But it meant he had never understood reading. Not in the way Claire and Brevity seemed to revere it. He revered being read as a character of an unwritten book. Quite a lot. Though evicted from his book, he knew the singular awareness of life he felt being seen, being experienced. But he’d never been quite sure what the reader got out of it.
He came to an understanding in the Dust Wing. He was lost in a sea of dust and decay. Staying here would surely mean drowning, but stories reached out and offered him a life raft.
It was not like taking skills from a book, as he had before. Nor was it like as he remembered living his own story. It was not even reading, not with his eyes. Stories filled him like water into a sponge—first he absorbed; then he overflowed. As he listened—as he received—story after story. Each one passed through him, yet left something behind. A suspicious voice, a desiring ache, a fierce demand, a lungful of bittersweet victory.
It was like recalling well-loved music; it was like training swordplay into your bones. It was like the meditative wistfulness of hunting. It was like the euphoric agony of running. It was like everything and like nothing, and it seeped deep into Hero’s bones. He was the first reader the Dust Wing had had in—well, perhaps ever, and every book that hadn’t yet withered to the point of madness stretched out to him, eager to be known.
It overwhelmed him. Hero had always made a point to avoid other books—he would never be caught in the damsel suite. He’d always held the uneasy fear that the presence of other characters, from unwritten books like him, would only remind him of what he could not do, could not have, could not be. Perhaps the ink had weakened him and poisoned his resistance, but he found the opposite was true. The Dust Wing poured its stories into him, and he felt nourished, not washed out.
Claire had tried to explain what listening to a book’s song was like, the lingering sense of possession even after a book was closed, but this wasn’t that at all. Hero wrapped the stories around him like armor, not to become someone else but to see what he recognized in the mirror.
The only thing he lost was time. When he came back to himself, he was midway through a close-cut ravine of tablets and clay. The light-giving dust was thick enough here that he could see a couple of feet around him, and dust was like a thin layer of muted slate gray snow beneath his feet. The sharp cliff face of tablets to either side was jagged, not worn down by time. Hero supposed that was only logical; no natural formations of time and weather held sway here. It looked more as if a towering pile of tablets had grown until breaking under its own weight. It had split and crumbled, creating walls of jagged and tumbling artifacts that reached over his head.
Like in the Unsaid Wing, the form of the text felt unnatural and wrong to him. Books should be friendly to the reader—an enticing voice, paper, or even a flat-screen. These tablets were the wrong sort and unfriendly to the core. Not many spoke to him here, and his head was filled with only a susurrus of whispers. The silence might have been what drew his attention back. It was the only reason he heard the slow, ponderous grind of footsteps.
It was enough of a grounding sound to alarm Hero into action. He hunkered down against a spill of clay, just grateful that he’d been here long enough that the dust had frosted even his bright hair and clothing to dullness. The steps grew nearer, and only at the last moment did he think to snatch up a heavy clod of stone that must have broken off some greater slab. It was more cudgel than sword, but Hero hefted it anyway.
There was no helpful shadow cast in the dark, but the whispers receded in their own kind of warning. A broad figure emerged from a gully in the ravine, making their way, Hero noted, with a purposeful kind of shuffle that was more surefooted than he’d managed. Hero could only track his movement by the way the dust shifted in his wake. He’d been here long enough for another living creature to feel foreign, and the thought struck an absurd panic in him. As soon as the figure moved under him, Hero leapt with the rock over his head.
It was not an elegant attack—Hero found himself embarrassed by the raw sound he made to ease his frayed mind—but Hero had enough experience in combat to be efficient. Which was why when a fist closed around his throat and the world inverted, his back hit the ground with a grunt of surprise.
He flung his knee up, catching his assailant in the gut. The grip on his collar didn’t loosen, but the curse he heard stopped his intentions of a follow-up move.
“Hell” was the word, and Hero had heard it said often enough with self-righteous judgment and disdain to place the voice.
“Rami?” He felt a subtle trace of feathers brush past his nose, and there was no containing his relief. His voice sounded cracked and thin as paper to his own ears and his eyes were alarmingly hot. “Ramiel?”
The hand at his throat let go and appeared to hesitate a moment before patting down his collar. “You’re a rather hard man to find,” Rami finally said.
The dim light shifted as Rami backed off of him, but Hero felt plastered to the ground. He entirely ignored the sharp point of rubble that was beginning to make inroads into his ribs. “How—you—what the hell are you doing here?”
“Are
