Library of Karsa

The Library of Karsa, located in Laesnum's Old Quarter, is the central branch and largest repository of the Brilliant Chronicle. The sprawling complex was the first established by Selber in the 4th century, having been expanded multiple times, and it contains approximately 3,500,000 documents, relics, and texts covering the history, culture, and personal accounts of the entire span of the empire. The halls are home to many hundreds of scholars, librarians, and archivists to maintain the expansive catalogue, as well as a corps of administrators overseeing the wider Chronicle and its several branches in other cities. This large staff is headed by Karsa, the library's namesake and longtime proprietor; as an Ascendile of Nadall, serving for the past three hundred years as his personal secretary, Selber tasked him with administering the program's central office.

The library has an expansive footprint in the city's richest district, comprising multiple gargantuan halls and repositories surrounded by a halo of smaller, administrative buildings. Many of the buildings date from the 6th and 8th centuries, however they closely modelled off the original 4th century simple sandstone hulks--principally unadorned, austere compared with the rest of the gaudy district, filled mostly with floor after floor of cases and bookshelves. The central chambers, six in total, are long, rectangular buildings, both nigh-unprecedentedly tall and spacious, and largely stark with only cursory bronze ornaments and high vaulted windows.

Among the lavish Old Quarter, where many of the priest's palaces and great temples lie, the Library campus resembles more of a defensive works than scholarly institution; standing beneath the 100 foot, sheer sandstone wall, many passersby hurry quicker. This is because when erecting the initial houses, Selber asked they be designed with defense and disaster in mind--in short, they were built to survive the Orilons.

The library contains an extensive catalogue of documents covering all aspects of the empire's history--from contemporary military accounts and the original copies of foreign treaties, common recipes and folk remedies, religious dogma and personal works by the Ascendants, to narrative travelogues of distant lands and far-flung oral tradition. Beyond the purely textual stores, they also house numerous artifacts, remains, and sensitive objects entrusted to them.

The archivists have amassed this vast trove of over three million texts through passive taxation and active pursuit. Part of the customs procedures for entering the city, as well as certain border checkpoints across the empire, requires submitting any written works you carry to be copied and added to the library. This allows them to steadily snap up all circulating texts and maintain copies of books from visiting scholars which would otherwise be harder to acquire. The other method they employ is more hands on; the Brilliant Chronicle has a huge array of field agents who wander the empire, and sometimes beyond, directly reporting on their findings. These studies include descriptions of uncatalogued biota, interviews with figures of all statuses, primary source reporting, and a litany of other endeavors. These proactively generated records account for a minority of reports in the main library, but are intensely valuable.