I closed the book carefully.
“You found the books.”
I spun. He filled the doorway, silent as smoke, watching me with those amber eyes. I hadn’t heard him approach.
“How long have you been there?”
“A few minutes.”
“That’s unsettling.”
“I know.” He didn’t apologize. Didn’t explain. Just watched me, like I was a book in a language he was trying to learn.
“These are organized by color,” I said, gesturing at the window shelf.
His jaw tightened. “Yes.”
“Why?”
His fingers curled and uncurled.
“It is all I can see in them,” he said finally. “I cannot read most of them.”
“How many can you read?”
He looked at the shelves. At the thousands of volumes crammed into every available space. “Perhaps one in five. Perhaps less.”
I waited.
“Reading requires teaching.” The words came slowly. “I have been alone a very long time. The traders who sometimes came to the mountain’s edge... they wanted to sell, not to teach. And I...” He stopped. Started again. “I kept buying. I kept thinking,someday. Someone would come. Someone would read them to me.”
The weight of that settled into my chest. Collecting words he couldn’t decipher. Building a library for a person who hadn’t arrived yet.
“Then why do you have them?”
The silence stretched. His hands flexed at his sides, that tell I was starting to recognize. The one that meant he was holding something back.
“I do not know,” he said finally. “When I see a book, I feel... compelled. To bring it here. To keep it.” He stopped. His jaw worked. “I have been doing this for a very long time. I have never understood why.”
“That’s hoarding.”
“Yes.” No defense. No excuse.
“That’s not healthy.”
“No.”
I should have left it alone. Should have made a polite noise and changed the subject. Instead I heard myself say: “Do you hoard other things? Or just books?”
His eyes met mine and held. Something was happening in them. That flicker in his pupils, the one I’d first seen at the market.
“I did not,” he said slowly. “Before.”
“Before what?”
He didn’t answer. But his fists clenched and unclenched, and he looked at me the way he’d looked at the books. Like I was something he needed to keep.
I turned back to the shelves because I couldn’t hold his gaze anymore.
