This is the 14th and final chapter of my cosy fantasy serial. If you’d like to know what happened previously, here is chapter 13, or you can jump to the index.

If you would like to start from the beginning, go to chapter 1.

Let Me Be Your Villain

Sydney is still as sweltering hot as it was two days ago. Maybe worse. As we make our way across the city once again, Sol puts his head together with Fancyfangs. When I join them, and he tells me to go ahead and lead the way to the convention centre, even I’m not dumb enough not to recognise that he only says it to get rid of me.

I really don’t understand why Sol talks to him. What he would even talk to him about.

I am not bothered by this.

I glance over my shoulder when Sol hands Fancyfangs a pen and holds out his notebook from his pocket as Fancyfangs starts scribbling something.

I really am not bothered at all.

One of the villains has an altercation with the ticket machine at Hornsby station—we managed to get out of our fictional world into the real one through some weird backdoor way too far north of the city to count it as part of the city, but apparently Sydney’s border has a weird kind of geographical ambiguity to it. You can live in the next town and still count yourself as living in this one.

The altercation with the ticket machine leads to a further—albeit relatively short—altercation with the personnel, but when Hammer Lady steps forward to clear up the misunderstanding, we end up boarding the train without any further questioning.

She doesn’t even need to raise the hammer.

Only when we step off the train do I notice that Sol isn’t with us anymore.

“Where is he?” I ask through gritted teeth as I catch up to Fancyfangs.

“Where is who?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

“I don’t waste my energy pretending anything,” he says while examining his sharp, pointy nails.

Bullshit. “Solomon.”

“Oh, the pretty ghost librarian? He said he had some business to attend to. And that he would be back before anyone noticed. I guess he was wrong.”

“If you did anything to him, I swear—”

“I prefer to eat the living. Ghosts don’t sustain me.”

I have nothing to say to that. But then curiosity wins. “Aren’t you supposed to combust in the sun?”

“Yeah, it’s really an interesting experience. I haven’t seen the sun in hundreds of years. Today’s been truly special.”

“That’s not an answer,” I say as we cross over to the front of the convention centre where the crowd is gathering for the last day of Supanova.

“I couldn’t step outside during daylight in my world. I guess this world is different. Or maybe the sunscreen your friend gave me. I’m not sure.”

I try not to seethe at the thought that Sol didn’t only want some private time with this asshole, but at some point, when I didn’t notice, he also managed to find the time to give him sunscreen.

I spot a shining armour and tense involuntarily. Then another.

“Are you okay?” Fancyfangs asks.

I am more than okay. I march towards the group of fake Luciuses, with a hastily assembled plan that’s fuzzy on the details but definitely should end with me coming out on top this time. And has no security involvement.

Except that as I’m marching towards them, the group splits to reveal one person who looks exactly like the others, except he is somehow remarkably different.

I halt in my tracks.

“Finally,” Blondie says. “We face again. I’m glad you brought friends.”

The villains gather around me, while the fake Luciuses take up some kind of formation around the original.

Hammer Lady takes out her hammer.

I raise my hands.

Blondie shrugs. “It’s a shame that I don’t need to fight to defeat you anymore. It would have been fun.”

He turns, and one of his copycats hands him a book.

“See this?” Blondie raises the book. “I can finally do what I’ve always meant to do. Defeat the most vicious villains, all at once. An utter demolition of all wickedness from the world.”

I squint at the title.

THE GREATEST VILLAINS IN THE HISTORY OF FICTION

“You know that is all fictional wickedness you are trying to defeat, right?” asks Fancyfangs, and I’m trying not to be upset that he spoke before me.

“It’s my fate,” Blondie replies. “I was made for this very purpose.”

I don’t think he gets what Fancyfangs is saying, but I don’t point it out. “And how are you planning to do it?” I ask instead.

Blondie consults one of his copycats. The villains behind me grow restless.

“It’s a book from the magic library,” he says. More consultation. “Once I burn this book, all characters in it will be erased from memory forever.” Another consultation. I’m pretty sure copy-Lucius is dictating to Blondie what to say. “And then all of you will disappear forever.”

I ponder that answer for a moment.

“Can he really do that?” one of the villains asks. I don’t take my eyes off Blondie to check which one.

“You know, there’s one problem with that,” I say and step forward. We are standing face-to-face with Blondie, his huge sword still strapped to his back. Maybe that’s what makes me so bold. There’s a crowd gathering around us, watching the two groups in this final face-off.

“What is?” Blondie asks, and the familiar confused expression returns to his face.

I’m going to hate this. But there’s no other way, and Sol isn’t even here to witness my not-at-all-villainous solution to this problem. I know one thing. If what Blondie’s friend is dictating to him is true, then all wickedness is indeed at risk. And without that wickedness, all good stories are in jeopardy. I cannot let that happen. Not only for the villains standing behind me, but for all those people who enjoy these stories.

For the people here at this convention.

For the fake Luciuses, no matter how dumb they all are, to copy this asshole.

For all people who are as obsessed with books as Sol.

But most of all, I’m doing this for Sol.

For his grumpy murmurs, and sunny excitement. For his nerdiness, and for his love of a library that enslaved him. For a dead guy, who has the brightest future ahead of him. It’s a shame that once I do this, I can never go home with him again.

The library has been growing on me.

“Lost your tongue?” one of the fake Luciuses calls out.

Impatient bastard. These wanna-be heroes don’t even know the basics of how to be dramatic.

“You know, Luce, you had one purpose,” I say, focusing my attention on the real hero. “Only one. To defeat your own villain. You aren’t fulfilling your purpose by burning this book; you are avoiding it. This book is for all the villains who have completed stories. Their heroes already went up against them, whether they succeeded or failed. You are just picking up the crumbs instead of facing what you were created for.”

“What are you talking about?” Blondie asks.

I can’t believe I really have to spell it out for him. “You were meant to defeat me, dumbass. You escaped your story because whoever replaced me couldn’t hold a candle to my wickedness. And you searched for me. All this time. And now that we are finally here, you decide you’d rather burn a book than face me? Are you really such a coward?”

Blondie’s face contorts. He pulls out the greatsword.

I’m in so much trouble.

It felt like a great idea. Now I raise my hand more in a don’t hurt me gesture than any real I’ll unleash my magic in self-defence kind of way.

“Stop,” someone calls.

When I turn, I find the only person who can decide my fate standing at the edge of the crowd right next to Sol.

Brenna Lockwood.

If Lucius wasn’t still holding the book that could seal the future of all great villains I’d never make the ranks of, and wasn’t measuring the angle at which he’s about to cut my head off, I would be laughing as all the Lucius imitators abandon his side and flock around Brenna.

She steps forward, and they part for her, following her every step in awe. It would be cute if Lucius weren’t the most effed up hero ever written. How did Brenna even get to the conclusion that it was a good idea to cut me, but keep him?

One of the great mysteries of the universe.

But the distraction is enough for me to grab the book out of Blondie’s hand. He notices, of course. I don’t wait to see whether he cuts me down.

“Sol!” I yell and throw the book. He’ll strangle me for this if I ever survive.

The book is magical, from a world Sol still belongs to, and my bet on the power of that pays off as he catches it without a problem. For anyone who doesn’t know and see Sol, I imagine the book has just disappeared into thin air.

“You’ll pay for this,” Blondie grumbles.

He towers over me.

“No, he won’t,” Brenna says. “Draven isn’t your problem anymore, Lucius.”

“He’s a villain.”

“He’s a deleted villain,” Brenna replies.

“Wicked and monstrous, an enemy to defeat.”

“Neither wicked nor monstrous enough,” Brenna says. “Kind of a softie, if I’m being honest. Not really great villain material at all.” She glances at me. “No offence.”

“None taken,” I say while I wrestle down the fact that I am genuinely, terribly offended. In a hovering on the edge of tears kind of way. How could she say that? Surely, it’s just a show she’s putting on for Lucius. She cannot possibly think that I’m so bad at being bad.

I am a perfectly fine specimen of a villain.

“But I need you, Lucius,” Brenna continues, ignorant of my internal turmoil. “There’s real wickedness spreading in the world you left behind. A dangerous dark force that will consume all that is good if you don’t stand up to it. Please, Lucius.” She holds out a printed, unfinished manuscript. “Please help me. Come home.”

Blondie lowers his sword. He isn’t looking at me anymore. His eyes are fixed on the stack of paper in Brenna’s hand. His home. Not mine. I am not his villain. I have no place, no home anymore.

Lucius walks up to her, his hand reaching towards the paper. I’m filled with a sad, deep longing.

“It’s not your place,” Sol whispers as he steps up next to me. His hand brushes against mine.

“It could have been, if I weren’t such a softie,” I reply. I failed. For the first time, it really hits me. I failed at being a villain.

“It was never meant to be,” Sol says. I glance at him. He’s giving me that soft smile that is the gentlest curl to only one corner of his mouth, but it brights up his eyes with a new kind of light. He hugs the book of all villains to his chest. “You were always meant to be my hero, Draven.”

Lucius touches the manuscript in Brenna’s hand, and he’s sucked inside it with a flash of light.

Brenna lets out a ragged breath.

“Thank you,” she says, turning to me.

“No, thank you. You saved me here.”

“Not me. Him.” She nods towards Sol.

“Can you see him?” I ask.

“No, but when he’s around you, I can always tell where he is just by looking at you. And when that note magically appeared on the table in front of me, telling me that you needed my help, I had no doubt who delivered it.”

I look at Sol, and I do not care who thinks I’m mad. Maybe they are right. I am. I don’t care to go back to my world where I could battle Lucius and fulfil my destiny. All I want is to bury my hands in those ghostly white curls and smell paper and dust and lavender soap forever.

When Sol smiles at me, I want to disappear. If only because that would mean this is the last thing I’ll ever see. And this moment is perfect.

“Thank you,” Sol says and raises the book. “This should be enough for the board to allow me back to work. And with Brenna’s help, I think we can convince them that what happened was really no one’s fault. You really are my hero, Draven.”

I shake my head. “I’m no hero. But I’ll be your villain. If you let me.”

Sol presses his soft lips against mine. Brenna takes out a notebook and starts writing feverishly. When she tears the page out, I flick out a finger and hope that this time I won’t miss. As the paper goes up in flames, the real world disappears.

It takes a week to send home every misplaced villain, and they make a mess of the library that has already looked more like a battlefield. Another week to clean up the mess.

The board calls in Sol to meetings for hours where they discuss the events that led to us almost losing the library and all the villains. I only know because he tells me. The board doesn’t want to see me. They don’t think I belong here, but I don’t really belong anywhere anymore. Yet it doesn’t bother me. When Sol puts his head on my shoulder, I could be in any world. I’m home.

He’s in another meeting where the board will finally announce our fate.

I pace the library waiting for him to return. They should let me stay. They should let both of us stay. That is the best I can hope for. I’m getting a hold of my magic, and they cannot, really cannot blame that little fire accident on me. Or on Sol.

As I cross in front of Sol’s desk, a corner of a book catches my eye. It’s sticking out from under the pile of notes Sol would normally never leave in such a mess. I push the notes aside. One flies off the desk. Underneath, I uncover a book.

LET ME BE YOUR VILLAIN by Brenna Lockwood

I frown as I pick it up. I flick through it with shaky hands. It’s not my story. It’s ours. Sol’s and mine. The pages I tore from Brenna’s hand at her apartment during our first visit. Also, more than that. It still runs short, though, just like most books in this library. Just under a hundred pages.

I cannot help but smile at the thought. There are still plenty of empty pages to fill. Our adventure has barely begun.

I find the last page. Unfinished, but not incomplete. I read the last few lines, and smile.

It ends with a kiss.

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This is chapter 13 of my cosy fantasy serial. If you’d like to know what happened previously, here is chapter 12, or you can jump to the index.

If you would like to start from the beginning, go to chapter 1.

Not from this world

Sol’s revelation doesn’t help one bit. Lucius is a threat. Always has been. Now he’s just a much bigger threat, apparently. Maybe I’m selfish, because all I care about is that we make things right for Sol. Get his library safely back in order, and he can be his usual ghost self again.

And that I can shove Lucius back to whatever boring story he’s come from.

Even if that story used to be mine.

“How did he do that?” asks the woman, who materialises into existence so close to my face that her floating hair catches in my mouth. I spit it out.

She is a ghost, uncomfortably reminding me of Sol when he’s upset, and it fills me with the infuriating feeling of helplessness.

But her question is valid. Sol furrows his brow.

“He’s not from here,” I say with a sudden realisation. “Never was.”

“That’s not possible,” Sol says.

“Think about it.”

“I am,” he replies with a mild annoyance that somehow makes him even more attractive.

“When he arrived, what book did he step out of?”

Sol purses his lips, thinking. “A picture book.”

“Exactly. Do I look like a picture-book villain to you?”

He tilts his head.

“Don’t answer that.”

“Fine, what are you thinking?”

“He didn’t step out of our story. But from a different one. When we went to the convention, there were all these fans of Brenna dressed up as Lucius. Brenna didn’t delete our story. She just deleted me from her story. She kept Lucius as a hero.”

“But she made a mistake,” Sol says, his eyes bright with the sense of discovery. “Her story has a hole. Somewhere, somehow, she didn’t erase you properly. A sentence, a mention of you remained. That’s why you keep flickering but never fading. That’s why Lucius remembers you and is coming after you. Because you are still part of his story.”

Sol stares at me as if he’s just delivered a death sentence. I find this is the most cheerful news I’ve received as long as I can remember. Admittedly, that’s not remarkably long.

“That’s why,” I continue, “Lucius has access to the world’s finished stories. The ones people remember. Because he’s part of them.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that you are basically stuck in limbo?” Sol asks.

I shrug. “If limbo means staying here with you, there’s no place I’d rather be.”

Sol stares at me in amazement. I raise my hand and touch a finger to the tip of his nose before I can tell my hand not to be stupid. But Sol smiles, and I smile back as my insides fill with pleasant warmth.

