Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

honey red and rivercat,

It was a noble question, and if destiny had seen fit to reveal its staggering answer to him then, he would never have believed it.

If silence could crash, it did. If it could break like a wave and flood a room with all the force of the ocean, it did.

Of course today would be the day the sun got stuck in the sky. The gears of the heavens had gotten gummed up,

a first kiss, especially—is the moment before your lips touch, and before your eyes close, when you’re filled with the sight of each other, and with the compulsion, the pull, and it’s like . . . it’s like . . . finding a book inside another book.

The learning curve was delicious.

lazy and liquid with sleep and well-being.

Talking to Minya was like getting slapped in the face.

How had they survived a whole day on the merest touch that was last night’s kiss? If they’d known then what a kiss was, they couldn’t have. It would have been unbearable to come so close—to barely feel and almost taste and be snatched apart before . . . well, before this. But they hadn’t known.

The searing softness, the melt.

But right now, he’d have given it all up for this small mystery, this tiny, newest, and best mystery of Weep. This kiss.

Shaped by fairy tales, she thought, which made it better than every straight nose in the world.

It might take weeks, after all, just to master necks.

She felt him shiver and she sensed—and he did, too—how very much remained to be discovered.

Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.

They were both already fallen. They would never finish falling. The universe was endless, and love had its own logic.

“It was one-plum wrath.”

He looked him right in the eyes and saw a man who was great and good and human, who had done extraordinary things and terrible things and been broken and reassembled as a shell, only then to do the bravest thing of all: He had kept on living, though there are easier paths to take.

You had only to look at Lazlo to know it would be brilliant. And Sarai could not be in it.

His gasp was the rupture of the small, brave hope growing inside his shame, and when Lazlo mounted Rasalas with Sarai clutched to his chest, he dropped to his knees like a warrior felled in battle.

Eril-Fane shuddered as her tears seared his skin, and something inside him gave way. He pulled her arms tight against his chest and crushed his face into her hands. And then, and there, for everything lost and everything stolen, both from him and by him in all these long years, the Godslayer started to sob.

She didn’t know any other way. There was nothing left over, nothing, not even enough to grow. Through sheer, savage will, Minya poured even her life force into the colossal expenditure of magic necessary to hold on to her ghosts and keep her charges safe—and not just safe but loved. In Great Ellen, she had given them a mother, as best she could. And in the effort of it all, she had stunted herself, blighted herself, whittled herself to a bone of a thing.