The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2)

by A.J. Hackwith

Treat her well, old book. Or I’ll come back and burn you too. Librarian Claire Juniper Hadley, 2019 CE

Beneath the tisane collection, a damsel girl sat cross-legged, a mop of dark curls curtaining her face.

She was a ghostly creature of bony edges, as if peeled out of a nightmare softened into dream.

Rami was an angel of few words but a whole catalog of looks.

The effect was as if a porcelain doll had escaped the tyranny of petticoats and discovered the pastel goth aesthetic as an act of rebellion.

Hero, the character that broke his own book. The book that’s forgotten itself.”

Damsels were really astonishingly, aggressively pushy, in Hero’s opinion.

REGAINING CONSCIOUSNESS WAS A scandal. Claire

“You’re not the librarian, you’re not an author, you’re not alive. Who bloody cares! You think your characters do? I certainly didn’t. Your friend Hero didn’t. You don’t escape your own story, Claire. It’s impossible.”

You could tell a lot about a librarian by their handwriting. There were Yoon Ji Han’s utilitarian notes in blocky lines, straight and unforgiving as his instructions. And here were Ibukun’s warnings, letters like spears. And Fleur’s looping lush scribble, always taking over the lines above and below it. Uncontainable, full of life. Brevity always thought she would have liked Fleur.

“You’re worth a hundred of that human.”

Brevity wasn’t sure which was more suspect: Hero volunteering for inventory or Hero concerned for the damsels.

Brevity had been expelled, the first muse to ever have her duty revoked. She’d been cast out and sent to the Unwritten Wing, where she could perhaps do no more harm and, the muses had likely thought, be tortured by the presence of stillborn stories she couldn’t touch.