“Well, if you want me here in your limbo, it’s better if we stop Lucius from ruining every story ever written.”

“But how do we do that?” asks the woman with the hammer. My little villain army is all gathered around us, listening to this conversation.

Sol looks around, searching their faces. “You,” he points at Fancyfangs. “Come here.”

Vampire boy strolls over.

“Luckily,” Sol says, “it is part of my job to ensure everyone crosses this library belongs here. As you do not belong here, I have permission to use this.”

He takes out a small book, like a pocket-sized travel guide. When he turns it around, I realise that it really is a travel guide. Not just anywhere.

A LIBRARIAN’S GUIDE TO STORIES WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN

“What about the library?” I ask as Sol opens the book. “And the board? If you leave—”

“I suspect they are quite busy with all the mess we’ve made so far. Let’s hope they are busy enough not to banish me before we can clean this up.”

The villains gather even closer around us; except for the little group I tasked with staying here and guarding the library. I’ve carefully chosen the ones from boring stories, the ones without magic, and interviewed them to rule out any kind of pyromania. No one needs more fire in this library, especially not while we are away.

Sol places his palm on a page, covering it all up before I could read it. Light starts shining through his fingers. Brighter, and brighter until I must close my eyes against the blinding light. His other hand finds mine and squeezes. Wind sweeps around us, its chill sending a shiver through me.

“Draven,” Sol whispers.

I squeeze his hand right back to reassure him I’m right here.

“Draven.”

“Yes.”

“Open your eyes.”

I do. I stand in the middle of the villain circle, my hands clutching onto Sol’s like a child woken from a dream. There’s no brightness, just a soft red ambience coming from the neon lights attached to the left wall of the endless corridor ahead. Both sides are lined with doors as far as the eye can see.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“In the archives. The space between. Every door opens to a different story. To the left are all stories abandoned; to the right, all stories completed. And the little stars on the door signal how well known a story is. No matter if it’s only ever read by the family and friends of the author, or if it’s a New York Times bestseller, they all have a place here.”

“How are we going to know which door to go through?”

“We aren’t going through any of them,” Sol says. “At least, not any exciting ones.” Sol looks at me, his eyes once again their bright blue that makes him look so alive. “You gave me the idea.”

Instead of opening any of the doors ranging from intricate timber through heavy stone to light curtains, Sol rushes down the corridor. I can barely keep up. All the villains are following on my heels. Then Sol stops abruptly, yanking a trapdoor open in the middle of the path. It has a peeling sticker that says, “Fire exit, do not obstruct.”

“Why would a pocket dimension have a fire exit?” I ask, but Sol is already halfway down the hatch, climbing a creaking metal ladder. “And why on earth would a fire exit be a ladder? That’s not at all safe!”

“Shut up and climb,” Hammer Lady grumbles in my ear.

I climb, because no one argues with Hammer Lady and keeps all their bones intact. At least, that’s the impression I’ve got, and I really don’t want to test that theory myself. I reach the bottom of the ladder in pitch-black darkness. Something wet seeps into my shoes.

“Where are we?” I ask.

The ladder creaks painfully as Hammer Lady lowers herself down next to us. When I hear a loud hissing sound, I squint up towards the exit and see a shadow crossing over the door, followed by a scream.

Sol rolls his eyes. “Villains.”

“Should we be worried?” I ask.

“The only thing I’m worried about is getting back to the city on time,” Sol says and marches towards the exit at the far end of the tunnel. “Let’s go.”

Fancyfangs lowers himself down the ladder, grinning. I wonder if the drop of blood at the corner of his mouth is his signature one, or fresh. But when I do a headcount, everyone is here.

We follow Sol towards the light.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope my serial will bring some joyful moments to your day!

Best wishes,

Find me also on Wattpad, Instagram, BlueSky, and my website.

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This is chapter 12 of my cosy fantasy serial. If you’d like to know what happened previously, here is chapter 11, or you can jump to the index.

If you would like to start from the beginning, go to chapter 1.

A gathering of villains

Thirty-two villains have gathered in the reading room. Don’t ask me why the Library of All Things Never Written has a reading room. The books here were never written, and it would stand to reason that no one is here to read them. And yet there’s a reading room full of fictional characters. They all have their stories to tell. Unfortunately, some of them have extraordinarily long stories, and we don’t have time for that.

Sol and I furiously gather all the information we can about their most recent experiences. Not all of them cooperate. But the ones who do, reveal their unpleasant encounter with justice seeker Lucius Brightlight, and are still baffled by the fact that despite their majestic power, they’ve been outplayed by our hero.

I have serious doubts about Blondie’s ability to outplay anyone or anything more intelligent that a sack of potatoes, even in the face of all the evidence.

Sol rushes up to a teen with red hair and matching red eyes sitting in the corner and chewing on a handful of torn pages. He confiscates the remnants of the book with a mournful expression.

Okay, maybe not all of them would outwit the potatoes.

“Doesn’t sound like him,” I whisper when Sol relays the last of the similar stories.

Sol hums.

“Someone is helping him,” I say. It makes more sense than the assumption that Blondie has suddenly grown a brain.

“Who would do that?” Sol asks.

“More escaped heroes?” a guy chimes in. He has fangs and a permanent trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth.

The suggestion makes sense. Yet it doesn’t feel right. “Did he have anything on him?”

Fancyfangs shrugs. “Other than the enormous sword? I really didn’t have time to observe. He just snarled and then puff. I was here.”

I’m fidgeting—my fingers snapping of their own accord. I will them to rest before I set any more sparks on the bookshelves by accident. This inaction isn’t helping anyone.

“All right, attention, oh great villains of forgotten stories!” There’s a grumble in the crowd. Some disbelieving murmur. I ignore it. “As you all know, an overenthusiastic hero is taking you out of your stories and sending you here. Our most important task is to figure out where he would go next and stop him.”

A woman with wolf-like claws raises her… claws. She doesn’t wait for me to tell her she can talk. “Are you absolutely sure we’ve been forgotten? I find it hard to believe—”

“Rest assured, you have not,” Sol says. “If you were, you would have disappeared by now.”

That sends another murmur across the room. This one has a tone of apprehension to it.

Fancyfangs also raises his hand and starts talking simultaneously. “Yes, but then why would he send us here?”

“This is a space between reality and fiction,” I say. “A place between existence and non-existence. Here, your stories are saved, even if they are forgotten. And the characters of those stories pass through here before they…”

I trail off without finishing that sentence. Ever since we’ve returned, I’ve been too busy with the villain-invasion to think about my fate. I haven’t started flickering yet, and I’m feeling pretty secure overall, but that means nothing. My second chance at existence is a few thorn pages locked inside Sol’s desk drawer. There’s no way this would end well for me.

Sol still looks at me with some kind of admiration in his eyes, as he says, “Fade away.”

“I’m not bloody fading anywhere,” a woman with red braids and a hammer with a head as big as her torso says, and to my greatest horror raises says hammer as if she could crush her own impending disappearance with it.

“We won’t let that happen,” I say. Sol gives me an encouraging nod. I suddenly desperately want to kiss him again. I clear my throat instead. “If we capture Lucius, Sol here can help all of you get back to the stories you belong.”

The words leave a bitter taste in my mouth. Something is still off. I look at Sol. There’s a slight furrow in his brow. He feels it too. Am I lying to these people?

“How do we find him?” Hammerlady asks.

“Find his loved ones and torture them,” a man in a mask says. I doubt he means their beloved teddy bears.

“You, sir, need to stay here,” I tell him. He gives me a murderous look. “Several of you need to stay here, actually.” Sol can tell I’m improvising. I hope no one else can. “In case, um, Lucius returns to the library. He’s come here before, and maybe he has a plan for gathering you all here. When he returns, we need a group here prepared to take him on!”

The masked guy pulls back his shoulder and nods. “Okay.”

I try not to look too relieved.

Looking at these folks, I wonder again why Brenna deleted me. I think I’m just as fun as any of them. Consideration for another day. If I ever meet her again, and she doesn’t kill me for destroying her notebook, I’ll probably ask her.

Sol flips an enormous tome open on the table in the middle of the room with a heavy thud. Everyone goes silent for a moment. Sol grabs it.

“I need you all to state your names and last known location,” he says.

Every villain in the room—except me, of course—starts talking at once. A small brawl breaks out in the back of the room over who is the loudest and who has the right to speak first.

“Enough!” Sol’s shout sends an icy chill over the room. He has no reservations about using his ghostly magic anymore, and in a pleasant contradiction, the chill makes me feel hot. “Line up. No one speaks except the person who is in front of me. Everyone will get their turn.”

Oh, that authority. And for once I’m not on the receiving end of it. Thankfully. Or sadly. I’m not sure anymore. My emotions are in a weird tangle, but one thing I’m certain of is that Sol is the knot in the middle of them, and I don’t even want to untangle that. He could choke me with it, and I’d say thank you.

But my peers line up silently as instructed. Which is impressive.

The tome turns out to be a catalogue of all the villains whose stories have appeared in the library. I wonder if there’s a catalogue from the perspective of every character. Heroes, villains, unfortunate love interests. Sol compares the names of those present to the ones in his book and makes brief notes on the margin.

Until Fancyfangs.

“Are you absolutely sure your name is Count Dracula?”

“I am.”

“And you are from Dracula by Bram Stoker?”

“Most certainly.”

Sol frowns, then calls over the next person. Some he ticks off on a sheet of paper. Others, he adds to the bottom of the sheet, and his frown deepens.

“What’s wrong?” I ask after the last of our guests disperse in the reading room.

Sol points to the names in red at the bottom of his sheet. “These are not unfinished stories. Not even early discarded drafts. Some of these villains are here from real, completed, well-known books. Classics. Bestsellers.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means Lucius isn’t just eliminating villains of forgotten stories. He is on a mission to defeat all villains. Erase them from memory. Destroy the greatest stories the world has ever seen.”

Thank you so much for reading! I hope my serial will bring some joyful moments to your day!

Continue here:

Best wishes,

Find me also on Wattpad, Instagram, BlueSky, and my website.

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This is chapter 11 of my cosy fantasy serial. If you’d like to know what happened previously, here is chapter 10, or you can jump to the index.

If you would like to start from the beginning, go to chapter 1.

The only way home

I’ve forgotten how to breathe. Sol’s kiss was so quick and feather light that I’m unsure it really happened. But there’s something in his pleading gaze that pulls me towards him. I kiss him back, just to confirm.

And it is so very real that I suddenly understand why people talk about butterflies in their stomach. Mines are going to burst out of me at any moment, and then Brenna’s story is going to turn from cute romantic fantasy into horror from one page to the next. But somehow my body remains whole, even while I feel like I cannot fit inside it.

I kiss him questioningly, and as he returns it and hangs onto my shirt with two firsts, then I let loose the hungry abandon I’ve always imagined kissing him with when it was dark enough that even my own thoughts could hide away from my conscious mind.

Then he steps back. “I’ll be okay,” he whispers.

“Liar,” I say.

He doesn’t deny it. But it’s all good, because I finally know what to do.

I spent the last week searching for me story, then hunting down my author to create a new one. But Brenna was right. Brenna, who is still scribbling away next to us, knew immediately when she saw me. Well, the second time, she saw me. She understood my real story even when I couldn’t see it.

What she doesn’t understand that to get Sol home, our story cannot have a happy ending. Worse, it cannot have an ending at all.

“Thank you for doing this,” I say to her.

She looks up from her notebook, and that moment is enough for me to snatch it.

If this was some big and serious fantasy drama, this would be the moment when I toss the notebook in the fireplace. But who has a fireplace burning in the middle of summer in Sydney, Australia? Definitely not Brenna.

So instead, I start tearing out the pages.

“What are you doing?” Sol and Brenna ask at the same time, their voices like echoes of each other.

I turn to Sol. “I’m getting us home.”

I really desperately hope this will work. I drop the empty parts of the notebook back on the table and tear the pages filled with Brenna’s scribbly notes to as tiny pieces as possible.

Sol tries to take them from me, but of course, the only thing he can touch in this form is me. His fingers slip through the paper. “Draven, you can’t! It’s your story. The one thing you wanted! The thing you needed the most to survive. To go home.”

“This is the only way to get you home,” I reply. “My story doesn’t really matter. I’ve never been a really great villain anyway.”

In the corner of my eye, Brenna smiles.

“I can’t let you sacrifice—” Sol says, but then the room disappears around us.

I cough at the dust as it settles inside my nose. The smell of old paper and recent smoke lingers in the air. Sol is holding onto my arm, then shakes his head as if chasing away a dream. Then he grips the shreds of paper from my hand and jerks it away from me.

“A story never finished,” I say. “That was the answer. A way to get you home.”

I don’t know why I’m smiling. I’m back exactly where I started, in the Library of All Things Never Written. A fading character of a story soon to be forgotten.

Sol pulls out a folder and puts the pieces of our story inside it, then slams his drawer shut so hard it echoes in the silence of the library. Then he locks it.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“My job,” he says. “It belongs to the library now.”

There’s bitterness in his voice, and I suddenly remember how miserable he was here. He loved the library yet resented that he was enslaved to it.

“I shouldn’t have brought you back here,” I say. “You hate it here.”

Sol shakes his head. Silver curls are flying. I want to bury my fingers in them.

“I don’t hate it,” he says. “I love the library. I love the job. I just wish there was more…”

“More what?”

“More we do with them. I don’t want to just guard unfinished stories. I want bring life to them. I want to wake them up, share them, so they cannot be forgotten.”

The floorboard groans as I shift my weight. I can’t help but thing that the library wishes for the same. “Why don’t you?”

“The board would never allow it.”

“The board?”

“Did you think I created the rules? That I gave myself this job?”

“No, of course not,” I reply. There were rules Sol had to obey. Rules he broke when he opened the portal into the real world.

“If I don’t do everything exactly as they tell me to, they will send me back to the real world to be nothing, but a ghost consumed by madness.”

“But you broke their rules,” I say, dread spreading through me.

“That’s why I need your help to find Lucius and set things right. Maybe if I avert this crisis, I can earn their forgiveness.”

