Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer, #2)

by Laini Taylor

she wrote, people weren’t just white or blue, but every color, and the godsmetal palace floated on air, moving from place to place.

Butchering was women’s work, never mind that it took more muscle, and more stamina, than killing. “Our women are strong,” the men boasted from up on the headland, clear of the stink and the flies. And they were strong—and they were weary and grim, trembling from exertion, and streaked with every vile fluid that leaks out of dead things, when the glint caught Nova’s eye.

This is not our life. Remember. We don’t belong here. The Mesarthim will come back and choose us. This is not our real life.

He’d stopped the citadel from falling, and so instead of everyone dying, only Sarai had.

She was a ghost and he was a god, and they kissed like they’d lost their dream and found it.

Isagol, the goddess of despair, had manipulated emotions. If Sarai could do that, she could unwork Minya’s hate.

Sarai was the goddess he’d met in his dreams and fallen with into the stars. He’d bought her the moon, and kissed her blue throat, and held her while she wept. She’d saved his life. She’d saved his life, and he had failed to save hers. It was unthinkable that he should fail her again.

simple. This was what Minya knew: Have an enemy, be an enemy. Hate those who hate you. Hate them better. Hate them worse. Be the monster they fear the most. And whenever you can, and however you can, make them suffer.

Thyon knew this smell. For all that he was a duke’s son, born in a castle, with a palace of his own gifted him by the queen, he was a scholar, too, and he lived this smell. It was unmistakable. Universal. It was books. He gave a laugh that spun the dust in front of his face and sent ripples through the heavy air. “It’s the library,” he said, and his very first thought was that Strange would give a limb to get to wander in this place. “It’s the ancient library of Weep.”

Fertility, sexuality, strength, the ability to create and nurture life: These were the powers of a woman, and the ink honored them, connecting them with all their foremothers going back hundreds of years.

It was the moon: a slender crescent shaped to the soft curve of her, with a scattering of stars to close the arc and form a perfect oval on her belly. “The moon,” Sarai whispered, loving it. “Like the one you bought for me.”

She was the sky. Heavy, bewitched, he leaned forward and brushed his lips over a star.

Many a choice is made in this way: by pretending it makes itself. And many a fate is decided by those who cannot decide.

“You have ruined my tongue for all other tastes,” she whispered, and felt his mouth smile against hers. There was sound in their breathing, the softest of sighs.

She gave the words back to him, murmuring, and kept them, too. You could do that: Give them back and keep them. “I love you” is generous that way.

she was overcome by a feeling so powerful she thought surely her ghost couldn’t contain it. It wanted to spill out of her in waves of music and silver light. It would, if she’d let it, she thought. Literal music, actual light. But she didn’t want to wake him, so she kept it inside and felt that the whole of her being was just a fragile skin wrapped around tenderness and aching love, and the kind of surprise you feel when...oh, for example, when you wake up after dying, and get another chance.

Azareen tried to make Eril-Fane swear not to die for her, but he would not take that oath.

The mind is good at hiding things, but there’s something it cannot do: It can’t erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone. They rot. They fester, they leak poisons. They ache and stink. They hiss like serpents in tall grass.

Which would mean, if it were true, that they were Minya. And that maybe, just maybe, the ragged little girl with the beetle shell eyes, malefic, hate-ravaged, and bent on vengeance, was only a piece of who she was. A little, broken piece.

Sometimes nothing was better than something. It all depended on the something.

The floating orb, twenty feet in diameter, was hollow, and it was empty. But...there was something wrong with the emptiness, though no one was there to notice. A nearly imperceptible warp wavered in its center. There was nothing there, but the nothing moved, like a pennant rippling in a breeze.

There was a glimpse of sky, and...it was not Weep’s sky. And then the edges of the air fell back into place. The orb closed. All was quiet. The bird was gone.

She came to a clearing, and it was not a crone or cat she met but Lazlo, leaning against a tree, trying to look casual with a rather large iguana perched on his shoulder.

“Show me this bed,” she said, her voice low and liquid, and Lazlo took her by the hand and led her through the trees. The iguana was not invited.

Instead, each saw hope, a mirror of their own, and brightened like new-polished glavestones that had been muted under dust. Eril-Fane groped for words, but only one came to him: “Daughter,” he said. The word filled a space in Sarai’s chest that had always been empty. She wondered if he had a space like that, too. “Father,” she answered, and he did have a space, but it wasn’t empty. It had long been filled with small bones and self-loathing. Now the word dissolved them and took their place, and it was so much lighter than what had been there before that Eril-Fane felt as though he could stand up straight for the first time in years. “I’m so sorry,” he said. The words scraped up from some pit within him, and shreds of his soul seemed to cling to them like flesh to the barbs of a scourge. “I know,” said Sarai. “I’m sorry, too.”

No one ever mentioned those babies, either, though they had certainly been real, and had been born in the world only to be shown right out of it, all under a pall of silence.

“There’s a room,” he said. “I never went in it, but I saw it once from the end of the corridor. It’s big. It’s...” With his hands, he formed the shape of a sphere. “Circular. That’s where Korako took the children.” He was describing the heart of the citadel.

“I’ll get greasy fingerprints all over you,” the warrior had muttered, going to do as he was told. Thyon, flushing, had pretended not to hear.

