you value your own experiences enough to ensure they aren't lost.
He stood, joints creaking again, and started back toward the library.
GRN: Your mother is waiting for you to finish that section on political alliances. She thinks you'll find the part about the Meridian Accords particularly relevant to current politics.
MAE: Why would three-hundred-year-old politics matter now?
GRN: Because the families who signed those accords are still around. The alliances formed then still influence decisions made today. The past isn't finished just because it already happened. It's still actively shaping everything we experience.
He disappeared into the library, and I sat alone in the courtyard with my journal and my speculation and the growing understanding that maybe my family's obsession with preservation wasn't about clinging to what was already done.
Maybe it was about recognizing that everything connects - past to present to future - and that understanding those connections meant seeing patterns others missed.
I went back inside. Back to the library, back to the desk, back to the book about political alliances that I'd dismissed as irrelevant. My mother looked up when I sat down, surprise flickering across her face before settling into quiet satisfaction.
MTH: Changed your mind?
MAE: Just trying to see the pattern.
I read the section she'd assigned, and this time I actually focused. Not just on the dates and names and treaty details, but on why it had happened. What had driven those families to form alliances? What had they feared, hoped for, tried to prevent or achieve?
And slowly, reluctantly, I started to see it. The way decisions made centuries ago had rippled forward, affecting choices that led to other choices that eventually shaped the world I was living in right now.
The past wasn't finished. It was just waiting to be understood.
But even as I read, even as I started to appreciate what my family was trying to teach me, part of me still wondered about the future. About what hadn't happened yet, what wasn't written, what remained open to intervention and change.
About whether understanding the past meant accepting the future as inevitable, or whether it gave you tools to shape what came next.
My hands rested on the book's pages, and I felt time passing through them. Not manipulating it, not yet. Just being aware of it in a way I'd never quite noticed before - the constant forward motion, the transformation of now into then, the way every moment was simultaneously present and already becoming history.
I was eleven years old and bored with studying the past. But maybe, I thought, maybe there was something worth learning here after all. Even if I still couldn't shake the feeling that the future mattered more.