Item from The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Michael's domain — every species, their languages, instincts, and ways of being, studied so deeply that the boundary between student and subject dissolved.
The catalog of animals is the complete knowledge of every species that has ever existed — their biology, behavior, communication, social structures, and relationship to their environments. Michael has studied it so thoroughly that his own cognition has hybridized with animal perception. He processes sensory information through frameworks that are part human and part predator. The catalog's power is subtler than war or death but no less transformative: understanding the animal world means understanding the biological foundations of all living behavior, including human behavior.
The animal catalog doesn't look like a library section. It looks like a vast preserve — open spaces that shift between biomes, containing or simulating every habitat on Earth and some that don't exist on Earth. The air changes as you move through it: forest loam, ocean salt, desert heat, tundra cold. Animal sounds layer over each other — birdsong, insect hum, predator calls. Some of the animals here are not simulations. Michael has never been entirely clear on which ones are real.
Also known as: the animal catalog, Michael's catalog, the beast stacks