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“Shit,” said Rowan rather eloquently as the Librarian surged toward us, all of its eyes open and bulging, each and every one of them wet and blinking and gold, weeping runnels of red slime down its carapace.

Its many mouths kept up their shrieking chorus, passing a triumphant I will finally die between themselves with increasing volume, until all I could make out in the happy cacophony was the word die.

“I can’t fucking believe this is how I’m supposed to die—”

“Stop,” came Gracelynn’s voice. “Please.”

And the Librarian did.

We all did.

Their voice itched inside my skull: it felt like Gracelynn had unstoppered my skull and reached in to dig their fingers into the folds of my brain, work them deep enough that I could feel their nails scrape over the hot fat.

Stop, Gracelynn said, and the word felt like a vise, a pincer: it squeezed like a choke collar.

I gagged on the sensation. I was nauseous from it.

My vision doubled and swam. The light in the library went liquid and slippery, and it hurt to look at the world, hurt to do anything save obey.

Even my breathing shallowed, eager to accede.

Stop, Gracelynn said, and for a single dizzying moment, I wondered whether her word was enough to break my heart’s promise to my continued health.

The Librarian hung slack from the ceiling, a puppet degloved from its owner’s hand.

Staring up into that galaxy of arms, no longer outstretched but heavy along the sides of the creature’s blood-slimed centipede body, a part of me wondered if it’d have been better if the Librarian had stared at us with hate in its multitudinous collection of eyes.

But instead of vitriol, there was a childlike petulance, a pout echoed by every mouth it possessed.

“You,” it said to Gracelynn with a shiver, the motion bringing with it a wave of noise not unlike a hundred castanets being clacked in unison.

“You don’t understand what it is like to be alive for so long, to be alive when even your books have forgotten your name and there isn’t a page in the world to hold a memory of the syllable, to be alive now during the death of wonder. ”

Slowly, impossibly, its head creaked to where Gracelynn stood trembling on the side. A fine sheet of sweat glowed along their skin. Blue veins stood against the white of their throat. I could see their pulse quavering in the pale meat, like a bird struggling to loosen itself from a net.

“I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. Let me eat him and it will be done.”

Another shiver, the air crackling like small bones broken.

“No.”

“I will give you the tithe.”

Gracelynn froze.

“Oh, that’s not fair,” said Rowan, still cocooned in my arms. It was pure fucking luck that none of my flesh was making contact with his exposed skin, not his hands, the nape of his neck, his scalp.

He laid pillowed awkwardly on my chest. For all that I’d come to associate with him with necrosis and violent death, Rowan smelled of neither: only shampoo, a faint whiff of smoke, and something like old books and sandalwood.

He wasn’t wrong. At the offer, Gracelynn went rigid, what light there was in their expression draining.

Seeing its advantage, the Librarian continued hungrily.

“We will give them back. Calls-to-shadow, your dark-born, dark-loved. The tithe for something so much better.” Its voice smoothed to a creamy purr.

“Because they are mine now, they are mine to give back, mine to do with as I please. Hellebore itself cannot stop me. Take your spouse. Give me the deathworker to eat. Give him to me as they gave her to the Raw Mother. Give him now. ”

“I am entirely bones and probably taste bad.”

“Then I will choke on you,” trilled the Librarian, much too happily. “Your spine will needle my throat. Your skull will suffocate me. Your scapulae will catch and I will stop breathing, and I will at last die.”

“You can’t,” said Gracelynn, proving that some people did indeed have integrity.

It was clear how tempted they were to say the reverse, however, each syllable spoken like it had to be dug out from concrete.

In their tremors wracking their soft frame, I saw how they wanted to say yes instead to the Librarian, how the word ate through their tongue, the bowl of their jaw. “They’re my friends.”

“We just met!” said Rowan, unhelpfully.

“Jesus Christ, shut the hell up.”

The Librarian’s head lolled back in our direction, its expression no longer as put-upon. It had regained its pyrexic excitement. It licked the circumference of its mouth with a gorily red tongue, and blinked its many eyes in an undulating wave that shimmered up into the darkness of the ceiling.

“Just him,” it said. “All others can walk free. Cursed-song, dark-born, murderer. ” Its attention was for me alone.

