“How I wish you could see yourself exactly as I do.” He locked gazes with me. Unblinking. Unflinching. Empty. “Or perhaps you already do, more than you are willing to admit.”
“I don’t know what you’re babbling about.” I couldn’t help it—I turned away to escape those empty, white eyes that reflected nothing. Which was a mistake. Morte had left the door open, giving me a perfectly awful view of Nome Ore’s bleak landscape. What at first looked like the rolling hills of the countryside became far more macabre when you looked closer.
The hills were alive, but not with the sound of music. More like moaning. Rather than dirt, the rise and fall of the landscape was built from the mottled, decaying, and sometimes still-moving souls of the Forgotten—the characters who didn’t matter, who no one remembered, who were sentenced to slowly fade into recycled ink piles.
“Whatever,” I said, shutting the door on the Forgotten and everything else I didn’t want to think about—like my graying hands. It freaked me out that my soul existed in the underworld as a faded reflection of myself that could be erased at any moment. “Can we just get on with this already? I’ve got better places to be. Like anywhere but here.”
“Please take a seat.” Morte gestured in front of his desk. A petrified Forgotten had been twisted into a chair with literal “arm” rests.
Turns out you don’t need a body to shiver. “I’ll stand.”
“Suit yourself.” With a thunk, Morte tossed a large book on his desk, sending papers flying.
I barely noticed. I focused on him through the flurry as he thumbed through the Compendium of Storybook Character’s glowing, ethereal pages, which held the extensive records of all the lives that mattered. The stories of the characters that would be remembered and retold. Both hero and villain.
Taking an involuntary step back from the daunting book, my foot landed on something with a crunch. I looked down at pulverized powder and the remaining chunks of a blackened, withered hand and fought the urge to hurl.
Morte sighed as the twisted Forgotten chair lost a chunk from the other arm. “They don’t make souls as sturdy as they used to.”
Sans serif scarabs scuttled out from under Morte’s desk to nibble at the pieces of Forgotten. The little punctuation mark bugs swarmed my feet, then ran away as I kicked and stomped.
“Still afraid of a few bugs?” he asked with a tsk and snatched a paper from his desk, making a few notes on it with his red-ink laden quill. Rather than a feather, his pen was shaped like a sickle. “I doubt the book will discriminate based on that. A very small flaw in comparison to your many, many others.” He tapped a page of the compendium with his sickle. “So tell me, little hero, was your story worthy to be recorded this time?”
It wasn’t, and he knew it, since he saw everything, lurking and taunting me from my shadow.
The first time I died, I had done so to protect Dorthea, which should have been enough to land my name in those golden pages. But turns out it’s hard to scam the Compendium of Storybook Characters.
When I took Morte’s red sickle and used it to sign the page, I may as well have been using invisible ink. The book soundly refused to acknowledge me. As if it knew that I had sold out my friends to claw and survive my way into a happy ever after of my own. It rejected me, not caring that anybody in my situation would have done the same thing. It didn’t matter that, in the end, I tried to make it right.
As usual, I didn’t meet someone’s—or, in this case, a stupid book’s—expectations. I shouldn’t care what it thought. I have never wanted to be a hero. Or a villain. Except, if my name and story weren’t recorded in the compendium…
Through the closed door, I could still hear a symphony of discordant wailing. A silver serpent slithered out from a hole in the chair-shaped Forgotten. “Traitorssss like you dessssserve far worsssse.”
“That’s a Grimmed lie!” I swatted at the snake even though I was unsure if it was real or if I was so screwed up that my conscience was now manifesting as a scaly critter, rather than a self-righteous chirping cricket.
“Is it a lie?” Morte tapped his pen on the desk. “You have been here for quite a while this time. Maybe the Girl of Emerald has realized it was a waste of life magic to resurrect a worthless betrayer like you.”
“Dorthea will come.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” Morte extended his arm around me like a creeping vine. “She is a hero after all,” he continued. “She’s pure and good. So she’ll come because it’s right. Even though she’d rather not.”
“It’s not like that. We’re friends.” My protest sounded hollow even to me. Perhaps part of me wondered the exact same thing.
“You can’t hide from me. Don’t forget, I see all of you,” Morte said, his slim and sickening grin splitting his face. “You don’t have friends and only look out for yourself. You push people away so they can’t abandon you like your mother did. Then your father—”
Panic blew through me like a storm, knocking away all my defenses. “Stop it! Stop it!” I put my hands over my ears, knowing it would do nothing to keep his voice out. I tried to channel the strength of the forest.
I am a child of the trees. Though the wind may howl, I will not break.
“How many times did you utter those words in the Emerald Palace kitchens, waiting for your father to come back? Face the truth, Rexi,” Morte said, bringing the sickle up under my chin. “You were born to be forgotten.”
“It’s not true. It’s not true,” I mumbled, still holding my ears and rocking slightly.
Find me. I sent the thought to Dorthea like a prayer. My usual fury at her had decayed and crumbled, just like everything else down here. All that was left was the aching need for her to see some worth in me. I’d promise anything she wanted—anything so I didn’t become one of the Forgotten. I’d be strong and good and kind and perfect and just.…
A soft, warm, green tendril of flame reached down from the ceiling above me.
Swallowing my moment of weakness, I glared down at the king of shadows. “Well, that’s my ride. As always, it’s been a ball. Let’s not do it again.”
I started to reach for the tendril, but Morte pulled a thin, metal, knotted cord from the binding of the compendium and, flicking it like a whip, wrapped it around my neck. Even without a body, the soul can feel pain. I shrieked, and the cord tightened as he yanked, cutting into me, ripping and fraying a place so much deeper than flesh.
“You’re not going anywhere yet.” He brought his cracked, gray lips next to my ear, close enough that I could feel the breath he shouldn’t have had. “A coin for the ferryman or a knot for me—no one leaves the depths of spilled ink without paying the price.”
Very carefully, I unwound the knotted wire from around my neck. It wasn’t a whip. It was my story line, pathetic and withered as it was. Each knot in the line stored a key part of who I was, everything I had done. If anything happened to it…