Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

shrestha (SHRES·thuh) noun When a dream comes true—but not for the dreamer.

“The library knows its own mind,” old Master Hyrrokkin told him, leading him back up the secret stairs. “When it steals a boy, we let it keep him.”

“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.”

If the dream chose the dreamer, then his had chosen poorly. It needed someone far more daring than he. It needed the thunder and the avalanche, the war cry and the whirlwind. It needed fire.

He had a trio of fears that sat in his gut like swallowed teeth, and when he was too quiet with his own thoughts, they’d grind together to gnaw at him from within. This was the first: that he would never see further proof of magic. The second: that he would never find out what had happened in Weep. The third: that he would always be as alone as he was now.

All his life, time had been passing in the only way he knew time to pass: unrushed and unrushable, as sands running through an hourglass grain by grain. And if the hourglass had been real, then in the bottom and neck—the past and the present—the sands of Lazlo’s life would be as gray as his robes, as gray as his eyes, but the top—the future—would hold a brilliant storm of color: azure and cinnamon, blinding white and yellow gold and the shell pink of svytagor blood. So he hoped, so he dreamed: that, in the course of time, grain by grain, the gray would give way to the dream and the sands of his life would run bright.

Who had ever expended so much passion on a dream, only to stand helpless as it was granted to others? Others, moreover, who had expended no passion on it at all.

thakrar (THAH·krahr) noun The precise point on the spectrum of awe at which wonder turns to dread, or dread to wonder.

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.

For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions.

mahal (muh·HAHL) noun A risk that will yield either tremendous reward or disastrous consequence.

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.

It was no small thing to shed a lifetime of nonbeing and suddenly be seen.

“It is the best hope we have,” said Eril-Fane. “It won’t be the work of moments, as it was for Skathis, but what else can we do? We might be looking at years of effort. It may be that the best we can hope for is a tower to reach it and to carve it away piece by piece until it’s gone. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren may well be carting shavings of mesarthium out of the city as the monstrosity shrinks slowly to nothing. But even so, even if that’s the only way and we in this room don’t live to see it, there will come a day when the last piece is gone and the sky is free.”

Here was the radical notion that you might help someone simply because they needed it.

Looking now, though, she thought that handsome was beside the point. He was striking, like the profile of a conqueror on a bronze coin. And that was better.

“What’s the point of being old if you can’t mortify the young?

sathaz (SAH·thahz) noun The desire to possess that which can never be yours.

“Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.”

“I only mean,” he rushed to explain, “if you’re afraid of your own dreams, you’re welcome here in mine.”

It wasn’t just metals and magnets anymore, but ghosts and gods and magic and vengeance, and while he wouldn’t call himself an expert in any of those things, he had more to recommend him than the others did, starting with an open mind.

“Moth killer,” she admonished him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really loved that moth, too. That one was my favorite.”