The Library Of Lost Tomorrows (Η Βιβλιοθήκη των Χαμένων Αύριο)

-From The Meletic Tales.

In the marble-clad city of Alexandria, where minds burnt brighter than oil lamps and scrolls numbered more than grains of sand upon the shore, there existed a certain murmur. Not a place listed in catalogues nor named by librarians, but one whispered between known philosophers as a place of veiled wonder—the library of lost tomorrows.

It was not marked by column or inscription, nor was it included amongst the seven halls of the famed Great Library. It was said to exist beneath it, or behind it, or perhaps beside it, like a shadow cast by knowledge itself. Only those individuals who sought not power or fame or certainty might find its door. It did not open with any keys, but with human awareness.

Zenon, a young philosopher of twenty-eight years, had come to Alexandria not for its monuments or politics, but for the purity of thought. He wore no garland, carried no scroll and spoke seldom—save to question. His eyes were the pale olive of dusk, and his voice was low, even when speaking of the stars.

He had studied under Metrios the elder, a man who taught that the pursuit of wisdom was not to conquer the world, but to understand one’s place in it. Even under Metrios, Zenon felt a restlessness, as though truth were always just beyond the final page. One night, after a long silence in the hall of echoes, his master said, 'You must stop seeking answers as if they are possessions. Some knowledge is not given, only encountered'.

'Where do I encounter it?' Zenon asked.

Metrios had only smiled faintly. 'There is a place... where futures sleep'.

That was the only clue he had, but the whisper was planted.

The weeks passed. One evening, after wandering the scroll-vaults beneath the main library, Zenon noticed a narrow, dust-veiled corridor behind a broken statue of Hermes. Something in him stirred. He walked towards it, torch in hand. The walls narrowed. The air cooled. The silence then thickened.

At the end of the corridor was a door—wooden, old and plain. No markings, no guards. He reached for the handle, but before his hand touched it, the door opened inwards without an audible sound.

Inside was a chamber lit not by flame, but by a soft, ambient light that pulsed like breath. Shelves upon shelves lined the curved walls, each laden not with dusty scrolls of history or science, but with smooth, unlabelled scrolls tied in golden cord.

He stepped forth, and the door closed behind him.

A figure emerged from the far end of the chamber—tall, draped in indigo robes and head bowed. A man, although he never spoke. His eyes were not empty, but vast, as if reflecting every sky ever imagined. He gestured once, and Zenon understood: Read 'What is this place?' Zenon whispered, though the walls absorbed all sound.

The man said nothing. Zenon approached the nearest scroll and untied its cord. It unfurled in his hands with the texture of water and ash. What he read was not a tale of kings or gods, but a life.

His life—had he never left his father’s vineyard in Kyrene. He saw himself as a vintner, married, laughing beside children who bore his eyes. His hands were stained with wine, and his face creased not by worry, but by sun and joy.

He blinked, stepped back. He took another scroll. This one showed a different path—had he pursued rhetoric instead of philosophy. He saw himself in Rome, debating in marble forums, influencing senators and gaining prestige, but with a certain hollowness in his gaze.

Scroll after scroll, path after path. He saw himself as a traveller, a priest, a recluse, a criminal, a father or a martyr. Each one etched with clarity, neither romanticised nor condemned. They were not dreams. They were real—real possibilities unchosen.

He was amazed. Not out of incredulity but from a revelation deeper than language itself. The librarian remained still.

Some futures ended in joy, some in ruin. One scroll showed him in Athena, caught in political turmoil, killed in a riot at thirty. Another showed him living long, revered as a sage, dying in sleep surrounded by students.

'Why show me this?' He finally asked.

The librarian lifted a hand and pointed to the central wall. There, etched faintly in the marble, was a phrase in the oldest dialect of Greek: Τὸ ἕν ἀντικατοπτρίζεται ἐν ἁπάσῃ πιθανότητι. To Ena reflects itself in all potentiality.

Zenon recited it under his breath. 'The One reflects itself in all potentiality'.

In that moment, the room pulsed again—this time in rhythm with his breath. He realised the scrolls were not prophecies. They were instead mirrors. Mirrors not of fate, but of freedom. They showed him not what was destined, but what could have been—had he chosen differently.

Each breath he had taken, each thought he had nurtured, had shaped his path, bending the future like the limb of a fig tree towards the sun. These scrolls were not judgments. They were revelations of responsibility.

He looked to the silent librarian again. 'Why do none speak of this place?'

The man finally answered—not aloud, but into the fabric of his awareness: 'Because most seek certainty. Not awareness in their search'.

Zenon bowed his head.

He stayed in the library for what felt like days, reading not all, but enough. He began to recognise patterns—that even in sorrowful paths, there had been moments of grace. That wisdom was not always in the length of life, but in the depth of a single gesture. That regret, when seen clearly, was not a weight, but a guide.

Eventually, he tied the last scroll he would read. 'I see now', he whispered. 'These are not ghosts. They are echoes of To Ena—reflections of what is always present'.

