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Two trips, and the way back
It’s easy to think that if only we could see the other paths in life, perhaps all mistakes and disappointments could be avoided. That a glimpse might tell us of some hidden possibility hitherto unknown. Tempting, to think of a life made in rearrangements of tiles until a grand mosaic is produced. No section out of place. But life is not a picture. Life is a story. Every path has its challenges and its victories, and no choice stands as a single tile to be replaced. My choices brought me here. I hope they will bring us all out.
Librarian Poppaea Julia, 51 BCE
Hero
Hero stood at the doorway looking down into the well of muses. It smelled of cardamom and regret. It was as he remembered it- an ever shifting kaleidoscope that reflected back to him the possibilities of his arrival there. There were a dozen versions of himself reflected back on him. The majority seemed like him, staring back. His green coat, still tattered at the right hem from the scuffle in the Dust wing, his right cheek scarred from the defense of the library. Some versions stood with others. Claire, in one. In another, Rami with a hand resting gently at a different Hero’s shoulder. In another, a twitching monster trapped in frills- Probity, if he had to guess. He redirected his gaze away from that possibility.
His goal was information gathering. He wanted a universe in which things still made sense. In which he still had his book, or never found out the truth. A world in which he’d saved all of the library and the plan to defend it had really worked for all of them.
In the distance, two muses lounged against a surface made of reflected light, eyeing him as he struggled to adjust to the disorienting space. He felt sick. He wasn’t entirely sure how muses came by their names, but he wondered if he was being looked down on by a muse of the realm of love or wit or schadenfreude- something suitable to the sort of amused gazes directed at him as he took unsteady steps forward.
He waded forward. The world seemed to shift on several different axis at once, and then he was drowning.
Rami
“Brevity?” Rami paused, his walk uncertain as he approached the library desk. “May I speak with you?”
“What’s up?” The muse looked up to face him, the expression on her face falling once she took in his posture and expression. “What’s wrong?” She corrected.
“Hero’s escaped. Or…left?” He wasn’t entirely sure what the correct terminology was for Hero anymore. He hadn’t talked with Hero about what he wanted to be seen as: human, or book, or something else entirely.
“Did he mention anything, the last time you talked?” Brevity gently closed the book in front of her and set it to the side, giving him her full focus. “You did…talk, right, after everything?”
“We’ve talked, but…” But not about them, or the kiss, or what Hero is no doubt struggling with. “He’s been…thinking about things. I can tell. I thought it might be wise to give him room to figure it out for himself.”
Brevity groaned and slid her hands forward on the desk. “Boys, I swear! No wonder he’s been moping around the stacks like a half remembered ghost! He discovered that he’s got a soul and you kissed and then…nothing? Rami, most folks like to talk about stuff like that. Or at least do more of the kissing.”
“Hero doesn’t. I mean…the talking part.” They also hadn’t done much more kissing, which he did assume would be happening more often regardless of whether or not hero considered himself human.
“Rami!” Brevity came around the desk, already looking like she was preparing for a trip. “I think I know where he went. Come on, I’d like to go retrieve him before Claire has time to worry about him disappearing on her again.”
Hero
He rose, gasping, and a hand reached down and grasped him by the arm.
“Hero?” Rami looked down at him, his dark eyes looking watery and concerned. “That was quick, how long were you gone?” Then after a moment, the eyes narrowed and the grip around his arm tightened and pulled him up and out of the well. “Come. You must be disoriented.”
“That’s an understatement-“ He stumbled out and, pulled along, then only stopped once out of earshot of the well and the muses within. The whispers of The Unsaid Wing swirled around them as Rami rounded on him. It was all overwhelming: the well, resurfacing, and the lurch in his gut when confronted by the full force of a Watcher’s scrutiny.
“Who are you?” To be fair, Hero thought, that was the question that he had been hoping to answer.
“Look, old man, have you not come to expect rash decisions from me by now? Really, I was just…going to take a peek. Nothing all that serious, I assu-
“No,” Rami interrupted, and in a motion no less bewildering than the rest of the previous five minutes, lifted a hand to Hero’s cheek. A rough thumb brushed across the smooth scar tissue there. He found himself blushing, which must have made the mark stand out all the more. “My Hero doesn’t have this.”
“Sorry, what?”
They found a bench, garlanded with flowers and with a view to the unsaid wing, and sat eyeing each other warily.
“The scar is from our escape from Mdina, in the catacombs. And then…probably afterwards, too. When Andras attacked my book. I think that prevented it from healing up like it might have otherwise.”
“Andras?” The Alternate Rami said, his brow crinkling just a little in what was, for Rami, an unusual amount of concern. “I…I killed Andras in Mdina. It was…Uriel let the hounds of hell after Claire. She allied with him and was willing to let humans die for a scrap of paper that would never get her what she really wanted. I decided then that I didn’t want her to decide what happened.” He huffed out a tight sigh, and Hero watched as his face hardened into a steady discomfort. “She did decide, in the end. She got her scrap and in exchange for a swift end to the war I nearly started, hell got me.
