The Catalog of Death

Item from The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Margaret's domain — the complete knowledge of death, dying, the afterlife, and resurrection, studied through repeated personal experience.

The catalog of death contains everything there is to know about dying, being dead, and coming back. Margaret has studied it through the most direct method possible — dying, repeatedly, in every way, and returning each time with new knowledge. The catalog covers the mechanics of death, the geography of the afterlife, communication with the deceased, and the techniques of resurrection. It is the quietest and most isolating catalog because its subject matter creates a fundamental separation between its student and the living.

Appearance

The death catalog is the quietest section of the Library. The light is dim and sourceless — not dark exactly, but muted, like perpetual twilight. The temperature is cool. The shelves contain texts on mortality, afterlife cartography, resurrection techniques, and the experiences of the dead transcribed into formats the living can read. There is a persistent smell of flowers — funeral flowers — and underneath it, the faintest trace of decay. Some of the books feel cold to the touch.

Also known as: the death catalog, Margaret's catalog, the death stacks

What They Know

• Assigned to Margaret — her study required dying hundreds of times and returning with accumulated knowledge
• Contains the complete mechanics of death: what happens to consciousness, where it goes, how it persists
• Includes afterlife cartography — maps of spaces that the dead inhabit
• Resurrection techniques that allow Margaret to return from death, though each return changes her
• The death catalog connects to the forgotten lands — death's territory borders the spaces beyond reality

Connections

• studied_by — margaret
• housed_in — the_library
• connected_to — forgotten_lands

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