Fray's Cherished Pages

Fray Recommends: Lamentations of the Dead Dreamer

(Word Count: A little under 3,000)

But first, a word on this blog as a project.

A new year dawns on the lair I am building for myself.

While I spend time editing what has been a weekly release web serial to the quality of a published book, I find myself craving more than just hopping from social media site to site, casting my posts adrift in the hopes they find an appreciative audience. In no small part, this post and blog are born out of a need to put words into what the stories I've imbibed whilst crafting the stories I've longed to add to my shelf mean to me.

To find what I've craved in others has long eluded me. That I would do so mid-telling of Depths of Promises Sworn, there is no other way to say it. There was simply no room to stop and adjust. I cannot even begin to describe to you how important it is to me how much embarking upon writing my own transfeminine fiction has been inspired by and further facilitated meeting queer creatives that make this world feel a little less lonely.

Which is a lot of words to just express... relief. I suppose you could also consider this post a form of gratitude for no longer feeling like I have to invent everything I want to see in stories I want to read.

This, and all future Fray Recommendations, are intended to share the kinds of impressions that go beyond enjoyment and into the realm of feeling worth composing a whole love letter in dedication. To put a finer point and set a more reasonable goal for myself, this is just space to share the stories that make a girl long to go through the trouble to regrow a tongue in time to savor transbian pleasures long denied to her. (Too much? Not enough? I can never tell when it comes to t4t tastes.)

It is no longer enough to simply write and share the stories I've always yearned for. I long to put into your hands the stories that I wish I had already finished reading before writing Depths of Promises Sworn. As such, any story I talk about, I promise to link you to the creators responsible as best I am able. Again, the internet and circumstances can be such fickle mistresses. Links will be amended as needed, as I want this blog to be space I always return to.

You should know that a stance I have always maintained on websites I post my public writing projects is that any story penned under my name will remain freely available in some form forever.

As an extension of that, this little blog is intended to be a very easily migrated project. Each post will be saved with backups in case circumstances demand this library of words be packed up and redeployed elsewhere. I want to treat Fray's Cherished Pages as a central nexus in which you can always find the highlights:

Today, I'd like start my recommendations section off by exposing to you the beating heart of a story penned by an author I trust and treasure immensely.

Lamentations of the Dead Dreamer

Book 1: To Break a Fae, by Nevarii Akshae

Lamentations Book 1 Cover Image

Purchase Links: Nevarii's Itch.io

Amazon (for a physical copy)

Cover Artist RedsHeIs's Patreon

At the time of writing, Lamentations (occasionally referred to as LotDD) remains an on-going serial. I will also link Nevarii's Patreon for early release of new chapters or ongoing support.

For the purposes of making a recommendation, I shall endeavor to keep spoilers to a minimum. For illustrative purposes, everything I will be drawing upon in any amount of detail will be limited to the opening 2 chapters. Beyond that, I'm hoping to focus on what it is like to put yourself through reading a book like this.

I know precisely what series I am recommending. Before we get any further, I am starting with content warnings. Regardless of how you might feel about them, Lamentations of the Dead Dreamer deals with trauma and subject matter that some readers under no circumstances wish to engage with.

I want to respect that, and warn you up front.

I do not recommend this series of books for light reading, but I do very firmly recommend them in their entirety.

Content Warnings

Pulling from the opening of the book itself, Lamentations of the Dead Dreamer prominently features themes of abuse. Mental, psychological, physical, and outright sexual abuses are all contained within the first book's pages.

The main character of LotDD enters into an abusive relationship. Expect slavery, abuse, sex with less than stellar consent, dehumanization, suicidal ideation, being kidnapped by someone who has tried to detransition you... and more. (That should cover the hardest edges)

While the author promises the main character will get her happy ending, this is very firmly a story of chasing acceptance, settling for being desired by a manipulative abuser, and fighting for every ounce of happiness one feels is deserved.

Without getting into spoilers, I can go a little further in impressing upon you that the first two books read like a story filled to bursting with more promise than its point of view character can see for herself.

Charming little Fae girl

To Break a Fae is a first person perspective story about a fae girl named Lyra. She, like all forest creatures who are adopted and taught by the fae, sung her body into its current form.

Her story begins with nursing feelings over a fresh rejection.

