Scriptorium Soiram (Script-tor-ee-um Sw-ah-rah-m)

by Isidor Kaufmann, public domain

The Scriptorium Soiram is a library in the same way that a nation’s army is a group of soldiers, which is to say technically correct but vastly underrepresenting the concept.
The Scriptorium is a massive archive formed to pool scholastic, historical, and arcane research in order to further the learning of Ostelliach as a whole.
It is overseen by a group of librarians with centuries of experience between them, including Elenil Aenan, the elderly elven sage currently serving as Head Knowledgesmith who was alive before The Breaking and was the primary chronicler of one of the event’s most trustworthy accounts.
Selection to this group is a murky process, and tends to be generally regarded as “the people who spend the most time here eventually end up on it if they want to.” Each librarian is trained extensively in locating texts in the archives, navigating the labyrinths of papyrus and stone to find what each visitor needs through a combination of magic and old fashioned memorization.

Learning For All

In the past, perhaps the Scriptorium was a bastion of knowledge where only the most learned could enter, but the past several decades (thanks in no small part to Elenil’s efforts) have seen attempts to make the halls more welcoming and accommodating. This includes a free program for learning to read/write Common, free space for private tutors to conduct sessions with their clients, and no cost or up-front registration to visit. This decision was not the most popular with some scholars, but recognizing they had no room to tell someone like Elenil how scholarship should work, they generally keep their grumbling and sneering to themselves.
The result of this pivot has been beneficial to the Scriptorium in more ways than Elenil and his counsel had anticipated. Elenil had simply been railing against the notion that only a few should hold all the knowledge, having lived through The Breaking and seeing how critical every voice of the Finite Architects had been, how damaging it had been for people to be so specialized in knowledge that entire places had been doomed by no one knowing the basics of alchemy or herbology. (About whether or not Elenil was one of the Finite Architects, he’s not said and no one else knows.)
However, because of how open the Scriptorium is and the growing reputation that anyone can learn there, no matter how “stupid” they may think the subject they’re requesting is, has made it a fond institution of the people and not an ivory tower for them to shun. Each pilgrim to the institution is given the opportunity to donate to its upkeep, and invariably even the poorest migrant will toss in a silver or two for the effort. This uptick in donations has been vital in keeping the warding around the building, with a welcome side effect being that the entire region of Illuvia tends to be relatively free of chaos magic surges due to the power the structure emanates, serving like a massive temple dedicated to learning.
The Scriptorium generally does not allow individuals to check out material, given the size of Ostelliach and the difficulty it would have trying to collect all material once it was due. However, neither do they tend to be too affronted when a text walks out the door or a scroll vanishes from the archives; the general philosophy is that the knowledge clearly was needed elsewhere. (Generally, all knowledge is open to whomever requests it, but the Scriptorium does keep a log of who has requested which texts, so if a budding evil necromancer or would-be magical assassin is on the loose, they have the information to notify proper authorities.)

Architecture

The Scriptorium is the tallest building in Ostelliach, 10 storeys of warded, magically-reinforced stone bricks divided by school of magic with 2 floors of conference rooms, study carrels, writing desks, and even bare-bones sleeping quarters for those who cannot bear to tear themselves from their research for long.

Floors

1. Help desks, information for navigating the archives, breakrooms
2. Conference rooms, writing desks, sleeping quarters
3. Conjuration
4. Evocation
5. Necromancy
6. Transmutation
7. Illusion
8. Divination
9. Abjuration
10. Enchantment

Defenses

The Scriptorium was built with magic interlaced into each brick and then re-applied once connection to The Web was reestablished. The tower has wards applied to it routinely to protect it from erosion, natural disasters, physical attacks, and magical influence; the goal is to establish a safe haven from all of the horrors of the world, where people can study in relative peace.
To this end, they also possess a volunteer spellsword militia to guard and automated spell alarms and traps against dangerous entitites or ill will. In over 1,000 years, the Scriptorium has never once fallen to an attack (and being a cherished cultural touchstone, not many people would dare attack it and receive the ire of all of Ostelliach; even those who can't read generally appreciate the idea of the establishment).

History

The Scriptorium Soiram is the oldest standing institution in Ostelliach, founded over 700 years before The Breaking. It was the combined effort of every willing and available scholar in the continent at that time, all of them collectively donating their research, their texts, their tomes, their scrolls to build the initial collection with the understanding that shared knowledge could only benefit each of them.
In the time after The Breaking, the Scriptorium served as the safe place for the Finite Architects to develop their proposals to protect Ostelliach by Rebuilding the Temples and pioneering the Godcrafting ritual. They spent nearly 2 years locked in those halls, their actions there secret and lost to history, before they emerged and announced they had found ways to stave off annihilation.

Founding Date

774 PB

Type

Library

Included Locations

• Katakomvu Pituatoir

Characters in Location

• Fari Rubyminer

Related Historical Events

• 774 PB
  Scriptorium Soiram founded