It began in the Unseen Seminary (no relation to the Unseen University, except for the similar smell of pipe smoke and ancient, slightly smouldering paper). The Librarian had warned them, of course—never shelve the Apocrypha next to experimental spell scrolls. But someone had, and it had been a Tuesday, and that's when books tend to go a bit theological.

  The result was The Scroll. Capital S. It had the King James Bible on one side and the Codex Runicus on the other, written in ink made from the tears of frustrated scribes and the occasional beetroot.

  And it could fly.

  No one quite understood how. Perhaps it had misread Isaiah 40:31 — “they shall mount up with wings as eagles” — and took it a bit too literally. It flapped through cathedral windows, distributing leaflets (often copies of itself), quoting scripture with the enthusiasm of a confused but well-meaning street preacher.

  What made it worse was the replication.

  Every time someone read aloud from The Scroll with conviction (or caffeine), it produced another copy. This, combined with its habit of quoting wildly out-of-context verses — “Leviticus 11:20, ‘All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be regarded as unclean’” — while divebombing unsuspecting scholars, made it a theological and ornithological menace.

  It multiplied like loaves and fishes, but with paper cuts and exorcisms.

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  “It's spreading like a bad sermon,” muttered Brother Tweak, a monk whose vow of silence had been interrupted when a rogue Scroll thwacked him across the face with Revelation.

  Efforts to stop it were futile. The Inquisition tried to burn a few, but fire made it angry. It retaliated by quoting Matthew 5:18 — “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass…” — and flinging itself into the sky in a flurry of jots and tittles.

  In the end, the solution came from the Order of Saint Footnote, who specialized in adding marginalia until nothing made sense anymore. They created The Concordance: a massive tome of commentary so dense, it caused gravity wells in libraries. The Scrolls read it, attempted to cross-reference themselves into oblivion, and vanished in a puff of self-contradiction.

  Some say one still flaps around the Library of Alexandria (version 2.0), preaching from Second Hesitations.

  But that’s just apocryphal.

  ---

  Real References:

  Isaiah 40:31 — the verse about mounting up with wings as eagles.

  Leviticus 11:20 — “All flying insects that walk on all fours…” (used absurdly out of context).

  Matthew 5:18 — about not one jot or tittle passing from the law.

  Codex Runicus — real medieval manuscript, written in runes.

  The King James Bible — you know this one.

  The Concordance — biblical concordances are real; they catalog every word in the Bible.

  Apocrypha — writings not considered part of the canonical Bible.

  Unseen University — from Pratchett’s Discworld, famous for magical mishaps.

  Second Hesitations — not real (obviously), but a classic joke “book of the Bible.”