Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

He’d had another name first, but it had died like a song with no one left to sing it.

There were two mysteries, actually: one old, one new. The old one opened his mind, but it was the new one that climbed inside, turned several circles, and settled in with a grunt—like a satisfied dragon in a cozy new lair.

the life that pinched like tight shoes.

the stories poured from him, and Lazlo listened. He listened the way a cactus drinks rain.

He learned to coax Brother Cyrus into that place of reverie, and he collected the stories like treasure. Lazlo owned nothing, not one single thing, but from the first, the stories felt like his own hoard of gold.

He was a whirlwind. He was a god.

As for the name of the vanished city, it had vanished, too. Lazlo would always remember the feel of it in his mind, though. It had felt like calligraphy, if calligraphy were written in honey,

“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.”

Lazlo couldn’t have belonged at the library more truly if he were a book himself.

On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream. “Strange the dreamer,” they called him.

the dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around.

“Get out of doors, Strange. Breathe air, see things. A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light.”

Master Hyrrokkin sighed. “I miss the days when you lived in fear of me. However short-lived they were.”

LOL

What’s the point of being old if you can’t beleaguer the young with your vast stores of wisdom?” “And what’s the point of being young if you can’t ignore all advice?”

He had a lot of books, all lined up on the window ledge in his little room. They contained seven years of research and every hint and tidbit that was to be found about Weep and its pair of mysteries. They did not contain answers to them.

It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming?

His hearts hadn’t stopped beating after all. They were fast and irregular, like a pair of trapped moths.

war, like fortune, doesn’t touch all folk with the same hand.

The cathedral bells rang out, and all the other church bells followed—light and sweet, like children answering a parent’s call.

For seven years, Lazlo had been “Strange the dreamer,” and his books had been “scribblings” and “foolishness.” Now, just like that, they were his “work,” validated and stolen in one fell swoop.

The room felt hollow and dead, like a body with its hearts cut out.

His handsome face was devoid of mockery or malice, and was instead intent, alive, and fascinated. Which was so much worse. Because if Lazlo thought a dream could not be stolen, he underestimated Thyon Nero.

His books were not his dream. Moreover, he had tucked his dream into their pages like a bookmark and been content to leave it there for too long.

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 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.

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. Right now.

that wasn’t what stopped Lazlo’s feet as abruptly as though his soul had flown on ahead of his body and left it stranded. It hadn’t, surely, though maybe it leaned forward, like a craned neck. A craned soul.

In the sheer, shimmering improbability of the moment, it seemed to Lazlo that his dream had tired of waiting and had simply… come to find him.

There was a sensation in his hearts, though, as a stirring of embers. There was fire in him. It wasn’t smothered, only banked, but it would burn like the wings of the seraphim before this was over.

he’s called the Godslayer.”

A rare opportunity. Could it be what he hoped? What if it was? In all his dreaming—and indeed, all his despairing—he had never foreseen this: that his impossible dream might simply… ride through the gates.

you could almost feel their carefully cultivated skepticism fail. If there were gods in need of slaying, here was the man for the job.

It was his manner—the warmth of him, like steam rising from tea. One looked at him and thought, Here is a great man, and also a good one, though few men are ever both.

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.

Lazlo wasn’t a creature of anger or envy, but he felt the scorch of both—as though his veins were fuses and they were burning through him, leaving paths of ash in their wake.

When Lazlo had gone to Thyon with his “miracle for breakfast,” it had been so clearly Thyon’s story that he hadn’t even considered keeping it for himself. But… this was his story. He was Strange the dreamer, and this was his dream.

“My name is Lazlo Strange,” he called out, and the full complement of Tizerkane warriors turned their heads as one to look at him. Their vivid faces showed their surprise—not because Lazlo had called out, but because he had called out in Unseen, and unlike Thyon, he didn’t treat it like a common thing, but the rare and precious gem it was. The words, in the reverent tones of his rough voice, sounded like a magic spell.

an alphabet that looked like music sounded?

There were lines around her eyes from laughter, and around her mouth from grief. She didn’t speak, but something passed between the two. These seconds were the longest of Lazlo’s life, and the heaviest with fate.

There were no books to hide behind, and no shadows—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. Or. No story yet told.

Master Hyrrokkin, looking stunned and proud. Lazlo nodded to the old man—the only person besides Thyon who knew what this meant to him, and the only person in the world who might be happy for him—and he nearly wept.

I’m going to Weep, he thought, and could have laughed at the pun, but he kept his composure, and when the Tizerkane warriors rode out of the Great Library and out of Zosma, Strange the dreamer went with them.

Strange the dreamer—library stowaway and scholar of fairy tales—had never been thirstier, or more full of wonder.

she’d looked enough like Sarai that the visions of her body were like seeing a prophecy of her own death.

“I might not have my own dreams,” she said, as though it scarcely mattered, “but I have everyone else’s.” “It’s not the same. That’s like reading a thousand diaries instead of writing your own.”

She felt the pulse of life in things and nursed it forth to make them grow. She was, Sarai thought, like springtime distilled into a person.

“I can always push you into its mouth and run. So you see, you’ll have saved my life, and I’ll never forget it.” “Nice,” Lazlo had said. “That’s exactly the sort of heroism that inspired me to play Tizerkane as a little boy.”

He was a good language teacher all around, mainly because he talked so much, but he was unreliable—as Lazlo had discovered early on when he’d asked Azareen, Eril-Fane’s second-in-command, what turned out to mean not “Can I help you with that?” but “Would you like to sniff my armpits?” She had declined.

“Well?” asked Eril-Fane. “What do you say about threaves?” “I need to amend my ‘Ways I Hope Not to Die’ list,” said Lazlo.

Horizons instead of books. Riding instead of reading. It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books behind, but he carried all his stories with him, out of the glave-lit nooks of the library and into landscapes far more fit for them.