The books are damp. The books have always been damp. If you wanted dry knowledge, you should have stayed on the surface.
FROM: Marginalia in the catalogue of the Drowned Archive BY: Junior Archivist Foxglove, who was supposed to be reshelving but instead started writing and could not stop I have been in the Drowned Archive for four years now, and I can say with scholarly confidence that it is the most extraordinary, infuriating, beautiful, and fundamentally impossible institution in the Reach, and possibly in whatever remains of the world above. The Archive occupies seventeen chambers connected by passages that the original builders — if there were original builders; the Archive may have simply grown, like everything else down here — carved into the living rock at angles that suggest either brilliance or lunacy. The shelves are limestone, rising from dark water on stone pillars. The books are written on treated fungal-membrane (waterproof, luminescent, and faintly aromatic — the scent of old knowledge, which smells, for the record, like wet stone and ambition). Bioluminescent algae casts a sickly green...
From the lore of The Gaslit Reach.