Sol shouldn’t have to earn anyone’s forgiveness. He’s the most caring, most reliable person I’ve ever met. Real or fictional. Living or dead. I grind my teeth at the idea that someone could judge him unfairly. If there was anything I could do… but of course, there is.

I can help.

It’s an impossible task. But I don’t say it out loud. Even if I have read every book that has never been written in the forever growing library of unfinished stories. I won’t say it, because I want to do this for Sol.

Even if it’s impossible. If anyone can do it, it’s us.

Sol sits in the middle of the floor, the world’s greatest catalogue lying open on his lap. It’s heavy with thousands of pages. A catalogue of all stories in this place. He’s maintained it. Recorded every new arrival by hand for the last hundred years.

His fingers trace every line, and he quietly shakes his head. Trying to guess which story Lucius would invade without even knowing the content feels daunting. Sol takes it as if it’s another Tuesday.

I was concerned when we got back here that he’d be sad or upset, but he’s home amongst the books. In his element trying to solve a mystery. I’ve never expected that I would look at a book worm with his nose in library catalogue and find it hot. Something must be wrong with me.

But I’m a villain. I want to embrace everything that’s wrong with me. This feeling most of all.

“Excuse me?” someone asks behind me.

I jump and slam my shoulder into a shelf. “Ouch.”

The woman has flaming hair and wears a matching red dress. She scowls.

Sol looks up. “Welcome.”

When the woman raises her hand, trying to flick her fingers, I say, “Don’t.”

She finally looks at me. “Why not?”

I know her kind. Rationale won’t work. I fake nonchalance. “I tried fire last week; it didn’t work out.”

She measures me up. “Maybe I’m better than you.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are,” I reply.

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” another guy says as he materialises from nothing. He has a hook for one hand and wears an idiotic hat. I would mock him if he didn’t have so much blood on that hook. But I don’t want him to stick it in me.

Then another person appears. And another.

“No, he cannot.” Sol drops the catalogue and stands. “It’s impossible.”

“What is?” I ask as our lonely little library becomes a crowd of confused, unsavoury people.

“It’s Lucius. Eliminating all villains.”

Thank you so much for reading! I hope my serial will bring some joyful moments to your day!

Continue here:

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This is chapter 10 of my cosy fantasy serial. If you’d like to know what happened previously, here is chapter 9, or you can jump to the index.

If you would like to start from the beginning, go to chapter 1.

You made me this way

I request Sol’s help to figure out where Brenna lives, before I could enact my diabolical plan and follow his instructions to the local library. By the time we get there it is, unfortunately, closed.

I quickly add breaking and entering to my crimes against humanity—which I’m sure would dwarf next to all the wicked things I committed as a villain, if only I could remember them. Sol reassures me that if I were caught, I would land in prison, nonetheless. I decide it’s for the best not to get caught.

Once inside, I have to lean on Sol’s knowledge of the real world once again, and with his help, I showcase my incredible talents at using technology. Once the computer is turned on, and I fire up a web browser, we find Brenna’s address in no time.

Really, no time.

It is disturbing how easy it is to get someone’s home address off the internet.

Brenna lives on the second floor of an apartment building in East Sydney, close enough to the beach that I can smell the ocean as we walk up her street.

We climb another hill approaching Brenna’s building, and I note how the number of steep hills is unreasonable here for a beach-side city.

In my imagination, a beach city would be flat, like a line extending from the crystalline water, filled with quaint little houses where fisherfolk live their ordinary yet satisfying lives. Sydney defies that image at every corner.

We climb up what I hope is really the last goddamn hill.

To my greatest relief Sol says, “This is the one.”

Yellow light spills out of several square windows of the equally square building, its red brick wall reflecting the equally yellow light of the single streetlight that seems to have an undeserved loyalty to a job all other streetlights must have abandoned for something that pays better. It sits lonely on the side of the narrow road filled to the brim with cars parking on both sides.

I slow to catch my breath, then stop in the pitch-black doorway. A light comes on, and I immediately run behind the building before anyone could see me.

“Draven?” Sol calls, but he has no choice and must follow me.

“Someone’s coming,” I whisper.

“Yes, we were coming.”

“But the light—”

“It’s motion detector.”

“Motion-what?” Apparently, I do not know everything about the real world that my creator knows, and this lack of knowledge once again puts amusement in Sol’s pretty eyes.

“It detected that you were coming and turned on the light so you can see.”

“Who?”

“The motion detector.” Sol sighs at my confused expression. “It’s a machine.”

“How do you know?” I ask, peeking around the corner.

“I read it. It’s all in the books.”

“But how do you know its real?”

“Writers abandon just as many non-fiction books as fiction ones.”

“Oh.” Now, for the first time, I’m embarrassed that Sol’s tethered to me and as a result he must follow me and explain to me the concept of a motion detector.

I gather my courage to approach the machine door again. The idea that it can see me is unnerving.

“How are we going to get in?” I ask. “Do you think the motion detector will see us and open the door as well?”

“No,” Sol says with the patience I accredit to people looking after little people who aren’t very smart. “I don’t think it will.”

“Should I press one of these?” I point to the panel with little buttons. “Or all of them?”

“They have names. And numbers.”

I lean closer. They indeed have names with tiny script. I press the one that says Brenna Lockwood.

“Hello?” A robotic version Brenna’s voice comes through a speaker.

“Hi Brenna, it’s Draven. Could we please talk? It’s important.”

Silence.

“I promise not to burn down the building.”

“Are you the creepy guy who stole my unfinished manuscript?” she asks, but she doesn’t sound angry. I’m not sure if it’s because I cannot see her, or because the speaker distorts her voice.

“No. I mean, I am a creepy guy, but I didn’t steal your manuscript. I’m only creepy because I guess that’s what you wanted me to be. Or maybe you didn’t, because you never finished that manuscript, and I was just supposed to disappear when you forgot about me, but then Lucius came, and I set the library on fire—”

“Draven?” she asks.

I stop talking.

“How is this even possible?”

“It’s a long story. I can tell you if you want, but I really don’t like talking into this thing.”

“I’m going to regret this,” she says, then a sudden buzzing sound sends me almost running around the building again.

“The door is open,” Sol whispers.

I squint. It doesn’t look open to me, but the buzzing sound continues. “The motion detector?”

Sol coughs, but I think he’s laughing. Not sure why. “No, Draven. It’s Brenna. She wants us to come in.”

“She doesn’t know that you are here.”

“Just open the damn door, please?”

I push against it, and the door opens. As we step on the stairs, I hear Brenna’s voice again. This time not robotic.

“Here, first floor.”

“I have my ghost friend with me, can he come too?” I ask because it’s a polite thing to do.

“Of course,” Brenna says. “All imaginary villains and their ghost friends are welcome. Gosh, I’m going insane.”

She stands in the door in a nightgown and a bathrobe.

“Sorry I woke you,” I say.

“No, you are not.”

“No, I’m really not.”

She leads us into the apartment and makes tea for herself. An hour into my recollection of the past week, she still doesn’t believe me, but she’s starting to embrace her own insanity enough to make a cup of tea for me too.

“What do you want from me?” she asks.

“I want you to finish my story.”

“I can’t. I scrapped that draft. Wrote a different one. I sent it to my editor.”

“Why?” I finally ask the question that’s been nagging me all this time. But I still cannot say it in its entirety. Why wasn’t I good enough for you?

She shakes her head confused. “I had a deadline with my publisher.”

“Then give me another story,” I say. “You didn’t like the last one, clearly. Write a new one. Give me a new life.”

She contemplates that. “Don’t you already have your story? You visited the most magical library in the universe!”

“Technically it’s the second—” Sol tries to chime in, but only I can hear him.

“You escaped, you tasted the real world, you fell in love—”

“I did not,” I say categorically, but can’t help glancing at Sol. Not sure what I expect to find there. Confirmation, maybe? But as he stands still, bright blue eyes boring into mine, my heart jumps a little.

Come with me, I wanted to tell him barely more than a day ago. I didn’t know why, but I wanted him by my side. And he has been, reluctantly.

“Do you want to be part of my new story?” I ask him.

He takes a step closer, a bitter smile on his lips as he reaches for my face. I rest against his palm. “I can’t be, Draven. Even if she wrote me into your story, my place is elsewhere.”

“The library? Why do you love it so much?” I ask and I try not to think about the ridiculous pang of jealousy I feel for infinite shelves filled with unfinished stories.

Sol turns away from me. “I love it, yes. But it’s not the reason. I’m not a character in a story. Never was, never could be. I was a man in the real world. A man who fell into a story once and died inside it. That’s how my soul got tied to the library. Just like you would fade outside your story, I fade outside the library until I turn into a poltergeist, then finally disappear.”

I glance back at Brenna, but she already has her notebook and pen in hand, scribbling away. She gives me an encouraging nod when she notices me staring.

“If I write your story, it will be your true one,” she says. “Everything you told me, it’s amazing. I have to write this down.”

She keeps scribbling.

“If that’s true,” I say to Sol, “If being puts you in danger, then you have to go back, Sol. Now.”

“I will,” he says.

“I’m fine, you don’t have to wait here for me.” I don’t want him to wait for me. Because I don’t want to say goodbye, but I want him to risk disappearing even less. I want the soft-spoken Sol with his love for stories, and his ghostly outbursts, who smells like old paper and lavender soap, to be in his library where he belongs.

I blink long. When I open my eyes again, he’s still there.

“You don’t know how to get back, do you?” I ask.

Sol flinches.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t want you to worry about me.”

“I’m not worried!” I think I’m shouting. “I’m angry with you.”

Brenna looks up. “What’s wrong?”

“Sol can’t get back to the library.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Yes, apparently. He’ll die if he doesn’t go back.”

“Isn’t he a ghost?”

That gives me a pause. “He is, but he will be even deader.”

I’m making no sense. I don’t really care. I need to stop this. Turn it around.

“Can I put him in the story? Maybe a story inside the library?”

I look at Sol. “Could that work?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“He says let’s try,” I tell Brenna.

“Okay.” Brenna goes back to her notes, writing furiously.

“What if it doesn’t work?” I ask.

“And what if it does?” Sol asks.

That gives me a pause. “Would you want a story where you are stuck with me in the library? What if I set it on fire again?”

Sol tilts his head and smiles. “That’s the most exciting thing that happened to me in the last century. Even tops the teddy bear torture.”

Heat runs up my cheek. “I’m sorry about that.”

Sol laughs. “No, you’re not.”

“Not really,” I admit. “But seriously. If Brenna succeeds, you may never get a moment of peace locked up in the library with me forever. And if she doesn’t—”

Sol is still smiling as he takes my face in both of his ghostly hands. I lose track of all my thoughts at his touch. He looks at me for so long, my heart hammers against my ribcage. Maybe he is thinking about how to let me down gently. How to tell me he’d rather be a dead ghost than locked inside the library with me for the rest of eternity. And who could blame him, when I set his books on fire, and brought down a stupid hero on him.

“Whatever happens,” Sol says. “Please, don’t set my library on fire again.”

Then he leans closer and kisses me.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope my serial will bring some joyful moments to your day!

Continue here:

Best wishes,

Find me also on Wattpad, Instagram, BlueSky, and my website.

Subscribe now

This is chapter 9 of my cosy fantasy serial. If you’d like to know what happened previously, here is chapter 8, or you can jump to the index.

If you would like to start from the beginning, go to chapter 1.

A proper villain

Once I’m deposited outside the convention centre, I wait for the security guard to disappear. He doesn’t. Rather, he crosses his arms, scans the sea of people coming and going, and glares whenever his eyes pass over me.

I pretend to give up my vigil and walk across the road and down a side street. Once out of sight, I circle back to the building to find another entrance. If I can avoid Brenna and the Luciuses, then hopefully no one else will recognise me.

All I need to do is get Sol out of there.

I find a parking lot filled with enormous stinky rubbish bins. There’s a metal door. The moment I touch the handle, the door slams open, rattling on its hinges.

Behind it stands a very upset poltergeist-like Sol.

I want to sigh in relief at the sight of him, but my heart is hammering inside my chest.

“Sol?” I ask tentatively.

A gust of wind whooshes past me, not unlike the magic I unleashed myself when I rediscovered my powers. Sol is floating in the middle of it, his ragged shape torn by the airflow. His eyes glow with ice so cold his gaze sends a shiver through me.

I’m supposed to be the villain, not him. Nothing about this is right.

I have to fix it.

I take a step closer to him. “Sol, it’s me.”

I don’t even know if he can hear me. Understand me. That thought clenches my insides even more. What if Sol forgets who I am, and I’m his only tether? Would he be lost in this shape forever? Do I even have a chance to bring him back? So many questions, and I know nothing. Not of this world, not of my own, nothing but what I learned from Sol’s relentless mumbling in the library over the last week.

I’m Draven Nightshade, I remind myself. A magic-wielding villain, archenemy of Lucius Brightlight, a creation of Brenna Lockwood. I am here in the real world to find a way back to my fictional one, and this screaming ghost in front of me is my only friend.

“Solomon Winter,” I whisper. “Come back to me.”

Sol wavers, then screams again. I think he’s in pain and that pain pierces my chest like a lance so hard I stagger back a step. But it won’t stop me. I take two steps forward.

“Sol, please.”

He’s looking at me, finally silent.

“Your library needs you.”

He tilts his head, and his shape becomes less of a blob and more reminiscent of a human body.

“I need you.”

I shouldn’t have said that. But I’m desperate. Trying not to think about whether being desperate to bring him back makes my last sentence actually true or not.

Sol’s piercing gaze takes on a softer shade of blue. I want to plunge into that summer ocean. But I just let myself a hint of a smile.

“Draven?”

His shape solidifies into one that I recognise. I know this form, as if I’ve been trying to learn the shape of him all my life. One week now feels like a lifetime. Maybe because, for me, it is.

“Welcome back,” I whisper.

“Hey, what are you doing there?” a man shouts, and when I turn, I recognise the security guard from the distance.

