Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

That was the year Zosma sank to its knees and bled great gouts of men into a war about nothing.

and the cloud of his breath accompanied him like a chummy ghost.

Lazlo owned nothing, not one single thing, but from the first, the stories felt like his own hoard of gold.

They marked his first consideration that there might be other ways of living than the one he knew. Better, sweeter ways.

“Life won’t just happen to you, boy,” he said. “You have to happen to it. Remember: The spirit grows sluggish when you neglect the passions.”

You’re young. Your spirit shouldn’t be ‘fine.’ It should be effervescent.”

But it did have some connection to vitality, or “passion,” as Master Hyrrokkin said, and those without it were emotionless, lethargic. Spiritless.

but because he took it. Right there in the tombwalk, as though it were a real, physical burden, he put himself beneath it to help Thyon bear the weight—even if Thyon didn’t know it.

He stood in the shadows, furious with thought.

Here, captured between covers, was the history of the human imagination, and nothing had ever been more beautiful, or fearsome, or bizarre.

and was instead intent, alive, and fascinated.

Because if Lazlo thought a dream could not be stolen, he underestimated Thyon Nero.

and imagined he could feel the minutes and hours of his life running through him, as though he were nothing but an hourglass of flesh and bone.

Now the bird. The presence of magic. And something beyond the reach of understanding. An affinity, a resonance. It felt like . . . it felt like the turn of a page, and a story just beginning. There was the faintest glimmer of familiarity in it, as though he knew the story, but had forgotten it. And at that moment, for no reason he could put into words, the hourglass shattered. No more, the cool gray sift of days, the diligent waiting for the future to trickle forth. Lazlo’s dream was spilled out into the air, the color and storm of it no longer a future to be reached, but a cyclone here and now. He didn’t know what, but as surely as one feels the sting of shards when an hourglass tips off a shelf and smashes, he knew that something was happening.

like calligraphy, if calligraphy were written in honey.

His head felt wrapped in thunder.

only Lazlo Strange in his worn gray robes, with his nose that had been broken by fairy tales, looking like the hero of no story ever told.

Knifeshine and spreading blood.

They had reshaped his eyes, cutting them narrower against the light, and altered the line of his brow, drawing it forward and knitting it between his black eyebrows in a single furrow. Those small changes wrought an undue transformation, replacing his dreamy vagueness with a hunting intensity. Such was the power of a half year of horizons.

And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.

but even the sight of a strong, bare arm crooked gently round a waist or shoulder could make her ache with the yearning to be held. To be one of a pair of bodies that knew that melting fusion. To reach and find. To be reached for and found. To belong to a mutual certainty.

He trailed off, a lump forming in his throat. The Godslayer had a mother waiting for him in Weep. He had sent her word of his imminent arrival, and in his note he had seen fit to mention Lazlo.

The imagination, he thought, no matter how vivid, was still tethered in some measure to the known, and this was beyond anything he could have imagined.

And so his introduction to the world of homes and mothers was powerfully good,

The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion—to close a door in one’s own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering—and cause it—and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication. But at some point . . . here in this room, Sarai thought . . . she had lost that capacity. Hate had failed her, and it was like losing a shield in battle. Once it was gone, all the suffering had risen up to overwhelm her. It was too much.

in this indulgence of sunlight,

The look on his face! The wonder in it, the witchlight. Her hearts raced at the thought, and her palms went clammy. It was no small thing to shed a lifetime of nonbeing and suddenly be seen.

The answer really couldn’t be simpler, but he didn’t think Thyon was equipped to believe it. “Because you needed it,” he said, and his words pulled a silence over them both. Here was the radical notion that you might help someone simply because they needed it.

There were crescents and quarters, gibbous and full, and they weren’t charms, they were moons—real miniature moons, cratered and luminous, as though lit by the rays of some distant star.

He was striking, like the profile of a conqueror on a bronze coin. And that was better.

A blaze of connection—or collision,

as though they had long been wandering in the same labyrinth and had finally rounded the corner that would bring them face-to-face.

It was longing. To be someone’s child. Her throat felt thick. She bit her lip.

Pacing, she felt as though her life had chased her down a dead-end corridor and trapped her there to taunt her.

She wept, waiting for nightfall, and finally it came. Never before had her silent scream been such a release. She screamed everything, and felt as though her very being broke apart in the soft scatter of wings.

she was the only one who knew the suffering of humans and godspawn both, and it came to her that her mercy was singular and precious. Today it had forestalled carnage, at least for a time. The future was blind, but she couldn’t feel, truly, that it would be better without her in it. She gathered herself from her wild scatter. She gave up the sky with its signal-fire stars, and flew instead down to Weep to find out what her mercy had set in motion.

Two rooms, door closed between them. Two warriors with their faces in their hands. Sarai, watching them, could see that everything would be better if the faces and hands were to simply . . . switch places.

Did they not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and hers, mingled together, could . . . countervail each other?

Poor Azareen. To see her curled up like that and skinned of all her armor was like seeing a heart flayed from a body, laid raw on a slab, and labeled Grief.

And Eril-Fane, savior of Weep, three years’ plaything of the goddess of despair? What label for him, but Shame.

And so Grief and Shame abided in adjoining rooms with the door shut between them, holding their pain in th...

The Muse of Nightmares, tormentor of Weep, spooked from a dream by a sweet librarian?

There it was, the witchlight in his eyes, sparkling like sun on water. It does something to a person to be looked at like that—especially

She crossed them—artlessly, she felt, like some arm amateur taking the easy way out.

But far more intense was the utter, ineffable tenderness he felt, and the solemnity. As though he had been entrusted with something infinitely precious. As though he had taken an oath, and his very life stood surety to it. He would recognize this later as the moment his center of gravity shifted: from being one of one—a pillar alone, apart—to being half of something that would fall if either side were cut away.

Her name was calligraphy and honey.

witchlight, still witchlight, and she wanted to live in it forever.

from this new place in him where so much delight had been waiting in reserve.

It was new to both of them—this nearness that mingles breath and warmth—and they shared the sensation that they were absorbing each other, melting together in an exquisite crucible. It was an intimacy both had imagined, but never—they now knew—successfully. The truth was so much better than the fantasy. The wild, soft wings were in a frenzy. Sarai couldn’t think. She wanted only to keep on melting.

It was like a thread of light passing from one to the other, and it was more than acquiescence. It was complicity, and desire.