The librarian inclined his head.

'Then I must return. Not to escape this place, but to live rightly beyond it'.

He walked to the door, but turned once more. 'What is your name?'

The librarian touched his own chest—then to Callimachus—and smiled faintly.

There was no need for names. Only mere recognition.

When he emerged from the corridor, the morning sun was just beginning to trace the spires of Alexandria. Dust motes floated in golden beams. The library above stirred with scholars and scribes, none of whom noticed where he had come from, but he was changed.

He did not rush to tell others. He did not claim divine vision. He walked quietly along the portico, hearing anew the call of doves, the rustle of olive branches in the breeze.

Over time, he wrote again—not as one who teaches, but as one who shares. His writings spoke not of what should be, but of what might be. He spoke of presence, of choice and of awareness. That each breath is a beginning. That each action bends the skein of possibility.

When asked by students how he became so serene, he said only: 'Because I have seen all I might have been. In that seeing, I am finally who I am'.

Some dismissed him. Others listened, but none could deny the peace in his manner displayed.

He never spoke of the library again. For he understood it could not be sought. It appeared only when the mind was ready not for answers, but for conscious humility.

When Zenon passed away, his students lit no grand pyre, built no marble tomb. They planted a fig tree instead, near the corridor where he had once vanished. It grew slow and strong, its limbs turning always towards the blazing sun.

Beneath its roots, some say, rests a single scroll unwritten. Waiting still, but the library did not slumber.

A generation later, a young woman named Timandra, a mathematician and sceptic, stumbled into the same corridor while tracing lost architectural blueprints. Unlike Zenon, she did not seek answers to the soul. She sought structure, cause, formula, yet the door opened for her.

Inside, she too was greeted by the silent librarian, now visibly older, although his eyes remained eternal. She laughed at the scrolls at first, thinking them metaphor.

Until she read one—in which she had discovered a theory unifying celestial harmony and mathematical proportion, bringing her fame from Athena to Babylon. In another, she saw herself as a mother, raising a daughter who would become a great thinker. In yet another, she saw her own death in solitude, never daring to speak what she believed was the truth.

Timandra stayed longer than she expected. When she left, she wept in the open air of Alexandria. Not for what she had seen, but for what she now understood.

She found Zenon’s fig tree. She sat beneath it and began to write equations not of numbers, but of great possibilities—drawing new curves on the parchment of existence.

The library continued—not as a secret to be uncovered, but as a threshold that reveals itself to those ready seekers to meet their infinite reflections.

For each lost tomorrow is not a wound, but a whisper. A reminder that each moment is not a line, but a door. Opened only by human awareness.

The seasons turned in Alexandria. The library did not call out to the world, yet the world seemed to draw nearer to it. Those few people who wandered unknowingly into its presence did so not because they were wise, but because they were willing in its desire.

The decades passed, and whispers of Timandra's mysterious insights began to ripple through the schools of thought. Some people called her mad, some called her visionary, but to those people who truly listened, her teachings contained an underlying humility—a noble reverence for the unknown paths that might have been.

It was said she wrote a single treatise before her death, entitled Contours of Possibility, filled not with conclusions but with provocations. ‘To grasp truth’, she wrote, ‘one must release the desire to possess it in the first place’. Her followers planted myrtle and laurel around Zenon's fig tree, forming a garden without walls. There, students would sit and contemplate the wise silence between choices made.

One winter morning, as frost clung to the marble steps, a boy named Zenobios wandered into the great library. He was neither scholar nor scribe, but the son of a poor potter, drawn to the warmth of words. He had heard tales of Zenon and Timandra, but more than their names, he had been stirred by a recurring dream—of doors and unread scrolls.

He traced the corridors with bare feet, unnoticed by the stewards. The broken statue of Hermes, now nearly crumbled, still leaned against the apparent shadows. The corridor was darker than before, but the air within it pulsed with the familiar breath of silence.

When he entered the library of lost tomorrows, the room welcomed him with a quiet shimmer. He did not question the presence of the librarian, who watched him with ancient patience. Zenobios was young, but in his gaze lived the weight of someone who had already lost too much in his life.

He picked a scroll. This one showed him a future in which he inherited his father’s kiln, crafted amphorae shaped like swans, and married a girl with honey in her laughter. In another, he became a thief, then a soldier, dying with honour at a forgotten border. In yet another, he became a playwright, whose words helped a broken city laugh again once forgotten in him.

What stunned him most was not the actual paths he might have walked, but the truth that none were more right than the other. Each was a choice, a creation of meaning.

He whispered to the librarian, 'Then meaning is not found—it is made?'

The librarian, ancient and voiceless, nodded once.

The boy asked, 'What if I choose nothing in my decision?'

This time, the librarian’s silence felt heavier than the scrolls. Zenobios looked at his own feet, still dusty from the streets of Alexandria.

He read more scrolls, each revealing a different world, a different self. In each, the thread that connected them was intention. Not the events, nor the rewards, but the clarity with which he chose.