“We’d better get out of here,” I say, and grab Sol’s hand.

It’s still cold, but not the ice piercing my skin as it was before. I hope this will last, but I’m filled with a foreboding feeling.

The security guard starts jogging towards us.

“Shall we?” I ask Sol.

He nods.

The guard picks up his speed into a sprint. We run faster.

Thankfully, the guard is better trained for carrying innocent villains out of a convention than for chasing them down the street, so by the time we reach the train station, he’s long given up and returned to his post.

I could run further. Maybe I’m panting and my pulse is through the roof, and breathing has become really hard, but I really could run longer. But there is Sol, and his recent incident, and I decide to slow for his benefit. I collapse onto a bench as gracefully as I can manage.

“I’m sorry,” Sol says, when I can finally hear over my own heavy breathing.

“Why would you be sorry?” I ask.

I should be the one apologising. I shouldn’t have listened to him; I should have turned back at the first sign of his distress. I knew how terrible this was for him, and I let him convince me to keep going. I was an idiot.

“I ruined your meeting with your author.”

Oh, that. “I managed to ruin it all by myself. Thank you very much!”

It’s true. I’m almost proud of myself for that. And Sol here tries to take credit.

“No, it was my fault. I pushed you to go. I promised to be fine, but then I got… flustered. I distracted you and ruined everything.”

I huff. “You need to stop trying to take credit for everything! I alone pissed off all the fake Luciuses and make a fool of myself in front of Brenna. You had no part in that. I really don’t need any help to ruin things. It is in my nature!”

Sol stares at me.

I stare back.

“Are you seriously upset because you think I want to take credit for you ruining things?”

Well, when he puts it like that, it sounds… it sounds very much like me. “Well, I really don’t want you to blame yourself.”

He shakes his head, but there’s a hint of a smile at the little corner of his lips that loosens a knot somewhere in my chest.

“What are you going to do now?” he asks.

“Me? What are we going to do?”

“Not much I can do, apparently. But I guess I have no choice but to follow you around. And try my best not to turn angry ghost or whatever.”

“You are the sweetest ghost I’ve ever met,” I say before I could clump down on my idiotic mouth. “Even when you are angry.”

Sol leans his head against my shoulder. It’s a comforting weight. He may be invisible to everyone else, but he’s real to me. And I want to protect that more than any treasure.

We sit in silence for a while, until the clouds turn pink, and the last of the convention crowd dissipates.

“I think I need to turn into a proper villain,” I say.

“You are a proper villain, Draven.”

“You are just saying that to make me feel better. I’m a failed villain. That’s why Brenna threw away the entire draft I was in. But I think she recycled Lucius from my story. That’s why the fans were all dressed like him.”

“They acted like him, too. Big and dumb and self-righteous.”

I chuckle. Sol laughs with me. Another knot untangles itself from my chest.

“How is he in the library, if he isn’t even forgotten?” I ask.

“I don’t know. But even the book he came out of… it wasn’t yours. Or his. It was a children’s book with wild animals.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

Sol straightens up. “Wait. What if he’s not forgotten? What if he’s escaped?”

“Is that even possible?”

He looks me in the eye. The setting sun paints his white hair with a golden glow. I don’t even understand how people cannot see him. I cannot not see him. All I ever want to see is—

“Draven, you must talk to Brenna.”

“That’s what I meant. I really have to do something evil. Like a real villain. If I scare her enough, she will talk to me.”

“I’m not convinced that’s the most—”

“Of course, you aren’t,” I say as a brand-new plan takes shape in my mind. “Just follow my lead.”

Thank you so much for reading! I hope my serial will bring some joyful moments to your day!

Continue here:

Best wishes,

Find me also on Wattpad, Instagram, BlueSky, and my website.

Subscribe now

This is chapter 8 of my cosy fantasy serial. If you’d like to know what happened previously, here is chapter 7, or you can jump to the index.

If you would like to start from the beginning, go to chapter 1.

Supanova

My terror dissipates as Blondie walks right past us and joins a group where every guy looks like some variations of Lucius Brightlight. I apparently have faded after all, and Sydney is hell, where Blondie can duplicate himself infinitely until he fills my entire world.

“Cosplayers,” Sol groans, and I rescind my previous conclusion, as he would surely never accompany me to hell. Even if it was in Sydney.

I squint at the Lucius-crowd. Not sure what cosplayers are, but I realise with a relief that they are all poor copy-cats. To their left, another group imitates villains of all varieties. They are all fake. I may very well be the only person here who isn’t faking. And no one brings the villain-theme so well as an original.

I pull back my shoulders, standing tall and proud, and play with my fingers to see if I could summon some fancy sparks.

“Stop it,” Sol warns.

“Why?”

A group of ghostbusters walk past us, accompanied by a few fake ghosts. I glance at Sol and wish people could see him. He’s such a cool ghost that no one’s costume can compare.

“Because you can’t control your magic, and if it activates, you might set something on fire. Wouldn’t be without precedent.”

“You’re a buzzkill.”

“I’m just trying to get us into this convention and find your author so we can get home. Both of us.”

“Fine,” I reply. I still think he’s a buzzkill.

The inside of the building is filled with even more people in all kinds of cheap costumes—correction, there are two girls holding hands whose costumes are so professional, they must have cost a fortune. Everyone else is rest in mostly cheap, but creative garments.

The crowd trickles through the front hall filled with tables and advertisements of the three-day program. It takes us fifteen minutes to reach the main hall. Yes, there’s a clock on the far wall where I check. My pocket watch is still unusable.

Here, the crowds ease marginally as people break out in different directions.

If I’m uncomfortable sardined amongst so many people, Sol is straight up miserable. And I don’t mean his usual state, which is also quite miserable. I mean, he’s suffering. There is always a person who is either walking through him or standing inside him, no matter how much he’s trying to shuffle out of the way. Soon he ends up so close to me we’re almost touching.

“Are you okay?” I ask, not that I don’t know the answer.

A guy steps into him, looks at me, surprised, and says, “Fine, mate.”

I ignore him. My eyes are focused on Sol. His skin has taken on a greyish tint, and his translucent body is shivering uncontrollably.

“We need to get out of here,” I say and reach for his hand, relief flooding through me when I grasp solid, smooth skin. But it’s cold to my touch. Too cold.

“No,” he says and twists his hand from mine.

“You are not well,” I hiss.

“You need to find your author.”

“I can do that once I’m not worried about you.”

He rears back. “You’re worried about me?”

Okay, yeah, that was a stupid thing to say. “Of course not! It’s just that you are cold and shivering, and I cannot focus like this.”

“Ignore me then and continue.”

I groan, frustrated. “It’s impossible to ignore you.”

“Sorry. But I’m tethered to you, remember? You cannot just leave me outside. You really don’t have a choice.”

“Then tell me how to make this easier for you.”

Sol finds the tip of his ghost-shoes fascinating. “It is going to be hard for me to be here in this crowd, no matter what you do.” He pauses, flexing his feet as he floats just above ground like a ballerina, except for his hunched, weary form. “But I appreciate you wanting to help. Let’s find your author. That’s how you help me get out of here faster.”

I should feel repelled. Because of course I don’t care who feels what, except that I want to hug him now and I know I shouldn’t, and if I tried, it would probably make things worse. That last bit holds me back.

“Let’s go then,” I say and push forward, looking for a space where the least people go.

There really isn’t one.

As we snake through the crowd to the books section of the convention, I glimpse the group of men who all look like Blondie. They queue up towards a table that has my author’s face printed on a two-meter-high poster.

“Oh, no,” I whisper, while Sol heroically follows and pretends that he isn’t feeling as sick as I know he is feeling.

If he can push through that, I can face half a dozen fake Luciuses.

I march up to the table, give the guys my friendliest smile as I pass them, and stop in front of Brenna Lockwood.

She looks up from the book she’s signing. “You need to wait in line…” then she stops.

We stare at each other for a moment.

“Hi,” I say.

She loses the smile.

“We need to talk,” I continue.

She slams the book shut. “No.”

In that exact moment, one of the fake Luciuses walks up to me. No, that’s not really the right word. He climbs into my face describes it a lot better. Which I really wouldn’t care about. Except that in his attempt to get close to me, he walks through Sol. And that seems to be the tipping point. Sol pales, then flickers, his shape distorting. Then he gets the zoomies. It is not good.

I panic as he circles the table and all of us around it, not because I’m worried what he would do, but because I don’t know if he can return to his physical—I mean more normal ghost form afterwards. This is an unknown territory for me. I suspect it isn’t much better known to him.

“Sol?”

“What?” Brenna asks.

That quickly reminds me why we are here, and I really don’t feel like beating around the bush any longer. “I need you to put me back into your story.” I glance after Sol. “Urgently.”

Of course, I don’t know what would happen to Sol, but I assume that with me going back to my story, Lucius would also return to his place and, as a result, Sol could finally go home to his library. It all sounds so very simple. Except that it’s all hinges on a single thing: Brenna doing exactly what I’m asking her to do.

And from the look on her face, that seems highly unlikely. But I can be charming if I need to be.

“Get out,” Brenna hisses.

“Pretty please?” Charming, aren’t I?

“Now.”

Okay, it is pretty hard when I have to keep one eye on the zooming ghost around us.

“Look, lovely Brenna. I don’t really have time to explain, but it’s a question of life or death. Or at least something like that. For the sake of all forgotten stories and their guardian, who is currently an insane ghost circling us, you need to put me back into that story.”

She glares at me. Fake Lucius number three comes up to me and says, “You’ve heard the lady.”

He puffs out his chest, and I’m thinking he’s actually doing a pretty damn excellent imitation of the original. Except that my Lucius should be from an unfinished story, and these guys seem to know him very well. That raises so many questions I can’t even consider right now.

“How come that these guys are dressed like Lucius, but no one is dressed like me?” I ask, because maybe that distraction will help me establish rapport with my author.

“That’s it, I’m calling security,” Brenna says.

I guess that didn’t work.

And this is the second time I’m hearing these words in my brief time in the real world, and it wasn’t very pleasant the first time either. This time, fake Lucius number four shoves me away from the table. I would raise my hands and shoot him with whatever element comes out of them—I still can’t control that—but I promised Sol I wouldn’t. So, I don’t.

Sol knocks over the large poster stand with Brenna’s face on it, which tells me that the situation is going from bad to worse. A ghost angry enough to interact with objects in a real world is in real danger of becoming a poltergeist and losing themself entirely.

Yes, I read some books during my week in the library. Paranormal fiction was captivating. Unfortunately, I have no idea which part of it was true, so I just have to assume.

“How can I convince you?” I call out to Brenna, because there are two Luciuses standing between us.

“If you don’t leave now, I will sue you for IP theft! You have clearly stolen one of my older manuscripts, and trust me, you won’t get away with this.”

I haven’t a clue what IP theft means or what it’s like to be sued. I’m guessing it’s all bad, but I don’t feel as threatened as I’m guessing Brenna has intended. Then security shows up and I’m starting to think that all the Luciuses are either very gentle or were holding back, because the security guy dressed all in navy blue with muscles probably trained in an arena grabs my jacket with two hands and starts pulling me through the crowd towards the exit.

Sol knocks over another poster and then—despite the tether that was supposed to keep us together—disappears from sight.

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One Ring to Rule Them All Sell for Money

We stand in front of a dark townhouse in Surry Hills. It’s older than most buildings I’ve seen in Sydney so far, looming over the thick bushes surrounding three ridiculously tall palm trees sticking out from the tissue-sized front yard. The stairs leading to the front door are crumbling so badly I’m not sure they will hold when I step on them.

“The key is in the pot on the left,” Sol says.

“How do you know?”

“It was my house once.”

I need to hit pause here just now. “Wait. What?”

“I used to live here.”

“You mean as a real person?”

Sol tilts his head. “How do you think I’ve become a ghost?”

“I don’t know! You never talk to me about any of it!”

“I was a real person. I died.”

The streetlights here are sparse enough that I must squint to make out Sol’s expression, and I still cannot read it.

“How did you end up in the library?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “It’s complicated.”

“Why is it so hard for you to tell me anything?”

Sol shrugs.

I reach into the pot and find the key as Sol said I would. “You’ll have to give me more than that before I break into a stranger’s house.”

“They are not home.”

“Again, how do you know?”

Sol sighs. “My niece, I mean the grand-granddaughter of my niece. She, um, loves Instagram.”

“Instagram?”

“The app. Where people post their life updates with photos and videos and stuff?”

I will wildly assume this has something to do with the smartphones people seem to have in the real world. “Okay, and you have that app? I’ve never even saw you hold a phone.”

“No, of course not.”

I stand at the top of the stairs with key in hand, not making a move to open the door. The wait stretches long enough to make Sol uncomfortable.

“Well, she deletes her posts after a week. She thinks it protects her privacy.”

“Wait, so those posts—”

“End up in the library. We have billions of them. Keep them in a neat little folder.”

“Billions of deleted social media posts?”

“They are forgotten stories. The medium doesn’t matter. They go on this big holiday every year. She always posts about it. She even posted her luggage photos last week. They won’t be back for another two weeks.”

“Wow.”

“We crash for the night, and I have something hidden in the backyard if we’re lucky. That should get us through the next few days.”

“And you are only telling me this now?”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly keen on returning here, so I hoped you could come up with an alternative.”

That is enough to make me feel shit about my plans. I shove the key in the lock with more force than necessary.

The house feels a lot bigger on the inside than it looks from outside, even though I only explore the lower level. I want to see where Sol lived, but the place is modern and trying to fake minimalism, and I doubt that any of it is really Sol’s style. Whatever this house was like a hundred years ago, none of it has remained.

I decide to spend the night on the sofa, wanting to keep the disruption to the house at a minimum. But I’m also starving, and half-drunk on three sips of rainbow cocktail, so I’m less hesitant to disrupt their food supply. The fridge is off, as it should be for such a long holiday, but there are ready meals in the second freezer.