He pushed back from the table to stand, but before he could, Ruza’s hand closed on his. He still wasn’t looking at him, but he had caught his hand so he couldn’t walk away. Thyon stared at his fingers enclosed in Ruza’s as though they belonged to some stranger. He hardly even registered the feeling. It was too alien. No one had ever held his hand. Not that Ruza was holding his hand. He was only touching it. It was nothing. When he let go, though, and drew his hand away, Thyon felt its absence keenly.

“There were twelve of them,” said Ruza, either not noticing, or choosing to ignore the snap in the alchemist’s voice. “Chosen of all the best and brightest of their race to voyage outward from their world and ‘stitch all the worlds of the Continuum together with their light.’ ”

“Right through the sky,” said Ruza. “The twelve were called the Faerers. Six went one way, and six the other, cutting doors from world to world. Thakra was the commander of the Six that came this way.” He laid his hand on the book. “This is her testament.” Lifting his hand, he pointed to the first disc of the diagram. “Meliz,” he said again. His eyes were bright. “That’s the seraph home world. It’s where they began.”

Last night he’d wondered at the coincidence of seraphim and Mesarthim both coming here, thousands of years apart—right here and nowhere else on Zeru. Now he understood: It wasn’t a coincidence. If indeed there were worlds, and seraphim had cut doorways, what was to stop... anyone from using them? He tipped back his head, looked up at the citadel, and asked, “What if there’s a cut? Right. Up. There.”

But he did, and they all gasped as his hand... vanished, right off the end of his wrist. He yanked his arm back and his hand reappeared, whole and unharmed. They all stared at it, then at one another, trying to grasp what they’d just seen. Lazlo was transfixed. There had been no pain, just the breeze, and a feeling like cobwebs brushing over his skin. He reached out again, only this time, instead of simply thrusting his hand forward, he felt along the gossamer edge of the seam, inserting his fingers so they winked out of sight, and then he grasped the invisible edge and lifted it.

They had been poised on the very verge of thakrar—that point on the spectrum of awe where wonder becomes dread, or dread wonder—and the acknowledgment of something man-made—or at least something made—sent them spinning hard to dread.

“Azareen. I wish...” He pitched forward, as though he were falling asleep. She caught him, but couldn’t hold him upright. Her arms were numb, and he was so heavy. She collapsed to the side, and he slumped down over her. “What?” she asked, desperate, with her shallowing breath. “My love,” she pleaded as his eyes went dull. “What do you wish?” But the time for wishing had passed. Eril-Fane died first, Azareen just after.

Kora’s killer died. Nova felt her own blood pulsing in time to his arterial spurts, and even in the roaring slow motion of her shock, she thought he died far too quickly. What now? Was there an after? Would time keep traipsing forward, indifferent? Nova wasn’t ready for after. There was no “next,” not for her. She had failed. This was all there was, only this, forever.

“Father,” said Sarai, for only the second time in her life. He was slumped over Azareen. Their eyes were open and unseeing and dead.

Today Sarai had finally met her father. He had spoken the word daughter and filled an empty place inside her, and now it was empty again. He was dead at her feet. He was dead.

Now he straightened. Sarai caught a glimpse of Azareen’s eyes that a moment before had been lifeless, and they were not lifeless, not anymore. They were haunted, bleary, fierce, imploring, and unmistakably alive. She sat up, too.

Their blood was pulsing back into their bodies.

They understood that they were witnessing magic. The bubble, the field of energy. The invader possessed this gift, the extraordinary ability to turn back time. And she had used it to unkill her victims. They understood, but they didn’t trust it.

Instead it was death they would share. Again. And again. And again. . . . Nova couldn’t stop. There was nothing after this. So she just kept on killing him.

Rook’s gift was to close off a loop in space and time—a small space, a short time—so that events trapped inside happened over and over until he opened it again.

And there it was, the truth at the dark heart of it all. Two hundred years of tyranny, and it all came down to this: Skathis, so-called god of beasts, was breeding magical children to sell as slaves across dozens of worlds.

We might be at odds, hate each other, and desire each other’s destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief.

She’d grown up under the burden of them—or rather, she’d not grown up. Minya used up every ounce of her energy in this colossal, incessant expenditure of power. She spent too much. She spent everything, and had nothing left over to grow on.

The thing about Rook’s time loops: They didn’t have to be opened in the same place as they’d been closed. That was the true beauty of his magic. It was for more than repeating an event over and over, or glutting a grieving goddess on vengeance. It was for reaching back in the flow of time—ten seconds at the most, but ten seconds could be everything—and saying: No. I don’t want that to happen. And fixing it so it didn’t.

But she could, if she chose, break it open before. Rook would, if it were up to him. Eril-Fane and Azareen could have lived. But Nova had no mercy.

So they were all looking up, and all of them saw the seraph move. It was just a twitch of its fingers first, then its whole massive arm suddenly bent at the elbow, reached in, and tore open its own chest.

She wrenched open the citadel’s chest and it reached inside itself like a man tearing out his own beating heart. But it wasn’t a heart it tore out. It was people—humans, corpses, godspawn, ghosts. The huge metal hand reached in, and the metal walls and walkway turned liquid and caught them, conspiring to drag them into its cupped palm.