Even when untangling fraught emotions, Lyra's heart and perspective hammers away at such beautiful little thoughts that brim with how much she has been treasured in the past beyond the circumstances in which we meet her. When the woman who rejected her is threatened by intruders into the Dead Dreamer's Wood, Lyra must confront very pointed words from her adoptive Fae Mother.

"No one will ever be worth sacrificing your happiness for. Don’t ever try to live in misery for another!”

And yet, you hold in your hands a book titled Lamentations of the Dead Dreamer: To Break a Fae.

To put it as gently as I can, Lamentations offers a love, life, and happiness that is rejected, selflessly bargained away, before being found again and convinced it is worth both clinging to and fighting for. It is both tragic and heart warming, displaying an understanding of how the contrast elevates both in ways that have left me crying for hours as I cling to every page.

That said, I understand that books depicting sexual assault are very hard passes for some. I'd like to take some time to address the abusive relationship that this story revolves around.

I am willing to open my blog recommending LotDD because it at no point feels like pointless misery. Cracking open each Lamentations book feels like boarding a ship bound for ever more perilous waters as the number and weight of reasons to brave such a storm grow in equal measure.

I'm not here to defend Thendra or her reavers. I'm here because, like Thendra, there's so much more to Lyra than being a pillow slave if you're willing to engage with this world and Lyra's place in it.

If you're like me, and find yourself bouncing off this story and coming back to give it another attempt, you might find that Thendra stands out from the number of wretched characters that wield power and influence in the rifts. The further you get into these books, the more nuance of Thendra's presence on the page begins to take shape as a growing understanding taking root that digs far deeper than the foundations upon which most other characters exist. To grasp at her schemes and manipulations is to watch as someone plays the long game in a world full of petty, short sighted monsters who would sooner eat and discard Lyra without a second thought.

Thendra remains a manipulative abuser whose schemes form an undercurrent throughout these books. I will not sugar coat the feeling that it always feels like she's somehow responsible.

It is just refreshing to realize that, once I start to see the forest for the trees, I can find some measure of comfort in reading a story where the abuser has an axe to grind against this whole wretched dream.

Parsing out Lyra's place in all that just... hits different than most stories I read revolving around an abusive relationship.

Even as Lyra bargains away her life in the place of another's, there is a back and forth between Lyra and Thendra that matters. Lyra's opening move upon meeting Thendra in the opening chapters is to poison absolutely everything that Thendra is trying to achieve.

What follows is an attempt by all parties to salvage a situation in which everyone is set to be unhappy. That Lyra is a girl with talons and curse songs that she can leverage matters a lot to me. It means we're not just in for a story where we watch a genuinely sweet girl who makes my heart hurt as early as page one endure cruelty without reason or agency.

Thendra is a creature of purpose and schemes that go beyond Lyra. Our beloved little Fae is just factored into them in ways which Lyra herself proves herself capable.

It also quickly becomes apparent in the opening chapters that Thendra is not the first person to abuse Lyra. She opens this book terrified of being alone... again. She was abandoned first by humans, then the other Fae, and now the first girl to find her in the Dead Dreamer's Wood. Rejection aside, not being alone is worth enough to Lyra to bargain away her life so Thendra cannot pursue and possess this other woman.

In the coming chapters, Lyra will learn that this dream and its many rifts are filled with no shortage of monstrous women who would eat, enslave, and/or discard Lyra without a second thought.

Thendra, despite presenting in the opening pages ten pages as the leader of a bunch of muscular women over seven feet tall, is quickly described as a shadow of night falling upon a field of dying sunlight to the sound of thunder. Narration treats her more like a storm that goes beyond contests of strength versus skill.

Instead of any of that being turned on our protagonist, Thendra is forced to negotiate. And in those negotiations, begins to see Lyra as something valuable.

Lyra reads like a trans girl who, as of the opening pages feels discarded by everyone she has ever known, might be particularly vulnerable to that.

Those are the opening pages and thrust of the first two chapters.

Beyond the Dead Dreamer's Wood

If asked the story's appeal or reasons to push through the most difficult chapters: I would paint Lyra's story as a defiantly beautiful maelstrom of emotion that takes the time to find moments to give you a scenic view of what each tragic verse has wrought upon all who have endured them. The pace at which Lamentations navigates difficult subject matter waxes and wanes in according to what each moment demands.

