The Library of Shadows

by Rachel Moore

There is life, there is death, and there is love—the greatest of these is love.

For someone who died before using a toaster, he sure thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

“Those are a unique type of spirit, typically bound to something physical—jewelry or a sculpture, trapped inside a mirror, perhaps—that belongs to a person who controls them, the Heir of Fades. They’re very rare. It’s not likely we’d have any Fades on campus.”

There is life, there is death, and there is love.’” Somehow, Este knew what would come next. “‘The greatest of these is love,’” they finished together.

“When you love someone, it’s like building a library and filling the shelves. It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been since Austen wrote Emma or Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise. We can still pull them from the bookcases and dive back into the words, the same as the day they were written. All the years and memories are still right here, cataloged inside us.”

Could it be enough if all they ever had was almost—almost touches, almost together, almost real?

“Life and death together,” Mateo read, “create the complete human experience—no one without the other. What, then, perseveres? Like an oath sworn in blood, love ties the living to the dead, for you cannot know darkness without first knowing light.”

Maybe sepia-toned nostalgia was its own type of haunting. The ache of missing something you could never have again.

She’d assumed that if no one could be hers forever, they didn’t need to be hers at all.

Este smiled when she said yes. She kissed him, warm and sweet and soft, and she’d keep kissing him until their hair grayed, until their skin wrinkled, until dust gathered on the bookshelves. Eventually, they’d become nothing more than sun-faded ink, a final line in her favorite story, one she was no longer afraid to write.