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

by A.J. Hackwith

HERO WAS OF THE opinion that once decent folks began pulling things out of one another’s bodies, one should take a second look at the decisions that led them to that point.

“They burn them first, the stories. Humans always come for the stories first. It’s their warm-up, before they start burning other humans. It’s their first form of control, to burn the libraries, to burn the books, to burn the archives of a culture. Humans are the stories they tell. If you want to destroy your enemy, destroy their stories. Even if the people survive, it will be as if they never existed at all.”

Rami felt like he was missing an important undercurrent of the conversation. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Humans were always evolving new ways of not saying what they meant.

Knowledge purifies. We serve no one with ignorance.

Mad . . . now, that’s a peculiar term, and, saints, don’t they love applying it to women. Women have a special facility for madness. We’re encouraged to go mad over the littlest things, because if our anger caught and held on the big things, we’d shape the world.

And there was enough interfering with her thinking as it was. For instance, there appeared to be a soliloquy going on past the open doors, just outside of eyesight. “Bird,” Claire said without looking up. The sound of dusty feathers fluffing up and resettling told her she’d been heard. “Is there a Shakespeare knockoff in the hallway, yes or no?” Hard claws tapped softly against metal as the raven shuffled along her perch on the back of the opposite chair. She cocked her head sideways, then made a sound akin to a tuba in mid-childbirth.

The best of humanity can be found in Hell. I’ll fight any theologian on this fact. Hell is a place you sentence yourself to, which by necessity requires a solid bit of self-reflection. Or, at the very least, a death’s-bed awareness. Mortality has a way of forcing one to be honest with oneself; none of the frivolous barricades we erect in life withstand it. You find the failures here, but you also find the strivers, the yearners, the eyes open enough to see the distance between where they are and where they could have been. Hell is a place for the dreamers that have woken up, and the books still asleep. In both ways, Hell is a place ripe for stories.

Panic could be felt without being acted on.

Books are a secret hidden in plain sight. Read me, they say. Look at me. Turn my pages. Touch my spine. Read my words, and content yourself. Every book is a secret that only readers know.

Going mad is an excellent defense. Nothing is so discounted, dismissed, as an eccentric woman speaking the truth.