Its pacing is something I could only marvel at in the moment, but with time became an aspect I longed to spill ink about. Nevarii can spend paragraphs sell you on the idea of what Lyra is experiencing in upsetting amounts of detail before entire weeks of her life whisk past in the blink of an eye.

Expanding on this idea, Lamentations is a story that will careen between peaks and valleys of emotional highs and lows. At every step, Lyra is offered choices. Even if the reality of the situation is that her options are quite limited, she makes an impression on almost everyone she meets that echo far further than one might expect.

At the end of the day, I find myself clinging tight to far more than the moments of unexpected kindness that Lyra receives. Where I would love for Lyra to find someone other than Thendra, Nevarii delivers scenes that dance along a knife's edge between beautiful catharsis and the threat of tragedy over losing every alternative Lyra encounters. When I expect Thendra to ruin everything, I am left to grapple instead with just how irreplaceable Lyra is as our main point of view character.

All of this leaves the nature of abusive partners laying out their lures and sinking their little hooks into someone until it feels like there is no other option as a backdrop upon which Lyra is confined with the weight and assurance of gravity itself anchoring her to the center of unfolding events. I speak now speaking in broad strokes about the nature of abusive relationships because it is the fantastic details of Lyra's struggles and how it is depicted that makes Lamentations worth reading.

The nature of the conflict aside, the highs and lows of this story are executed with such care that even if I were more comfortable spoiling the details, I worry I would do you a disservice by not letting readers discover for themselves the reasons I cling to these cherished pages.

If you can handle a fairly dark fantasy story, there is a lovely tale that follows a trans main character as she stumbles through a world filled with lesbians of all sorts. I can very firmly recommend the first two books of Lamentations of the Dead Dreamer in their entirety.

If you're still not convinced, I encourage you to give this story a look at Scribblehub. Nevarii puts a lot of effort into her chapter titles. There is enough there that I think just reading through them will give you an idea of the kind of journey you're getting into.

For me, it's not enough to experience trauma. I long to see people and characters both receive the time and support needed to recover enough to accept that they do in fact deserve better. One of the main reasons I'm constantly gushing about these books is that I think they deliver what I crave in spectacular fashion.

That said, if you've been wondering why I mostly stick to mentioning the first two books, it's because I've read no further. Not to bury the lead, but the second book of Lamentations of the Dead Dreamer: To Break a Reaver, is my favorite book of all time. ^^;;;

That the third book only exists in web serial form is the main reason I've read no further. While I treasure the time spent editing my own work and reading other stories that mean everything to me, a part of me longs to feel the weight of the third book in my hands as I read it for the first time. Nevarii was even kind enough to place a bookmark on the chapter I left off of on in the web serial before pressing a copy of the second book into my hands. (If you're curious, I took a break between chapters 70 Unforeseen Consequences and 71 Found Families and Painful Melodies. There's an element of letting actual time pass while this story lives in my head rent free that really makes me feel for characters who experience the passage of time the hardest.)

For those of you who prefer to only read stories that are finished, you're missing out on at least two series that have single handedly guided the direction in which my editing and future writing is headed. That said, I can offer you only what others have offered me: Book three is allegedly filled with so much healing and reaping all that Lyra has set in motion that readers are claiming book three is far easier to read than the first two.

While I can weigh in no further until I reread book 2 enough to feel confident writing a whole second blog post on it, I look forward to the sunrise in which I can add this entire series to my treasured hoard of books that I can recommend with the whole of my heart in their entirety. <3

Until then, do be kind to yourselves and each other. If Lamentations sounds like too much for you, Nevarii's Sun Spoken Turn is a far gentler story that will be happy to lure you in with polyamorous lesbians accepting of trans characters at the start of the book. I'm... checks notes ...about 135 chapters into that one. It reads like being let loose in a fantasy world that I'd yearn to get lost in for years with an all queer tabletop roleplaying group.

For extra encouragement, it is directly connected to Lamentations of the Dead Dreamer in subtle ways that make my heart to ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. But if I'm being honest with you, Nevarii as an author had me at the first lines of its description: "A soul of fire trapped in the wrong body, Inamatorii is branded and transformed by the vengeful Goddess of the Sun Spoken to enact the old songs of wrath and ruin. Given the chance to escape old chains, and soon discovered by a loving harem of travelers, Inamatorii only wishes to enjoy the life her old body denied her."

As for me, you can expect the next blog post from me to be about Fleet and Fabricant trilogy by Kay F. Atkinson