After I realise that frozen meals require heating up and that sounds very complicated, I raid the pantry and grab two bags of corn chips with an avocado and cheese dip that I’m pretty sure has never seen either avocado or cheese.

When I’m halfway through the second bag, Sol asks me to follow him.

I raise the bag. “Can I finish?”

“You’ll make yourself sick.”

“I don’t see how that is your problem.”

“Draven, please.”

I grumble but put down the food and follow him to the backyard. An old tree stands vigilantly in the middle, surrounded by concrete, but its roots left ample space as if the family somehow had a special respect for the tree, and built their outdoor life around it.

Sol points under one of the crooked roots, pushing up like a bent knee.

“Dig here.”

“You are kidding.”

“I’d do it myself, but…” He swipes with one hand, and it goes through the tree. “I’m a ghost. Come on.”

“Whatever you buried here a hundred years ago won’t be there. And even if it were, I doubt it would be any use to us now.”

“Because you know the real world so well.”

He has a point. I grab a small plastic shovel that may have been designed for children. And I dig. Not that Sol can just tell me what to do, but I can get him off my back faster this way. I don’t even have to dig deep before I get stuck in a small wooden box. It’s old, cracked, and rotting here and there. I try to clean off the dirt. There’s a small lock on it, but the key is also attached to the box. The height of security.

“Open it,” Sol says.

I turn it around a few times in my hand, run my fingers over the golden filigree on the lid, before I detach the key and put it in the lock. It turns easier than I expected. The precious red jewel, set in a golden ring, glints under the moonlight. It’s enormous.

“Is that a ruby?” I ask.

“Yes, a very expensive one,” Sol replies.

“Oh, Sol,” I say, kneeling in the grass under an ancient tree.

When I look up from my awkward position with a ring box in my hand, he stands before me. His white hair gleams in the moonlight, surrounded by the night sky. He stares at me expectantly. I held out the box to him.

“Wait, are you giving me a ring now, or am I giving you one?” I ask, still on my knees.

“Does it matter?” he says and shifts on his feet uncomfortably.

“Solomon Winter,” I say solemnly. “Would you do me the honour of telling me what on Earth am I to do with this?”

Sol rolls his eyes. “Get up. We’re selling it.”

Selling an ancient ring proves to be a lot easier than I expected. That is, after Sol painstakingly talks me through how to set up an online account on one of those auction sites and provides me with more fake data to enter than I could have ever imagined he would be in possession of. I shouldn’t be surprised. His entire ghostly existence is built around looking after made-up stories that people have forgotten. And what are lies if not made-up stories, most people cannot keep straight?

It’s still a perfect opportunity for me to try to understand Sol better. But to all my attempts at questioning, Sol only has evasive answers.

Whatever he was when he lived, it must have been quite a life. I wish he would share it with me. Apprentice my ass.

The guy who has bought the ring on one of those scammy-feeling auction sites agrees to the exchange at Central Station next morning and brings cash. We meet him at nine and trade the ring for the money. I wonder if it’s as fake as my address details.

But it’s enough for the convention tickets, a few days at a cheap hostel and finally, for some proper food. We pick up pastries for breakfast from the Woollies on the corner, and a coffee from the little kiosk next door.

I don’t think I’ve ever had coffee in my life, but everyone is having it on the street, so I have to have it too. I dump five packets of sugar in it after the first sip. After that, it’s not too bad.

Then we take the train to the convention.

“What if you don’t find the author there?” Sol asks, then shuffles to the middle seat as someone almost sits on him.

“Aren’t you a ray of sunshine?” I murmur.

I really try to be quiet, but I’m learning that strangers on the street look at me weird regardless of whether I’m talking to a seemingly imaginary friend or not, so I stop caring quite fast. It must have something to do with my appearance. If anyone stares too hard, I stare back at them, they gasp at my eyes and turn away. It works out.

But the train gradually fills with unusual-looking folks, and I somehow don’t stand out that much anymore. I don’t know how I feel about it. Average isn’t my brand. When a guy flops down opposite me in a black coat and spiky black hair with the tips dyed red, I respond to his friendly grin with a scowl. How dare he try to look cooler than me?

We—and by we, I mean Sol, myself, and about two hundred weirdos I perfectly fit in with—get off at the Sydney Olympic Park station and make our way to the stadium.

My plan is entering its final stage. I can barely believe that if everything goes well, I could be home by lunchtime.

Then a tall bond guy crosses the road with a broad sword attached to his back. I’d recognise that sneer anywhere.

“Sol?” I grab his arm and pull him deeper into the crowd. Blondie doesn’t slow. He is heading straight towards us. “Sol, I think we have a problem.”

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Cocktails and Rainbows

We do not feed anyone to the sharks. I’m disappointed.

We don’t even threaten them, and I’m out of ideas. My plan is falling apart at step 3.5, but thankfully Sol suspects nothing. I still have time to turn things around.

“You have no idea what to do now, do you?” he asks finally.

Okay, maybe he does suspect something.

“We could go back to the hotel, sneak in through a window and find an empty room for the night,” I say.

Sol shuts me down with a simple, “They will catch you before you step foot inside.”

To my greatest annoyance, he’s probably right.

By the time the sky turns pink and orange at the edges, my legs hurt. We walk across the city, then turn east, and down to Oxford Street, strolling past colourful bars, shops, and restaurants. Meanwhile, Sol tries to supply me with an abundance of unhelpful advice, so I stop paying attention to him.

“You could try to charm someone. Be nice to them,” he says. Again.

“I’m a villain, Sol,” I reply for the hundredth time. “I’m supposed to be evil. I don’t know how to be nice. Even when I try, it doesn’t work out.”

“That’s not true.”

“I tried it with you,” I say as we cross the road and walk past a building, its artful graffiti depicting people who wear rainbow-coloured paint all over their faces and bodies.

They seem happy. This place feels happy. Part of me deep down wants to stay here with them so we can be happy together.

“No, you didn’t,” Sol replies. “Not really.”

“I gave back your teddy bear.”

He opens his mouth to object, then thinks better of it. To me, he seems as real as any person walking past me. Others pass through him. The crowd is thickening, but I couldn’t care less about who stares at me for talking to myself, or for watching a handsome ghost gliding by my side.

Sol isn’t my friend. I cannot stand him. And I know for a fact that the feeling is mutual. Yet, there’s something softly intimate about him being only mine. I alone can see him, hear him, touch him. His presence fills me with warmth while strangers shiver brushing past him. He must despise this situation with his entire being.

It’s for the best that we get on with our little mission and return both of us back to our respective places. Even if it means that for plan step 3.5, I need to spend the night on these streets and walk to the edge of the city and back to find enough money to get into the convention tomorrow. Or sneak inside if necessary. Sol and I only need to endure each other’s company for one more night.

As we cross the road, I glimpse the young couple who helped me out with directions at the Botanic Garden. They smile and wave at me. I wave back.

“Okay, I have an idea. I really think we should—” Sol starts.

“Do you want to get a drink?” the blond guy asks, cutting him off, as they reach my side.

I don’t blame him, because, well, no one can hear Sol other than me, but Sol narrows his eyes at him.

The offer sounds better than any other option we have at this point. “Sure,” I say.

Sol nudges me immediately.

You don’t have money. And I really think that it’s time we started on my plan.

I shake my head gently. Sol is not the person who should be making plans. Maybe he should be reading them. He’s good at that. I want to go and get a drink anyway, and deal with the problem of payment when it comes up. But Sol makes me hesitate. I hate him for it.

“You know what, I’m not really sure if I can—” I start.

“We insist,” the other guy cuts me off.

What can you do when they insist. I give them a tight smile and gesture for them to lead the way. Sol pouts. I ignore it. We walk down a quiet little side street with art deco offices and converted warehouses.

The first thing that grabs my attention as we enter a bar hidden in a backyard of an otherwise quiet building, is that the place has a high concentration of pretty men dressed in leather straps. I have no objection against this whatsoever.

I imagine instead my past villainous life, where I must have had a dark castle at the edge of the world with an army of minions, and I hope they all looked and dressed like this.

The rest of the place is filled with dark plush booths and warm mood lighting, which simply means no one can see any further than their own hand, except if they turn towards the bar or the dancefloor.

The guys I’ve come with lead me to a booth and tell me to sit, while one of them throws himself into the crowd, fighting his way towards the bar.

“I’m Santosh,” the other says.

“Draven.”

“So, what are you doing in Sydney, Draven?” Santosh asks.

Sol sits next to me, sulking. I want to ask what his problem is, but I shouldn’t make an ass of myself in front of Santosh, so I pretend to ignore my ghost.

Santosh’s boyfriend returns with three glasses of liquid that has at least three different colours and rainbow umbrellas. The taste is even more delightful.

“Exploring,” I reply. Very smooth. “How about you?”

“Just living, working, partying, the usual.”

I like him.

“My boyfriend, Nick,” he says, pointing at the blond guy, as if it hasn’t been completely obvious from all our previous encounters who the boyfriend is.

“Nice to meet you, Nick,” I say, and I feel like I deserve a gold medal in real-world politeness.

Sol shuffles in his seat. There isn’t a lot of space in these booths, and as Nick slips in next to Santosh, and they both move closer to me, Sol is stuck between them. Then Santosh moves over a little, and Sol is under him. My ghost companion screeches and jumps on the table.

“I cannot do this, Draven!” he shouts at me.

I gape.

“Are you okay?” Santosh asks.

It’s extremely hard to ignore Sol sitting in the middle of the table trying to get my attention.

As he shifts his weight, I reach out to catch my glass before he could knock it over, but of course, his hand goes right through it. It makes me sad, suddenly. I was just starting to enjoy myself.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I remember to say.

“Look, Draven, right?” Nick says.

I nod.

“It’s okay, man, if you don’t want to hang out. We’ve just thought you might want company.”

I do want company. Except that my company is hugging his knees on the table and looks so lost, it eats itself into me, digging a hole in the middle of my chest.

“I do, I’m sorry,” I say. “I did, at least. It just might not be the right time.”

“We get it, man, no problem,” Nick says. “Let’s just have this drink, chat, and then we can all go on our way. Totally no pressure.”

I take a big sip of my drink.

“They wanted to sleep with you, you know,” Sol says, and I choke on my drink, coughing up rainbow coloured alcohol all over Sol.

Santosh pats me on the shoulder.

When my tears stop, Sol is still sitting in the middle of the table, but his posture is more relaxed. He’s watching me with the barest hint of a smile.

“I’m glad you find my almost-death by rainbow cocktail entertaining,” I bite out.

Nick looks at me with question in his eyes from across the table. I’m so ruining this. I could save it, make up an excuse, stay, chat, charm them, like Sol was trying to tell me to do. But all I want is to get out of here. With him.

“Oh, not… that’s… it’s not… sorry guys, I think it’s for the best if I just go.” I climb out of the booth. “Thanks for the drinks.”

With that, I basically run out of the club into the clammy summer night. It’s so messed up.

Sol is still smiling as I look around the street, trying to decide on a direction.

“You need to stop that,” I grumble.

“Stop what?”

“Making me look crazy in front of everyone. Why would they want to sleep with me anyway?”

Sol purses his lips, holding back a laugh. “Why would anyone?”

I stare, unsure if it’s an insult or a compliment. Even less sure if I want to know the answer. After about two seconds, I decide that I definitely do not want to know. I start down the street with no destination in mind.

“Draven,” Sol calls after me. “You know you’ll have to sleep somewhere.”

“I’ll find a quiet doorway.”

“I have a better idea.”

I turn back towards him. He’s been following, but somehow, he’s started floating again, rather than walking. It didn’t bother me much earlier, but now, in the dark, it’s disconcerting. I try to ignore it.

“Why didn’t you say that before?”

“Because you weren’t listening.”

“I’m listening now,” I say.

“Too late. I think I’ll just have to show you,” he replies and pulls me the opposite direction.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope my serial will bring some joyful moments to your day!

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When Draven—the deleted villain of a fantasy book—finds himself in a library of forgotten stories, he teams up with the reluctant ghost librarian to find his author and rewrite his story before he fades out of existence.

Here I’ll have a full index with links to each chapter, updating this page as they come out.

Chapter 1: The Library of All Things Never Written

Chapter 2: Heroes and Villains

Chapter 3: Through the Looking Glass an Executive’s Memoir

Chapter 4: Welcome to the Real World

Chapter 5: Lost and Found

Chapter 6: Cocktails and Rainbows

Chapter 7: One Ring to Rule Them All Sell for Money

Chapter 8: Supanova

Chapter 9: A real villain

Chapter 10: You made me this way

Chapter 11: The only way home

Chapter 12: A gathering of villains

Chapter 13: Not from this world

Chapter 14: FINALE

Thank you so much for reading! I hope my serial will bring some joyful moments to your day!

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If you would like to start from the beginning, jump to chapter 1.

Lost and Found

I need to digest Sol’s ghostly existence in this world. It’s not that I haven’t known he’s been a ghost all this time, but to me, he’s real and my mind just doesn’t want to reconcile with the fact that I’m the only one who can see him.

I stare at the ground, because the streets have too many people, and the shops are full of shiny things Sol won’t let me steal, and Sol is sad, so I want to look at him the least.

The one positive coming out of my staring at the ground is the ten-dollar bill I pick up as we turn the corner. A middle-aged guy with broken glasses almost knocks his head against mine, but I’m faster.

When we both straighten, the money in my hand, he stares at me with a menacing frown.

I stare back.

He flinches.

I win.

He walks away, grumbling.

There are at least some advantages to looking like a villain.

Then Sol is standing in his place, watching me with more disappointment and less malice. I make an effort not to flinch away and put on a neutral expression.

“You said we needed the money,” I say. Not defensive at all.

“Maybe he needed it too.”

“We need it more.”

“How is that going to help us?” he asks, arms crossed over his chest.

“We need a plan,” I say.

“You don’t say,” he replies.

I raise the ten-dollar bill. “Well, we have money now. So, we can get food and accommodation, and buy a ticket to where my author lives, so we can visit them, and lay out our request.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“What?”