“Got you?” Hero leaned forward, looking for signs that perhaps Rami had been harmed by the legions of hell.
“As a replacement. For their missing Arcanist.”
“You’re the Arcanist?” Hero gaped for a moment, staring at the this alternate Rami. He squinted his eyes, “So, what about the rest? About your Hero. He’s…” Hero nearly asks how he became his Hero, how he managed to make gently touching his face seem like an everyday occurrence. Instead, he asks, “Does he still have his book?”
“He is separated from his book, but I imagine that he could not exist without it.”
“Oh boy, you all are complacent. You get hell without a fight and suddenly you’re behind the times.” This had been the alternate universe he’d been looking for. A place without the burden of the knowledge he now had. The burden of being made of soul-stuff and everything that comes with it. Hero paused, looking at Rami, and realized that he felt like not telling him about it would be keeping a dangerous secret. His Hero should know. “Do you know about the books? About Myrrh?”
“Hero.” Rami didnt pause long. A look had passed over his face that Hero hadn’t seen since the Dust Wing and the fight against the altered muses. He was worried, or scared, or both. But for Hero, not for himself. “You don’t have your book?”
“Hell, don’t look at me like that. I’m fine, you’re fine, everyone’s fine. But you should know…unwritten books are soul-stuff…Pieces of human souls. Growing like cuttings in peat moss.”
Rami
When they arrived at the well of the muses, a man with lightly tanned skin and copper hair was standing outside on the grass, his green velvet jacket removed as he rummaged through the pockets.
It wasn’t till he pulled a familiar book from the inner pocket of the jacket that Rami realized that this was someone else entirely.
“Who are you? What happened?”
“We came to look for information about the muses and one of them told me I should try consulting myself? Which honestly I thought was a muse version of ‘go fuck yourself’ at first, but I waded in…and then I crawled back out here.”
Rami walked past the version of Hero without a scarred face, and towards the well.
Behind him, Brevity started to object, but he reached back and gently pulled a downy feather from under his collar. “Don’t worry, I’ll find the correct path.”
He waded in. His vision whited out, and when he could see again he was sitting on a bench across from Hero. His Hero, who are far as he could tell, was mid conversation.
“So…I have a soul,” Hero said, looking out across Elysium instead of “Or part of one, for whatever that’s worth. And I was hoping…I suppose that’s why I wanted to come here. I wanted to try to find a version of myself who might know what the hell to do with that sort of information. Your version of Hero, he doesn’t know yet. Do you…you seem like you care about him.”
“Yes,” Rami said. He sighed lightly, watching this man- his Hero, struggling with something that he had been too afraid to talk to him about. “I do. Hero, did you come here, and dive into the well of muses, in the hopes that someone might tell you how to have a soul?”
“Yes!” He threw his hands out, gesturing emphatically at the concept of souls in general. “Yes, how to have a soul, what that’s even supposed to mean. If it makes me human or…something else, something new. I don’t even know if there’s a particular answer I’m hoping for. I feel like they’re all expecting me to pick an option and move forward, but it’s more than a choice for me. For any other books that might awaken in the future…or do…whatever it is I’ve done. I’m deciding for them, too."
"I know…you gave up everything for humanity, but I never wanted to be something that he had to look after.” Hero looked up, and Rami stared back into his open and flushed face.
“I kissed him and it’s been weeks. Maybe…I mean there’s no doubt there’s an attraction, how could there not be, but maybe a book isn’t good enough…or a human isn’t equal to a Watcher. Kisses in the heat of the moment are one thing…”
Rami’s heart sank and he took a deep breath to gather his thoughts before speaking. “I can’t decide for you what you want to be, or how you want to be seen- but I do love you, Hero.”
“You mean…him. The version that I switched places with.”
“I came after you.” He smiles, one corner of his mouth twitching up at the corner. “You didn’t
think I’d follow you when you left without word? I would have thought we’d learned our lesson by now.”
“It’s really you?”
“Would I lie?”
“I don’t know,” Hero rubbed at the side of his face and smiled a tired smile. “You keep surprising me. Can we go home?”
“In a minute.” Rami leaned forward and tentatively lifted a hand to push back Hero’s hair. It’s soft. “I’ve been thinking about that kiss this whole time.” He pulled him forward for a kiss and, after no time at all, Hero kissed back.
-
Ten minutes later, a different Rami and Hero walked out of The Arcane Wing towards Claire’s realm. At the entrance to the library, they paused, Rami taking a moment to rest a hand at the small of Hero’s back. “Ready?”
“To tell everyone that an alternate universe version of myself said that unwritten books are made of souls??” He shook his head, dispelling the ridiculousness of it all, an an uncertain feeling bubbling up under his ribs. “Sure. Let’s go.”