The Peculiar Archives is where the official records of peculiars are held. The building is situated near Wakeling and Rookery in London, England in the Carnival Tourist Loop.
The Council of Ymbrynes also meet in the archives to convene for their annual Nitpicking of the Bylaws.
Description[]
The building itself is four stories, the top three just rows of narrow, rounded windows, like an old office building. It was nearly identical to all the buildings around it. In Hollow City, it was totally encased in ice. Ice coated its windows and doors. Icicles hung like fangs from every sill and ledge. Snow spilled from its doorways, collecting in giant heaps on the sidewalk. It looked like a blizzard had struck the building—from the inside.
The floor ramped upward, leading past silent furnaces leading into a large room. A tunnel had been carved straight through the middle. The room appeared to be a reception area, with rows of straight-backed chairs facing a massive desk and some filing cabinets, all trapped inside tons of ice. Blue-filtered daylight shone from a row of unreachable windows, beyond which was the street, a smear of indistinct gray. On the walls hung dozens of clocks, their stilled hands pointed every which way possibly to keep track of the time in different loops. Above them, directional signs pointed the way to certain offices: Undersecretary of Temporal Loops, Conservator of Graphical Records, Nonspecific Matters of Urgency, and Dept. of Obfuscation and Deferment. The tunnel came to an end at a fancy, balustraded staircase that was free of ice but awash in loose papers.
Some of the rooms were frozen. Bulging tongues of ice had broken doors off their hinges, and through their splintered jambs I could see evidence of a raid: kicked-over furniture, drawers torn open, snows of paper on the floor. A machine gun leaned against a desk, its owner frozen in flight. A peculiar slumped in a corner beneath a slash of bullet holes. Like the victims of Pompeii, arrested in ice rather than ash. The Map of Days is located at the Peculiar Archives.
Miss Wren's room is a cozy room dimly lit by oil lamps and a rocking chair. The Ymbryne Council meeting place is a large room dominated by a massive oval table, its wood polished to a mirror shine. Portraits of famous old peculiars, not framed but drawn directly onto the walls in oil and charcoal and grease pencil. One was a face with wide, staring eyes and an open mouth, inside of which was a real, functioning water fountain. Around its mouth was a motto written in Dutch, which translates to: “From the mouths of our elders comes a fountain of wisdom.” Another one says: "Ardet nec consomitur" which translates to: “Burned but not destroyed.” A few windows have small telescope tunnels melted through them with mirror attachments that look down at the street below.
The injured lay in mismatched beds in a makeshift hospital room, watched over by a nurse with a bulging glass eye. The nurse's room has a stool for the nurse to sit on.
History[]
Hollow City[]
In "Hollow City", Jacob Portman and the other Peculiar refugees travel here from their loop looking for Miss Wren, in order to heal Miss Peregrine back to her human form. At this time the entire building is covered by ice due to the young peculiar named Althea who froze the building to keep everyone out. Fortunately they go to the outside of the building and Miss Wren confronts them, and after hearing Olive's complaints she takes them inside the loop and attempts to heal Miss Peregrine inside of the loop overnight. The little Peregrine Falcon is again a human, but the wards and the ymbryne are shocked when they find a man instead of a woman, who is actually Miss Peregrine's evil, elder brother, Caul Bentham, who then captures all the peculiars and the ymbryne, while killing Althea, and escapes with all of them except Jacob and Emma.