Pallas’s eyes had been blue, and Rami might have noted—just in passing, mind you—how appealingly the light caught and turned that blue to something like a paler imitation of the sky. It had an innate openness, a youth, that was unusual for immortals and long-dead residents of the realms. But those sky-eyes had been taken over, clouded. They felt grayer, infinitely older and weary, softening his entire face with an alien, remote regret.
“A possession?” Hero hissed under his breath.
“A reflection, you fool,” Iambe corrected. She made a dismissive gesture to the still form of her brother. “Echo can only repeat what has been said, and can only appear as a reflection, willingly given.”
“Reflection willingly given,” the mirror-Pallas called Echo repeated, though his—her, at the moment, Rami mentally corrected—lips didn’t move.
Rami tried to redirect his thoughts. “But your brother—”
“He’ll be fine. Simply trapped in time until his reflection returns to him. Mother would never let him wither away.”
“Away,” Echo said wistfully.
Something else—something entirely silent and chalky with resentment—echoed between mother and daughter. Rami measured it and knew well enough that he wanted no part of that explanation. Some stories were not his to hear. He cleared his throat. “An honor to meet you, Librarian Echo. We would like to access your Library, by your leave.”
Echo-Pallas tilted her head and regarded them for a tick of silence. “Leave,” she said. Her eyes were on Rami, but the order was obviously for Iambe. To her credit, she barely flinched. She left with a shrug and one final sour look to her brother’s still form.
Ramiel made introductions as brief as possible, since Hero was still staring aghast, as if Echo was the worst kind of demon. The sooner they moved on to business, the better. “We are searching for information on a past librarian of the Unwritten Wing. One by the name of Poppaea Julia. She was of your time, and seeing as this realm claimed her, we’d hoped we might find answers here.”
Echo-Pallas appeared to consider. The soft voices were affirmative when they repeated, “Here.”
“This isn’t even a conversation.” Hero’s cheeks were still missing their color, but he appeared to have recovered his usual catlike disgust, at the very least. “We will get nowhere like this.”
“No. Where like this.” Echo said, and Hero threw up his hands with a grunt.
“She’s the librarian of Elysium,” Rami insisted. “If there’s anyone left who knew about Poppaea Julia, it’s her. We have to try.”
“It’s her we have to try.”
Hero made a strangled sound. “See? This is an exercise in comedy.”
He wasn’t impatient; he was unnerved. Rami had learned by now to read around Hero’s protests and simply ignored him. Echo was staring intently at them both. The replication of Pallas’s faded blue eyes had grown sharper, and a keen intellect trapped in them was trying to get something across. Something important. “You do know something?”
Echo stayed silent.
Rami tried again. “Poppaea Julia, the librarian of the Unwritten Wing who rebelled. Did she come here after she was banished?”
Echo’s chin drifted right, then left. No. But she was still staring at him, pinning him with her gaze. Hero began to grumble something, but Rami held up a silencing hand—a distant part of him noting with surprise that Hero actually complied—as he tried to run over what had been said.
“It’s her we have to try,” Rami repeated slowly. “Her, who? Is there someone else who knows more?”
Without so much as a blink, Echo turned on her heel, light as a dancer, and walked away. Rami furrowed his brow and risked a glance at Hero before gesturing after her. “We have to try.”
Pure skepticism etched itself over every one of Hero’s precisely handsome features, but he mimed his lips shut and raised his hands in defeat. They jogged to catch up with Echo, but it was obvious where she was leading them.
Into the sandstone canyons of the library of Elysium.
14
HERO
The wings of the Library are multitude. What gets remembered and what gets forgotten? Books, poems, unsung heroics, regrets. It seems random, what the Library sees fit to preserve for eternity. What do these things have in common? Are they all creative acts, or fated in some way? What are the criteria of immortal survival?
The only thing I can see, from here, is that they’re all innately human. Humans are the only mortal creatures that compose such ways to express desire, want, regret. Expression of the way things should be, or never were. That’s a very human skill.
Librarian Ibukun of Ise, 929 CE
THE STACKS OF THE Unsaid Wing were not peopled by neat rows of dreaming hardcover spines. The spines in each square-cubed wood apartment seemed more scattered and dead than sleeping. Scrolls tumbled in a cascade out of one shadow, while a stack of tattered envelopes threatened to spill off a high shelf entirely. It wasn’t all paper or parchment either. Hero caught a glint of sunlight between piles, engraved rings, carved bone. Knotted poesy crowns of flowers. Occasionally, a box appeared completely empty, but as he passed, a tendril of whispers reached out with a snippet of half-formed words. Hero knew better than to stop to listen.
Yes, the Unsaid Wing was an alien world compared to home. Compared to the Unwritten Wing. “Home,” where did that come from? Hero was a character of an unwritten book. Unwritten books did not have homes; they had . . . prisons, he would have said once. Places where they were held. Unjustly. Illogically. Temporarily.
That was it exactly. The Library could not be a home, no matter what mad impulses took his brain, because that would make the Library cease to be a temporary stopping point. To stop would be to give up on his book, fixing his book, inspiring his author, or . . . or at least getting to live his story again.
No, Hero focused on the yellow tendrils that directed their path in the oddly smooth moss beneath his
