The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,53

the blighted. I hate the day I ever learned your name.

“Well,” Hero said as he read, “this could be good.”

And I miss you.

“Oh, never mind.” But he didn’t stop reading.

The Library is in chaos. My own wing is in lockdown. Hell runs amok. And great wailing quakes of gods know what is the only indication I have that an Unwritten Wing even still exists. The Muses Corps, for lack of a better target, has been railing at me—me!—to do something, but of course there’s nothing to do. Hell is hell. It’s all very good to go on about the Library being an independent entity, but there’s no one to stop Morningstar on a rampage. He can’t get rid of us, I don’t think. Not all of us. But, gods, it sounds like he’s going to try.

What did you say?

What did you say, when you got this mad plan in your head? To challenge Morningstar for right to the domain? And then to claim authority, not on behalf of the Library—oh no, nothing as sensible as that—but on behalf of the BOOKS. Had you totally taken leave of your senses? Was my companionship so undesirable that you would seek to end your existence entirely?

I’m the Arcanist. My job is magical artifacts. As a golem, I am an artifact. Artifact and Arcanist. My domain is working with materials. As you used to say, things. Finding things. Keeping things. Fixing things. Yet I don’t know how to fix this.

I know you, Julia. I know what your first concern would be. “But are the books well?” you’d ask, voice getting that endearing fleshy squeak that humans do when distressed. I’m sure that’d be your first question. I wish you were here to shake. Of course the infernal books will be fine. You could drown the whole Library and the essential part—what makes the damned things so valued—would be left. I don’t know what that would even look like, but the unwritten books will outlive us all. The curse of unwritten books is to never truly live but exist forever.

I wish librarians had been half as cursed.

Where are you, Poppaea? When it failed, where did he send you? To your Blessed Isles, the land of heroes you spoke of? To Tantalus? Or to oblivion? Surely, what qualities you share with your damned books mean oblivion isn’t in store for you. The written and the writer are the same, after all. Perhaps Morningstar sent you to one of your books, to rejoin what you’ve missed for so long. Maybe you’ll be caught in your own story, ready to be read. I think you’d like that, really.

You used to tease me, sweetheart, about emotions. How stoic golems were, how passions must move so slowly through clay. But I am angry now, dear one. Angry at you. How could you abandon your post? Abandon our shared duties, our routine of care and curiosity?

How could you abandon me?

I may be mere clay and magic, not like your precious books. But I thought you’d cared for me all the same.

Come back, Julia. This can’t be the way your story ends.

I’ll read every book until I find you.

Arcanist of the Arcane Wing, Revka bat-Rav

“A tragedy.” Ramiel’s murmur was like ground gravel against Hero’s skin. He must have stared at the papyrus long after reading it. Hero felt queer, like he was slipping between the loops of thick script.

“More self-pitying nonsense.” Hero shook his head and tried to focus on what had nagged at his attention. “I would have thought a golem would have been more practical.”

“Nothing more practical than loss. It’s a natural product of time,” Ramiel said quietly. Hero struggled not to wince. Of course the stoic old wart was still haunted by his own losses—Hero couldn’t imagine what it’d be like to be born in literal paradise and lose it. Hero hadn’t been born in paradise. If there was an opposite of eternal contentment, Hero had woken to that. He’d been born with a burning want in his chest, a hunger-pang sense of something missing. He supposed his author had put it there, though he’d never thought to hate her for it.

“Well. She could have done something about it besides bellyache,” Hero said weakly.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Ramiel’s glance at him, his expression softening to something dangerously near kindness. “Like a suicidal run at your own author and burning your own pages?”

“To be accurate, I didn’t burn my pages. She did. Authors