When he left the library, he didn’t become a philosopher. He didn’t write epics or lead armies. He simply returned to his father’s side, shaping clay with greater care, and speaking with words weighed gently before spoken. He became a Meletic. When people asked why he smiled without reason, he said, 'Because I choose to'.

He told no one of the library. Not because it was a secret, but because it was to be respected.

In time, the library faded again into whisper and rumour, like a tide that only meets the shore in stillness, but there were more.

A healer named Akantha, who discovered the library after losing her brother to fever, and within its scrolls saw lives where she had saved him—and others where she had never known him at all. She emerged not in despair, but with a deeper tenderness for every heartbeat she now touched in her life.

A sceptical lawmaker named Phaidros, who found the library in his old age, and for the first time saw not laws, but the lives shaped by their absence. He left behind no edicts, only a parchment bearing seven words: 'Let mercy speak where judgement has reigned'.

Still others. Each changed not by answers, but by mere awareness of the truth.

No two saw the same scrolls. No two asked the same questions. For the library was not a place, but a mirror.

It was not built by stone, but by consciousness. It was not guarded, but awakened.

Thus, it waits—behind broken statues, in corridors of forgotten thought, beneath fig trees that bow towards the sun.

Waiting not for seekers of power, but for those people willing to stand before possibility, naked of certainty and open of heart and soul.

For within the library of lost tomorrows, one finds not fate, but the living breath of choice. The essential art of becoming. The library breathed still.

In one final account passed quietly from teacher to student, it was said that Zenon himself returned once more in his final years, stooped and silver-haired, not to read, but to leave a single scroll of his own. What he wrote remains unknown, for the scroll was bound with a cord of woven fig bark and placed deep within the central chamber.

Some people say it contained a map of his soul—not in roads or rivers, but in decisions and silences. Others believed it was blank, left unwritten as a gesture of trust in all who would come after him. Some Meletics say that the scroll reveals the secrets of the cosmos.

Regardless, his gesture echoed the truth he had once uncovered: that the future is not given but gifted—one breath at a time in its duration.

When the wind stirs quietly through the colonnades of Alexandria, and the dust shivers across forgotten stones, listen closely.

For perhaps, in that hush between footsteps taken, the door is opening again, and the library of lost tomorrows waits—not to be found, but to be recognised for what it truly reveals with its solved mysteries.

The library of lost tomorrows waits—not to be found, but to be recognised.

It was on such a day, long after even the last pupil of Zenon had turned to dust, that another came—a girl named Myrrhine. She was no scholar, but the daughter of a stonemason, with rough hands and a sharp mind. Her days were filled with hauling water, sweeping floors, and carving shapes into limestone with her brothers. She dreamt often of halls filled with echoing quiet, and of voices that did not command but revealed.

One afternoon, after escaping the noisy market, she wandered behind the great library to where the fig tree still stood. It had grown taller than the rooflines now, and its roots curled like slumbering serpents across the stones. As she sat to rest, her hand brushed against a groove between two slabs—and the stone shifted.

Beneath, a stairway revealed itself, damp with age and shadowed by time. Myrrhine did not hesitate. The path felt already known.

She followed the passage, step by step, until the air became cool and the quiet so profound it hummed. The door stood waiting.

And so it opened. The chamber within had changed little. The same curve of shelves, the same breath-like light, but the librarian was gone. In his place, the room itself welcomed her—scrolls unfurling of their own accord, revealing futures not with force, but invitation.

One showed her as a sculptor whose works would line the temples of a reborn Athens. Another revealed a life tending olive groves in peace, raising a family and writing poetry no one would read. A third showed her dying in revolt, her name carved into the stone she once cut.

She watched, listened, accepted, and then she began to write.

Not to predict, but to honour—every breath, every choice, every unseen turn.

When she left the library, her face bore no awe, but clarity. She spoke to no one of what she had seen, but those people who met her from that day forth often said: ‘There is something about her—as though she remembers what has never happened.’

She understood the way the Logos and the Nous functioned within the emanations of To Ena, the One. She had discovered the essence of Meleticism.

Perhaps that is the true gift of the library of lost tomorrows. Not prophecy, but presence sharpened by potentiality.

A life lived not in fear of what was missed, but in deep reverence for what might yet become.

In the decades that followed, the fig tree that stood above the hidden stairway grew thick-limbed and vast, its canopy whispering in voices only the patient could hear. Locals began to call it 'The listening tree'. Some said that if you sat beneath it in stillness, long enough and without expectation, you might come to understand something unspoken within yourself.

Visitors left no prayers, only fragments of parchment—dreams, regrets and wishes—folded carefully and placed amongst the roots. Now and then, someone would return from a quiet absence, their gaze changed not by knowledge, but by comprehension.

They would walk the city as if seeing it for the first time, not weighed down by what had not been, but attuned to the breath of what still could be.

The library, it seemed, did not vanish. It merely waited—quietly, patiently—in the fold of a choice, in the silence before decision. Always near. Always listening.

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