“Do you know what that’s worth?” Sol asks.

“Ten dollars.”

“Do you know how much ten dollars are really worth?”

“Not really,” I admit.

“You can buy waffles.”

All my sadness over Sol’s ghostly existence evaporates, as I turn back towards the waffle shop. “Really?”

“No!” he shouts. “I mean yes. That’s pretty much what you’ll get for it.”

That does sound like a setback to my original plan.

“Okay, so, obviously, you are not a villain, so you aren’t amazing at planning. But luckily for both of us, I am. Don’t fret. I’ll handle it.”

Sol gives me a nod so deadpan I consider for a moment that he’s mocking me. But surely not.

“So here is the plan.” I count on my fingers. “One, we buy waffles.”

“Obviously.”

“Two, we find out where we are.”

“In Sydney.”

“Three…” I trip over my words. “How do you know?”

He points at the newspaper stand we’re standing next to. It’s packed with papers titled Sydney Morning Herald.

“Excellent. Three, we find out where my author is.”

“How?”

“Don’t distract me, please. I’m planning.”

“I see.” Sol nods contemplatively.

“Four, we tell them to write me back into their story. Five, we both go home.”

“And let me guess. I shouldn’t ask about how.”

“Just follow my lead,” I reply.

Of course, my plan has some holes. But I’m confident I’ll fill them in as I go.

The first item goes according to plan. We get waffles. They are as good as they smell. I devour them all.

Then we make our way out of Haymarket onto a road where the snake-tram runs, and as one stops next to me, opening a dozen doors that look like human-sized toothless mouths, I jump inside. No one stops me. Sol gets on the tram too. No one stops him either. Probably because he’s a ghost and no one can see him.

I assume he only follows because he’s tethered to me and all that and not because of his unwavering confidence in my plan, but it doesn’t matter. I’m still not sure what that tether means, and he doesn’t elaborate. From the expression on his face, it seems like it’s adjacent to getting some kind of deadly disease.

I take the tram all the way to the harbour, and no further, mostly because it doesn’t go further. I use the time to polish step three of my plan. I’m not sure the wander the streets until I spot them approach is going to work for finding my author, but it’s a start.

An array of ships hurry in and out of the harbour, making infinite waves in the sparkling water. I consider taking a ship, but a bulky man stands next to a beeping gate that doesn’t let me through.

“Maybe, let’s just stay on this side of the harbour,” Sol suggests.

“Exactly what I’ve been thinking,” I reply.

Across from us, a gigantic monster of a ship that is as big as a ten-storey building just chills on the water near the bridge and doesn’t move. I take a while to contemplate whether it is anchored, and if it is, then what kind of anchor can hold a ship this big.

We walk around the Opera House—Sol informs me what it is, because honestly, it does not look like any kind of house at all. It’s more like a collection of enormous broken wings of a white dragon.

Next, we get lost in the Botanic Gardens. At least that really looks like gardens.

“Remind me which step of the plan this is?”

“Three,” I reply with the confidence I don’t feel.

“You are lost.”

“I am not,” I lie.

“I could help, you know.”

“Can’t you just fly up and check which way is the water?” I ask. “Not because I’m lost.”

“No, I can’t just fly up,” he says. “I’m still human. Sort of. I didn’t grow wings when I died.”

I don’t believe him. “You float.” Which is something I’ve observed shortly after we clarified his ghost-status in this world.

“Float. Not fly.”

Me not believing him changes absolutely nothing.

We’re still lost.

I’m still denying it.

A handsome young couple sees me arguing with myself, and rather than giving me a wide berth like everyone else, they come over and ask if I need help.

“I’d love to find my way back to the Opera House. If you could point me in the right direction, I promise not to burn you to crisps or feed you to the sharks,” I say with the utmost courtesy.

They laugh.

Sol buries his face in his hands.

“Don’t you worry, mate, we’ve got you. Just follow this path down here. It will take you back to the waterfront, then turn left. You’ll get there in no time.”

Say thank you, Sol says, as if I need to be told how to be polite. He’s just here to confuse me.

“Thank you,” I say to the two guys.

“Great hair, by the way,” one of them says as they walk away.

“I know,” I reply with a grin.

By the time I reorient myself towards the path they suggested, Sol is already two steps ahead, staring back at me impatiently.

“Do you think I should have asked them about food and accommodation?” I ask.

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Because people don’t just give strangers food and accommodation.”

“Why not?” I ask again, when I get a glimpse of water sparking under the relentless sunlight.

“Because they might be bad people!”

“Well, they are bad people if they don’t help those who need food and accommodation.”

“Not them. The person who pretends they need food and accommodation. They might just want to sneak into their home to rob them.”

“If they wanted to rob them, they could just break in and rob them. Asking for food and accommodation, then robbing them after they got everything they needed, sounds like a lot of extra effort for nothing.”

Sol floats ahead of me, his head tilted to one side. “You are terrible at being a villain.”

An entire family on bicycles rides past us. Only the two-year-old with the support wheels is bothered by the fact that I’m talking to the air in front of me. She sticks out her tongue. I return the gesture.

“So going into unnecessary circles to commit a crime makes for a better villain?” I ask.

“Generally, yes.”

“Hm. That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Sol agrees.

I’m a little taken aback. Sol has never really agreed with me on much before. We walk back in silence, past the Opera House and the ferry terminal.

“Are you okay?” I ask once I jump back on the tram. It’s a stupid question. He’s been dead for a century. And now I dragged him into a world where I’m the only person he can interact with, and on top of that, I am the one whose fault it is that he’s here and not where he needs to be.

“Where are we going now?” he asks instead of answering. He’s clearly not okay.

I don’t have an answer. I’m on the tram, because that was the only place after the hotel room where the temperature is mild enough, so my brain doesn’t boil inside my skull. I’m hoping that riding the tram back and forth will somehow miraculously provide an answer to my burning how to find my author question.

And at the very moment when I think what an idiotic idea that is, the tram rides past the answer.

“Sol, look!” I point out the window. Fifty people whose name statistically cannot be all Sol follow my finger. “Is that a library?”

The building has a big Dymocks sign on it.

“It’s a bookstore,” Sol says.

No one is staring at him.

I jump off the tram as it comes to a halt.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “They have books. Books have stories. And wherever stories are found, you can find authors too.”

It sounds reasonably smart. No idea, if it’s true.

What I really find inside Dymocks is a crowd of people who do not look like authors at all. Not that I can be certain that authors look any different from normal people. Maybe they have pens, or I am an author written on their shirts. These people have neither.

What we also find inside are three levels filled with books. As opposed to Sol’s library, though, where every volume is unique, here are many copies of the same story.

I pick one up and flip through the pages. Hundreds of pages. So many of the books in the Library of All Things Never Written ran out at page ten or sooner. These books are filled all the way through four, five, even eight hundred pages. And there are smiling faces on the back to make it easier to identify the authors.

“Do you think I would recognise my creator from a picture?” I ask. “Would I feel an undeniable connection when I pick up a story written by them?”

“I don’t know,” Sol says, only half listening. Then he tries to zoom ahead and gets stuck, yanked backwards by some invisible force. “Draven, this way. Look!”

“Is that the tether?” I ask, more intrigued by his jerking movement than whatever he wants to show me.

Sol ignores my question, and I follow him as he moves forward.

“Are you physically tied to stay close to me? Is that what you meant?”

He grunts when I stop, forcing him to stop ahead of me. Then he turns to face me. “Something like that. Happy?”

I shrug. I don’t know if it should make me happy. It really doesn’t. He doesn’t seem too happy either. Yet I’m glad he’s here with me. “What did you want to show me?”

This time, I follow him towards the back of the shop. There’s an entire section dedicated to sci-fi and fantasy stories.

Stepping between those shelves fills we me with all kinds of warm and fuzzy feelings that my awakening internal villain finds absolutely disgusting. Peace and joy. Gross. I shudder. There are so many books, it will take me a day just to look at the back cover of all of them. Which is, admittedly, a lot quicker than going through Sol’s library. But even then, there’s no guarantee that any of those author photos would trigger something in me. I spin around, trying to take it in all at once.

A poster catches my eye.

Supanova

Comic Con & Gaming

Book signings:

And a bunch of names. And photos. One of them jumps out at me. Not literally, like the bunny in the library, but it’s like it’s brighter than the others. My breath hitches. A woman in her late twenties with blond hair and enormous glasses smiles at the camera. Through it, as if she could read my soul.

“Sol?”

“Yes, I see it.”

“We need to go to Supanova,” I say.

“I agree,” he replies. “However, getting into the convention will cost you money.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought waffles.

I gaze longingly towards the lengthy queue of people waiting to pay a lot of money for made-up stories, while completely oblivious to the fictional character walking amongst them.

“Don’t even think about it,” Sol warns.

It’s too late, I’m already thinking it. “Are you absolutely sure we can’t just threaten to feed them to the sharks?”

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If you would like to start from the beginning, jump to chapter 1.

Welcome to the Real World

I’m convinced that the hotel room is not occupied today. Mostly because Sol shouts at me for three hours without interruption. Or at least whatever amount of time feels like three hours when an angry ghost is screaming at you for saving their miserable afterlife.

“I cannot be here, Draven!” he concludes.

I look at my pocket watch to confirm the length of this very one-sided conversation. The little hands are going backwards, occasionally stop, then jump ahead, just to start ticking backwards again. It’s very disorienting, so I stop looking at it.

“Well, you cannot be there either,” I say, while pulling the curtains to look out the window.

And… woah. If my pocket watch was disorienting, then the outside world is a whole new level.

“I need to go back. Now.”

“Go, then,” I mutter, not taking my eyes off the enormous metal snake sliding on rails down the street. Tram. I know what it is, even though I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen one before. Same for a hotel, for that matter. “Oh, except that there’s a psychotic hero that tried to kill you, so maybe go back with some kind of plan.”

“Why do I have a feeling that you are only paying half attention to me, Draven?”

Because I’ve never seen a tram before, and they are fascinating. “I’m listening.”

“By leaving Lucius alone in the library—”

“I put the forgotten stories of the world in jeopardy. I know. You said that like two hours ago. And again, an hour ago. And again, fifteen minutes ago. Which would be fair if said stories were not, you know, already forgotten anyway.”

At least we both agree that Lucius is mostly the problem here. We do not agree on the level of blame, though, because I would personally put it all on him, while Sol claims that it’s my fault he’s in the library with no supervision.

“This is not a joke!”

I finally turn away from the window. I don’t really want to, but I guess I must negotiate with Sol.

“Can we maybe discuss what we do now, instead of going on about the thing I shouldn’t have done, which is saving you from Blondie?”

Sol sighs. It’s giving me hope. He always sighs when he concedes.

Now, at this point, there’s a lot I don’t know about the real world. For example, I know nothing about hotel rooms despite recognising one, and know even less about their doors and how fast they can be opened. Hence, as the beep sounds, I don’t even get to turn around fully before a woman with her bra falling off stumbles into the room backwards, followed by another woman kissing her ferociously—bra still intact.

They do, however, notice us immediately, which is followed by a few muffled screams and one of them running at us with a hastily picked up umbrella, the other following a step behind. Sol, the absolutely heartless bastard, steps out of the way, so the women are both coming at me.

I duck and circle them until I’m at the door where Sol is waiting for me to catch up. Why they are not attacking him is beyond me.

Someone behind me shouts, “Call security!”

I don’t wait to find out what that means.

We put two corners’ worth of distance between us and the hotel before slowing down. It’s sweltering hot outside. When I finally look up, I’m mesmerised once again. The place is a collision of many worlds with weathered brick buildings leaning against glass towers with ornate paifangs standing at each end of the street. Colourful lanterns hang unlit above our heads, their golden rims sparkling in the relentless sunlight, and the scent of something sweet and delicious wafts in the air.

Sol matches me step by step as I follow the aroma and my grumbling stomach.

“You’re still here,” I say.

“And you are still an idiot,” he replies.

I try very hard to ignore him. He reciprocates.

The real world feels familiar. I recognise things I’m convinced I’ve never seen in my own world. Maybe it’s something to do with the author’s knowledge of reality somehow slipping into me at the time of my creation.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I ask Sol, staring at a sport car speeding past us.

He doesn’t reply. I guess I exhausted my weekly word allowance with the dressing down he gave me for kidnapping him from his precious library in the middle of a crisis.

We go around the next block, ending up where we started. Then we do it again. I peek into every shop through the window, and I definitely do not recognise everything. We continue to circle around, firstly because I still haven’t found where the smell is coming from, secondly because I also have no idea how to find the single random person who came up with stories they already forgot in the real world. But who says I can’t get lucky at least once?

We snake through a crowd that is a mix of suits, bored locals, and excited tourists trying to pick their lunch. Some wear hats (mostly the tourists), some sunglasses (mostly the suits) and a few carry parasols (they may be locals).

“Finally,” I say as I follow a line to a window where they give out bubble-shaped waffles that smell like heaven in a paper cone.

“What are you doing?” Sol asks. Oh, look, he still has words left.

“I need to try that,” I respond, as a child who reaches to my elbow walks past, and my nose almost falls into his cone.

“And how are you planning to pay for it?”

I blink.

“That’s what I thought,” Sol says and drags me away from the line.

“How are we going to pay for anything?” I ask. I should have thought of that.

Everything has a price, even in my made-up world. I think. I don’t exactly remember, but it feels true.

Sol turns to face me. The crowd flows around us. Except the three people who bump into me in quick succession.

“We can’t pay for anything,” Sol says. “We are stuck here with no money, no place to stay, no food, and absolutely no one who could help us whatsoever. Are you starting to grasp what a stupid thing you’ve done?”

Okay, maybe pulling Sol out of the library, which consequently sealed the library off, was not my most well-thought-out idea. But it doesn’t mean I’ll accept defeat. I’m supposed to be this smart and scheming evil who always has a back-up plan. That’s how villains work, right?

“I could burn them to crisps unless they give us those round baby-waffles?” I suggest, and raise my hand menacingly.

