You cannot unread a book. You can burn it, but the reader has already changed.
FINAL ENTRY — Dr. Eleanor Hartley CLASSIFICATION: PERSONAL — NOT FOR BUREAU ARCHIVE (They will archive it anyway. That is what bureaucracies do. Let the record show I tried.) The Bureau classifies the Cité des Dames as a Literate Contamination Vector. The designation is accurate. It is also, I have come to believe, a compliment the Bureau did not intend. Literate Contamination operates as follows: when the Cité's Bleed touches adjacent Shards, agents begin finding books on their shelves that were not there before. Books by authors who do not exist in their world. Books arguing for things their societies have never considered. A treatise on the rights of citizens appears on a Velgarien bureaucrat's desk and he spends three days trying to classify it before realising he agrees with it. A volume of poetry surfaces in a Gaslit Reach archive and reduces the archivist to tears in a language she has never learned. A mathematical proof materialises in Station Null's data core and the AI cann...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.