Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor

Author:Laini Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

30

LIKE EATING CAKE IN DREAMS

The sun set. A bland dinner was prepared and eaten. Sarai saw to Minya, fed her and cleaned her, left Feral watching over her, and went to her room.

Lazlo had gone ahead, and her steps up the long dexter corridor were much quicker and lighter than they usually were. In fact, her feet barely touched the floor. All these years, after sundown, when the others went to bed, she had gone back to her room—not to sleep, but to send out her moths and visit nightmares on the people of Weep. And though she’d passed through hundreds of minds every night, she’d always felt so alone. Not now.

At the door, she paused. Her insides fluttered, from knowing Lazlo was here and the whole night was ahead of them.

This morning, with the pink of sunrise slanting through the window, she’d vanished her clothes and lain down on the bed, and Lazlo had lain down with her. They’d slept, skin to skin, and met in a dream, and there, too, they’d lain skin to skin.

Being a ghost had a lot in common with being in a dream. Neither were “real,” in the strict sense of the word. Dreams drew on memory, experience. As Sarai had discovered with Lazlo, from their efforts at conjuring cake, you couldn’t taste what you didn’t already know.

It was the same with her ghostflesh. Sarai knew that all sensation now was her mind’s best guess based on what she’d experienced before, and she’d experienced almost nothing. Lazlo had never touched her real skin, except to carry her dead body, and she’d only kissed him in dreams. So when his lips brushed her nipple, or his fingertips traced round her navel, she could only imagine the feeling. It felt real. It felt wonderful, but she couldn’t help thinking it was like eating cake in dreams, which is to say: a pale phantom of the true and exquisite vastness of pleasure that is the privilege of the living.

Not that she’d appreciated that privilege while she was alive. She’d never had the chance, and now she never would. It was a sad thought, but there was a saving grace: In dreams, sensation could be shared, just like emotions and the flavor of cake. As long as it was known to one dreamer, it could be imparted to the other through the medium of the dream, so that when Sarai brushed her lips over Lazlo’s nipple, or traced her fingertips round his navel, she could feel what he was feeling, and share in the exquisite vastness by proxy.

That was what she was thinking, flushed, warm, and eager, when she stepped into her room… to find it transformed.

She halted in the doorway and stared around in astonishment. It had always been beautiful, but it had been just a room, and tainted by the fact that Skathis had made it for Isagol—one monster’s gift to another.

Whatever it had been, it was no longer “just a room.” It was a fairyland. It was a forest glade.

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