Wait.
As I looked around for something else to take my anger out on, I realized I was alone. The Nome King should have been waiting for me, waiting to edit me out of the story. I mean, this last death wasn’t exactly a plot twist. He knew I was coming. Yet his office was empty. Either I had materialized in someone else’s cubicle, or the boss was out.
“Well, since he’s not here, he probably wouldn’t mind me poking around his desk. And if he does, I’m already doomed to be a Forgotten. It’s not like he can really make things that much worse.”
I started ransacking the place, hoping to find my plotline. The office was mostly bare, but honestly, I’m not sure I wanted to know what the King of Death kept for personal effects. The knotted wire wasn’t here, but without really thinking, I pocketed a bent quill tip that had been discarded. Dead or alive, old habits lingered.
The silver serpent slithered under the door, coming into the office. “Ssso much trouble.”
I wiggled my soul’s bare toes. “I am not above skinning you and making slippers. I’ve seen Dorthea make enough of them, it’s probably rubbed off on me.”
Instead of being intimidated, the serpent wound its way up one of the desk’s legs. It seemed to chuckle, which sounded almost like crackling glass, and said, “You really have no idea. I ssssuppossse the Housssse of Emerald hasss alwaysss been full of foolsss.”
Maybe if I ignored the snake, it would go away. After all, it was just a scalier version of the cricket nag, a manifestation of my inner thoughts of niggling conscious. It should be quiet. I’d done a good job with this last chunk of life. I sent the frog back with a body and Hydra should be saved.
Hang on. I sorta kinda saved someone. Maybe while Morte was out, I should get a closer look at the compendium without his critical, creepy eyes.
His sickle and the book had been left out on his desk, like he’d rushed somewhere in a hurry. Taking a deep breath, I put the tip of the sickle to the page and scribbled my name: Rexi Hood. The ink skimmed the surface of the page…then dribbled off in a puddle.
“Argh! Son of a harpy.”
The snake chuckled. “You were a loussssy henchman. But an even worse sssavior.”
Pixed, I grabbed the snake just below the head and looked into its slitted, pewter eyes. Even in that position, she stared at me like she owned me.
“Griz,” I said, twisting my mouth in disgust like the word was something her flying puppies pooped out.
“In the ssssoul.”
I snorted and flicked her glittering silver scales. “Even your soul has tacky taste.”
She rattled her tail, which would have been far more menacing if it had actually rattled. “My ssssissster will bring me back. You’ll sssseee.”
On the desk, the compendium rustled and creaked, like some unseen force was touching it. Pages flipped back and forth in a flurry until it seemed to settle on what it wanted. One by one, several of the names scrawled on the page became unreadable, obscured by a swipe of white, gossamer ink.
James T. Hook
Grigori Rasputin
Pollyanna Crow
I would bet Mordred’s name had been whited out on some other page.
“Yesss,” Griz said, tapping her tail next to a name on the page. Grizelda De Ville.
We both waited for her soul to return topside, but the red letters spelling out her name stubbornly leeched through the white streak.
“Must be hard to reanimate a puddle,” I quipped.
She shrieked, but without her stormbolts or acid-peeing puppies, she wasn’t nearly as scary.
“Here,” I said to Griz, tying her soul body into a knot around what was left of the creepy armrest. “Tell Morte I’m sorry I missed him. Let’s not do lunch.”
I couldn’t record my name and I couldn’t go back to Story for an eighth time, so waiting in the office for Morte to finish his Spell Checks or whatever was pretty much the worst thing I could do. But that meant going out…there.
Griz hissed and snapped as I stepped out the office door, but anything she said was lost to the howls of the Forgotten. Paper rained down from the sunless sky, some of it crumpled, some torn. Some with great slashes and symbols in bold red ink. Pages of stories that went unfinished and untold. I’d heard about it while serving in the Emerald Palace from sermons about the Storymakers that controlled our fate. The clerics of Libraria admonished all to pray for the Makers to show you the way. Then they warned that those who didn’t behave or follow their path would end up cut out of the story and left on the underworld floor.
Seeing the blizzard of words among the cries of the Forgotten, I was almost starting to believe that there was a power that wrote every line of Story.
With no sun or moon in the sky, the only light source in Nome Ore seemed to come from bright flares in the distance. Maybe they were portals to other places, to other lands. Maybe I could sneak through.
Carefully, I navigated my way around the piles of souls and crumbling structures of unwanted and discarded settings. Slinking my way around, I stayed out of sight of Morte’s copy riders—an army of identical, featureless clones, their entire bodies wrapped in scrolls. Though I don’t know how they saw without eyes, they rode around on little creatures with shovels for faces. Like little paper pushers, they shuttled the falling pages toward the light sources.
This was by far the longest I had stayed in the underworld. After my first death, my soul looked much like a pale watermark. Each time, the transformation had progressed. This seventh time, my hands were still faded gray, but diseased black spots had taken hold of my toes and dark-gray tendrils were curling up my legs.
“Gross.” I tried to wipe off my calves, but they were slick, like they were covered in smeared ink. The black glistened in the glow of the light. Which turned out to be a great blaze of ivory flames coming from a hole in the ground. So much for a way out.
The copy riders scrambled into view from behind the mounds of Forgotten. They scurried like insects, pushing unfinished manuscript pages into pits to fuel the flames. Like a forge—only instead of melting steel, they were melting souls.
I covered my mouth to keep from screaming as I watched more featureless clones tossing characters into the trough to be dissolved into ink.
I’d backed up next to a pile of decaying Forgotten characters without realizing it. A hand shot out and grasped my arm.
“Help us.”
I screamed. I couldn’t help it. When I recognized the face as Fryer Tuck’s, half his jolly face blackened and crumbling away, I screamed louder.
The Riders ambled toward me, surrounding me and grabbing at me. I slashed at them with the bent quill tip like it was a knife. For every slice I made in their scroll wrappings, sans serif scarabs crawled out. For once, I didn’t care about the bugs and kept hacking away.