Location from The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Father's place of punishment — a space of absolute darkness and suffering where the children were sent when they failed or disobeyed, shaping them through pain into what they needed to become.
The coal tunnel is where Father sent his children when they failed. It is not a physical location in any mappable sense — it exists as part of the Library's architecture, a space designed for punishment with the same precision Father applied to education. Time works differently inside. What feels like days of suffering may be hours or years outside. The children do not speak of what happens in the coal tunnel in specific terms, but they all carry the marks — physical and psychological — of time spent there. Father used the coal tunnel the way a blacksmith uses a forge: to heat, hammer, and reshape. The children who emerged from punishment sessions came back harder, more focused, more committed to their studies. Whether this constitutes effective education or cosmic child abuse depends on whether you believe the stakes justified the methods. Father believed. The children are still deciding.
Absolute darkness. Not the darkness of a room with the lights off — the darkness of a space where light has never existed and may not be permitted to. The walls are close and the air is thick with the smell of old coal and something else, something organic and wrong. The temperature fluctuates between freezing and burning. Sound behaves strangely — screams echo for too long, or don't echo at all.
Also known as: the coal tunnel, the tunnel, punishment