Folded sheaves gave way to rolled scrolls, which gave way to older, more eccentric materials. Unlike the words of the Unwritten Wing, these words were never meant for anyone but their intended recipient, so the artifacts felt no inclination to change, to demand to be read. An inherent laziness, in Hero’s opinion. Finally, Ramiel came to an abrupt stop several shelves down.
“Poppaea Julia.” Hero squinted through the blocky lettering on the shelf. “She’s here after all. The librarian that challenged Hell.”
“Supposedly,” Ramiel said. “It can’t hurt to look.”
Hero made a noncommittal sound. This had been his idea, but after catching glimpses of the kind of unsent tripe this library held, he doubted they’d find anything enlightening here now. The first few minutes he spent perusing confirmed his instincts. “This is all human nonsense before the woman had even died. There’s not going to be anyone with unsaid words for her after her death here. Nothing about the Library.”
The complaint didn’t slow down Ramiel in the slightest. He kept methodically examining shelves farther down, touching each scroll lightly, as if it was a treasure, holding it up to the light to read. His expression told the tales—Ramiel was not an expressive creature, but Hero had found himself gaining literacy in the way his arched brows knit in concern, the way the grim line of his generous mouth softened, just at the edges at small things. It was much more entertaining than the scrolls, at least, and Hero had to keep himself from staring.
“Here now,” Ramiel muttered. His brows did a caterpillar dance. Code: astounded surprise in the language of Ramiel’s face. Hero looked down to find the cause. The rolled papyrus in Ramiel’s hand was not yellowed ivory like the rest of the collection. The bleached surface was too white for the human-made papyrus of the day. Fine emerald script, spidery as tattered thread, crossed the scroll in tight, orderly lines.
“What is it?” Hero relented and crowded Ramiel’s shoulder to get a better look.
“Every unsent communication,” Ramiel mumbled with a shake of his head. “They really are thorough.”
Hero had no patience for slow reveals. Ramiel’s hand was blocking the way, but Hero’s eyes jumped to the blocky thick signature at the bottom of the page. “Revka . . . Arcanist?! As in Hell’s Arcanist?”
“It appears so.” Ramiel frowned as he unwound the scroll to read again. “It wasn’t always a position held by a demon.” Hero had a faint memory of Claire saying the same thing once. During one of the many obsessive attempts she’d made to train him to be a proper assistant for Brevity. Hero hadn’t bothered listening, since assisting wasn’t so hard and appeared to be simply doing what menial chores Brevity asked for. But it had been fun to watch the way Claire’s dark eyes had sharpened into storms as she berated him.
Over Ramiel’s shoulder, the text had taken on that wiggling, twitchy quality of library-to-library documents. Hero already felt a headache coming on—not that books could get headaches— but squinted his eyes determinedly until the ink resolved itself into a letter.
Librarian Poppaea,
You are an imbecile. You are a knacker-eared, fecund-brained bastard of ill-cast winds. You are a fool’s fool, a dunce among the blighted. I hate the day I ever learned your name.
“Well,” Hero said as he read, “this could be good.”
And I miss you.
“Oh, never mind.” But he didn’t stop reading.
The Library is in chaos. My own wing is in lockdown. Hell runs amok. And great wailing quakes of gods know what is the only indication I have that an Unwritten Wing even still exists. The Muses Corps, for lack of a better target, has been railing at me—me!—to do something, but of course there’s nothing to do. Hell is hell. It’s all very good to go on about the Library being an independent entity, but there’s no one to stop Morningstar on a rampage. He can’t get rid of us, I don’t think. Not all of us. But, gods, it sounds like he’s going to try.
What did you say?
What did you say, when you got this mad plan in your head? To challenge Morningstar for right to the domain? And then to claim authority, not on behalf of the Library—oh no, nothing as sensible as that—but on behalf of the BOOKS. Had you totally taken leave of your senses? Was my companionship so undesirable that you would seek to end your existence entirely?
I’m the Arcanist. My job is magical artifacts. As a golem, I am an artifact. Artifact and Arcanist. My domain is working with materials. As you used to say, things. Finding things. Keeping things. Fixing things. Yet I don’t know how to fix this.
I know you, Julia. I know what your first concern would be. “But are the books well?” you’d ask, voice getting that endearing fleshy squeak that humans do when distressed. I’m sure that’d be your first question. I wish you were here to shake. Of course the infernal books will be fine. You could drown the whole Library and the essential part—what makes the damned things so valued—would be left. I don’t know what that would even look like, but the unwritten books will outlive us all. The curse of unwritten books is to never truly live but exist forever.
I wish librarians had been half as cursed.
Where are you, Poppaea? When it failed, where did he send you? To your Blessed Isles, the land of heroes you spoke of? To Tantalus? Or to oblivion? Surely, what qualities you share with your damned books mean oblivion isn’t in store for you. The written and the writer are the same, after all. Perhaps Morningstar sent you to one of your books, to rejoin what you’ve missed for so long. Maybe you’ll be caught in your own story, ready to be read. I think you’d like that, really.
You used to tease me, sweetheart, about emotions. How stoic golems were, how passions must move so slowly