Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.” “Beautiful and full of monsters?” “All the best stories are.”

Lazlo thought they looked like a pack of ghosts on coffee break.

What was he? Storyteller and secretary and doer of odd jobs, neither Tizerkane nor delegate, just someone along for the dream.

There were carrion birds in the sky, circling and cawing ugly cries that Lazlo imagined translated as Die so we can eat you.

Thyon’s jaw clenched. When he spoke again a tightness had replaced the mockery in his tone. “Alchemy is a science. There is no comparison.” “Well, I’m no alchemist,” Lazlo said, affable. “You know me, Strange the dreamer, head in the clouds.” He paused and added with a grin, “Miracles for breakfast.”

!!!!!!!

The mysteries of Weep had been music to his blood for as long as he could remember. This time tomorrow, they would be mysteries no longer. The end of wondering, he thought, but not of wonder. That was just beginning. He was certain of it.

Vengeance. Sarai heard the way he said it, and she understood something. Vengeance ought to be spoken through gritted teeth, spittle flying, the cords of one’s soul so entangled in it that you can’t let it go, even if you try. If you feel it—if you really feel it—then you speak it like it’s a still-beating heart clenched in your fist and there’s blood running down your arm, dripping off your elbow, and you can’t let go.

Minya remembered. She had burning coals for hearts, and her hate was as hot now as it had ever been.

what purpose did hate serve? She thought it was like the desert threave, a sand beast that could survive for years eating nothing but its own molted skin. Hate could do that, too—live off nothing but itself—but not forever. Like a threave, it was only sustaining itself until some richer meal came along. It was waiting for prey. What were they waiting for?

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.

She screamed an exodus.

Sarai screamed moths. Moths and her own mind, pulled into a hundred pieces and flung out into the world.

a feeling, growing inside her, and not a good one. At first, it had felt a little like holding in cruel words instead of speaking them—how they sit burning on the back of your tongue like a secret poison, ready to spew into the world.

Her throat wanted to scream. Her soul wanted it, too. She fought against it as though there were demons in her trying to claw their way out and ravage the world. Let them, Minya would have said. The world deserves ravaging.

Her consciousness had wings. She couldn’t fly, but it could. It was a kind of escape, but it mocked freedom.

They were dark, small, and lovely—the exact purple of the lining of night, with the shot-silk shimmer of starlight on dark water.

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. To wake up holding hands.

combining and recombining in the ceaseless effort at making sense, at making self. 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.

In the realm of the real, she might have been just a girl, in hiding and in peril, but in the unconscious mind she was all-powerful: sorceress and storyteller, puppeteer and dark enthraller. Sarai was the Muse of Nightmares.

So they layered cynicism atop their longing, and it was something like laying laughter over the darkness—self-preservation of an uglier stripe. And thus did they harden themselves, by choosing to meet hate with hate.

Once upon a time, Sarai would have imagined Minya’s delight, and done her worst. Not anymore. Tonight, she imagined Hayva’s delight, and did her best. Channeling Sparrow, her sweet Orchid Witch, she willed the dead tree back to life and watched it set forth leaf and bud while the two memory-children danced around it, laughing. In the real room where the girl was slouched in a chair beside her dead brother’s body, her lips curved into a soft smile. The moth left her brow, and Sarai left the dream and flew back out into the night.

Lazlo had to be content with echoing exclamations from Calixte, who was given to gloating. “Hey, Tod, am I really seeing this?” he heard her call. “Or am I lost in my vast credulity?” And, a moment later: “What are you doing here, Tod? Don’t you know it’s rude to wander about in someone else’s credulity?” And then: “Is this fact or reason I’m encountering? Wait, no, it’s more demon bones.” He suspected she wouldn’t soon tire of the joke.

He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.

Whatever happened here, Lazlo knew that that part of his life was over. He had crossed continents and drunk starlight from rivers without names. There was no going back from that.

Never mind that Thyon Nero had grown up on delicacies and Lazlo Strange on crusts, neither had ever enjoyed a meal more.

when he looked up from the page, he sought out Lazlo, first with his eyes, then with his feet.

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.

Eril-Fane looked weary. The vitality that usually radiated from him was all but gone. Averting his eyes as though ashamed, he said, “I don’t sleep well in Weep.” It was the only time Lazlo had heard him use that name, and it chilled him.

The Godslayer smiled, eyes warm and crinkling, and reached out to thump him on the shoulder. And Lazlo, who lacked not only a mother but a father, too, thought that having one might feel something like this.

no amazement could be spared for a river, no matter how epic. There just wasn’t enough amazement in the world.

“The shadow of our dark time still haunts us,” the Godslayer had said. And Lazlo had fixed on dark time, and he had wondered at the word haunts, but he had never thought to consider shadow. It was a literal shadow. There was the city—fabled Weep, unseen no longer—and the day was bright, but it lay dark.

Lazlo felt as though the top of his head were open and the universe had d...

Sarai remembered her nightmare, and having no control over her own knife-wielding hand, and shuddered at the thought of being Minya’s toy.

part of being irrational is not caring that you’re being irrational, and right now she just didn’t.

his words reeled out as though she’d reached down his throat and ripped them from him. “The Godslayer is coming!” he cried out, gasping. That much Minya made him tell, but the rest he spoke freely. Savagely. “And he’s going to tear your world apart.”

He felt himself perfectly poised at the midpoint between wonder and dread, and didn’t know which to feel.

Lazlo could scarcely decide what was more extraordinary: that it was floating, or that it took the form of an immense being, because here was where his wild and improbable theory came wildly and improbably true. In a manner of speaking. The entire impossible structure took the form of a seraph.

Lazlo looked up: at the shining citadel of alien blue metal floating in the sky. Sarai looked down: at the gleam of the Cusp, beyond which the sun was soon to sink, and at the fine thread winding down the valley toward Weep. It was the trail. Squinting, she could just make out a progress of specks against the white. Lazlo was one of the specks.

Lazlo’s mind was afire with marvel, the lit match touching off fuse after fuse. Burning lines raced through his consciousness, connecting far-flung dots and filling in blanks, erasing question marks and adding a dozen more for every one erased.

If his absorption were a pattern of light, though, Sarai’s was a scribble of darkness.

Her pulse was frantic, her breathing ragged, and it seemed impossible that people could live at all with such flimsy stuff as skin keeping blood, breath, and spirit safe inside their bodies.

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Ruza. “Like what?” “Like I’m a beautiful book you’re about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes.”

“You two idiots,” said Azareen, and Lazlo felt a curious twinge of pride, to be called an idiot by her, with what might have been the tiniest edge of fondness.

Over the edge was nothing but empty air—a straight drop far, far down to the rooftops. She was uneasy, standing so close. She made the descent every night through her moths’ senses, but that was different. The moths had wings. She did not.

In all of Great Ellen’s years in the nursery it had manifested only once, and Korako had taken the baby away on the spot.

Sometimes you can glimpse a person’s soul in just a flicker of expression,

She was fifteen years old and furiously alive,

Staring at herself in the mirror, she found that she’d lost the ability to see herself through her own eyes. She saw only what humans would see. Not a girl or a woman or someone in between. They wouldn’t see her loneliness or fear or courage, let alone her humanity. They would see only obscenity. Calamity. Godspawn.

She’d never desired to be anything like her mother before, but tonight she craved a little goddess ferocity,

heroes, whatever else they are, are also men—and women—and prey to human troubles just like anybody else.