The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,102

gasped in a breath. His lungs filled with dust and sent him coughing to his knees again, dragging part of the pile down with him.

It stirred up enough dust to illuminate his lap when he’d recovered. Enough to see what was in front of him.

Books—piles, acres, caverns, a mass grave of books. Piles, jumbled as if they’d dropped from the ceiling, waved and crested around him with no rhyme or reason. Books splayed on their spines, pages bent, covers torn; others appeared completely untouched. All sharp edges made soft by the colony of dust muffling everything.

Abandoned books had a scent. It clung to Hero’s tongue and gilded his lungs with dust and regret. It wasn’t precisely an unpleasant smell, no hint of mildew or rot. These books hadn’t been abused, but simply forgotten. Gauging by the dust, Hero might have been the first creature to set foot in this place in centuries. Altogether, it gave Hero a terrifying suspicion of where he was.

The Dust Wing of the Library was not mentioned many times in the Librarian’s Log. And when it was, it was mostly under the emotional subheading of NOPE. It was the wing to which books that were written but forgotten, lost, or destroyed were consigned. A graveyard of humanity’s stories. No librarians to care for them, no patrons to peruse the stacks, simply the books and the dark of oblivion.

When Hero had read about it, he’d enjoyed the feeling of delightful horror. A boogeyman for unwritten books. An idea to give one a delicious shiver before going about one’s day.

The reality was far colder.

The ink should have created something with his book, not damned it. Not sent him here, where no books return from. It was illogical, and Hero gratefully grasped onto the irritation in preference to other, darker emotions curdling in his chest. Illogical, an affront he would have to complain about at length when he got out of here.

When he got out of here.

The charade of that idea required movement. Hero stumbled to his feet. He picked a direction, trying and failing to chart a way through without stepping on any books. It was impossible. Canyons and hillocks of books stood in his way in any direction. Leather covers slipped under his toes, and pages crinkled and tore under his heels. Little destructions, tiny deaths passing in silence for those already long forgotten.

He’d half expected the damage to stir something up. Wake up a book. Surely these poor blighted creatures couldn’t be so lost that they wouldn’t try to send out a character to save themselves. But as Hero struggled through a leaning arch, the only thing he could hear was his labored breath, and that would definitely drive him mad before the dust did.

So, he started to mutter under his breath the first thing that came to mind.

“Once upon a time there was a man . . .”

Hero’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom by now and could make sense of the terrain. It wasn’t all leather-bound books here, not like the Unwritten Wing. With no readers to reach for, each text arrived in its original state as on Earth. There were books and folios, scrolls and hides, stories told in tribal knot work and stories etched in bone. Though they were few, bits of hypertext even drifted mist-like among the higher columns of rubble. Leto had told Hero only enough about the internet to give him a vague idea, but even humankind’s most prolific, infinite libraries still let stories slip through the cracks of time.

Hundreds, thousands, millions of stories. Lost like Hero was. He tucked his chin in his chest and tried again.

“Once upon a time there was a very handsome, clever man who was unfairly called a villain. Although he did nothing but speak common sense and see what needed to be done, his acts of charity were never understood and therefore he was a villain. It was all quite unfair, so one day he said to hell with the rules and . . .”

A sigh shattered the silence, which had been so complete, the slightest noise sounded like a gunshot. Hero jolted, plastering himself to the cliff face of books so hard he was enveloped in a cloud of dust. He coughed, and his eyes watered as he took in a lungful of neglect. For a moment, faces appeared in the haze. A chin, wide eyes. An open mouth. When he wiped his eyes and could finally see again, they were gone.