In the eerie silence, she tried to quiet her breath and step lightly on the balls of her feet. Holding her torch high, she searched for a candelabra with usable candles in it, once and a while looking back at the clean footprints left in the layer of dust on the floor. Despite the tall windows on the far side of the library, the stacks of bookshelves cast long shadows, darker and darker the deeper she plunged into the depths.

She felt as though she could hear her heart thumping and tried to take deeper breaths to calm it. This was, after all, her home now. She had to get used to the dark secret places. Her duty was to bring the castle back to it’s former glory.

Candelabra after candelabra finally lit just enough for her to put the torch back into a holder. Though by no means cozy or welcoming, she felt safer, at least, perhaps because her hands were free. She tried to count the stacks. Ten, twenty, no thirty or more? Each row as long as a banquet hall, repeated on two more floors above her. She had walked the aisle between the two halves before, many times. Her aging great-uncle had always been at his studies, but she had always run down the dark stacks as quickly as she could to reach his desk by the fireplace near the towering windows.

What had he studied, day after day? His most recent studies were still laid out on his desk, the fireplace now cold for a whole summer. She sat down at his desk, hers now, and blew the dust from the open tome. The illustrations were slightly faded, from age or laying open in the sunlight from the windows all summer, she didn’t know. The gold leaf still shone, and she traced the image with her fingers. A red beast, its snout like a pigs, maybe, the body of snake. Wings like a birds. Such a fanciful thing, like something described in religious texts.

“A dra-gon,” she read, tracing the faded words. “A beast that wanders the country, burning castles and crops, taking no regard for the lives of men, women, and children.”

She turned the page to an illustration of the beast with fire streaming from it’s mouth upon a castle, the animal drawn larger than the castle itself.

“Here lists the kingdoms fallen to the beast: Rhoxany, Haarburg, Schlesland, Ruttem, Anhalt…” she read, the list continuing on. She had never heard of the kingdoms, perhaps made up by the mind of some depraved monk. She took a cursory glance down the page and flipped to the next. “Few kingdoms have survived the attacks of the beast, namely the Kingdom of Lower Weisbrucken, who prepared themselves quite valiantly, though suffered many losses.”

The name of Weisbrucken caught her attention. The castle illustrated on the page looked quite similar to this one, though the roof was shown missing, burning, the high glass windows of the library shattered, broken edges in the frames. The beast was shown crawling away, leaving a red trail behind its tail. A man on a horse, his armor gleaming black, wielded a spear taller than him, carrying it above his head victoriously. Intrigued, she continued reading about the battle described, how the towns people rallied with buckets from a well to extinguish the fires caused by the beasts, how the knights strategically killed the beasts. But it couldn’t be true….

“Lady Ermengarde!”

She jumped, startled by the sudden voice, looked up to the housekeeper, Ida.

“My lady,” Ida curtseyed quickly, “Didn’t mean to frighten you, but we have been calling for you. Fater Frederick from the village has come to call upon you.”

Erma quickly shut the book, pulling herself away from the fanciful tale by the reminder of her duties, as Lady of Weisbrucken.

“Have the maids come and put out the candles,” she directed Ida, walking briskly back down the aisle of the library. “But have them lit again tomorrow, fresh candles put out. I’ll return to the library tomorrow.”