The Library of Broken Worlds

Contents
 
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Tesseracts and Material Gods of The Library of Broken Worlds
 Contents
 A girl and a god, alone in communion.
 —I was born in the Library.
 —Awilu ballads begin with a call and end with a sacrifice.
 —I fell in love in the mud, but I destroyed it in the dust.
 —To understand Nergüi, you have to understand two things.
 —There’s a kind of story called a portal story.
 —Once I decided to look, the Library opened itself up to me.
 —As ze lived. Radically, with love.
 —Let’s imagine a boy.
 —In the end, Quinn himself showed me the path to the center of my glass.
 —The dead are alive in the desert that surrounds the Library.
 —This is the secret of our lighted paths.
 —I came to kill you.
 Author’s Note
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Also Alaya Dawn Johnson
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Tesseracts and Material Gods of The Library of Broken Worlds
 A girl and a god, alone in communion.
 —I was born in the Library.
 —Awilu ballads begin with a call and end with a sacrifice.
 —I fell in love in the mud, but I destroyed it in the dust.
 —To understand Nergüi, you have to understand two things.
 —There’s a kind of story called a portal story.
 —Once I decided to look, the Library opened itself up to me.
 —As ze lived. Radically, with love.
 —Let’s imagine a boy.
 —In the end, Quinn himself showed me the path to the center of my glass.
 —The dead are alive in the desert that surrounds the Library.
 —This is the secret of our lighted paths.
 —I came to kill you.
 Author’s Note
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Also Alaya Dawn Johnson
 Copyright
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Yet, friends in publike places, if you would
 Hackle the blatant beast and call him tame,
 Sound Melville deep to grapple your white whale,
 First you must live with corpses three months old.
 No Kraken shall depart till bade by name.
 No peace but that must pay full toll to hell.
 –Malcolm Lowry, “Warning from False Cape Horn“
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 A girl and a god, alone in communion. The god awakes, as he was meant to. He is furious!
 “I’ll kill you like I killed the others, the ones with your face.”
 The girl is her own light in the darkness. “I’m dying anyway.”
 “A virus can’t kill you as fast as I can,” he says.
 “But you, great Nameren, the Naamaru Catre, the Tezcatlapa, Aurochs whose great horns are crescents of twin moons, whose testes swing like the bells of war—”
 “Are you laughing?”
 It is a fine, wide laugh. “You won’t 
 
 
 Nadi found me in the tunnels, where the collected knowledge of humanity burrows underground like an anthill led by an aging queen. I was a screaming newborn with clay-dark skin shrunk and wrinkled around fresh-set bones. Ze didn’t realize right then what I was—maybe ze felt a tickle in zir ear, the ghost of an echo of a memory—but ze saw me from the first as human. It took me years, growing up in the Library, to realize that ze was the only one who would.
 Iemaja is the common name for the