Muse of Nightmares

The second book in Laini Taylor's duology that began with Strange the Dreamer, the story picks up in the floating citadel above the city of Weep, where five blue-skinned godspawn, the half-human children of dead gods, have been trapped their entire lives. In the previous book, Lazlo Strange, an orphaned librarian who discovered he is half god, saved Weep by using his power over mesarthium, the alien blue metal composing the citadel. But he could not save Sarai, the godspawn called the Muse of Nightmares, who could enter human dreams through magical moths. She fell from the citadel and died.

Minya, the oldest godspawn, catches Sarai's soul at the edge of evanescence, the dissolution that claims all souls after death. Minya's gift is binding the dead as ghosts. She looks perpetually six years old, the age she was during the Carnage fifteen years earlier, when the hero Eril-Fane, called the Godslayer, slaughtered the gods and nearly all the godspawn infants. Having saved four babies that day and built a ghost army in the years since, Minya weaponizes her rescue of Sarai, seizing control of Sarai's ghost body and issuing Lazlo an ultimatum: He must obey her every command or she will release Sarai's soul to oblivion.

A parallel storyline follows sisters Kora and Nova, who years earlier on the frozen island of Rieva dream of being chosen by the Mesarthim, the empire's blue-skinned soldier-wizards. When a skyship arrives, Kora manifests a rare gift called astral, projecting her consciousness as a massive white eagle. Nova's gift is even rarer: She is a pirate, one who can steal and wield other people's powers. The ship's captain, a smith named Skathis who would later enslave Weep, takes Kora aboard and leaves Nova behind, beginning centuries of estrangement.

In the citadel, the standoff escalates. When Lazlo refuses to carry Minya's ghost army to Weep for a campaign of slaughter, she begins releasing Sarai's soul. Lazlo offers a compromise, promising to bring Eril-Fane to the citadel instead. In the tense pause that follows, Ruby, a godspawn who controls fire, drugs Minya's tea with a sleeping draught found at the bedside table of Letha, a goddess of oblivion whose power was to consume memories. Minya collapses, and the immediate crisis ends.

While Minya sleeps, the godspawn discover that mesarthium sustains both their pigmentation and their powers; without it, they fade to human. Sarai finds her gift has changed: Instead of sending moths into distant minds, she can enter dreams through direct touch. She ventures into Minya's mind and finds a nursery locked in a Carnage loop, with Minya frantically hiding babies from approaching killers. More disturbing, the ghost nursemaids who raised the godspawn, Great Ellen and Less Ellen, appear in the memory as hostile women who despised the children. Sarai realizes the nurses died before the Godslayer arrived. She concludes that Minya killed them at age six, then unconsciously remade their souls into loving mother figures, projecting her nurturing impulses into the ghost forms and retaining only rage and fear in herself.

Meanwhile in Weep, Thyon Nero, an alchemist who is part of Eril-Fane's scholarly delegation, and Calixte Dagaz, a convicted jewel thief and fellow member of the delegation, discover a buried library containing a holy book that reveals dozens of worlds lie layered like pages and connected by portals. Lazlo flies down to negotiate with Eril-Fane, who agrees the godspawn should take the citadel and leave. Eril-Fane, Sarai's father, flies up with his wife Azareen and his mother Suheyla to meet Sarai for the first time. He also reveals that the white eagle Wraith is the preserved remnant of Korako's soul, her astral projection having survived outside her body when the goddess was killed. In the heart of the citadel, Lazlo discovers a nearly invisible seam in the air. When he pulls it open, they see into another world: a crimson sea beneath dark mist. Before they can react, Wraith tears through the portal, followed by four invaders.

The lead attacker is Nova, now centuries old, who has spent her life tracking Skathis across dozens of worlds, searching for her sister Kora, who became the goddess Korako. Her crew consists of three godspawn once sold as slaves before Nova freed them: the telepath Kiska, the time-looper Rook, and Werran, whose scream sows panic. Nova leads with Werran's stolen scream, paralyzing everyone, then strips Lazlo, Ruby, and Feral, a fellow godspawn who can summon weather, of their gifts and turns their powers against them. Sarai, whose ghost nature makes her immune to gift theft, attacks in nightmare form but cannot harm Nova physically. Using Kiska's stolen telepathy, Nova plunges into the group's minds and witnesses Korako's murder in Eril-Fane's memory.

Grief-maddened, Nova traps Eril-Fane and Azareen in an endlessly repeating death using Rook's stolen time-loop gift. Minya, waking from her drugged sleep, leads her ghost army into battle. Nova steals Minya's gift, but the weight of hundreds of souls nearly crushes her, forcing her to release the other stolen powers. She breaks the time loop only after one final killing, making Eril-Fane's and Azareen's deaths permanent. Using Lazlo's stolen mesarthium-shaping ability, she rips open the seraph-shaped citadel's chest, and its massive hand sweeps everyone except Lazlo into Weep's amphitheater. Nova cages Lazlo and pilots the citadel through the portal.

In the amphitheater, Sparrow, a godspawn who has secretly developed a healing aspect of her plant-growth gift, presses her hands to the warriors' wounds. She regrows their pierced hearts, draining her mesarthium energy and becoming fully human. Eril-Fane rises and commands the Tizerkane, Weep's warrior guardians, to stand down. Minya, fading without mesarthium, releases her entire ghost army to conserve power for Sarai's tether alone. She uproots the Ellens' soul-tethers; for one moment the real women surface, cold-eyed and menacing, before evanescing. The personality fragments return to Minya, making her whole for the first time. As Sarai begins to dissolve, Thyon races forward with a shard of mesarthium he cut from an anchor weeks earlier. Minya seizes it, and the metal stabilizes Sarai's tether.

A rescue party flies through the portal and finds the citadel warped by Nova's anguish into a screaming, hunched shape. Inside, Nova sleeps, having crushed a mutiny by her own crew. Werran warns that killing Nova would leave the others permanently trapped in time loops. Sarai touches Nova's skin and enters her dream: a frozen sea with the faces of her victims under the ice. Sensing a link between Wraith and Korako's preserved soul, Sarai invites the eagle into her chest. Korako's dying message manifests as a phantasm of Kora, who delivers a final plea: "Promise me: no vengeance. Let all the ugliness end here" (485). Nova, shattered but freed from denial, wakes. She frees her crew, uncages Lazlo, then walks to the garden edge and falls into the red sea below.

With his power restored, Lazlo transforms the citadel from seraph to eagle, an homage to Korako, and renames it the Astral. The crew of fourteen sets out through the layered worlds to find and free the godspawn children Skathis sold as slaves. Minya loses her first baby tooth, confirming that whatever froze her body has begun to reverse. Kiska, Rook, and Werran restore Weep's true name, Amezrou, preserved beyond the sealed portal where Letha's memory-eating power could not reach. Sarai resolves to use her dream gift to heal minds rather than haunt them. In the epilogue, Eril-Fane asks Azareen to marry him again. They conceive a son and name him Lazlo. Years later, the Astral returns to Amezrou before departing toward Meliz, the seraph home world.