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

How people love to see a dream shatter, thought Nova from far away. To see the dreamer hobbled and lamed, foundering in the shards of their broken hopes.
‘This is what you get for believing that you could have more. You're no better than us. You’re nothing special.’

Friends? A pair of warriors and a thief? Even now a voice within him explained that they were lowborn, incompatible with his sta-tion, and ridiculous besides. But now that voice sounded haughty and condescending, and he wanted to put it in a jar and toss it in a river, then sit and eat bacon with his ridiculous, lowborn friends.

Their shames were different, but their fear was the same: of seeing rejection in the other's eyes.
Instead, each saw hope, a mirror of their own, and brightened like new-polished glavestones that had been muted under dust. Eril-Fane groped for words, but only one came to him:
"Daughter," he said.

But Sarai knew what she knew—what only she knew-and the greatest feat of strength she had ever witnessed was the one he performed every day: continuing to live for the sake of others, when it would be so much easier to stop.

"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.

There was nowhere she would rather go than Dreamer’s Weep with Lazlo Strange.

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