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January 1, 2020 - February 10, 2024
How much easier it would be if everyone knew their role: the hero, the sidekick, the villain. Our books would be neater and our souls less frayed. But whether you have blood or ink, no one’s story is that simple. Librarian Gregor Henry, 1982 CE
And carefully, thoughtfully, pragmatically, Claire lost her patience for concerned ex-lovers.
There was a reason the first words out of an angel’s mouth in the stories were Be not afraid.
Hanging around unwritten authors had taught Leto a lot about the words one didn’t say.
War has always followed libraries, my apprentice. History has made no effort to hide that truth from us. Look at Rome; look at the Crusades. Vanquishing an enemy and taking his books was just as strategic as taking his cannons. Books are knowledge weaponized. And what weapons you cannot steal, you must burn. Librarian Gregor Henry, 1986 CE
For Claire was not one to throw away her life rashly for vengeance. She respected vengeance. Vengeance deserved time.
And she was already contemplating ways to return to this blighted, half-dead realm one day and burn every inch of it to the ground. She didn’t care if she burned with it.
“He was a man who made a choice. You don’t get to take that away from him.” Hero’s voice was hard.
“I might have disagreed with his choice, but I would not steal his right to make it,
because I know how that feels.”
“Inspiration means having faith. It’s . . . it’s what muses do. What
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?
Rami could almost taste the memories as they cracked through the boy’s brain. A headache, gravelly sand, bronze chain, bronze hair. Sun on stones, snack cakes. Ale and ravens. A kiss. Papers and tea. Uncomfortably squishy.
The pain in death isn’t the dying. It’s the wounds we leave in our wake.”
“Forgiven doesn’t mean no regret. We’ll always regret the wrongs we’ve done. It just means you aren’t punishing yourself for it.”
The trouble with reading is it goes to your head. Read too many books and you get savvy. You begin to think you know which kind of story you’re in. Then some stupid git with a cosmic quill fucks you over.
“Don’t be a silly wiggins, ma’am. This will go faster if you come down here.”
Stories can die. Of course they can. Ask any author who’s had an idea wither in their head, fail to thrive and bear fruit. Or a book that spoke to you as a child but upon revisiting it was silent and empty. Stories can die from neglect, from abuse, from rot. Even war, as Shakespeare warned, can turn books to graves. We seek to preserve the books, of course. But we forget the flip side of that duty: treasure what we have. Honor the stories that speak to you, that give you something you need to keep going. Cherish stories while they are here. There’s a reason the unwritten live on something as
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“First of all: fire. Library. No. Second . . .” Brevity shrugged. “Weapons stopped being art. Fickle human progress.”
“Get your hands off my book.”
It’s not just for the sake of the authors and the books that we keep the unwritten sleeping. Yes, we have to preserve the stories, and yes, the trauma an escaped book could do to an author is significant. But the whole situation is rotten for them, isn’t it? Coddled away to sleep in some dusty realm? Might be, the unwritten have an idea or two of their own on how their story should go. Might be, they’d have reason to be angry. Pray they never wake up. Librarian Fleur Michel, 1798 CE
over Claire’s shoulder. She held very still. She felt the figures at her back, dozens of them. No, not dozens. Hundreds. And she knew the books were awake.
Books woken up after a long, very long, sleep. Heroes and villains and damsels and knights. Monsters and rogues and saints and madmen. Books and stories and characters and conflicts from ages long past, furies and passions honed over an eon to a killing edge. Aliens and monsters and queens and mercenaries and children. They crowded the hall behind her and clung to shelves; those with wings and tails crowded overhead. Dozens, hundreds, more. The weight of the wakened Library balanced, heavy and infinite, in the air. They didn’t bother with the niceties of dimensional physics. Out of the corner
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“We can.” The words came to Claire’s lips, like grave dust. “We are the dreams that did not die with the dreamer. We care nothing for the dark.”
“We are imagination.”
Her starless black eyes gained weight, as if feeding from the judgment. Claire tried, with the parts of her mind that weren’t screaming, to identify her. The woman didn’t seem like one of Claire’s own characters, or any damsel that had appeared in the past. This wasn’t a character that had ever woken up under Claire’s care, perhaps had never woken up. This was a character from an old book, breathtakingly old, a book conceived when characters such as this were not women, but forces, faces of the gods.
But the Library had already found her. The Library would not bring the others here until it was done with her.
The young ladies—Leto had referred to them as damsels before Brevity staunchly corrected that they were their own goddamn heroes now—were
“Rule number twenty-three. No fighting in the Library.”
“You need to leave, angel. The Library is closed and Hell will not claim you.”
“Not mad? I wouldn’t go that far.” Claire’s smile was paper-thin. “It’s been a day for nonsense. I’m full up on madness and horror.”
Rami couldn’t claim he knew either woman well enough to know what was being transmitted without words, but he knew the look of survivors when survival was not expected.
And here’s how you make a story: Soak a life in mortality. Scrape the soul. Librarian Gregor Henry, 1899 CE
Claire softened the words with a nod to the pot on the caddy beside the desk. “Tea?” “I prefer coffee, if you have it.” Claire made a face. “Well, now you definitely can’t stay.”
He angered the Library.”
She looked like precisely everyone’s grandmother, if one’s grandmother kept the blood of her enemies under her nails.
The muse had ranted and railed, and at one point Rami had had to restrain her from fade-stepping right to Lucifer’s court herself to set things right.
It stung a little, but Claire had to nod. Hero made an imperious gesture. “Then Claire-ify it. Oh—clarify! God, I’m clever.”
