Myrrh. Myrrh. MYRRH, sod it! Souls. That’s what they didn’t want me to know. Librarian Poppaea rebelled in order to acknowledge and free the fragmented souls of books. It didn’t work, obviously. Perhaps Old Scratch thought we librarians would be more compliant if we thought it was just books and magic. The devil obviously has never met a bibliophile. Rebellion is in a reader’s blood.
Stories are slivers of us, all of us. What makes a story real is the soul of the author. We’re humanity, splintered into the stories we tell ourselves. I doubt the old demon would be pleased to know I’ve rediscovered this. I’ll need to feign ignorance; perhaps we all will. But future librarians need to know.
The logbook keeps a librarian’s secrets, until they’re needed. Well then, old book. It appears we have work to do.
Librarian Fleur Michel, 1782 CE
THE BRUSH OF RAMI’S palm on her cheek had been the end. Or perhaps it had been the words, echoing long after her sight faded. Guttural, heart-piercing prayers, colliding like wayward meteors in the dark. Maybe the end had been long before that. All the paths led to here and now.
When she could see again, the Dust Wing was gone. Everything was gone, replaced with . . . color. Not the rainbows-and-unicorns kind of color. No, the miasma that swam around Brevity and clogged her throat was the spectrum of light off the surface of something dark and deep. There was no breaking the surface here. This was oil slicks and crystalized lava. It was like breathing bismuth, with its rainbows of geometry shaped by very old, old things.
Brevity floated in a world of specters and in a sea of ink.
A darker blot loomed, growing larger like a whirlpool that the world turned around. Brevity let the current pull her, for lack of another destination. The shadows grew, and eventually she could make out a solid thing, a sliver darker than ink at the core of it. The piece at the axis was fragmented and melting. It was a kernel of an idea, an unfinished shape that lost edges, gained edges, until it was nearly impossible to discern what was underneath the roiling black.
Nearly.
The air felt punched from Brevity’s lungs. “Claire.” A familiar jut of stubborn chin gave way to long braids that dripped and melted like candle wax. Brevity tried to swim forward through the air, but it was harder now. As if the colors were swirling through her, not around her. A furious dog paddle drifted her in the right direction. The effort sent little eddies that ate away at and disseminated what was left of a shoulder. “Oh, boss.”
The kernel of Claireness rotated like a tumbling asteroid in the void. Her face was carved out of obsidian, cold nothing instead of warm, beautiful brown. Only the shifting ridge of eyelashes told Brevity that her eyes were opening.
Brevity let herself drift, afraid even the slightest current would carry more of Claire’s core away. Never mind the way her limbs felt increasingly light and gauzy, as if she herself was being erased. “What have they done to you?”
“A gentle colonization.” Brevity flinched and just barely stopped herself from twisting at the voice. Rami stood as if on solid ground. If solid ground were at right angles with any sense of up and down that Brevity’s brain had. The ink swirled around him, ruffling his feathers like a breeze, but didn’t appear to sink in. He studied her for a long moment, face growing graver. He held out a hand. “They’re being less careful with you.”
Brevity reached out and trembled with the certainty that her fingertips were not going to stop at Rami’s palm, but he clasped around her wrist with a precise kind of confidence and pulled. Brevity fluttered toward him as if she weighed nothing at all, and when he set her feet gently to the ground—his ground—it felt more like sticking to the filmy surface of a bubble than standing.
The puddle that made up Claire, thankfully, did not stir at all. She didn’t appear to notice their presence, or if she did, she simply chose not to care. Brevity swallowed down the feeling of impending grief. “I can see the ink, but . . . the books like me. They wouldn’t do this to us. What is this?”
“Souls,” Rami said quietly. “The heart of any story is a little, tiny sliver of an author’s soul. That’s how any story is made.”
“What?” Brevity blinked rapidly, trying to hold on to that thought. It felt important somehow, the way dream revelations felt important right before disappearing upon waking.
“Later.” Rami’s voice was hard and grounding. “All you need to understand is that the ink is slowly taking over Claire, piece by piece. Trying to bury her under its own existence. We need to anchor her before I—before I try what I’m going to try. Otherwise we could lose her too.”
“Okay.” Brevity took a deep breath and held a little tighter to Rami’s hand. “Right. Claire?”
With Rami’s anchoring influence, the black core appeared to be turning in a slow orbit. Claire’s face began to turn away without stirring.
Right, it wasn’t just Claire in there, and it certainly wasn’t Claire in control. Brevity needed something the ink would respond to. Something that would get its attention, and also Claire’s.
“Do you want to hear a story?” Brevity breathed, through searing tears that felt like they were flooding her throat. “I promise it’s a good one.”
There was no color inside the ink that had smothered Claire; too much was going on beneath the surface. But there was a ripple, however faint. The wax-wasting drip of her hair slowed, as if cooling.
“A story. A soul for a story, and a story for a soul.” Rami’s voice was thoughtful and he was nodding when Brevity glanced back. “Try it again.”
Brevity swallowed and focused on Claire, the familiar outline she could still pick out through the black. “This is a story of a woman
