A Hackwith - The Library of the Unwritten

She sniffed. “No guns?”

“Tell me about it,” said Hero.

And then the rest of the damsels began to take up arms.

Hero divested himself of all but his own sword, and soon enough they were busy pulling out unwritten combat books and conferring. Hero withdrew to where Brevity stood in the doorway, shoulder bracketed against the frame. She was running through the time left. They would need a plan. Barricades. Units. Tactics.

Hero tilted his head. “That was clever, what you did there.”

“What was?” Brevity acted surprised.

“Making them volunteer. Tricky.”

“I didn’t make them do anything. I just had faith they’d come up with the right answer.” Brevity sniffed. “Inspiration means having faith. It’s… it’s what muses do. What I did, once.”

“You must have been a brilliant muse,” Hero said.

A quiet smile grew on Brevity’s lips. “I was. Now I’m a brill librarian. Let’s get to work.”

LIGHT BLUE CAPSULES SPARKED a dull constellation against a navy blanket. They were that medical blue: the color of latex gloves and bitter chalk, but dulled by the bedroom’s yellow-tinged lights. They held the attention of the boy curled over them with a hunger-pang intensity.

When Rami went looking for the remains of Leto’s soul, he found a cluttered bedroom floating in darkness. Inside, a haggard teenager hunched over his bed, knees drawn and bony. The pointed ears and the oiled skin were gone, but Rami recognized the tangled curly hair, the soft brown coloring, the gaunt jut of the chin from the demon-boy he’d met. He was Leto, and yet he wasn’t. He was what Leto would be born from. Guilt and regret and self-loathing.

Rami knew exactly what that looked like.

The boy fixed sightlessly on the pills, tugging one end of the blanket to make the little blue ovals twitch back and forth. Back and forth, up and down. As if balancing the scale.

“You already know what happens.” Rami made his voice as gentle as possible.

The teenager raised his eyes dully to where Rami stood in the corner of his bedroom. The boy’s face didn’t change. Didn’t register surprise, as if a strange angel popped into his room at midnight every day. He made no move to cover up the dozen pills before him. “I deserved it.”

“Do you want to tell me why?” Rami already knew what he would hear, but the question wasn’t for him. He had to step carefully, so carefully here. Pulling a soul from its memory was a fragile process, and Rami was aware how desperately out of practice he was. The memory seemed already to be fraying at the edges; an eerie vignette of dark blur muddled the corners of the room.

“I… He’s dead because of me. I killed him.” The boy started toying with the pills again.

Rami gestured. “This doesn’t look like where society keeps a murderer.”

“I might as well have killed him. Darren, he… We were friends. Since we were kids. But lately he was just so… annoying. And always complaining. I tried. I tried!” Frustration flickered to life in Leto’s voice, giving it an uneven edge. “I invited him to stuff! He shit all over everything.” He flicked a begging glance to Rami, but the angel said nothing.

He clenched the blanket in his hands as his eyes diverted again. “It’s like he wanted to be miserable. He was always threatening to kill himself. Always talking about it for attention. I just… You panic the first few times, because you care, right? But after the twentieth time, it felt like it was just talking. He was on about it again and… I snapped. I said, ‘Sure, yeah. Hurry up and do it if you’re going to do it already.’ God, I was… ‘Just do it or shut up,’ I said.” Leto’s breath became ragged, his voice thick as he swallowed. “So he did.”

“I’m sorry,” Rami said.

“Don’t.” The boy was suddenly tense. “Just… say anything but that. Don’t. That’s what they all said. All they ever say. I kept waiting for someone to figure it out. Read the texts he was always sending me. Ask questions. Figure out I’m the reason that… But no one did. Everyone just knew we were friends. Everyone’s sympathetic, everyone’s sad. I’m not sad. I’m mad. I’m so—” Leto screwed his eyes shut again, and his voice broke. “But everyone’s so fucking sorry .”

“You really think they’d blame you?”

“They should. I… Darren never cared about normal stuff. The guys at school called Darren— Well, they called him a lot of things. I dropped him just to impress guys who couldn’t give two fucks about me. I abandoned him.” More pills crept between the boy’s fingers, and the shadows stirred across the floor. “Betrayed him.”

Rami watched the blue dots leaving dust on clenched hands. “You think this will help?”

“Nothing helps. Nothing fixes this.”

“Nothing stops it either,” Rami said. “The hurt doesn’t stop just because you turn your back on it.”

The boy was silent a moment, knuckles white. “Does it even matter?”

“It always matters to those you leave behind. You broke her heart, you know.”

His shoulders hunched. “Mom won’t care. She—”

“Not your mom. Claire.”

Confusion replaced some of the tension on the boy’s face. Memory foggy. “Wh-who?”

“The librarian.” Rami stepped forward. Not aggressively, but as one would come around the bedside of a sick person. “It’s time to remember, Leto. You’ve tortured yourself enough.”

“The librarian.” Leto repeated the word. His brow furrowed, and the boy seemed about to dismiss it. In this permeable place of time past, grief spent, Rami could almost taste the memories as they cracked through the boy’s brain. A headache, gravelly sand, bronze chain, bronze hair. Sun on stones, snack cakes. Ale and ravens. A kiss. Papers and tea. Uncomfortably squishy.

Leto shook his head to clear it. “That’s not. I haven’t. I still have to—”

“You already have. There’s no need to relive this,” Rami said. “Take my hand, and we can talk.”

Leto’s gaze drifted from Rami’s outstretched hand, was pulled again to the constellation of pills in his palm. “Who are you?”

“You can call me Rami.”

A familiar twinge crossed his face. Leto frowned. “You were chasing us.”

“I’m not now,” Rami said. “I just want to help.”

“Did it matter?” Leto rubbed his eyes. Rami could feel him fluttering between two memories, two kinds of now. Past and present warring. That was another feeling Rami knew well. “Did any of it ever mean anything?”

“We make our own meaning, like everything else in life. What matters to you now?”

“The Library.” Leto flinched, an apparent realization like ice water. “They were trapped.”

Souls usually didn’t pivot this fast. Rami grew concerned. “Easy, easy. You’re forgiven. You’re not in Hell anymore—”

“Who’s that?” Leto interrupted, frowning toward the other side of the bedroom. Rami swiveled around, half expecting to see a parent, a teenage friend. But the corner was empty to his eyes.