The Library of the Unwritten (Hell's Library #1)

by A.J. Hackwith

“A lie. A dream. Good stories are both,” Claire dismissed. “Is it so bad? He’ll remember the story, turn it over carefully in the back of his mind, feel the edges of it like he would a lucky coin. A story will change him if he lets it. The shape and the spirit of it. Change how he acts, what dreams he chooses to believe in. We all need our stories; I just fed him a good one.”

The realms of the afterlife are long-lived, but not static. Realms function off belief, and will change as beliefs change. Realms can die if starved of souls, but more often they morph into something closer to legend than to religion. Eternity bends to the whims of mortal imagination. I wonder what we would do if we knew we held such power when we were alive. It’s an opportunity.

We think stories are contained things, but they’re not. Ask the muses. Humans, stories, tragedies, and wishes—everything leaves ripples in the world. Nothing we do is not felt; that’s a comfort. Nothing we do is not felt; that’s a curse.

Books and stories are the creations of imagination, and that power is just for humans. Take it from me. Gods can will a realm into being, and muses can try to edge things along, but only a mortal can imagine a different way for the story to go. How cool is that? Humans are freaking terrifying. I love it!

When you consider all the realms of the afterlife, there are aberrations. To a librarian, Heaven is a large aberration. It seems curious that one of the grandest, most belief-fueled realms of paradise does not possess a library of its own. In the minds of its believers, Heaven must be perfect. Absent nothing, regretting nothing, wanting nothing. It makes sense, then, that Heaven has no wing of our library. What is a story without want, without desire, without need?

In the end, guilt and self-recrimination were the worst sins for a soul.

In Claire’s experience, heroes of unwritten stories were often the most fragile. All that destiny and tragic backstory. It made it easier to force them into their books, but it left a sour taste in her mouth. Entirely useless. Nothing folded like a hero without a story. Even damsels were sturdier.

Whenever she read a book in a binge, cover to cover in a day with little break, she always found it stuck in her brain like a haze. The narrative voice stuck with her, and for a bit after, it was always like a waking dream, living someone else’s thoughts. The book haunted like a ghost in her head, coloring moods until she shook herself from it.

“You can care and still cause harm. Feeling, caring, for someone else is the worst kind of weapon, in my experience. It allows you to do things you never thought you could do and things you never thought you would do. All for the love of someone else.

Books were always easier this way. Mere paper and leather. Simple, physical, containable. But, like people, books rarely stayed that way. Stories never lived only in the ink.

It seems blasphemous. In a constant war of immortal forces, ancient demigods, good and evil, the most powerful piece on the board is the fragile pawn of a human soul.

Stay out of politics? Ridiculous! When has a writer ever managed to avoid politics? Every story is political. Tell a soul a story they want to believe, and you can change the world.

No story is insignificant. That’s what the existence of the Unwritten Wing teaches us. No escapist fantasy, no far-off dream, no remembered suffering. Every story has meaning, has power. Every story has the power to sustain, the power to destroy, the power to create. Stories shape time, for Pete’s sake. Once upon a time. Long, long ago. Someday. And then what happened? Living author or dead, written or not, your story shakes the world. That’s common sense to a muse, and the idea librarians are supposed to honor. That every story, every human, matters. The hard part is convincing ourselves first.