librarian of the Unwritten Wing. One by the name of Poppaea Julia. She was of your time, and seeing as this realm claimed her, we’d hoped we might find answers here.”
Echo-Pallas appeared to consider. The soft voices were affirmative when they repeated, “Here.”
“This isn’t even a conversation.” Hero’s cheeks were still missing their color, but he appeared to have recovered his usual catlike disgust, at the very least. “We will get nowhere like this.”
“No. Where like this.” Echo said, and Hero threw up his hands with a grunt.
“She’s the librarian of Elysium,” Rami insisted. “If there’s anyone left who knew about Poppaea Julia, it’s her. We have to try.”
“It’s her we have to try.”
Hero made a strangled sound. “See? This is an exercise in comedy.”
He wasn’t impatient; he was unnerved. Rami had learned by now to read around Hero’s protests and simply ignored him. Echo was staring intently at them both. The replication of Pallas’s faded blue eyes had grown sharper, and a keen intellect trapped in them was trying to get something across. Something important. “You do know something?”
Echo stayed silent.
Rami tried again. “Poppaea Julia, the librarian of the Unwritten Wing who rebelled. Did she come here after she was banished?”
Echo’s chin drifted right, then left. No. But she was still staring at him, pinning him with her gaze. Hero began to grumble something, but Rami held up a silencing hand—a distant part of him noting with surprise that Hero actually complied—as he tried to run over what had been said.
“It’s her we have to try,” Rami repeated slowly. “Her, who? Is there someone else who knows more?”
Without so much as a blink, Echo turned on her heel, light as a dancer, and walked away. Rami furrowed his brow and risked a glance at Hero before gesturing after her. “We have to try.”
Pure skepticism etched itself over every one of Hero’s precisely handsome features, but he mimed his lips shut and raised his hands in defeat. They jogged to catch up with Echo, but it was obvious where she was leading them.
Into the sandstone canyons of the library of Elysium.
14
HERO
The wings of the Library are multitude. What gets remembered and what gets forgotten? Books, poems, unsung heroics, regrets. It seems random, what the Library sees fit to preserve for eternity. What do these things have in common? Are they all creative acts, or fated in some way? What are the criteria of immortal survival?
The only thing I can see, from here, is that they’re all innately human. Humans are the only mortal creatures that compose such ways to express desire, want, regret. Expression of the way things should be, or never were. That’s a very human skill.
Librarian Ibukun of Ise, 929 CE
THE STACKS OF THE Unsaid Wing were not peopled by neat rows of dreaming hardcover spines. The spines in each square-cubed wood apartment seemed more scattered and dead than sleeping. Scrolls tumbled in a cascade out of one shadow, while a stack of tattered envelopes threatened to spill off a high shelf entirely. It wasn’t all paper or parchment either. Hero caught a glint of sunlight between piles, engraved rings, carved bone. Knotted poesy crowns of flowers. Occasionally, a box appeared completely empty, but as he passed, a tendril of whispers reached out with a snippet of half-formed words. Hero knew better than to stop to listen.
Yes, the Unsaid Wing was an alien world compared to home. Compared to the Unwritten Wing. “Home,” where did that come from? Hero was a character of an unwritten book. Unwritten books did not have homes; they had . . . prisons, he would have said once. Places where they were held. Unjustly. Illogically. Temporarily.
That was it exactly. The Library could not be a home, no matter what mad impulses took his brain, because that would make the Library cease to be a temporary stopping point. To stop would be to give up on his book, fixing his book, inspiring his author, or . . . or at least getting to live his story again.
No, Hero focused on the yellow tendrils that directed their path in the oddly smooth moss beneath his feet. He would always be far from home.
“These are all unsaid things, then? Words that were formed with intent but never shared?” Ramiel was saying ahead of him.
He was still trying to converse with the damned creature. Echo-as-Pallas floated along ahead of them, hair flashing bright in the patterns of sunlight. The edge of her chiton barely stirred in