#31 The Bookwell

Age: As Old As Thought

Hidden or Lost?: Hidden

History: Among the cursed ruins of Old Baruch is a simple stone well. From the surface it appears to be a normal water hole, but anyone brave enough to venture down into its darkness will discover the mythic Bookwell, eternal archive and library of all knowledge.

Within the seemingly bottomless depths of the Bookwell, one can find a copy of every book ever written, and accounts of every age, even to the current moment. To accomplish this, the upper levels contain fields of spectral scribners, with one leg chained to the roots of the world and the other to their writing desk, forever scratching away at their pages, recording the events of the material world as they occur. Spider-like beings known as ‘binders,’ collect the sheets and weave them into volumes with enchanted silk, sending them down, down, down to be filed away among the infinite stacks below.

While the upper layers of the Bookwell are relatively safe, the further depths get wilder. The deeper one travels, the levels become increasingly filled with bizarre creatures and petty tyrants, all made feral by forbidden knowledge, old secrets, and hidden truth. Nested among moldering piles of torn pages waiting to be found and brought out into the light, all knowledge can be found somewhere in the Bookwell, including even the Foundational Truths, the hows and whys of the universe, the secret words. Information that can bind existence, or shatter it. It can all be found somewhere hidden in the Bookwell’s darkest leagues.

While most arcane scholars agree that like knowledge, the Bookwell is limitless, but this is not strictly true. At the very bottom, anyone who could survive the journey would discover a frantic, pained giant, puttering around an expansive study. This unfortunate immortal creature was doomed to know everything, and will spend eternity trying to collect the total of all knowledge, which it believes will finally set it free. In truth no curse keeps the wretched intellectual tethered to the Bookwell, it is only the misplaced greed for knowledge that cages it.

All who seek the Bookwell can come away with secrets and knowledge, but most looking for power never come back at all.

1. The Bookwell

2. Scribes Eternal

3. The Bindery

4. Unwritten Classics

5. The Infinite Stacks

6. Dictionaries and Truth

7. Forest of Wild Language

8. Vault of Secrets

9. Vault of Lies

10. Librarian’s Redoubt

11. Labyrinth of Arcane Tomes

12. The Chained Rows

13. Singularities

14. Preservation and Repair

15. Answers Bureau

16. Unknown Known

17. Ignorance Pit

18. Study of the Knowledgeable Wretch