I would have stiffened at the title if I wasn’t already skewered in place by Gracelynn’s command. “What did you call me?”

“I seeee you. I see what you are. I see it clear. Like the sun in the last hour on the last day of the universe. I see what you are. I will name you as they’ve named us: murderer, butcher, monster,” trilled the Librarian.

Its devout gibbering seemed to have a secondary effect; as it prattled gigglingly on, the Librarian’s movements were regaining their sleekness, and if before it had seemed like the creature was fighting unseen but very constrictive fetters to even twitch a look one way and the other, it now appeared like its bondage was beginning to loosen.

“Hey, Gracelynn,” I said. “Whatever you’re doing, you might want to consider doing more of it. Or something different. Because it’s starting not to work.”

“Don’t you think I know?”

The leering visage of the thing Hellebore had named Librarian lurched a foot closer to Rowan and me.

It had so many teeth: rows upon rows of molars tunneling into the back of its mouth, stubbling its tongue.

From a distance, that excess had been invisible.

The surplus dentition was the color of its gums, its tongue.

But they were definitely there, a textural horror that made me abruptly glad Hellebore, with its endless murders, had killed any nascent trypophobia I might have had.

Gracelynn sang out then: a single mercury-bright note that shone through my bones like a flame held to paper, and I burned in its light.

I was dying; I was euphoric in my dying.

My vision mottled with silver, dripping rivers of it, diffusing every detail.

And then slowly, that argent began to gray as everything in me shut down: heart, lungs, the factory of my digestive system; blood slowed, went sluggish, began to still; it was like falling asleep almost, a pleasing cottony nothing lulling me to unconsciousness.

I felt Rowan slacken too, his weight becoming an anchor, pulling me down into the dark.

We slumped into a pile of inert limbs; still Gracelynn sang.

They’d have sung me into death’s arms if not for the Librarian’s surprised laughter unfurling through the air.

“If only, cursed-song. If only, siren-sired. If only, sings-to-the-nothing.”

Gracelynn faltered. It was a mistake on their part.

A desperate, understandable mistake. A mistake anyone in their rarified position might have committed.

I’d find out later that what Gracelynn had wasn’t a gift for compulsion; they didn’t have siren ancestry.

What they carried was the echo of the words that calved the universe from nothingness and would one day put the cosmos back where it belonged.

But some laws, it seemed, were older than creation.

“If only the song would take me. I wish so much to be sung into the dust and the dirt and the deep nothing. I want so badly to die.”

The Librarian reared up, blotting the pressed-tin ceiling and what light there was with the spiral of its bulk. I could only see its smile, luminous somehow despite the rest of its face being in silhouette.

“And now I will.”

It lunged. This time however I was prepared.

Despite the headache I had accrued from being collateral to Gracelynn’s attempt at unmaking the Librarian, a vertiginous sensation half like food poisoning and half like the worst migraine ever, I was on my feet and running before the creature’s exultant declaration was finished.

Rowan pelted after me, admittedly at an awkward stumble as he had about a foot of height on me and I had my fingers twisted at his collar, and was pulling hard.

“ Run! ” I snarled, not looking back, barreling for the exit.

Only to have the way blocked by a crash of coils, the Librarian barricading the exit with its own shimmering flesh. Letting go of Rowan, I reversed, slamming into Gracelynn, who went down in a spray of tulle. I didn’t stop; I grabbed them by the elbow, dragging them forward.

“Inside!”

“Are you kidding?” wheezed Gracelynn, skidding to a halt. “That’s the actual library. We’re not—”

I dared a glance behind us as something came down with a whumph : it was more of the Librarian, more of its apparently infinitely extending frame, its arms everywhere, reaching for us, a nightmare forest of grasping hands.

Given its size, the Librarian could have ended this long ago, but I had a feeling it either liked its games or we were being punished for cockblocking its plans for euthanasia.

Either way, like it or not, we were being herded.

“We’re out of options.” When that didn’t move our new friend, I said, “And your spouse is probably in there somewhere.”

That did it. With a terse nod, Gracelynn gathered their skirts in both hands and sprinted past me with cartoonish speed; I could have almost laughed if not for the shrieking monstrosity thrashing after us, howling.

We fucking ran.