Sol grabs my wrists and pushes them back to my side.

“No,” he says, staring so deep into my eyes, our noses are almost touching. His nose is not perfectly straight. It has a little bump right in the middle if you look very, very closely. This is how close he is right now. I remind myself that he’s this close only to ensure that “No” really reaches my receptors.

“Pick them up in a tornado and drop them in the ocean?” I offer an alternative.

His nose twitches. “No, Draven. No, and no, and no. We won’t burn them, freeze them, feed them to the sharks, none of those things.”

Feed them to sharks sounds devious. I’m sad I didn’t start with that. “Why not?”

“Because that’s wrong.”

“Okay?” Yes, fine. I wouldn’t want to do those things, but thinking about the options I have at my disposal; these are probably still our best bets. “Then what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know!” Sol shouts. Then he sort of flickers. I expect him to take on his ghost form and disappear, but he doesn’t. “Damn it!”

A woman walks past us and stares into my face, frowning.

“Damn it!” Sol repeats.

“What is it?” I ask, but I shouldn’t have to.

If I paid any attention to Sol instead of just following my nose, I would have seen it sooner. He’s still the Sol I know, but he’s somehow more… translucent. A man walks right through him, shudders, and keeps walking. Sol is not in the angry poltergeist form I’m familiar with. He’s still him, in the shape I would describe as physical. I feel his hands on my wrists, and even here outside the library, he still smells like old paper and lavender soap.

“They cannot see you,” I say. “Only I can.”

“In this world, I’m just a ghost. Very few people can see me.”

“But I can. I always will, right?” I say with more panic than the situation warrants. We’ve barely known each other for a week, and most of it wasn’t even that pleasant.

“It’s worse than that,” he says. “You won’t just always see me. You brought me here. Which means I’m now tethered to you.”

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Through the Looking Glass an Executive’s Memoir

“Absolutely not,” Sol says, shaking his head so vehemently that the little curls of his hair draw silver circles in the air.

I purse my lips, arms crossed over my chest. “Why not?”

He opens his mouth to respond, but before he could say anything, I cut in. “Don’t you dare say consequences.”

I pull my shoulder back a little to emphasise my height and frown at him in a scary way. I think. It feels terrifying. I feel terrifying. Embracing that powerful, monstrous side of me that made me a proper villain is hard work, but I think I’m doing okay.

“It has consequences,” Sol says anyway, completely unfazed.

I deflate like an old tire. Maybe I need to do something with my voice. Or maybe I shouldn’t expect any of that to work on Sol. I don’t think he has ever been afraid of anything. He’d spank a dragon if it tried to breathe on his precious books.

That train of thought speeds towards an image of him with a whip and… I hastily shut it down.

“What consequences?” I ask.

He starts organising the three pencil cases on his desk and moves the teddy bear I once tortured an inch to the left. “Stories are fragile. Someone stepping into one they don’t belong could twist the story’s world in unimaginable ways.”

I have to think about that for a second. “What, we might turn a discarded bad fiction into a good one?”

Sol exhales with an exasperated sigh. “This is not a game, Draven.”

Everything is a game to me. I’m a villain who somehow lost his evil spirit and whatever schemes I was supposed to be brewing. I need new things to entertain myself. But I don’t spell that out to Sol. I doubt he’d understand.

Instead, I gaze towards the shelf holding the book Blondie disappeared into. “Whatever he is doing in that book, it might destroy that world, right?”

“It’s going to be fine,” Sol says with a pained expression. It is so not fine. And that works in my favour.

“We could get him back into his own story. And mine.”

He looks at the memoir in my hand. “That’s not your story.”

His eyes are on me, hands still for once. Waiting. Finally, I got him. I should have started with threatening his books instead of the teddy bear. Not that it matters anymore.

“It’s not my story. But it isn’t really anyone’s. What’s in here is real.” I open the book. It has three pages of financial statements. I hope they are as true as those things can be in the real world.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s so boring, it has no story. Especially not a story world. If you can put me in this book, where I’ll end up is just going to be the real world. I can’t do any harm to that.”

Sol furrows his brows. “Possibly. But why would you want to go there?”

The utter disgust in his voice gives me a pause. It’s a fair question. Why would anyone ever want to visit the real world? Yet, I have no choice. “There’s only one person who can save my story. And that person lives in the real world.”

“You want to talk to the author?”

Talking, well, I didn’t think that far. Maybe threats and torture would be more appropriate. This person, whoever they are, invented me as their villain after all.

“What’s the harm?” I ask softly. “It’s not a fragile story world that I could destroy just by stepping into it. It’s the real world. And if I succeed, I can go home. Maybe even rescue Blondie, so he can chase and threaten me there for all eternity. And you, Sol, get the peace of your library back.”

He looks away, shuffling his pencil cases again. “I don’t know. It sounds dangerous.”

“Not for you.”

“That doesn’t mean I’d just enable bad things to happen to others. Once you are here, you are my responsibility.”

Well, that is rich, coming from him.

“You either let me do this, or you let something a lot worse happen to me, anyway. You watch us disappear, forgotten. Isn’t that the same as letting bad things happen?” I don’t even bother to raise my voice. It’s unnecessary.

Sol stares at the middle of his desk, fingers tracing the veins of the wood. “You are the first who sees it that way. Maybe it’s scary, but—”

“Did you talk to any of the others?” Now, I’m shouting, but it’s more desperate than angry. I hate how I sound, but I cannot stop. “Over the hundred years you watched us disappear, did you ever ask any of us how we feel about it? Scary doesn’t describe it!”

Sol slams his fist into the desk. “I don’t have a choice! I cannot interfere; I cannot do anything! I’m just a librarian…”

“Now, you have a chance to change things. Sol, please. Can you do it?”

I wait and watch the top of his silver head. The curl over his ear. The blue eyes filled with determination when he finally raises his eyes to mine. There’s a part in me that wants to shout. Come with me. Leave whoever enslaved you here behind. See the world. Experience it. I tell the voice to shut up. Sol wants peace and his library. Not hunting down a forgetful author with an impish villain. He has more important things to do.

“I can’t do it alone,” he replies.

“How can I help?”

Sol takes the memoir and places it in the middle of his desk. “I’m the guardian of the library and its million portals, but I’m not allowed to open them. Today was the first time I broke that rule.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

Sol gives me a sweet smile. “They already know.”

I should ask who they are. But it’s not my life, not my story.

I glance at the book we shoved my hero inside. “Do you want me to take it with me?”

Sol throws both of his hands up in the air. “No! You cannot take anything with you. We don’t know what could happen if a forgotten story is taken to the real world. It could alter reality.”

“Okay,” I say, because really there isn’t much else to say. I will do whatever he tells me to do as long as he gives me a chance to fix my life.

“All right,” Sol says. The words are accompanied by a great sigh that once more makes me think this guy cannot be dead. But he is a ghost enslaved to a library, and I’m not even real, so we both have our own problems. “This will be a lot easier if you give me some…. ugh.”

His hands grapple the edge of the desk on both sides of the book.

“Ugh?” I ask and try not to stare. His arms are fully stretched out, and he leans his entire bodyweight into it. There’s a line of tension starting from his fingers, running up his arms and then down his back, then continue down his long, elegant legs. Shit. Why am I even noticing this?

“Your magic,” he mutters.

“My what?”

“There’s a reason I could do this so easily when I was…” he waves at me.

“Inside me,” I say and immediately regret it.

Sol turns pink. Yes, ghosts can blush, at least in their physical form apparently. Which means they can do everything that requires blood flow, and that is a thought I should not continue to explore.

I clear my throat. “I meant the possession.”

“Obviously,” he says.

“Obviously,” I repeat.

“The elemental powers were fully yours,” Sol says. “But the magic the library grants me is limited to emergencies. There’s a very strict code of conduct librarians must obey. We do not have a choice, you see.”

“So, like, you can’t open the portals by yourself?”

“Only in an emergency. And when I… you… well, we put out the fire, the emergency situation ceased to exist.”

“But you circumvented the rules using my magic.”

“Someone or something directly threatening the library is like an electric burst. I can use it to open portals, to do simple spells that are necessary to protect the books. Even possession requires such charge.”

“I thought ghosts can just possess people.”

“Free ghosts can.”

That sounds like the kind of flashing red button I shouldn’t press. “And you are not?”

“Hasn’t it been obvious?”

That is exactly the evasive non-answer I expected of him.

“So, how do I lend you my magic?” I ask, because I really don’t have time to coax an answer out of him he doesn’t want to share.

The teddy bear gives me a judgemental look. I will not apologise.

“You just stand over there,” Sol points to the opposite side of the desk. “And I’ll touch your hand when I need it. Don’t fight me.”

“Have I ever?” I ask.

Sol smiles. “All the time.”

I stand where he tells me to and listen to his soft voice as he chants a spell in a language that is definitely not from my world nor from the real one, nor any place I’ve ever known from stories or otherwise.

When his hand touches mine, it’s soft and warm.

He pulls something out of me. He is not stealing it away, just borrows a power I have too much of. I close my eyes and let him take whatever he needs.

When I open them again, the noise of traffic from beyond the open window fills my ears. A car honks so long, for a moment I question whether they would ever stop or go on forever. I stand in front of a full-sized mirror in a cheap, but pretentious hotel room. The spot where Sol touched my hand is ice cold, a ghostly imprint in a stark contrast to the warmth that had been there moments before.

On the other side of the mirror, Sol has one hand over the memoir and the other reaching across the desk, grasping at nothing.

He takes a shuddering breath before he stumbles into the worn, creaking chair behind him. Whatever he did to open this portal took something from him. A toll that makes his shoulders slump. I should hurry. This may be someone’s room. I need to get out of here, find my author, and fix my life, my story. Yet I hesitate.

Then the whine that is meant to be a battle cry pierces through the mirror. Sol perks up at the sound, searching the library.

When Blondie steps into the picture with his sword raised and his teeth bared like some raging animal, I do the stupidest things I have ever done. I’m sure of it despite not remembering most of my life.

I reach into the mirror, grab Sol by the collar, and yank him across into the real world.

The moment he starts shouting at me, the mirror only reflects his back in a blurry image. The portal, our way back, disappeared.

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This is chapter 2 of my cosy fantasy serial. If you’d like to know what happened previously, here is chapter 1 or you can jump to the index.

Heroes and Villains

I raise my hands on instinct. I don’t intend to unleash the sudden gust of wind that explodes from my fingertips. The burst of frigid air surprises me more than it surprises anyone else. The blast rams Blondie back into the bookshelf and has the unfortunate side effect of knocking over an entire row. I stare at my hands in disbelief.

“Not the books,” Sol yells, not a blink of surprise at my newfound magic.

His voice is swallowed by the inarticulate whine that Lucius has probably intended as a battle cry as he charges at me once again.

I pirouette out of his way, and he runs headfirst into the next set of shelves that collapse on top of him. He either has a very thick skull, or it doesn’t contain much sensitive matter—possibly both—because he isn’t fazed by half a bookcase landing on his head.

Sol turns into his ghost form, which he does whenever he’s distressed.

Ask me how I know.

**Side note**

I may have tried every possible way to buy Sol’s co-operation shortly after my arrival. Some of them involved quite unsavoury methods that even I would define as distressing. I took no pleasure in cutting off every limb of his teddy bear that sits on his desk.

In my defence, I sewed them back on afterwards. Then severed them again. When you are a villain, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Admittedly, I achieved nothing with this cruelty. Sol may be fickle with his shape, but his mind and soul are made of iron.

(Yes, adult ghosts can have teddy bears. For the record, it had already been torn and patched up before I touched it.)

“Make it stop!” Sol screams in that high-pitched echo of a voice he has in this shape.

I want to make it stop. Not necessarily to save his precious books, but I certainly want to stop his screaming because it’s making my ears bleed. If I can achieve that by neutralising the guy trying to murder me, that’s a win-win. The problem is that for a scheming villain, I’m absolutely clueless when it comes to trying to stop a hero determined to deliver justice for all the crimes I don’t remember committing.

“Can we, maybe, talk about this for a second?” I offer.

It doesn’t seem to reach any brain matter in Blondie’s head whatsoever. That explains why the shelf did no damage. He scrambles to his feet and swings his sword in my direction. My cloak is caught in the tip as I dance out of the way. I’m faster than him, but unlike some heroes of forgotten stories, I don’t harbour any illusions about how my speed is superior to his brutish strength. He’d only need to land a hit once, and I’d be plump. Or skewered. Or halved. None of which appeals to me.

Ghost Sol zooms around us like a border collie around misbehaving sheep.

“Seriously,” I try again for diplomacy. “We should discuss this.”

Lucius frowns, as if he has forgotten his next line in a script.

I press my advantage. “I’m sure you are also longing for a peaceful resolution.”

“You forfeited your right to a peaceful resolution!” he shouts.

I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know when or how I forfeited anything, but I don’t get a chance to argue. He rushes towards me, and this time, I’m stuck between two rows of shelves and cannot get out of his way. I back away as far as I can, but it’s not enough.

Red-faced and bright-haired Lucius Brightlight raises a sword above my head, ready to deliver his final blow.

I’m desperate. While I hope for the wind that unexpectedly saved me the first time, I don’t know how to control whatever power this is, so I just throw up my hands and think please, please, please, please, please.

Shockingly, it works. But what erupts from my fingers is not wind. It’s fire.

Lucius rears back, trying to tear off his shining armour overheated by the burst of flames. I stumble. The shelf in front of me is engulfed in fire, the scent of burning paper and ink filling the air as unwritten stories vanish in smoke and ash.

Sol whooshes past Lucius and screams at the sight of the burning shelf. Then he turns his ghostly eyes on me. Their otherwise lively blue is now turned an eerie ice colour, projecting pain and uncontrolled rage with such force my breath catches in my throat.

Then he does something I would have never expected him to do. I didn’t even know he was capable of. I should have guessed. He is a ghost, after all.

