Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.

Forbid a man something and he craves it like his soul’s salvation,

all the more so when that something

is the source of incompara...

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

“Strange the dreamer,”

He knew that, but the dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around.

The scholar left, and Master Hyrrokkin resumed his lecture. “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.”

What was alchemy? It was metallurgy wrapped in mysticism. The

pursuit of the spiritual by way of the material. The great and noble effort to master the elements in order to achieve purity, perfection, and divinity.

it seemed to Lazlo that his dream had tired of waiting and had simply… come to find him.

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.

Sarai laughed without mirth. “Feral, how could hate ever not be bad?” “If it’s deserved. If it’s vengeance.”

insipid,

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.

taking solace in this little bit of privacy while he lay awake, plotting the slaughter of the gods.

Hit me with a plot twist, the father is the Godslayer

Korako was dead now, along with Skathis and Isagol, Letha, Vanth, and Ikirok—the Mesarthim, all murdered by the Godslayer, Eril-Fane.

It hadn’t been Weep then, of course. That name came with the bloodshed, but it suited the two centuries of Mesarthim reign. If there had been anything in abundance in all those years, it had surely been tears.

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.

Because Lazlo, lacking one himself, tended to forget about mothers. It occurred to him that he might not ever have met one, or at least never exchanged more than a word or two with one. It hardly seemed possible, but there it was.

“Well, Sarai?” she asked. “What do you have to say about that? Your papa’s come back home.”

Lazlo was surprised he hadn’t figured it out. He gazed at the dazzling behemoth and the darkness beneath it. “The shadow of our dark time still haunts us.” Eril-Fane might have slain the gods and freed his people from thrall, but that thing remained, blocking out the sun, and lording their long torment over them. “To get rid of it,” he told the alchemist, as sure as he had ever been of anything. “And give the city back its sky.”

Tonight, the citizens of Weep would not weep because of her.

This stranger didn’t seem more important than the others. He was simply more beautiful.

Every mind is its own world.

She stood quiet inside the remarkable dream and pretended the dreamer was captivated by her.

When Lazlo woke again, a couple of hours later, he’d forgotten them both.

Why? Shit

which happened to include the university and library, the Tizerkane garrison, and the royal palace.”

She could have saved them all, if only she’d known.

“Well. We are all children in the dark, here in Weep.”

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

To be so tired was like evaporating.

He would be dead if it weren’t for her.

“I’m not a dream,” said Sarai. There was bitterness in her voice. “I’m a nightmare.” Lazlo breathed out a small, incredulous laugh. “You’re not my idea of a nightmare,”

Sarai’s skin was brown, and Lazlo’s was blue.

you must see that there’s a difference between being alive and having a life.”

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

“No,” he said, smiling. “I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And…” His voice grew bashful. Only in a dream could he be so bold and speak such words. “I hope you’ll let me be in your story.”

effervescent.

Tyrants have always taken who they wanted, and tyrants always will.

“Strange the dreamer,” said Skathis, extending one imperious hand. “Come with me.”

I want you in my mind.”

And he wanted her in his arms. He wanted her in his life. He wanted her not trapped in the sky, not hunted by humans, not hopeless, and not besieged by nightmares whenever she closed her eyes.

So Sarai rose to her toes, erasing the last little gap between their flushed faces. Their lashes fluttered shut, honey red and rivercat, and their mouths, soft and hungry, found each other and had just time to

touch, and press, and sweetly, sweetly open before the first wan morning light seeped in at the window, touched the dusky wing of the moth on Lazlo’s brow, and—in a puff of indigo smoke—annihilated it.

Crying crying losing my shit

Sarai vanished from Lazlo’s arms, and Lazlo vanished from Sarai’s.

It was the desolation of having found the place that fits, the one true place, and experiencing the first heady sigh of rightness before being torn away and cast back into random, lonely scatter.

This woman needsto stop writing cuz i cant take this

the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon dawned in the city of Weep,

Prologue