Strange the Dreamer

Sarai is the other protagonist of the novel, serving as both a love interest and a foil to Lazlo. Sarai meets her death at the end of the novel when she plummets from the citadel and is impaled on the finial of a gate below; Minya revives her soul and binds her as a ghost but uses that as leverage against Lazlo. Although Sarai seeks freedom from Minya’s hate-filled agenda throughout the novel, the ironic tragedy of her character is that she still ends up being an instrument of Minya’s vengeance in the end.

Sarai is first introduced in Chapter 12, when the point of view shifts to her third-person limited perspective. Sarai’s character arc primarily revolves around overcoming shame and embracing hope and empathy. She is the primary character through which Taylor explores the theme of Empathy Overcoming Cycles of Hate and Vengeance. Sarai seeks to lead a normal life; she wants to be a normal girl like the humans whose lives she glimpses in their dreams. Her gift of entering the humans’ dreams helps her to understand the terror they were oppressed by under the rule of the gods, creating both a sense of self-loathing and compassion toward the humans. Although she yearns for love, she knows that any human would see her blue skin and consider her to be an “obscenity. Calamity. Godspawn (197). Sarai’s arc revolves around freeing herself from her internal shame and rejecting hate to instead embrace empathy and hope for the future.

Sarai’s magical gift is the ability to disperse her consciousness through moths that she uses to enter people’s dreams, a gift that is the source of her primary internal conflicts. Because of both her ability and her narrative role, Sarai is uniquely positioned between the conflicting worlds of gods and of humans. She understands the humans and has empathy for the suffering they endured at the hands of the gods, and unlike the other godspawn, Sarai perceives her own godly parents to be “monsters” and fears that she, just like her mother Isagol, the goddess of despair, is destined to be a monster as well. Although Sarai internally recoils from vengeance, the massacre of the other infants during the Carnage and her bonds with her remaining family keep her conflicted as to the justification of her empathetic feelings. Instances of mercy and empathy cause her great internal conflict as she debates whether having compassion for the humans who slaughtered her family betrays the bonds she has with the other godspawn.

Ultimately, Sarai moves toward mercy and empathy, but she is especially influenced in this direction by Lazlo. In Chapter 41, Lazlo’s gaze is like a “witchlight” to Sarai; it begins to transform her perspective of herself, as “it does something to a person to be looked at like that—especially someone so accustomed to disgust” (354). This experience is the catalyst for her decision to oppose Minya’s thirst for vengeance, reflecting the theme of Love’s Capacity to Transform and Heal.

However, Sarai’s character arc does not reach a complete resolution, for although she overcomes her internal conflicts related to shame and using her gift for good or evil, she does not have the opportunity to move beyond the circumstances that constrained her. Although she technically dies at the end of the novel, the existence of a sequel suggests that perhaps the open-ended questions of Sarai’s arc, like Lazlo’s, will be resolved in later installments.

Minya is the daughter of Skathis, the god who was “most monstrous of all” (135). Minya is the oldest of the five surviving Mesarthim children (“godspawn”) and is the only one with actual memories of the Carnage. As a result, she harbors an intense hatred for the humans and makes vengeance her ultimate goal. She uses her magical gift of binding ghosts’ souls to torment humans after their deaths, and she directs Sarai to use her nightmares for the same end. When the children learn that the Godslayer has returned, Minya is eager for the chance to achieve retribution. Minya stands in stark contrast to Sarai, for she considers mercy or empathy for the humans to be a betrayal to the family they lost. Only vengeance is acceptable to Minya; however, despite that conviction, she stands as a reminder of how trauma functions to the detriment of those on both sides of a conflict, suggesting that anyone can be enticed toward hatred, give the right circumstances.

Although Minya is portrayed primarily through her tensions with Sarai, Chapter 31 provides a glimpse of Minya through a third-person limited perspective and creates greater insight into and empathy for her character. While Minya clings to hate and vengeance, the depiction of her in a private moment reveals that she is as deeply affected by trauma as other characters like the Godslayer. Her thirst for vengeance stems from the guilt and pain she carries from the past, as she repeats the phrase, “They were all I could carry” (266), conveying the crippling anguish she feels for not being able to rescue more of the children. Taylor also uses physical descriptions to create compassion for Minya; for example, in the final chapter, Lazlo pities Minya and describes her with legs that are “impossibly thin, her clothes as tattered as the beggars” (526) and sees the reality of her as “just a six-year-old child with a crushing burden” (527). These depictions of Minya emphasize the childlike nature beneath her ferocity, emphasizing the effects of the trauma she endured as a child and emphasizing the unresolved pain and helplessness she feels now.

Minya’s desire for revenge remains static throughout the narrative, but the deeper insights into her grief set her up to be a foil for other anguish-ridden characters like the Godslayer. Both characters represent the fallout that the events of the Carnage have wrought and stand as perfect encapsulations of Sarai’s statement that even good people can learn to hate (372).

Eril-Fane is the hero of Weep and the leader of the Tizerkane warriors. Resembling a character straight from a legend, Eril-Fane has “a stunning vitality to him, as though he breathed all the world’s air and only left enough for others by sheer benevolence” (62). When Lazlo first meets him, he notes the warmth of Eril-Fane’s manner and thinks that Eril-Fane is not just a great man, but also a good one (69). Although Eril-Fane is stoic yet fair and treats Lazlo with kindness rather than condescension, Lazlo learns that Eril-Fane harbors dark emotions and a darker past because of the events before and after the Carnage. Eril-Fane was kidnapped and sexually enslaved by Isagol; as a result, he broke free of her influence and killed all the gods and their infant children. Although his actions free the city of Weep, they leave his mind and soul irreparably damaged, and he harbors great shame and self-loathing for his actions despite his public status of conventional heroism. Thus, Taylor uses Eril-Fane’s character to explore the theme of Complex Morality in the Face of Trauma and Memory, subverting the commonly held expectations of a hero’s true nature, and to what degree a hero’s actions might actually brand him a villain.

Before the Carnage, Azareen was married to Eril-Fane for five days. Now, she is his close companion and second-in-command. Although Eril-Fane released her from her wedding vows immediately following the Carnage, Azareen has remained by his side and has never lost her love for him. Throughout the novel, she allows him to maintain his distance yet does not forsake hope that one day they will both be whole again. Azareen is as stoic a warrior as Eril-Fane, yet like Eril-Fane, her exterior hides deep wellsprings of grief. In Sarai’s meditations over the paradoxes of Azareen’s relationship with Eril-Fane in Chapter 41, “Grief” is indeed the name she gives to Azareen (352). Azareen’s experiences as another one of the god’s kidnapped humans has not deadened her soul like it has Eril-Fane’s, but it has nonetheless left her with much pain, compounded by her emotional separation from her former husband.

The relationship between Eril-Fane and Azareen exemplifies Love’s Capacity to Heal and Transform, as their characters develop in parallel to each other before intertwining at the end of the novel. Their conflicts are only resolved when they come together and allow themselves to love each other openly again. After spending the novel struggling against internal shame and anguish as a result of their respective traumas, Eril-Fane and Azareen struggle to connect; however, in one of the novel’s final scenes in Chapter 66, when Eril-Fane sees Sarai’s dead body, Azareen and Eril-Fane collapse and finally allow themselves to weep and comfort each other (518). Although their trauma prevents them from connecting as they once did, ultimately it is through the love that remains between them that Eril-Fane and Azareen finally find healing.