Cool, well I've spent a few minutes working on some ideas that I just got in terms of world-building that I'll share here. I'm glad to have found you again and I hope we can work together some more. They're not terribly refined or anything for the record, but I think I've got the point across well enough.

Edit: also, how long ago did this desolation occur/start?

[hider=Chant Magic]So first, the idea of the “Dark Library” potentially holding the secrets of whatever “magic” exists in this world made me think of words and chanting magic rituals. Then, there are these old gods that people are all praying to, even though they’re being ignored. This led me to a conception of magic in a similar vein to the Pioroa Shamans, an indigenous Amazonian tribe living in modern Venezuela. A summary of their magic is essentially that there exists a set of “Before Time” Gods, who were violent and brutal, engaging in constant warfare with eachother using the powerful magic that existed in the “Before Time.” Now, in the present, Shamans can use a powerful chant language (within psychedelic trances) to shift their spirits into the “Before Time” and access the magic there in order to re-write the history of the present time in order to heal sicknesses, make rain, ect.

Where I’m going with this is that maybe this Dark Library really is just a library containing the vast language of a time before the Gods died. So far all of our prayers have failed, because we did not know the right words to pray with. At first, once we’ve made it into the library proper, we start finding simple words that produce light, make grass appear, maybe even coat a sword in fire… But then the deeper we travel into the library the more powerful and deadly the chants become. As they become more complex, these chants force their user to interact with dark, malevolent Gods of death and warfare like the Vukash. Maybe there are some peaceful Gods too (though they likely won’t have the power to defeat our enemy). 

Then the party is going to have to face the moral issues of dealing with these Gods, paying the prices they demand, the dark visions and planes of the “Before Time” (do they start to corrupt?), and whatever else people come up with. I’ll stop here for now so that other people can see what they think and maybe add in some more stuff before I try to unilaterally hijack the magic thing but yeah, that’s what I’ve got so far.[/hider]