As Sol takes over my body, my consciousness is pressed up against the wall of my own mind. I cannot move my muscles. One of my hands is rising. I feel it, I see it, and it’s weird, because I did not instruct it to do that.

I’m pissed. I’m also somewhat impressed. Mildly, very mildly, turned on. I hope Sol doesn’t notice.

My mouth whisper words I don’t recognise. And just like I summoned the wind and the fire, there’s now a gentle rain dousing the flames.

I turn to Blondie. Sol’s rage tastes bitter on my tongue, but his panic subsides, replaced by determination. My hands draw an intricate shape in the air.

Lucius’s eyes grow wide. Then he is sucked up into the thickest book in that pile that was on top of him not so long ago.

Sol dashes out of me, takes up his physical shape again, and slams the book shut.

I stretch my muscles. I’ve never expected to appreciate them obeying my simple commands this much. I should probably be angry, but I’m too stunned to hold on to such negative feelings.

I stare at Sol in wonder. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

He stands on top of a messy pile of broken shelves and smouldering books, observing his toes and hugging that chonk of a book to his chest.

“Do it again.”

Sol looks up and glares at me. His sparkling blue eyes open so wide his white lashes are touching his brow. “I possessed you.”

Fair point.

“Not that! The magic portal thing.” I wave my hand at the book in his hand. “You put him back inside a story. Do it to me.”

As if I’ve just reminded him that it’s still in his hand, Sol shoves the book between two even bigger tomes on a shelf that’s still standing.

“That’s not possible,” he says in a tone that leaves no space for argument.

I’m going to argue it, obviously. “Why not?”

He starts organising the messy pile of charred books into smaller, neater piles. As he picks one up, it becomes whole again under his touch. He runs his fingertips over the cover gently before he puts it on top of a pile. I swallow the inclination to help.

“Portals are very complicated magic,” he says.

“Every book is a portal. You taught me that. And you are clearly the librarian. These stories live for you. With you.”

He pauses, a book he’s just picked up still in hand and looks at me. “And every character belongs to one. Putting a character inside the wrong book, a place where they don’t belong, has consequences.”

I narrow my eyes. “But that’s what you’ve just done. What does that mean?”

Sol returns to his organisation without another word. There’s something he’s not telling me. Something important. But it doesn’t really matter. He can keep his library; he can keep his secrets. I have better things to do. When I’m sure he considers this conversation closed, again, I go on a hunt.

I’m not looking for my own story this time. Finding my book has been an impossible task from the beginning. I would have to be insane to keep going and hope that I’ll stumble upon the right book by accident.

And let’s be honest, whatever fantasy novel Blondie is the hero of must suck. Even my arresting personality cannot save that. Thankfully, it doesn’t need to. Seeing Sol shoving Blondie in that book gave me a different idea. Who cares about our almost forgotten story, if I could find the author and get them to write a new one?

I am back in row 1364. After an entire week, I’m still on level one of a library that has 999 levels, each with 999 rows filled with stories never finished. Maybe that’s why Sol kept refusing to help. He knew it would be fruitless. For him, it would have been so much easier if I stopped wasting his time and just disappeared like I was supposed to. I’m not giving him that satisfaction.

The book I pick up is one of the boring ones I didn’t even bother to look at when I passed through here before. But it is perfect. I run back past 300 rows until I reach the broken shelves and the world’s most infuriating ghost librarian.

Sol looks up as I come to a halt and try to catch my breath.

I hold up the unfinished memoir of a business executive, and give Sol my widest, most unhinged grin.

He raises one smooth white eyebrow. “What are you—”

“I have an idea.”

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Below is the opening chapter of my cosy fantasy serial with LGBTQ+ romance.

I hope you enjoy!

The Library of All Things Never Written

Solomon strains on tiptoe from the highest rung of the ladder, fighting to place a hefty tome on the top shelf he cannot reach, while I watch with gleeful amusement. His arm turns ghostly and stretches out until his translucent fingers brush over the shelf’s edge, disturbing an army of dust motes. So close.

I lean against the end of the row at the opposite side of the aisle, close enough to watch, but far enough that Sol won’t confuse my interest with the willingness to help. I’m determined not to help him. Just like he is determined not to help me with my predicament.

A hundred years as a ghost should have taught him that his spectral form cannot support the weight of something so heavy. I’ve learned it, and I’ve only been around for less than a week. The book tumbles to the floor. Solomon mutters a curse. I chuckle.

“Could you be so dear and push the ladder a little closer?” he asks.

I hate when he speaks like an old person asking for a favour from a child, despite that we are both grown men. Yet if we measured age not by the passage of our lifetime, but by what we’ve retained as memories, that would be true: Sol, the hundred-year-old ghost librarian of The Library of All Things Never Written. And me, a week-old shadow of a story almost forgotten.

Destined to fade to nothing.

“Draven?” Sol calls my name. That is at least a thing I still remember, as everything else slowly evaporates from my mind.

I pick a book at random from the shelf behind me that gives a disgruntled groan as I shift my weight. Then I stick my nose in the book with unjustified interest.

It’s a tale about a stubborn woman who met an unpleasant man, told him to bugger off, and remained happily unmarried. Written by—I turn the book around in my hand to check the name on the front—Jane Austen. Well, not written. It is an early, discarded draft. A story never finished. Just like everything else in this place.

“Sorry,” I shout across the aisle. “I can’t hear you very well.”

“Come closer then, you useless little shit,” Sol grumbles.

It is not the first time he reminds me I’m useless, and he is not all that wrong. I swear, yesterday, I knew at least who I was meant to be. Today, all I can recall that my role was important. Everything I once knew, everything I once was, is melting away like ice cubes in a summer cocktail. Except it’s neither pretty, nor tasty, and it definitely won’t get me drunk.

“I’m busy at the moment,” I reply.

That’s not all that wrong either. I should be busy if I don’t want my uselessness to become the death of me. Literally. Unlike Sol, who is a ghost with a purpose, and as such, will be around for eternity, I don’t have the luxury of an afterlife waiting ahead.

I shove Austin’s not-a-romance novel back on the shelf. It’s instinct, rather than memory that tells me my place is elsewhere. Someplace darker. In an expansive world of magic and heroes and monsters. I turn around and glare into the gloom towards the endless rows of the Library of All Things Never Written. 999 rows of 999 shelves, on each of the 999 levels, constantly shifting and changing. My book is here, waiting to be completed. All I have to do is find it before it’s too late.

The tome Sol is trying to put on a shelf lands on the marble floor with a heavy thud for the second time. He gives up and comes over to my side.

He is an inch shorter than me, which says more about my height than his. I often wonder if he has always been this thin, or if it’s caused by being the ghost of a library for the past century and all that. His corporeal form he’s wearing most of the time has blue eyes that sparkle so intensely sometimes it’s hard to believe he’s dead. There’s a cute stubborn curl just above his left ear that never really stays in place with the rest of his silver hair.

He is barely older than me. Not counting his hundred years of afterlife, of course.

He’d be quite sweet if he weren’t so annoying.

“You are not the first—” Sol starts, but I am not in the mood to listen to another one of his monologues about accepting my fate.

“Character to end up here, I know.”

I march down to row 1867, where I stopped yesterday, and start opening every book, methodically, one by one.

Sol follows. “But you are definitely the only one who’s made such a mess here.”

Of course, I am. Because apparently, I am the only one who has stuck around not only for minutes or hours, but for days. Tomorrow, it’s going to be a week. His theory is that I have something unfinished—a sentence left hanging in the air that won’t let me go. Most characters of incomplete stories come through here and fade away peacefully as their creator moves on to something else.

But Sol gets the occasional pesky ones, who refuse to accept that their story is over. Some demand a way back (me). Others try to jump into stories they don’t belong in (the guy 3 days ago who sat with an open book on the top of his head for an hour before he disappeared). And the peskiest ones, who simply just don’t leave in their allotted timeframe (me again).

I wonder where the others from my story are. Whether they passed through the library in a blink or still struggle to make their way here. Whether they will be as challenging as me, or if they will offer Sol some much-needed respite. Whether I’ll still be here when they arrive, and whether I’ll recognise any of them.

Maybe the guy with the book on his head was my best friend and neither of us knew it.

Suddenly I feel heavy. The book I’m holding falls to the ground, as my arm flickers out of existence and returns just as quickly. Sol sighs and picks up the book, handing it back to me.

“Not long now,” he whispers.

I throw the book with such force; it sends the shelves rattling. “Don’t tell me it’s over.”

“Better make peace. Who knows, maybe this is a better fate than—”

I kick the shelf, and more books tumble to the floor. Sol stares at me, startled.

I don’t want him startled.

I want him to stop his attempts to make me more acquiescent and help me escape this dreadful fate. I want to shake him up, to dig in and pull him out of this shell of a meek ghost librarian who wants for nothing, except his books organised alphabetically. I want a glimpse of the lively, handsome young man he once was, but all I get to see is the memory of him in the sparkle of his eyes.

He starts picking up the books, dusting them off and putting back on the shelves.

“Not everyone gets to be a hero, Draven,” he says. “Just look at me. One day I was this promising apprentice, and the next day, I was here, organising stories I could never again be the part of.”

I hold my breath. This is the most Sol has ever revealed of himself in the past week. I want to hear all he has to say, but he goes silent.

“What kind of apprentice?” I ask.

His hand hovers over the next book. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

Yet it matters to me. I don’t say it.

“I’m here now,” Sol continues. “And all that matters is this.” He spreads his hands, long pale fingers somehow encompassing the entirety of this enormous library. I finally understand. His obsession with the books, his resignation. Because this is all that’s left for him.

Even those he meets disappear in a few hours.

And the one who sticks around is just an asshole like me.

I don’t remember what it’s like to have friends or family. I don’t even know if I ever had any myself. But I cannot begin to comprehend the loneliness Sol must have felt for the last century.

“Leave it,” I say as he lifts up the next book. “I’ll clean it up.”

I want to scream, but not at him. He’s been putting up with me for the last week, after all.

I reach for a book on the ground. It’s not particularly thick, and from the cover, it looks like a children’s story. There are all kinds of forest animals dancing around a tree. Don’t ask me how I know what forest animals look like when I cannot even remember my own occupation, but hey, at least I recognise a bunny.

The bunny jumps off the book.

I once again throw the book at the shelf, and give a startled, apologetic look to Sol.

He jumps after the bunny, which would be comical, but he’s also a ghost who can move with inhuman speed. His corporal form disappears, and when he returns to it, he’s holding the bunny by the ears in one hand.

We stare at each other while the bunny hangs peacefully with her tiny legs curled in front of its chest, glancing between us awaiting judgement.

“Does this happen often?” I ask.

Sol shrugs. “Occasionally. More frequently than stubborn ghosts of deleted stories sticking around for a week.”

“I’m not a ghost,” I reply. But in a library dedicated to things that do not exist, this is a hard argument to make.

“Can I help you?” Sol asks.

Before I could say yes, finally, for goodness’s sake, I’ve been begging for your help for the past week, someone clears his throat behind me. It’s so close to my ear that I jump, bumping into a very corporeal Sol, making him drop the bunny that happily hops away and disappears amongst the shelves.

“Yes, my good sirs,” the man says.

As I turn, a guy in a literal shining armour bows towards us. “My name is Lucius Brightlight.”

Well, that explains the shine and golden hair that reflects some unearthly light that doesn’t even reach between these shelves. Doesn’t explain the nose that has definitely been broken at least three times, though. For some reason, I really want to break it again.

“Solomon Winter,” Sol says. “What can I do for you, Mr Brightlight?”

Mr Brightlight clearly doesn’t understand what a pain Sol can become if people invade his library without an obvious reason to do so, because instead of answering the question that has been posed to him, not once, but twice, he looks at me. “And you are?”

His piercing and honestly quite judgemental stare feels eerily familiar. And not in a good way.

“Draven,” I say, because surnames are a luxury for those who are not fading out of existence.

I accompany it with a little innocent wave. I do not like this guy at all.

“Draven Nightshade,” he sneers. I like him less by the minute. “I’m here to destroy you and stop your wicked schemes.”

The surname is mine, I’m sure of it. I rack my brain for more. He’s definitely a hero. And he knows me. Clearly, we don’t get along.

I glance between Sol and Blondie as the realisation sinks in.

“I’m a villain,” I exclaim with a lot more amazement than that statement warrants. It totally explains the spiky black hair and cat pupils.

“And now you pay,” Blondie says, and raises a greatsword I didn’t even know he had on him.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope my serial brings some joyful moments to your day!

Keep reading:

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Find me also on Wattpad, Instagram, BlueSky, and my website.

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After a few weeks of posting and talking to people, I realised two things:

1. Some people who want to read it aren’t comfortable creating an account on Wattpad

2. Others who love it on Wattpad wish to read the chapters sooner

For both groups, I have some big news: LET ME BE YOUR VILLAIN is coming here, to your inbox with early access!

What does it mean for you?

First, I need to catch up to my Wattpad schedule. To do just that, in the first two weeks of March, I’ll be publishing three episodes per week here, ending next Friday (14 March 2025) with early access to episode six.

From that point onward, I’ll be publishing new episodes here two days before their Wattpad publication date, once a week every Friday.

Wait a sec, what is this serial about?

LET ME BE YOUR VILLAIN is an LGBTQ+ cosy, romantic fantasy with a generous dose of humour. Here is the burb:

Lost in The Library of All Things Never Written, Draven searches day and night for his own deleted story before it’s forgotten, and he fades out of existence. The task would be far easier without Solomon, the ghost librarian, constantly reminding Draven of the inevitable fate of deleted characters. Sol is convinced that only Draven’s stubbornness has kept him stranded in the library for the past week. But when the hero of Draven’s story breaks into the library to vanquish his escaped villain, Draven flees to the real-world dragging Solomon with him. Draven and Sol must find the author who abandoned Draven’s story and convince her to complete it, before she forgets about Draven, or her hero wreaks havoc to the library in search of a villain to defeat.

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope my serial will bring some joyful moments to your day!

Find me also on Wattpad, Instagram, BlueSky, and my website.