Laura McClure’s Reviews > Muse of Nightmares > Status Update

"Impossible?" Lazlo gave a soft laugh and shake of his head. "There must be things that are impossible. But I don't believe we've gotten there yet. Look at us. We've barely begun. Sarai, we're magic." He said this with all the wonder of a lifelong dreamer who's found out he’s half god. “You don’t know yet what you’re capable of, but I’m willing to bet it’s extraordinary.”

Her beauty annihilated him. How could she be for him?

He was Strange the dreamer, after all. He wasn't your ordinary dreamer, prey to all the vagaries of the unconscious. He moved through his mind with the assuredness of an explorer and the grace of a poet. Most dreams don't make sense, and most dreamers aren't even aware they're dreaming.

Her mind, he meant, knowing in a way that few people do that a mind is a place—a landscape, a wilderness, a city, a world. And that Sarai could go there. It filled him with awe and extraordinary pride.

She whispered, "I love you," and he was lost. No one had ever said those words to him, not once in all his life.

It represented a claiming of one's self—stepping forth from childhood and all the ways we're shaped by others, to choose and make a new shape, all on one's own.
And she’d wondered: What shape would she choose, if she were free to do so?

Fertility, sexuality, strength, the ability to create and nurture life: These were the powers of a woman, and the ink honored them, connecting them with all their foremothers going back hundreds of years.

Of all the possibilities laid out like a feast of uncertainty and doom, there was simply no scenario in which Lazlo Strange hurt Weep, or anybody in it.

In the young faranji, Eril-Fane's starved and stunted paternal feelings had found a place to fix. He was more than fond of the young man. He felt protective of him, and in spite of everything, he couldn't help trusting him.

Thyon Nero was late awakening to the understanding that other people are living lives, too... They had always been minor players in a drama about him, their stories mere subplots woven around his own, and it floored him to experience a sudden shift-
He was the minor player now, standing in the settled dust, while Strange flew metal beasts and held dead goddesses in his arms.